I was sitting in one of my favorite places to meet people — the local juice bar. I heard a conversation about the benefits of a raw food diet. One person was firmly behind the notion that a raw food diet was the ideal diet for health, but the other person believed that raw foods were not such an ideal. Here is the essence of the two arguments.

Cooking food destroys certain nutrients and enzymes, so when you eat raw food you get more nutrients.

While raw food contains more nutrients and enzymes, they are not as bio-available as slightly cooked foods, so you actually get more nutrients in your body with foods that are slightly cooked.

Talking with some of my friends in the know, both points of view are actually correct. It turns out that the machines that measure nutrients in food actually do measure more nutrients in raw food. There is little debate about that from what I can tell. However, the process that these machines use for extracting nutrients is very dissimilar to the way the human body works. It does take more digestion to get the raw foods into the body.

So, what’s really required here is a matter of perspective. If you live on a diet of steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cheesecake, then getting some cooked veggies into your life sure is going to be a big plus. The secret is to not overcook the veggies, but even overcooked veggies are better than cookies. As a first step, incorporate more veggies and fruits into your diet [being careful to limit the high sugar fruits] and cut back on the intense carbs like pastry, dessert, while breads, pasta, and even whole grains. Proteins and less intense carbs [including veggies of any kind] should be the mainstay of your diet along with a bit of good fat from olive, coconut or grape seed oil.

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