Veggies Need To Be Cooked

The following is taken from another website which clearly shows why vegetables should be cooked before eating:


Plant cells are surrounded by a wall. This wall is designed to resist breakage and to protect the stored nutrition in plant cells. Digestive juices act on the cell walls of plants little if at all; take a look in the toilet the day after next time you eat corn on the cob to see how true this is. Cooking, which can be expanded to include her sisters freezing, drying, sprouting, fermenting, and preserving in oil, breaks the cell wall and is necessary to liberate nutrients from plant cells. Cooked vegetables and fruits, grains, and beans provide more nutrients and are more easily digested than raw ones.

Cooked plants are far more nourishing than raw plants, whether we look at vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, or pulses (beans). Cooking not only breaks the cell wall, liberating minerals to our bodies, it actually enhances and activates many vitamins.

This is true especially of the carotenes, used to make vitamin A, and other antioxidants in plants. Research found that the longer the corn is cooked and the hotter the temperature, the greater the amount of antioxidants in the corn.

This also applies to vitamin C. A baked potato contains far more vitamin C than a raw potato. And sauerkraut (cabbage cooked by fermentation) contains up to ten times as much vitamin C as raw cabbage.

Some vitamins do leach into cooking water. Cooking with little or no water (for instance, steaming or braising) reduces vitamin loss in vegetables such as broccoli from 97% to 11%.

Note, however, that the vitamins aren't lost or destroyed, but merely transferred to the cooking water. Using that water for soup stock, or drinking it, insures that you ingest all the nutrients, and in a highly absorbable form.

Transferring nutrients into water, such as by making nourishing herbal infusions and healing soups, and then ingesting them is far more effective, in my experience, than wheat grass juice, green drinks, or any kind of nutritional supplement. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to optimally nourish oneself that I have found in three decades of paying attention to health.

Even if some vitamins are lost in cooking, people absorb more of what is there from cooked foods. Several recent studies measured vitamin levels in the blood after eating raw and cooked vegetables.

"Subjects who ate cooked veggies absorbed four to five times more nutrients than those who ate raw ones," reported researchers at the Institute of Food Research in 2003.