Cooking and Processing

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News by Raymond Francis All mammals eat raw food.  Unfortunately for us, humans have departed from what nature intended, and we are paying a heavy price for this foolishness.  One of the most egregious assaults on the nutritional quality of our food is cooking.  Heat damages nutrients, makes food more difficult to digest, and high heat even creates carcinogenic (cancer-causing) toxins. Cooked foods will not support healthy life in animals or humans.  Accordingly, some researchers have suggested a diet of at least 50% raw foods.  Others have suggested at least 80%.  The long-lived Hunza people ate about 80% of their diet fresh and raw.  What is the ideal percentage?  Nobody really knows.  It may be 100%. As I was researching the effects of food processing, I came across some shocking experiments.  I found that a calf would die from its own mother's milk, if that milk had been cooked (pasteurized).  As a chemist, I knew that heat altered the chemical properties of food, but I had never considered that pasteurized cow's milk would kill a calf.  (So why are we feeding this stuff to our children?)  I later found the owner of a large organic dairy farm, who repeated the experiment on his own animals.  After feeding the calves pasteurized milk, they became so sick and weak he had to stop the experiment to save their lives.  The point is:  cooking fundamentally changes the chemical and nutritional properties of your food.  "Food" and "cooked food" are not the same thing! In writing my book, Never Be Sick Again, I came across a totally unintentional experiment on the hazards of cooked foods.  The "experiment" occurred on the German cruiser Kronprinz Wilhelm.  During World War I, the Wilhelm cruised the seas for 255 days without touching land.  It lived off coal, food, and water captured from French and British ships before she sank them.  The crew ate beef, ham, bacon, cheese, potatoes, canned vegetables, dried peas and beans, white bread, margarine, tea, coffee, sugar, condensed milk, cake, champagne and beer.  They were amply supplied with all the above.  Other than fresh potatoes that were cooked before serving, the crew consumed virtually no fresh fruits or vegetables (no raw food).  Fresh foods were a luxury item, and were supplied only to the officer's mess.  As one can see, the diet these Germans were eating was not too much different from what many of us eat daily.  Everything the crew ate was cooked or processed.  Only the officers had access to any fresh food.  Let's see what happened to this crew: The ship left port in August of 1914.  Five months later, the ship's surgeon noticed an increasing pallor among members of the crew.  He also noticed shortness of breath and dilation of the pupils.  One month later, the crew complained of swollen ankkles and pain in the legs and arms.  Another month later, conditions were alarming.  Fifty of the crew could not stand, and they were dropping at the rate of two a day.  The symptoms included paralysis, atrophied muscles, dilated hearts, constipation, anemia, and pain.  After eight months at sea, 500 of the crew were sick, 110 were bedridden, and they were falling at the rate of four per day.  New symptoms included pneumonia and other infections, fractures and superficial wounds that wouldn't heal, pleurisy, and rheumatism.  Soon there would not be enough crew left to operate the ship.  The captian made a mad dash for the coast of Virginia, and anchored outside Newport News.  The best doctors were summoned.  The doctors were baffled by the many symptoms.  Finally, a reporter from the New York Globe, who was interested in nutrition, suggested they try raw fruits and vegetables.  Within 10 days, men stopped falling sick, and 47 had been discharged from sick bay.  The only people on the ship who did not get sick were the officers who had access to raw fruits and vegetables. The officers aboard Kronprinz Wilhelm ate only a small percentage of their diet raw.  Yet they stayed healthy while the crew fell apart.  How much raw food is optimal for human health?  The evidence indicates:  the more raw food the better.  Perhaps there is something to be learned from the fact that in nature all animals eat raw food.  Modern humans have departed from nature and eat most of their food cooked.  The result is our epidemic of chronic and degenerative diseases, while our "best doctors" remain baffled. This concept of consumming more fresh and raw foods may seem foreign to someone who has eaten cooked foods all their life, but it is also one of the most critical components of a healthy diet.  For good health, a high percentage of the diet must be eaten fresh and raw. Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again, Never Be Fat Again, Never Fear Cancer Again, and an internationally recognized leader in the field of optimal health maintenance. Reprinted with permission from: Beyond Health® News email: [email protected] Copyright 2001, Beyond Health