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Cooked Foods on a Raw Diet
Does
moving to a raw foods diet mean never eating hot food again? No, it
doesn’t. Sometimes you want something hot. Hot food has always
signified comfort for many of us. And on a cold, rainy day, carrot
sticks or wheatgrass juice probably won’t cut it for most of us.
Most
raw food, like our bodies, is very perishable. When raw foods are
exposed to temperatures above 118 degrees, they start to rapidly break
down, just as our bodies would if we had a fever that high. One of the
constituents of foods which can break down are enzymes. Enzymes help us
digest our food. Enzymes are proteins though, and they have a very
specific 3-dimensional structure in space. Once they are heated much
above 118 degrees, this structure can change.
Once enzymes are
exposed to heat, they are no longer able to provide the function for
which they were designed. Cooked foods contribute to chronic illness,
because their enzyme content is damaged and thus requires us to make
our own enzymes to process the food. The digestion of cooked food uses
valuable metabolic enzymes in order to help digest your food. Digestion
of cooked food demands much more energy than the digestion of raw food.
In general, raw food is so much more easily digested that it passes
through the digestive tract in 1/2 to 1/3 of the time it takes for
cooked food.
Eating enzyme-dead foods places a burden on your
pancreas and other organs and overworks them, which eventually exhausts
these organs. Many people gradually impair their pancreas and
progressively lose the ability to digest their food after a lifetime of
ingesting processed foods.
But you certainly can steam and
blanch foods if you want your food at least warm. Use a food
thermometer and cook them no higher than 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Up to
this temperature, you won’t be doing too much damage to the enzymes in
food...
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