Eating Cooked Foods on a Raw Food 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.

Enzymes can no longer perform the task for which they were intended once they have been exposed to heat. Because cooked foods' enzyme content is compromised and we must produce our own enzymes to process them, eating them contributes to chronic illness. 

Cooked food digestion requires important metabolic enzymes, which aid in food digestion. 

Compared to the digestion of raw food, the digestion of cooked food requires a lot more energy. In general, raw food is so much easier to digest than cooked food that it moves through the digestive system in half to a third of the time. 

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