Cooked Or Raw? Strangely Enough, Cooked.

Here's something that supports the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook - actually, several things.  But mainly, here's a question for you:

Given our family tree straight from the apes (I'm not getting into the creationsim vs evolution debate here - we have a clear history as far as foodstuffs and our digestive systems goes and that's that) are we better off with most of our foods raw, or cooked?

The answer may surprise you.

Seems we have had fire for long enough, and used it to prepare our food long enough, to have adapted to actually doing better on cooked food.  And - once again - The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook has been saying that all along...

In the book, I've said that humans are superbly adapted for our diet.  The diet we had up until about 400 years ago, anyhow...  And we are certainly NOT at all adapted for adulterated, processed, additive-laden, and differently-prepared foods.  For instance - did you know that peanut allergies only rose sharply in the last hundred years or so?  Coincidentally, in synchronism with a different, high-temperature, method of roasting peanuts...  Most people with a peanut allergy can eat raw unprocessed peanuts or boiled peanuts or slow low-temp-roasted peanuts just fine...  (BTW Please DO NOT just go off and eat a raw peanut if you're allergic - some people are genuinely allergic to all forms of peanuts, and before you try anything like that consult your dietitian or GP and make sure there's an allergy test done with raw peanuts first. You may, though, get a surprise.)

And we are in fact superbly adapted for our habit of storing certain vegetables and food all year around - so not ALL vegetables need be eaten only in season.  And - as the quoted article states - we are now superbly adapted to eating cooked and prepared foods - as long as we are preparing those foods in the ways our 100-generations-back ancestors prepared them.  So while it's true that tomatoes are one of our best foods for antioxidant lycopene, as I say in the book, tomato paste contains more accessible lycopene than raw tomatoes, and cooking tomato with olive oil and grapeseed oil allows your body to access even more lycopene, up to ten times as much as tomato paste alone.

If you're tired of feeling "a little bit off," tired of not always feeling in top form, or have prostate or other urito-genital inflammations or diseases, or even some more common problems such as Type 2 diabetes or arterial plaques or irritable bowels - my book CAN help.  (In my case, using the guidelines in the book I managed to reverse prostate cancer and also lose a few kilos of weight.  And yes - the diet was the only thing I used to reverse my prostate cancer, in under seven months.  Your mileage may vary, but the health benefits of using this book as your guide to food and eating seem pretty proven to me.)

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