Anyways, Now that i am vegan, many people come up to me and ask if i will try and go all raw vegan in the next year, as if raw veganism is an upgrade from veganism. I say, "NO"
Well, for one exculsively raw food may not be a great idea .
Raw veganism essentially excludes the heating process altogether and I have a problem with that.
WHY COOKING FOOD IS A GREAT IDEA!
Heat sterilizes food prior to consumption
Please remember that the food we eat is not sterile in any way.Cooking food is a great way to make sure that the food is safe enough to eat .There are lot of parasite eggs, worms, insects , dust etc that are present in fresh food-vegetables or otherwise. Plainly just washing them is not going to kill all of them.Some parasite infective forms though get easily killed by simple heating. Not just parasite eggs but many viruses and bacteria also get killed during the heating process. Needless to say, raw veganism usually avoids heat and thus skips an important sterlization process..
Heat breaks down fibrous food into easily digestible forms
Plant food is the greates for our bodies since it doesn't stagnate in our foodpipe and start rotting there for days like meat does, But having said that, some nutrients don't get absorbed fully coz the cellwalls of plant material are too tough to break down completely. Slightly steaming or cooking foods helps plant nutrients to become more assimilable and absorbable. Having said that, overcooking/frying/ovencooking might make foods lose their nutritive value by the same principle of heat breaking up nutrients into useless forms.Thus, slightly cooking plant foods is the key. Slightly cooked food is better than just raw or overly cooked food.
Heat breaks down some forms of plant food toxins in food to harmless forms
Many plant products, nuts etc have slight traces of toxins which easily get destroyed during slight cooking or steaming.Thus, cooking foods is a great idea just to make sure the harmful substances are broken down into less harmful or harmless structures.
Heating/cooking alters texture and taste of foods and make them more tasty or palatable
Point in question is vegetables which get tastier with a bit of steaming or roasting etc(again, please don't roast the hell out of food so that there are no nutrients left at all , even if that make them super tasty). Nuts when toasted get nuttier and tastier. Rice when cooked gets tastier, easily digestible and tastier too, same for potatoes and tubers etc.
Just because in raw veganism you are not heating things yourself doesn't mean you are not using products that were previoulsy processed in any way/Using a blender is a processing method in Itself Ya know!
I see a lot of raw vegans who use the blender a lot. I mean, i would rather eat crunchy semi cooked spinach rather than blend it raw. that way, i chew better, experience better natural texture of food and also break down spinach to take full advantage of its nutrient value. Blending uses electricity(so that cancels out the energy saved by not cooking) and seriously, why not enjoy the textures of food as is rather than blend it like that.Yeah, blending once in a while is a great alternative texture experience, but then using the blender like crazy everyday is really bad.After all , we do have teeth for a reason.
Speaking of teeth I don't want all the meat eaters saying, see, we have teeth to eat meat.. really? try chewing raw meat and tell me how long it takes for your silly lil non carnivorous human teeth to make a paste of the raw meat piece.Sure, we have teeth but we have herbivorous teeth.
So, coming back to why raw veganism is not processed food free. See, I see a lot of coconut oil being used.No matter how virgin it is, some amount of processing has taken place to extract the oil from the coconut meat, yeah? Some machines very used to grate the meat, crush out the oil , then refine it and make it bacteria free.There ya go, raw veganism is not really that natural. Yeah, eating up raw pieces of coconut after freshly breaking open a coconut from a tree sure is a natural one though.
I see a lot of raw vegans using cocoa power in recipes and calling it raw recipes. It is not really raw if the cocoa beans went through processing where they were first powdered, heated up , then cocoa butter seperated and the rest of the paste then dried up and packaged.That is major processing right there. Yeah? So that kind of raw veganism is not really raw at all.
Which is why, you might as well cook most of your food prior to consumption.No biggie.Raw veganism is good only if really raw. If one is going to use coconut oil and cocoa powder and other preprocessed foods , why not just make that lil bit of cooking as acceptable too.
What is the ideal vegan diet ?
Raw is good in some way but then Cooking your food for most part ensures that it is safe to eat since heat kills most bacteria and viruses. Thoroughly wash your fruits and veggies and cook most veggies since they are more fibrous and have more minerals which get better absorbed after plant cell walls are slightly broken down with food.Eat your fruits raw since that ensures you get your water soluble vitamins intact which usually evaporate or get destroyed upon super heating . Include a lot of grains in your diet-whole grains is a great idea since that ensures consumption of fiber along with the complex starches.Our body runs of sugars , therefore, a low carb diet is a very foolish thing to do. Sure, don't stuff yourself like a pig.Overeating any food will make you fat be it protein or starch.So, eat in moderation. There ya go, that is it.
