Issue #13

Should You Cook Your Food?

Here’s a question for you:

What single animal on earth cooks its food?

Answer: Humans

So why do we cook our food?  Well, here’s something to think about while you ponder the answer. 

If you view humans not as some special, highly intelligent life
form, but simply as one animal among many thousands of species living on planet Earth, that viewpoint should tell you that humans probably were not meant to eat food that has been cooked.  Why?  Because no other animal on planet earth cooks its food.

It is certainly true that our intelligence has gotten us into a lot of trouble health wise in terms of what we now call “food”, what we do to prepare our food and how far away we have gotten from the raw food diet that virtually all animals in nature eat. 

But we can also use that intelligence to understand when raw food is best and when a certain amount of “preparation” of our food is appropriate.  So let’s look at food as fuel for our bodies and, particularly, how to prepare it when necessary.

The food we need to fuel our bodies comes in essentially 3 forms.  They are carbohydrates, fats and protein.  Because the primary fuel that our bodies, and our brains in particular, use to do work is carbohydrates, let’s look at carbohydrates first.

Carbohydrates come in a number of different forms. They can be found in the starchy parts of foods like bread, potatoes and rice. They are also in foods that taste sweet like fruit, honey and in refined sugars that you find in soft drinks and candy.

Carbohydrates mostly come from plant sources such as legumes, vegetables, grains and fruits. But they can also be found in milk products in the form of lactose.
 
The carbohydrates we are going to focus mostly on are 1) starches and 2) green and leafy vegetables.  Let’s look at starches first.

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