December, 2022 | Beyond Science Labs

There is debate as to whether cooked or raw food is better for you, and the truth is, as always, there is truth in both extremes. Most contemporary raw-food diets include 30% cooked food, and processed foods are to be avoided. Raw food diets include fermented foods, sprouted grains, nuts, and seeds, in addition to raw fruits and vegetables. In all things, balance is the key.

Extremists believe that cooked food is toxic and potentially dangerous in terms of human consumption, though this may be true when it comes to commercially processed and distributed food.

As far as nutritional value in general, the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables begins to deteriorate significantly when heated for extended periods of time. Doing so will decrease beneficial plant molecules, phytonutrients, and vitamins. The longer you cook at a high temperature the greater the loss. If you are expecting to get enzymes from the food that you eat, it is important to note that enzymes are destroyed at 117°F.

Raw fruits and vegetables begin to lose their nutritional value when they are heated to a temperature of 115°F or more. This is especially true for apples, oranges, carrots, bananas, and the like.

If you are going to heat food, do so uncut, then cut after the heating, as heating cut food releases the nutrients more rapidly. The nutrients are most susceptible to being lost from cutting include water-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin C, followed by vitamins A and E, while fat-soluble vitamins D, E, and K are mostly unaffected by cutting and cooking.

Natural loss of nutritional value is due to exposure to heat, oxygen, and light over time. Most foods naturally begin to lose their nutritional value when it is harvested. So, getting access to food soon after harvesting will yield the most nutrients.

Not all Cooking is Bad

Gentle slow cooking is a heating method that helps to retain nutrients in fruits and vegetables.

Prolonged cooking over a period of time is actually good for some food items for enhancing the antioxidant power of beta-carotene and lycopene.

Beta-carotene

Beta-carotene is a powerful antioxidant that the body converts into vitamin A. So, cook carrots, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cantaloupe, and winter squash to your heart’s content, as these cooked beta-carotene-rich foods will help deliver the antioxidant power that has been proven to reduce your risk of heart disease.

Lycopene

Cook all the red fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, pink guavas, apricots, watermelons, and pink grapefruits you want as the cooking process makes the antioxidant lycopene more bioavailable. Lycopene is effective in reducing the risk of prostate cancer in men, and heart disease.

Both, beta-carotene and lycopene, protect us from free radicals which left unattended to can proliferate and often lead to chronic disease.

Cooking may reduce the overall nutritional value of these otherwise natural sources of vitamins and minerals, but it more than doubles the antioxidant value.

Microwaves

Whatever you believe about microwaves, whether they are good or bad if you have such an opinion, they do preserve the nutrients of raw fruits in vegetables. You risk the same depletion of nutrients as heating to temperatures over 115°F, but microwave heating exposes your raw food to these high temperatures for much less time, thereby saving nutrients that would have been lost at longer heat exposure.

Note that microwaves can be dangerous as they may expose users to microwave radiation. Microwaves cook organic material, and that includes you, too. Areas of the body particularly sensitive to microwave radiation are the eyes and testes.

Cooking Can Make Food Safe to Eat

If you do not have access to food that is safe to eat, or if your food sources are questionable, cooking any food to over 140°F will kill most bacteria, making food safer to ingest with a lower chance of contracting a food-borne illness.

Some foods may not be safe to eat in their raw forms, such as meat, eggs, or dairy, though some people do. If you choose to do so, please know where your food comes from, and be certain that you can trust the source.

Submitted by David M Masters

What did Methuselah eat?

- - Fruit
  - Vegetables
  - Meat

and for flavor,

- - Leaves
  - Flowers
  - Bark
  - Insects

Especially in a day and age when we are living between 75 and 77 years of age, we celebrate immensely if one of us makes it to 100, and no one makes it to 110. Yet, there are these records indicating that people lived to be 900-plus-years back in the day when Methuselah lived (3319 BC to 2350 BC) before “the flood.”

The flood happened suddenly and occurred sometime between 2350 BC and 2459 BC, and the jury is still out on a more precise date that historians can agree on, and many archaeologists don’t even acknowledge that there was a flood at all. This is due to the fact that the flood is interpreted as being worldwide, and there is no archaeological record verifying that the earth was totally submerged in water (and I agree with them).

People just like to argue and assert their knowledge over someone else’s, whereas a little humility may lead to being open enough to see that there is truth in the information that we have available to us somewhere, but you have to look to find it.

I hang around a lot of smart, well-educated people, and when they hear about using religious texts for anything, they start to freak out, citing the vast difference between science (fact) and religion (fiction). Yet, as we continue to dig into the secrets held beneath the surface of the earth, we are finding evidence that aligns with various religious texts. This is a thing, and it’s happening more often now, so maybe there is more fact in those texts than my scientific peers would like to admit.

We’ll see, if they will be open to new data, leading to revising their truth of the past, as it unfolds beneath us.

Back to my observations of Methuselah and longevity. He and his contemporaries lived extremely long live, pushing the boundaries of a thousand years. Methuselah did not give a thought to his diet. He just ate what was put in front of him, without care. My vegetarian friends maintain that Methuselah ate a strictly vegetarian diet.

I respect them and support the vegetarians and vegans, but I believe that Methuselah ate a natural diet that included fruit, vegetables, leaves, flowers, bark, and even insects, and he did eat meat on occasion (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). Food was prepared both cooked and uncooked, and Methuselah ate it all, sparingly, not in excess or in a gluttonous fashion.

I mention the flood because following this event people began to live shorter in their number of days, regularly until they reached a ripe old age of 70 years old by 1000 BC, the age of King David at his passing. And the only big changes I can see in the diet are more meat and grain.

Methuselah’s diet had evolved from the very same diet that is still preferred by the only species that we share most of our DNA, the chimpanzees, and bonobos. This appears to be the right kind of diet for humans that promotes long life spans.

The only thing is, even if we duplicated Methuselah’s diet to the strictest detail, we do not have access to that primitive uncontaminated nutrient-rich raw food to create our meals from.

The answer to longevity via food selection is much more complicated than “what to eat” because the quality of the food that most of us have access to is highly processed and has very little nutrition in it. It’s like we can barely survive for the years we can eek out on what we have access to as food these days.