Effects of Cooking on Vitamins and Minerals

April 3, 2009

Photography and Text by Omid Jaffari

Effects of Cooking on Vitamins and Minerals

More and more, people are choosing to begin a raw foods lifestyle, and the way our environment is going, it really is no wonder. There are more preservatives, chemicals, and poisonous additives in almost all of our foods. There’s the scary statistics of how much of our produce, meats, and dairy products are modified with manmade chemicals through biochemistry and genetic engineering-up to about 70% now. Then, of course, there are all the processed foods and refined sugars that have no nutritional value and have only served to produce and contribute to serious conditions such as diabetes and the like. In times like these, we have to safeguard our bodies, our health, and our lives from food that has been modified or tampered with. This is why so many have chosen to go with a raw foods diet and lifestyle.

Aside from all the gruesome reasons above of additives and GMO’s, etc; one of the number one reasons that most people switch from a standard diet to a raw food diet is to both lose weight and gain back the vital nutrients that their vegetables and fruits naturally contain. Few people truly understand what happens to their foods’ nutritional value when they cook it. Below, we take a closer look at what the effects are of cooking on our foods’ vitamins and minerals.

You may already have heard that cooking vegetables above a certain temperature depletes the vegetable of precious nutrients and minerals, but maybe you’re not sure how or what the specifics are, and-most importantly, what this means for those who ingest cooked veggies. Basically, at a temperature of 115-118 degrees-that can be just lightly steaming your vegetables-your vegetables lose the vitamins and nutrients they were built with, and also their enzymes.

Organic vegetables and fruits are one of – if not the only – last remaining foods that can be purchased in their original state, uncooked and unprocessed. This means that their stores of healthy vitamins and minerals are at their optimum, and therefore, the best things you can eat to not only feel good, but also build and maintain a strong immune system. This is why it is imperative to your health, wellbeing, and life that you do not compromise their nutrients by cooking them.

How are fruits and veggies compromised by cooking, and by how much? This is one of the main set of questions people have when they first start learning about raw foodism, cooked vs. raw foods, and their future health. Basically, when you cook vegetables or fruits, you lose anywhere from 30-50% of their initial nutrients and minerals and 100% of enzymes are damaged. What happens is when fruits and vegetables are heated at a temperature of over 118 degrees for 3 minutes or more, the vitamins break down progressively more and more the longer it cooks. More specifically, the vitamins and minerals in your once healthy veggies and fruits break down and are completely chemically altered from their original healthy state.

So, what does this mean for you, your body’s functions, and your overall health? Not only is your body now not receiving the scores of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals that the vegetable or fruit once held, but it is in turn getting a completely different animal that cannot be easily digested in your body. These cooked vegetables cannot be digested because one of the side effects of cooking it was that it also lost all its food enzymes. These enzymes, once a part of your digestion, interacts with your digestive enzymes to efficiently and easily digest this vegetable and all future vegetables. Without a properly working digestion, your body is thrown into chaos-and it cannot carry out the filtering process that it is responsible for: elimination of wastes, conversion to energy, and use and storage of vitamins and minerals.

Without proper elimination of wastes, energy conversion, and enough vitamins and minerals, your body is vulnerable to a whole host of short and long term conditions, illnesses, and diseases due to your digestive tract’s inability to process cooked vegetables in your system. So you can see that the reasons for choosing a raw food lifestyle are much more involved than just for the purposes of health, weight loss, etc. Your decision to choose raw foods over cooked foods is crucial to your health and life.

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Other Articles by Omid

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Comments

17 Comments so far

Elena on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 8:38 am
Omid, great article!

Elena – I thought so too. Thanks Elena. :-)
Steph on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 5:12 pm
It’s true that certain raw fruits and vegetables have more nutrients that are uncooked, but there are also many foods that are natural and are dangerous. Is natural always better? It feels like we’re headed in that direction, but sometimes I think we take it a little too far.

Hi Steph – Thank you so much for stopping by and bringing up a valid point, that not all natural foods are safe to eat. Is natural always better? Not necessarily. For the sake of the point made here, natural food falls into two categories, edible and non-edible. In this article, on this blog, and I’ll go as far as saying throughout the raw food community, the natural uncooked food raw vegan foodist’s consume is edible plant food that is safe for human consumption. The usual suspects apply – fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, etc., found at farmer’s markets, health food stores, your local grocery stores, or best of all, home grown. If ever there is a question about the safety of a natural plant, don’t eat it unless positively identified as safe to eat.

Thanks again for stopping by. :-)
roger on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 6:50 pm
i don’t think cooking compromises minerals. it’s probably more accurate to say that the minerals are seperated? if you consume the cooking water for your vegetables, you’re probably getting the full amount anyway. and does it really matter that the vegetable enzymes are denatured? your stomach acids would probably complete the job even if the heat of cooking didn’t. you’re still getting the component protein, it’s just lost its functionality. and i can’t think of any reason why you’d want to have plant enzymes; i’ve yet to meet a person who can photosynthesize :)

Hi Roger – i’ve yet to meet a person who can photosynthesize….. You made me laugh! That was too funny! I see Omid has responded to your comment, please see/read below. Thank you for taking the time to voice your opinion. :-)
Sarah on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 6:55 pm
I would have to agree with Steph. Although, I think you make some great points about the loss of vitamins from overprocessing. However, I feel that limited consumption of meat and fish do play vital roles in our body, and therefore do require some cooking. Not only that, but did you know that important phytochemicals such as prostate cancer fighter Lycopene actually increase with increased processing (like in tomato paste, marinara sauce, etc..)? Personally, I am trying make everything fresh at home, so that I can control the ingredients and cooking that go into them. These are just my personal feelings and disagreements with the raw food movement, but I can definitely see some of the benefits.

Hi Sarah – I/We appreciate hearing your personal feelings and opinion, thank you for sharing them here. I wrote an unpublished article on the subject of lycopene and yes it’s true that the process of cooking, for example, tomatoes makes the plant nutrient lycopene more absorbable. However, in my researching this topic, I’ve learned that eating raw tomatoes with the “good” fat rich foods like olive oil, nuts, and avocados helps the body absorb lycopene – a great way for raw foodists to obtain their lycopene. It is great to hear you are making an effort to prepare the healthiest food you can. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. :-)
Omid Jaffari on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 9:19 pm
Hi Steph, I do believe that natural is always better but as you said this does not mean that you can eat everything that is natural!

For example some beans and mushrooms can be poisonous when eaten raw and in large quantities. When you change your diet to raw and living food it is thus important to be educated about your food choices.

Lifestyle choices and healthy living are a very personal matter. People should pursue the path and take it as far as it makes them feel great, energized and healthy.
Omid on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 10:35 pm
Roger! I must say that you are really funny.

You are right in stating that minerals separate when cooking and this is why in many cultures and healthy diets, such as the macrobiotic diet, they always recommend to drink the broth or vegetable water.

However, when it come to enzymes they are a essential for good health. Enzymes exist in our foods and our bodies. In foods, they add value to nutrients and minerals that we need to fulfill easy and efficient digestion. In our bodies, we have enzymes for the purpose of carrying forth the efficient digestion of filtering the wastes, nutrients, and energy reserves for the body’s optimum health and function.

According to Dr. Edward Howell our lifespan is inversely proportional to the rate that the enzymatic potential of the body is depleted. Digestive enzymes ensure the complete digestion of food, which help eliminate potential problems caused by toxins.

Now, I would like to go back a little to the part that I like about your comment. Minerals. From a raw food stands, we look at vitamins and minerals together because they complement one another in their functions.

Therefore the question that minerals (1) something that is neither animal nor vegetable matter, (2) a crystalline substance formed via inorganic processes) does become inorganic (depleted) when cooked is true due to the complexities of the different particles that exist in minerals. For example Calcium. Calcium loses ammonia at a high temperature and is ultimately converted into nutride. What happens is that after vaporization of the excess ammonia, the resulting hexammoniate is converted to the amiods at temperatures slightly above that of its surroundings. But of course this is only one example. And indeed, not all mineral react this way, but there are some that do.

Now we don’t want to bring the test tubes out and go bonkers… but in general, we, as in raw foodists, like to take into consideration all argument, and weigh their pros and cons about our food. The conclusion is that there are more cons in cooking food overall.

Thank you for your comment Roger, it has made us go slightly deeper into these questions and answers.
Omid on April 4, 2009 Saturday, 10:46 pm
Hi Sarah,

I believe that a diet that is natural and toxin free will give you a radiant and healthy body. Although some chemicals, due to our environment, we cannot escape but by following a rawfood diet you are giving your body the tools not to become overly toxic and develop diseases such as cancer. So yes, cooking tomatoes enhances cancer fighting Lycopene but if you are consuming pure and living food there is probably no need for this.

However I do also agree that following a 100% raw food diet is not for everyone. Some people thrive on this diet and for others it doesn’t seem to suit them as much. But no one can argue that adding a lot more fresh, natural, unrefined and organic produce to your diet is bad thing ;)

Thank you so much for bringing up these points.
Michael on April 5, 2009 Sunday, 12:11 am
Firstly, I would like to point out that it would behoove you to change your wording. The use of the word “toxins” is incredibly vague and almost always associated with a pseudoscience. It’s a way to scare people into following what you advocate without actually mentioning any specifics. What are these “toxins?” Nobody knows, but they’re clearly very, very bad.

Another issue I have is the scaremongering involving the term “GMO.” ALL food is genetically modified, if you come right down to it. Apples weren’t supposed to be big and sweet and delicious. They’re that way only by human intervention. Most, if not all, of the produce is how it is because people manipulated them by breeding selectively. Even worse, many of the anti-GMO, organic food people are pushing this on others. Organic food grows much less per acre than genetically modified food and, while this results in a raise in price you you, for the less fortunate, it means there’s no food at all. I guess you can be glad that fewer people will have “toxins” in their systems. But it’ll be because there will be fewer people.

And so what if something’s genetically modified? It’s just an accelerated form of selective breeding. Apples aren’t being mixed with fish, as some would have us believe. They’re being mixed with apples.

Concerning the issue of digestion: cooking something helps to break it down in advance making it easier to digest and also increases the availability of the nutrients. Some compounds that block the absorption of nutrients are broken down as well.

You might also want to mention to all the ladies that there was a study showing that women who followed a raw food diet had a 30% rate of amenorrhoea – lack of menstruation.

Hi Michael – Wow, where to begin…

Your point on digestion is spot on. It is true that cooking or lightly steaming certain raw plant foods helps it become more digestible, especially the gassy vegetables. Everyone’s tolerance level differs, even among raw foodists, as far as their ability to digest certain raw and uncooked plant foods. Personally, my system isn’t that sensitive and can tolerate a wide variety of raw plant foods.

I have recently heard mention of amenorrhoea – lack of menstruation among females who follow a raw food diet. I don’t know much about this subject and it isn’t something I’ve experience personally, but I am interested in learning more about it. Do you have any information or links you can share?

On the topic of GMO – Genetically Modified Foods – this is were you and I have completely different views it seems. Have you ever watched the documentary film – The Future of Food? I’d be interested to hear your review of it.

One other thing, I’m not here, and neither is Omid, nor anyone else who contributes to this site, to scare people into following what we advocate. Raw Epicurean is focused on raw vegan food and the lifestyle and is open to everyone, whether you embrace this diet, in whole or in part, or not.

Thank you Michael for stopping by and sharing your views.
Lauren B on April 5, 2009 Sunday, 2:13 am
Where is the scientific data behind any of your claims? Do you have a PhD in biochemistry?

Interestingly enough, I digest the cooked grassfed beef, free-eggs, and organic dairy products I eat on my all natural low carbohydrate plan just fine. It’s raw plant matter and fruit especially (look up “effects of fructose” on Google Scholar) that can really cause digestion problems for sensitive individuals like myself. Too much raw plant matter = gas and bloating. Too many starchy veggies and sweet fruits (mangoes, grapes, etc.) cause blood sugar swings. Lovely side effect of “enzymes,” huh?

If you want the hard science behind eating a natural low carbohydrate diet, read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. And search “insulin resistance” on Google Scholar.

We both agree that less processed = better for you. What I’d ask you is how many people can stomach raw meat and eggs, a necessary source of highly bioavailable complete protein/CLA/iron for many with the omnivorous genotype. Our paleolithic ancestors DID learn how to roast meat, after all!

Hi Laura B

There are different types of raw food diets – raw veganism, raw vegetarianism, and raw animal food diets – where one primarily eats unheated food, or food warmed to temperatures less than 118 degrees. What we speak of here is raw veganism consisting of plant-based food, and no animal meat or by-products.

Omid wrote in response to Sarah’s comment and I’d like to share it:

“However I do also agree that following a 100% raw food diet is not for everyone. Some people thrive on this diet and for others it doesn’t seem to suit them as much. But no one can argue that adding a lot more fresh, natural, unrefined and organic produce to your diet is bad thing.”

I’d like to add that everyone’s dietary choose is a personal one. Sounds like a low carbohydrate dietary plan works for you from what you wrote and I think that is wonderful. The intention here isn’t to push our dietary beliefs or lifestyle onto anyone. We present delicious recipes and information to hopefully help guide anyone who has interest in learning or adopting a raw vegan diet and lifestyle.

Thank you for taking the time to express yourself here and I hope you visit again soon. :-)
Heather on April 5, 2009 Sunday, 10:24 am
Thanks for the inspiring post, Ingrid. Sometimes I need a reminder why this lifestyle is so important.

Hi Heather – you are so welcome! Hope you had a wonderful weekend. :-)
Zara on April 5, 2009 Sunday, 12:11 pm
Very good article by Omid! I’ve been following your blog for awhile now. All the information and wonderful recipes have encouraged me to add more healthy foods, fruits, and vegetables to my diet. As I’ve commented before, I’m not 100% vegetarian but I am enjoying more of it in my diet. I do still eat cooked food and I eat far less meat than I did before and I feel better than I have in the past, more light and healthy.

Zara – Glad you enjoyed Omid’s article ~ more to come. I’m happy to know you are incorporating more fruits and veggies into your diet. Thank you for sharing this news with us.
Cheris on April 5, 2009 Sunday, 4:55 pm
I enjoyed this article! It was straight to the point informative.

Hi Cheris – Glad you enjoyed the article. :-)
Nicole on April 7, 2009 Tuesday, 3:44 pm
Thanks for passing on the info Ingrid!
Chiaw on April 7, 2009 Tuesday, 10:01 pm
I’m a huge lover of raw vegetables and fruit. Their nutritional value is indisputable, not to mention superior taste. However, I’m not sure that I’m totally convinced about raw-ism.

There’s a lot good information in Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal Vegetable Miracle.”

I do agree with Omid that adding a lot more fresh, unrefined and organic produce to your diet is always a good thing.
Elena on April 9, 2009 Thursday, 7:38 am
So, I decided to revisit this post today, and found most of the responses quite interesting. I used to be a carnivore for the most part of my life. Because of my husband’s health we became vegan—his health improved tremendously. However, as the time went on, we noticed that our bodies were craving more and more uncooked foods. I had done an extensive research, which had only proven that the more raw PLANT food the better. So, we are now 80/20-100% (raw to cooked ratio).

Here are some statistics for those of you who are arguing about whether cooked foods is really that bad: cooking makes 50-70% of protein in food non-bioavailable, it interferes with the body’s absorption of minerals, it denatures essential fats, and destroys 70%-90% of water-soluble vitamins and phytonutrients and 100% of enzymes. With that in mind think about this: we all have natural enzymes working in our bodies that fulfill their function, like little soldiers all throughout our organs. What happens when you eat and then try to digest foods that no longer have living enzymes to aid proper digestions, you body pull on your enzyme “account” that you naturally have. The balance is your enzyme “account” drops low, is not replenished, since you are taking in “enzyme-free” food over and over, and your body faces enzyme bankruptcy. The enzymes that your body pulls from its organs are vital in keeping you healthy. When natural enzymes are depleted your body starts to slowly fail, most of the times without you knowing about it. The only way to replenish your enzyme “account” is through consuming enzyme-rich foods, which would be your plant foods before being cooked.

So, even though you still get some of the vitamins and minerals in cooked foods, you hurt yourself by killing all of the enzymes. So, if you do decide to eat something cooked, as I do once in a while, you have to make sure to supplement it with a lot of “live” foods to help your body.

I don’t want to take too much more space on this post, since this is not my blog, but THERE ARE studies that support these statements (and the statements in the post). All you have to do, instead of being a nay-sayer right off the bat, is to actually make an effort and read some literature on it. This is not pseudo-science—it’s a life proven fact! (And I am not just rambling—I do have a science degree : ) )

Those who are concerned about having too much gas when eating raw foods, do realize that if you mix fibre-rich plant food with simple sugars and processed foods, that is what creates the “gasy” atmoshphere–fiber does not mix with simple sugars! The two cannot coexist peacefully :) Try taking out processed foods for about 2-3 weeks and properly combine your foods, and you will quickly find out that gas and upset stomach are a thing of the past–and a happy tummy a thing of the future :)

All the best to this blog! Keep up the good work!

Elena – thank you for your very informative commentary. Excellent points you brought up! Hurray for a high raw diet! Please feel free to express yourself as you’d like anytime, you are always welcome to do so here. :-)
Omid Jaffari :: An Interview and Giveaway : Raw Epicurean on April 10, 2009 Friday, 6:43 am
[...] Effects of Cooking on Vitamins and Minerals [...]

Read my interview with Omid, a creative raw food chef, great writer, and wonderful teacher, who wrote this informative article.
Enzymes and Longevity : Raw Epicurean on May 1, 2009 Friday, 7:03 pm
Another great article contributed by Omid Jaffari

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