Muscle Diet

Studies show that uncooked foods are NOT always more healthy than cooked foods - in fact, sometimes the opposite is true. Let's take a lesson from fruit. Now most people don't like the taste of unripened fruit - think green bananas, rock-hard pears, etc. Some animals can quite happily eat these. Why the difference between people and animals? Well, it all goes back to Darwin - people and animals develop a taste for things that will help them survive and pass on their genes (if we didn't we wouldn't be here)! The ripening process gradually breaks down much of the fiber into sugars. Sugars can be absorbed by the human digestive tract but we DON'T have the enzymes to break down fiber and so can't use many of the calories from unripened fruit. Many animals DO produce enzymes that break down the fibre in unripened fruit, so their odds of survival go up if they aren't bothered whether the fruit is sweet and ripe.

Studies Show That "Raw" Meat-Free Diets May Be Harmful! 

When the German Institute of Human Nutrition looked at a group of over 200 people on a meat-free diet that was very high in raw fruit and vegetables (considered by some "the Holy Grail of healthy diets), they found that although they had lower total and "bad" (LDL) cholesterol, their "good" (HDL) cholesterol was too low in almost HALF of them and their homocysteine levels (which reflect heart disease risk) were higher. On top of these two risk factors being elevated, almost FOURTY PERCENT of them also had vitamin B12 deficiency (B12 is only found in animal foods), which would make them tired and breathless and could cause heart palpitations, jaundiced yellow skin and would put them at high risk of a blood disease called macrocytic anaemia (ahaaa, I seem to recognize some of those symptoms as discussed above!).

Cooked Food May Be Even More Healthy Than Raw Food!

The best example of cooked food being more healthy than raw is the case of the carotenoid lycopene, the main carotenoid in tomatoes. This nutrient is rightly called a "superfood" because quite a bit of research shows that it reduces the risk of various cancers and heart disease (probably more so than any vitamin or mineral). Well, until you cook the tomatoes, the majority of the lycopene will be bound up in the maitrix of the cells. So you may lose a small amount of folic acid and some vitamin C from cooking your tomato but you get up to 82% more lycopene! Other examples include: cooking rhubarb increases the polyphenol levels dramatically and these polyphenols are presently being studied for their anti-cancer activity, cooking bilberry increases the antioxidant activity of their anthocyanins, and roasting peanuts has been shown to increase their antioxidant activity as well.