NGI's Founder Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.
Some thoughts on the relative benefits of raw and cooked food from our founder, Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.:
Raw food is all the rage these days. The diet is based on unprocessed and uncooked plant foods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, sprouts, seeds, nuts, grains, beans, dried fruit, and seaweed. From what I’ve seen, there is a huge amount of work required to follow this diet, as there is much chopping, blending, dehydrating, juicing, and so on. Often, food is made to look like something it’s not – squash “spaghetti” or “mashed potatoes” made with raw cauliflower.
As it turns out, there has been a fair amount of anthropological research done in the field of raw and cooked food. Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, is the author of a recent book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human (Basic Books, 2009). When he was studying gorillas and chimps in the African wild, he decided to eat what they ate, as that seemed easier and made sense. After all, we are descendants of these animals! However, he found that eating the monkeys’ grub, roots, leaves, berries, and the like, was not enough; he felt ravenously hungry when he returned to camp. He yearned for a plate of hot mashed potatoes. It turns out that chimps and gorillas spend about six hours per day chewing their raw vegetable diet!
The discovery of fire, and the cooking of food, made a huge difference in how apes fed. Cooking, grinding, mashing, and breaking up food all help make it softer, and so aid greatly in digestion and absorption of nutrients because these techniques allow the digestive juices to extract more nutrients from both plant and animal foods. Professor Wrangham posits that cooking made the evolutionary difference between apes and humans.
Most interesting is the extensive research that shows that a cooked, soft diet increases absorption of both nutrients and calories. The calories from cooked food are more bio-available than those of raw food, and Professor Wrangham cautions that the calories counted by the thermodynamic paradigm (which ignores the effects of cooking) should not be considered the same as the energy obtained from cooked food.
Today’s movement emphasizing consumption of raw foods considers them more “natural.” That may be true. However, I believe that we should not quickly assume that “natural” is always good. Poisonous mushrooms are natural too, but I don’t see anyone eating them knowingly. Nor is there a “right” way for humans to eat. Most human societies eat local and seasonal foodstuffs, which vary greatly according to region.
Also, we are not like the apes: we read books, ride bicycles, build skyscrapers, fly planes. And we cook. Every single group of humans anthropology studies has the use of fire. So I would like to think that when food is hard to get and we need every bit of nutrition we can get our hands on, cooking our food is the ideal way to prepare it for consumption.
However, in our times we have gone to the other extreme: In the last 75-100 years, with the advent of commercially processed foods, we have gotten used to a very soft, finely ground diet – chopped meat, white bread, cakes, cookies, ice cream – and this diet over many years has brought with it numerous health problems and obesity. A raw-food diet, then, can be a very healthy and helpful approach to counterbalance the unhealthy effects of our long-term processed food diet.
This balance may be temporary. The pendulum swings. If one embarks on a raw-food diet, it’s important to pay attention to see if at any time the body says, “Enough!” It may be a month, a year, or seven, but a moment may come when a bowl of hot soup and some flavorful rice and beans suddenly feel just wonderful again.
Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D.
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Very informed, very lively, very balanced article. Love to read about the anthropological threads behind food, food lore, nationality, trendshifting, and all that.
Isn’t there a heavy-duty structural anthropology piece by Claude Levi-Strauss called “the raw and the cooked”? Can you please clarify as to any parallels? Thank you.
[...] Ann Marie Colbin, founder of The Gourmet Institute cooking school and leading nutrition expert, wrote an article this past week comparing raw food versus cooked food. Although the raw foods diet has gained in popularity in recent years, Ms. Colbin is not convinced it is a viable long-term option. She agrees that a raw foods diet can be very healing, especially if a person has been consuming a diet high in processed foods, low in fiber, and full of poor quality food choices. A raw foods diet can efficiently counteract the negative effects of such a low quality diet in that it is very high in fiber, nutritionally dense and detoxifying, but Ms. Colbin believes it is essential to stay in tune with your body and know when to say enough is enough and make the return to cooked food which is easier to digest and makes nutrients more readily absorbed. I have to admit that I agree with her on this point. All too often, we get hung up in the dogma of our food beliefs and stop listening to what our body needs. We need to leave the “labels” behind and just eat nourishing food that is right for our individual makeup. A 100% raw diet may work miracles for one person, yet leave another feeling outright starved. We all come with different physiological constitutions as well as different health histories and ethnic backgrounds. From my personal experience, I have greatly benefited from a high raw diet over the past couple of years, but I find that the percentage of raw that I consume changes with the seasons. In the warmer months I eat about 80% raw, while in the colder months, I crave warmth in the form of hot soups, cooked grains, and whole grain breads, so that percentage drops to about 50-60%. A 100% raw diet has never worked for me and I doubt it ever would. The important thing to keep in mind is to listen to your body. I can’t stress that enough. There is no one size fits all diet, despite the many claims to the contrary on the bookstore shelves. Not only do the needs of one person vary from the needs of another, but your own needs will change over time. You may discover you thrive on a raw vegan diet for a few years and then suddenly start craving cooked food or animal protein. Things change. Keep an open mind, drop the judgment that accompanies food choices, and eat what is right for your body. After all, the reason we eat is to provide our bodies with the fuel we need to function at our peak and to reach our fullest potential. Who doesn’t want that? To read AnnMarie Colbin’s article click here: [...]
I have been a proponent of the raw foods diet for a couple of years now, but I have never preached 100% raw to anyone. I firmly believe that you must listen to the needs of your own body, as you so aptly state in this article. I wrote a post about this article on my blog, http://www.GalantysGamePlan.com. Thank you for your insight Ms Colbin. I’m a big fan! I was a student at IIN and heard you speak there a couple of years ago. Attending the Gourmet Institute is on my life wish list! I hope to get there someday. Please check out my blog if you have some time. I’d love to have you as a guest blogger sometime. Thank you, Carol Galanty
Recently a new member of eating raw, and the plus side is I feel more alive, and more childlike. I have more energy and enjoy the chopping and gathering of all the whole raw foods. I was always healthy, but now I know when I am truly, intuitively hungry. We comsume far more food in this country and so much should not be considered food.
I love to cook too, but am devoting as much of my diet in a day to raw.
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