Are Raw Vegetables Healthier than Cooked?

Amander and I had a debate last night at Uno’s as to whether or not her excuse for not eating the steamed broccoli in her Fetuccini Alfredo was valid or not. “Cooked vegetables have no nutritional value anyhow, most of the nutrients are cooked out of them”. I disagreed, and thus a blog was born.

It turns out we were both a little right, and both a little wrong.

Raw food experts will tell you that raw food improves overall well-being, purification, longevity, gives you more energy, and is a cure for diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and even cancer. Scientific evidence has yet to back up these claims.

It is also thought that cooking (heating foods above 116 degrees Fahrenheit) destroys vitamins and minerals and that cooked foods take longer to digest and tend to allow partially digested fats, proteins and carbohydrates to clog up our digestive system and arteries.

Organica’s manager Larry Weinstein, a longtime raw food enthusiast agrees that exposing these enzymes to heat and nearly all will be inactivated. The body, he says, then has to pick up the slack and make more of its own enzymes, using energy that it could’ve used for other things — like chewing a raw carrot.

But raw isn’t always best. Rutgers University and Taiwanese researchers at last spring’s annual American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco say that they found that the body more easily absorbs iron from 37 of 48 vegetables tested when they’re boiled, stir-fried, steamed, or grilled. Of note, the absorbable iron in cabbage jumped from 6.7% to 27% with cooking. That of broccoli flowerets rose from 6% to 30%. [source]

An article from 2000 by Tula Karras of WebMD says that tomatoes may also be best not in the salad, but in the sauce. A study published in the December 6, 1995 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that eating cooked tomatoes could improve your chances of avoiding prostate cancer. Harvard researchers studied men who ate lots of tomato sauce, including that in foods like pizza and spaghetti. Those who ate at least 10 servings of tomato sauce every week were 45% less likely to develop prostate cancer than men who ate fewer servings.

According to the Dec. 26 issue of ACS Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a new study says that researchers evaluated the effects of three commonly-used Italian cooking practices — boiling, steaming, and frying — on the nutritional content of carrots, zucchini and broccoli. Boiling and steaming maintained the antioxidant compounds of the vegetables, whereas frying caused a significantly higher loss of antioxidants in comparison to the water-based cooking methods, they say. For broccoli, steaming actually increased its content of glucosinolates, a group of plant compounds touted for their cancer-fighting abilities.

“The findings suggest that it may be possible to select a cooking method for each vegetable that can best preserve or improve its nutritional quality”, the researchers say.

In conclusion.. it seems that Amander should have eaten her broccoli. I win.