Raw Is Good!

Raw! That’s the way many of us like it. Just plain raw! Give us raw and we are happy campers. We like raw sports, relationships with a rawness to them, raw sex, and kind of living our lives on a raw edge. Those of us who are raw oriented also know the value of eating raw. And believe it or not when we eat raw vegetables we provide our body with some very essential vitamins and nutrients that are not found in the can.

When we are single and living by ourselves we do have a tendency to live out of the can. We eat canned foods because it is quick and easy. Pour the can contents into a bowl and throw it into the microwave. Within a few moments we have something warm to fill our bellies with. However, when we live out of the can our bodies are not getting the nutritional value it needs to function at its best.

The body functions at its best when we do raw. That is when we eat vegetables that are raw or near being raw. But for many of us eating raw vegetables can be a little repulsive, and depending on the vegetable, a little difficult to eat. Regardless, raw vegetables, or as near to raw as possible, have many nutritional values and advantages for our bodies.

All vegetables contain enzymes. Enzymes help the body break down many of the other nutrients we might consume so that those nutrients are more effective for our body’s use. The bad thing about canned products, especially concerning vegetables, is that those enzymes we need for healthy living have been cooked out of what’s in the can.

The basic principle here is that the more a vegetable is cooked the more enzymes within it that are lost. That’s right, and it is something to be remembered when we cook vegetables. The more a vegetable is cooked the less its nutrient quality becomes.

Unfortunately, most of us are not chefs or doctors who know about the nutritional value of vegetables. Even on the raw food diet, certain vegetables do need to be cooked before they are consumed, primarily for digestive reasons. It’s hard for the body to process raw asparagus for example. Asparagus, although tremendously high in nutritional value, is real tough to eat raw and when eaten raw is hard on the digestive system to process. That is OK, though, as most raw food diet experts say you only need to make up eighty per cent of your diet with raw foods in order to get the health benefits.

For a large number chefs and nutritional advisors the advice given for cooking the vegetables you have to cook is to cook them as briefly as possible. Nutritionally scientific evidence does show that boiling vegetables does make them softer to eat, but the nutritional value of those veggies is lost in the water that the vegetables were boiled in. However, when you cook your vegetables gently and for a short period it is a different story.

Is raw good? It depends on the kind of raw you want, as we have seen. It does seem that eating our raw vegetables raw, however, has more of a health benefit than does boiling them. Maybe there is something to be said about being a little raw.