WHY DO WE EAT COOKED FOOD??? Some facts that we must question, if we are concerned for our health
From the book Cancer Proof your Body by Ross Horne (now out of print)
We recommend Ross Hornes latest books, please ask your local bookshop.
Cooked foods, especially those high in protein, can begin to putrify. The byproducts of putrification are toxins that are
absorbed into the bloodstream and deposited at body sites far removed from the intestinal tract.
Valuable enzymes in live raw food help keep the blood clear of poisons. It has been estimated that 80% of diseases are
caused by improperly digested foods and their by-products being absorbed into the body. A diet containing mostly
cooked food has proven to be detrimental in more ways than one. Cooking my suit the taste buds, but it destroys nutritional
components, vitamins, minerals and natural enzymes protective against cancer and in so doing 80% of the nutritional value of
the food is lost, mainly devoid of enzymes, as found in raw food.
According to Paul Kouchakoff , MD, of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry, Lausanne, the white blood cell count of a healthy
person increases to a level proportional to the degree to which the food has been heated or processed, and may double
or even treble. This effect is called ‘leucocytosis’.
As civilization ‘progresses’ and food becomes more and more preserved, processed and cooked, and generally less and less natural,
so humans everywhere display more signs of disease, much earlier in life.
All that cooking is good for is that it enables people to utilise grain for food and it renders edible other unsuitable foods such as meat
and potatoes. Thus cooking enables a lot of people to sustain themselves on the only foods available to them, but in return there is a
penalty to pay.
Reference has already been made to the problems encountered by eating cooked food. And the subject has been explained in depth
in two previous books, The Health Revolution and Improving on Pritikin. In brief, the natural digestive process utilises enzymes
existing in raw food which, when the food is eaten, perform a considerable amount of predigestion (breaking down the food) in the
upper cardiac section of the stomach before the main digestive system gets to work on it. Thus a great load is relieved from the
pancreas, the organ that produces the main supply of digestive juices.
This natural benefit is entirely missing when cooked food is consumed, because cooking destroys enzymes and, not only that, the
pancreas is doubly penalised because of the difficult nature of the sort of food anyway when compared to the natural food the human
system is designed for. Thus as described by Dr Edward Howell in his books The Status of Food Enzymes in Digestion and Metabolism
and Enzyme Nutrition, the human pancreas is invariably hypertrophied and twice its proper size compared with the relative sizes of those
in wild animals and is accompanied by changes in the gonads, adrenals, pituitary and other ductless glands.
Another adverse effect of cooking is that it renders minerals in the food less assimilable, and when cooking water is poured down the
sink some of the minerals are lost all together.
Dr Max Garten, in his book The Health Secrets of a Naturopathic Doctor, described how his health had not much improved by becoming
a vegetarian; and how this led him to try a completely raw food regime. He said:
The results were electrifying; within a few days I felt much stronger with a return of my former enthusiasm. Many of my patients
whom I had been able to convert to this new diet also reported similar results.
Dr Garten observed that putrefactive bacteria in the colon increased (and therefore the odoriferousness of the stool) not only with the
eating of meat but also with the degree of heat used in cooking all food, and with this increase came the appearance of aches and pains.
He said:
It could only be deduced that certain agents in the diet were either missing or had been altered by the heat. The respective protein
content of the vegetarian diet had also been found to be indicative of changes in the intestinal flora, legumes such as beans,
lentils, peas etc. equally contributing to the display of putrefactive changes.
Another aspect is that most commercially grown standard wheat is often sprayed with round up and now being a GM variety, has close to 60% gluten, rather than the original 20% in wheat before it was modified, resulting in many health issues.