Don't mind William. He is a mass of contradictions.  He is in favour of palaeolithic diets but frowns on the notion of Evolution. He claims to be a rawist but   eats lots of pemmican, half of which is always cooked/rendered, but which he is under the strange impression is actually all-raw. He is in favour of a healthy diet but doesn't seem to mind eating grainfed meats etc.

As regards the study, I think you may have made a mistake re the title of that study. I have previously  noticed that one or two online studies have claimed in the shorthand description that  cooking foods made them more "bioavailable"/"better absorbed" than raw foods, but when I actually checked the relevant studies, what they actually meant was not that  cooked foods were better absorbed by the human body but that the process of cooking increased the levels of a specific nutrient(s)  in that food. For example, lycopene in tomatoes, I believe, is increased by cooking.

Oh, I see what you mean. It is true that raw vegetables or grains have cellulose which prevents many nutrients in it from being absorbed. It is also true that cooking breaks down the cell-walls, thus releasing those locked-up nutrients. However, the nutrients released are simply higher in amount  after the cell-walls are shredded, they are not made more "bioavailable"/"better absorbed" for the human body by the process of cooking. Of course, harsher methods of cooking than steaming would negate that benefit as the increased heat would destroy many of those nutrients.

There is a small segment of rawists who, because of the above data, insist on eating all their animal foods raw(as cooked animal foods produce the highest amounts of heat-created toxins after being cooked and are less well digested after cooking) , but who prefer to lightly cook their vegetables. The catch, of course, is that the process of cooking vegetables creates a variety of heat-created toxins , plus destroys enzymes and bacteria which rather negates the benefit, IMO.

Like I said before, the only person who claims that cooking actually makes foods more easily absorbed in the human gut is Richard Wrangham. He has even produced one or two studies, organised by him, which are supposed to support his claims. However, this scientist is widely derided/ridiculed by anthropologists who view him as being a mere "chimp researcher", not a genuine anthropologist. His data is empty of evidence(he himself has admitted that he has no solid evidence to support his claims that cooking got started 1.8 million years ago) and he has produced some obviously biased evidence. For example, he has stated that a hominid like Homo Erectus would need to chew raw meats for 5.7 to 6.2 hours a day in order to get enough calories/energy each day to survive:-

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

 He bases this view on chimps' chewing rates, conveniently forgetting that apemen are not chimps, having different jaws etc.. What is worse is that he implies that modern raw foodists would need to spend this amount of time in order to get enough calories. This shows that he cannot have done any research among raw foodists. I mean, any basic enquiry would have shown him that we raw foodists spend as much time eating foods as any other person who eats cooked food diets. On top of that, many of us don't feel the need to chew much, anyway, just bolting raw meats down like dogs and other carnivores usually do.

The problem with Wrangham is that he is a committed vegetarian and feminist so is hopelessly biased. So, he doesn't like the notion that eating (raw) meat led to the bigger human brain since hunting is a largely male-associated activity, and he prefers to focus on low quality foods like tubers as they are improved via cooking(for example, cassava contains cyanide in raw form, and needs to be heavily processed/cooked before consumption).

Geoff


I can't find the study that I was talking about and I'm not willing to spend hours searching through PubMed, but the gist of the article wasn't that cooking will degrade some nutrients (which no-one is arguing with), it was that once cooked, the body can better absorb the nutrients.  Point being, for example, you will get equal or more nutrients from steamed carrots than raw as the cooking process will start to break down to the food and make the nutrients more bio-available.

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