Among the many contradictory areas of advice regarding food, how or whether to cook it is one of the big ones. The raw food movement swears you’ve got to eat all your food raw in order to be healthy. Chinese medicine indicates some people need to have food cooked. Among those who believe in cooking there are prohibitions about how to cook it: don’t boil, don’t fry, don’t grill… I’m not sure if there’s a death by sautee-ing crowd…
I had a lot of “raw food only” people around me for a while and at the same time my acupuncturist told me that anyone with as little chi as I had should avoid raw food because it burns chi. I ignored him at one point and ate salads four or five times a week for a few weeks and watched my already low chi plummet.
Since then I’ve observed the contradictions. Those who say food loses all nutritional value if it’s frozen and nutritionists who say it has exactly the same nutrition after freezing, those who say certain methods of cooking remove all vitamins and those who disagree… Since people have been cooking for thousands of years, I’m inclined to believe that I can get nutrition from cooked food.
Now that my chronic fatigue is greatly improved, I’m enjoying more raw food and I can see that it has good qualities, but I think I’m always going to have plenty of cooked food in my life. My health got better while eating it, so you’ll have a hard time convincing me that only raw is good. Also had lots of food that had been frozen and got well anyway. Sometimes I just take my own personal experience as the proof for me. In the face of lots of conflicting advice, sometimes that’s all you can do.
