Sheldon wrote:

> For maximum nutrition cook all foods as little as possible... for best
> nutrition produce should be eaten raw (a primary reason why juicers were
> developed). Anyone whose alimentary canal is having a problem absorbing
> nutrition (vitamins and minerals) needs to see a health professional...
> the healthy human body is quite capable of properly digesting raw
> vegetables.

From http://www.emaxhealth.com/1/166.html:

Plant cells are surrounded by a wall. This wall is designed to resist
breakage and to protect the stored nutrition in plant cells. Digestive
juices act on the cell walls of plants little if at all; take a look in the
toilet the day after next time you eat corn on the cob to see how true this
is. Cooking, which can be expanded to include her sisters freezing, drying,
sprouting, fermenting, and preserving in oil, breaks the cell wall and is
necessary to liberate nutrients from plant cells. Cooked vegetables and
fruits, grains, and beans provide more nutrients and are more easily
digested than raw ones.

A Haiku verse that could sum this up is:

Chewing what is raw,
how can one smile?
Muscles of the jaw too tense.

A macrobiotic diet, the only vegetarian diet shown to put cancer in
remission, consists of cooked food exclusively. Around the world,
well-cooked meat broths, think chicken soup, are the food of choice for
convalescents.

Cooked plants are far more nourishing than raw plants, whether we look at
vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, or pulses (beans). Cooking not only breaks
the cell wall, liberating minerals to our bodies, it actually enhances and
activates many vitamins.

This is true especially of the carotenes, used to make vitamin A, and other
antioxidants in plants. Research found that the longer the corn is cooked
and the hotter the temperature, the greater the amount of antioxidants in
the corn.

This also applies to vitamin C. A baked potato contains far more vitamin C
than a raw potato. And sauerkraut (cabbage cooked by fermentation) contains
up to ten times as much vitamin C as raw cabbage.

Some vitamins do leach into cooking water. Cooking with little or no water
(for instance, steaming or braising) reduces vitamin loss in vegetables such
as broccoli from 97% to 11%.

Note, however, that the vitamins aren't lost or destroyed, but merely
transferred to the cooking water. Using that water for soup stock, or
drinking it, insures that you ingest all the nutrients, and in a highly
absorbable form.

Transferring nutrients into water, such as by making nourishing herbal
infusions and healing soups, and then ingesting them is far more effective,
in my experience, than wheat grass juice, green drinks, or any kind of
nutritional supplement. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to optimally
nourish oneself that I have found in three decades of paying attention to
health.

Even if some vitamins are lost in cooking, people absorb more of what is
there from cooked foods. Several recent studies measured vitamin levels in
the blood after eating raw and cooked vegetables. "Subjects who ate cooked
veggies absorbed four to five times more nutrients than those who ate raw
ones," reported researchers at the Institute of Food Research in 2003.


So Sheldon was wrong. Inasmuch as he was just spewing a geyser of shit from
the dungheap of misbegotten notions that formed in his head during
senescence, that's not really surprising.

Bob