Is it too extreme to say that the current raw food diets are a glorified and socially acceptable form of anorexia?

Yes, it is too extreme. As fire came well after hunger in human evolution – I can’t quite see the logic in his reasoning. I eat raw/near raw foods at all times and am (cancer aside – Melanoma and unrelated to general health) healthy, very healthy for my age. The Japanese with things like Sushi are among the top two or three healthy demographics. (I LOVE Sushi)

agreed, too extreme.

I also think it’s extreme. If they can get by w/o meat and cooking, great for them, but I can’t lol.

I think it’s too extreme. One of my friends recently switched to raw food and she thinks it’s great. She was always very athletic and her goal was always to be as healthy as she can. She wrote an extensive blog post about the switch and how it affected her health and it all seems very positive to me.

@DarkScribe I don’t think I totally agree with you, but I might be missing something. I think that the ability to create fire was actually a huge push towards what makes human beings human. Maybe the species that existed before fire could rely on raw food, but it doesn’t mean that the humans of today can do the same.

I disagree with “our bodies are not designed to live off raw foods”.

Many fruits and veggies are better for you if you eat them raw—it helps maintain vitamins, fiber, antioxidants, etc. And I think most people would agree that we could all use more fruits and veggies in our diets. :)

(Raw fish is also delicious, but that’s another story.)

Some foods, however, need to be cooked for you to receive the most nutrients—tomatoes are an excellent example of this. Also, eating (?) raw tea or raw coffee is just yucky. :D

Most people with a healthy diet, I find, eat a combination of raw foods and cooked foods. However, many people with a poor diet eat a lot of processed (read: cooked) foods. So I think raw food-ism might have some things right.

All things in moderation, including raw and cooked foods. Any diet that espouses one simple type of food is usually erroneous and is designed only to make the author rich. People spend billions on diets every year, it is a very lucrative business.

While some anorexics may favor a raw food diet, the raw food diet does not in and of itself, promote anorexia. The inherent health risks and or benefits are an entirely different discussion.

The word that is now getting kicked around is orthorexia.

(By your/the author’s definition a junk food/“western” diet is also a form of anorexia IMHO.)

That’s a ridiculous conclusion, definitely extreme. Anorexia is an illness.

Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder. The idea behind eating raw food (whether it’s even true or not) is specifically to be healthier. I think conflating the two is disrespectful to both, and shows a deep misunderstanding of Anorexia nervosa.

Reading @kevbo‘s link, I can see where this idea comes from.

A “raw food diet” that is being promoted commercially may be associated with Anorexia, but that does not equal causation. It is best to avoid any outlandish food craze. A good healthy food plan is to eat ⅓ fruits, ⅓ vegetables, and ⅓ other. According to most studies, whether they are cooked or raw is considered to be irrelevant.

Our digestion system would work better with cooked food? I don’t buy it. Today we process the food even before we put it in the mouth, and by that doing half the work the digestive system would have done otherwise. Raw food is what we ate when we emerged from the shadows of natures arms.

A diet is a food regimine. Anorexics purposely starve themselves. Wouldn’t these 2 things be opposites?

To be honest with you, I wish that for the first 20 years of my life my mother had lived on a raw food diet than intentionally deny her body of food in order to be slimmer.

I’m not saying that a complete raw food diet is always the best thing for your body but it is ALWAYS better than intentionally starving youself and for that reason, I would say yes, it’s WAY to extreme.

I’m still trying to picture what totally raw sushi would taste like. The rice must be pretty crunchy?

@laureth The rice must be pretty crunchy?

Try putting some rice in vinegar and cold water in a refrigerator overnight. You would have a hard time telling that it wasn’t cooked.

@kevbo Thanks so much for the new vocab word. After hearing people opinions about the use of “anorexia” I realize it does goto an extreme. But orthorexia is just perfect. Thank you.

@DarkScribe Just a few clarifications. The author of the book (and he has much research to back this up) claims we were not human until we had fire. He puts cooking around 1.8 million years ago (fossil and anthropological evidence). This would put fire before human evolution, before we had fire “we” (this would be before Homo Erectus) we were very different (longer teeth and stronger jaws for chewing, larger guts to break down food, etc.)

Also the idea that Sushi is a staple in Japanese gastronomy is a western misconception. The Japanese eat a predominantly cooked diet. Also Rice in vinegar over night denatures the rice and essentially cooks it. There are many ways to denature protein, and acid is a common one.

@evegrimm It is true that many fruits and veggies are completely edible raw, but without exception, we are always able to extract more energy from cooked food than raw. Even when a primate (apes, chimps) is presented with cooked vs. raw food, they will always choose cooked over raw. Also there has never been a study to prove that many of the “live” enzymes in raw food actually survives past the hydrochloric acid of our stomach.

Raw food and fasting is immeasurably beneficial, if only we had the discipline to stick it, now eating raw foods is not comparible with anorexia any more than cooked food is equivelent to obesity.

I do think that the comparison is a lil’ extreme. If done properly I think that the raw food diet can be extremely beneficial.

@mammal @cosmosheep
Studies have been done on raw food diets. The only “beneficial” finding that has been found is weight loss. All other findings (well being, increased health, etc.) have no been validated.

The key (and reason I even attempted what I now clearly see as a far too exaggerated statement) is that people lost weight due to an energy deficit. The idea being if two people consume 2,000 calories, one eating raw and the other eating cooked. The person eating raw will not be able to take advantage of all of those calories because their body will be using energy in order to break down all of the raw food. So they will constantly be at a deficit. This would be no different than someone loosing weight by starving themselves of needed calories.

Keep in mind I’m not saying that we all need to eat ultra refined white flour and sugar, or anything like that. I’m just fining this diet craze odd, when it is so clearly against our nature.

@Noon Studies have been done on raw food diets. The only “beneficial” finding that has been found is weight loss.

In the seventies an official University based study found that mother’s milk was bad for babies. I wonder if this study was from the same source.

Cooking destroys vitamins and for that reason alone cooked food can hardly be regarded as more healthy, just more convenient and sometimes tastier.

@DarkScribe
The only situation when vitamins are “destroyed” are when they are lost in cooking water that is thrown out. Steaming retains almost all of the vitamins. The idea that cooking destroys vitamins is a huge myth. The environment of our stomach is just as damaging as a stove. Anything that would be destroyed in cooking, would be destroyed in our stomach before our intestines had a chance to do anything with it.

This doesn’t even begin to talk about the foods that our body cannot absorb unless cooked. Carrots, and tomatoes (just two examples) are healthier (yes healthier) when cooked. Our body has more access to the nutrition when cooking has burst the cells allowing our bodies to digest it more regularly. A study done on eggs found that the protein in cooked eggs was 40 times more digestible when cooked. When raw, our bodies are only able to digest 51–65% of the protein in eggs. Cooking it brought it up to 91–94%. By eating a raw egg (again only one example) you have to eat almost double to get the same benefit as eating cooked. Not to mention the calories your bodies losses when trying to break down the raw egg.

As for your University study about breast milk. That is why I said studies. I’m not talking about a one off study, but many studies. There have been many studies showing the results of raw food diets, and there have yet to be any studies that show any benefit other than weight loss (through starvation). On the other hand there have been several studies that have shown the benefit of mother’s milk.

@Noon The idea that cooking destroys vitamins is a huge myth.

Right. That is why supplementary vitamins can be kept at any temperature and retain full potency. Except of course that they can’t. They are in fact very temperature critical. Water soluble vitamins are extremely affected by heat – the fat soluble less so – but ALL are affected by heat to some degree. Light – although not an issue in cooking, also reduces potency.

As for tomatoes, yes, they are very different and with regard to some areas of health, with far more beneficial value when cooked. Guys at risk of prostate cancer should eat plenty of cooked tomatoes.

I’ll stick to very moderate cooking and take note of the many sources of nutrition advice and research that claims that vitamins are heat sensitive. Thanks for the advice though.

I think it’s far too extreme to call raw food diets in any way comparable to anorexics. I don’t really dig raw food diets, but they get nutrients into their body, even if they might not be as bio-available.

And the idea that raw food is somehow healthier has nothing to do with the preparation, but rather the sorts of food raw foodies eat, that is, real food. By eating raw, people instantly take out processed food from their diets, and that’s basically the best thing you can do. It’s the same thing with the weak studies some vegetarians will trot out, which ignore class factors (vegetarians are almost entirely of the middle and upper classes) and the fact that they don’t differentiate between processed and natural meat, grass-fed and corn-fed beef, etc.