I love raw carrots. I think cooked carrots are a travesty. Lycopene is a red pigment found in plants and is potent antioxidant, much more so than Vitamin C. Unsurprisingly, it's found in the red stuff, like watermelon, tomatoes, papayas and carrots. Since I prefer raw carrots, I don't think I need to worry about getting enough lycopene. I'm not sure, but I don't think strawberries or cherries, despite their color, actually have it.

Another very powerful antioxidant is oligomeric proanthocyanidin, more commonly known as OPC or grapeseed extract.

I take nutritional information with a grain of salt. Especially when it comes to "experts" telling us what's okay to do. Nutrition is an infant science. We don't know every chemical in food, or what they all do for us.

But antioxidants are a good idea since the flu season is upon us...and refuse to get a flu shot.

I love raw carrots. I think cooked carrots are a travesty.

Agreed! I also like raw celery (especially with buffalo wings), raw peas eaten straight from the shell, and raw green beans freshly picked. Otherwise, yes, please cook my veggies. Not down to sogginess, but cook them. Otherwise, I won't eat them. (Raw broccoli -- ick. Cooked broccoli -- yum.)

I love raw and cooked veggies. I usually steam my veggies, though, because I like them a little crunchy, even when they're cooked. I steam them in the microwave, for 3 -4 minutes, with about 2 tablespoons of water, a pat of butter, and maybe lemon pepper on some. NO salt on 'em, they don't need it. I love raw tomatoes, and also tomato sauce. ...and raw green beans freshly picked. Oh yeah, one of my faves. And raw celery with peanut butter or cream cheese, yum! Or right out of a freshly made Bloody Mary. o.

The Japanese have the highest life expectancy on the planet and usually eat their vegetables cooked or pickled.

Lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber are about the only veggies I can swallow raw. I love cooked veggies-all kinds. I think raw-food people are a little off their rockers.

I think raw-food people are a little off their rockers.

My younger sister is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating disorders. From what she's told me, there's a very high coincidence of obsessional disorders among people who maintain very restrictive diets - like raw foodies, and vegans. They're often consumed with fears that outside contaminants are corrupting their bodies, and they fixate on their waste products.

Raw food “true believers” need to do a Google search on anti-nutrients and goiterens(sp?). There is a reason that raw broccoli tastes like crap and cooked broccoli (even without butter) is ok. There ARE toxins in raw (even organic) vegetables. Those bad tasting toxins are a plant defense system. Cooking makes many vegetables taste better by neutralizing certain plant toxins.

If something tastes like crap unless cooked, it should be cooked. Carrots taste fine raw.

Anyone ever try more than a tiny bite of raw potato?

"There ARE toxins in raw (even organic) vegetables. "

No shit. They're natural - to keep us and other animals form eating the plant. In fact humans eat a wide range of quite toxic plants like chilis and rosemary, oregan, thyme and mint - toxic to everyone else.

"Anyone ever try more than a tiny bite of raw potato?"

Nasty. But apparently it's an indivudual thing. Ther are people who just love that.

Cooking is a form of predigestion. It is no more unnatural than he way spiders pump enzymes into their prey, wait for everything to liquelfy, and then suck all the goodies up. I just happen to think coking makes things taste better than the spiders' method.

The thing about cooking is that it is one of those few things that every culture does, without exception. There is something pathetic about people who come along with what they think is a wonderful idea that no one else has ever had. They are idiots - ususally those ideas have been thought of and rejected for good reason.

MMMMM....butter.....

Depends on the vegetable, for me. I like celery and carrots raw and LOVE, LOVE, LOVE fresh tomatoes (Particularly sliced with a sprinkling of garlic salt!). For me the true travesty are those awful greenhouse gassed things they pass off as tomatoes... And I prefer raw spinach to cooked. But everything else is much tastier cooked IMO...onions, garlic, definitely potatoes!!, asparagus, broccoli, mushrooms.

So, even if there's some nutritional loss, it's still worth it!

Lunch is calling...

For the love of god people, tomatoes are a fruit A FRUIT I tell you

YOuve all been brainwashed, there were classified as vegatbles so the government could make more money off of their imports given how widley a tomato is used

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

And cooking also kills things like the Salmonella...

> I don't like raw vegetables much

Eat once at this restaurant in Santa Monica and you'll never utter such blasphemy again.

Besides, how can you resist a place that offers a delicious plate of Lorem ipsum dolor for just $12.99?

"Do vegetables lose their nutritional value when heated?"

I can't answer that question. I offer as an alternative:

"Does your chewing gum lose it's flavor on the bedpost overnight?"

Re: tomatoes=fruit

You're right about that lujlp, sorry, I was getting carried away. Thanks for pointing that out.
:)

@ jerry:

"Does your chewing gum lose it's flavor on the bedpost overnight?"

When I was a kid, I found that putting it in a glass of ice water kept it fresh and tasty. Of course this was just a few hours at a time at most, I never tried overnight...(Gum was a rare treat for me growing up, so I had to hoard what I could get)

Some raw vegetables and legumes contain trace amounts of actual poison -- cyanide, for instance -- which are neutralized by cooking.

Jim writes: chilis and rosemary, oregan, thyme and mint

Remember me...to one who lives there...

Then she'll be...a true love of mine...

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

From the article: Cooking is crucial to our diets. It helps us digest food without expending huge amounts of energy. It softens food, such as cellulose fiber and raw meat, that our small teeth, weak jaws and digestive systems aren't equipped to handle.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

One wonders why nature created a species with the digestive apparatus too weak to actually feed itself. Do we cook food because of our feeble digestive systems? Or do we have feeble digestive apparatus because we cook food?

The article assumes that we always had such weak constitutions that we had to cook to survive, but that's irrational. We couldn't have always cooked food.

We were really high once in college, and had this discussion. How did we as humans learn to cook our food in the first place? Because you know the first time they tried it, they probably burned it really bad, and it tasted like shit. I still occasionally burn something and have to throw it out today using fancy appliances and timers. And I'm not a (complete) moron.

Just curious.

Patrick - I assume you only eat raw food including meat right? To show us how much tougher you are.

Crusader writes: Patrick - I assume you only eat raw food including meat right? To show us how much tougher you are.

Why would you assume that? I never said or implied that I did.

Since the original article suggested our constitutions are so weak, our teeth are so small, etc. that cooking food is a necessity. I put to that since the use of fire to cook food couldn't have always existed, there was a time in human history when this wasn't always so.

So, since we survived the pre-fire-use-for-cooking-food era, I can only conclude that our constitutions over the ages, evolved to be as weak as the author says they are.

Oddly, I seem to be the only one who prefers raw broccoli. I like the crunch! I like it marinated.

Anyhow. I like veggies cooked or uncooked. I like variety.

Patrick, of course there was a point where "we" (either some early human or recent genetic precursor) didn't eat cooked food - it was the point where our brains were smaller relative to the rest of our body, and almost all of our time had to be used to gather and digest food in order to meet our basic nutritional needs for survival. As we developed cooking, we were able to digest different kinds of food with superior and more concentrated nutrients, which freed up energy to go to our brains and building societies that engaged in activities other than food-gathering.

There's an interesting book on this subject I've been meaning to read; the reviews looked pretty good. http://www.slate.com/id/2219162/

There is another problem. With cutting and chewing you can only break open so many cell walls. Cooking does a much better job of that and results in us getting more nutrition from the food than we would if it was served raw.

I've always preferred almost all vegetables raw, since I can remember. From when I was small I would nag my mom to set aside vegetables for me before she cooked them. I just massively prefer the taste of them raw. Growing my own, picking them out the garden and eating them immediately - doesn't get better than that!

I doubt either cooked or uncooked vegetables are really bad for you. Debating about tiny bits of 'loss of nutritional value' here and there, when by and large we today mostly eat some of the most nutritional, balanced healthy diets we've ever eaten in the history of humanity, seems silly; nobody is dying or getting sick from cooked or uncooked vegetables, it's all good. There is no health crisis from either method. Just eat whatever you prefer the taste of, you'll be fine.

"There ARE toxins in raw (even organic) vegetables"

"Some raw vegetables and legumes contain trace amounts of actual poison -- cyanide, for instance"

Uh, yeah, that's why so many people who eat raw vegetables are getting sick and dying. Not. You do know what "trace" means, right? You'd probably have to eat about 20kg of radish (for example) in a single day to approach harmful levels of arsenic, and your body gets rid of the junk anyway, that's why we have livers and kidneys. Now funnily enough, heating arsenic turns it into arsenic trioxide, which is about 500 times *more* toxic - oops, so much for your theory.

Now cyanide, apple pips contain cyanide for example. Tiny amounts. Tiny, tiny, tiny amounts. Again, your body gets rid of these, no problem. You'd probably have to eat like a kilogram of apple seeds in a single day to be badly poisoned. (http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/apples.asp)

You're rather paranoid ... please point me to the statistics on people becoming badly sick or dying just from eating raw vegetables. It doesn't happen.

A question for the Tomatos Are A Fruit Damnnit! crowd.

Why fixate on tomatoes here? Chili peppers, cucumbers, beans & most things we call nuts are fruits too. Worse yet, strawberries are not a berry or a fruit.

We can either fixate on this; or accept that botany has a technical language distinct from plain english, and not worry overmuch about the differences.