Exotic, organic vegetables on display at a Hertfordshire farmer's market in the U.K.
Image: Wellcome Images
On the road to good health, there are many forks. Some paths, such as vegetarianism or the Mediterranean diet, have considerable science supporting them. Others, such as the vegan or plant-based diet, which shuns all animal products including eggs and dairy, are winning converts.
And then there's a new offshoot, the raw vegan diet, which deems cooking to be unnatural and unhealthy.
An increasing number of celebrities — most recently, tennis sensation Venus Williams — swear by this diet as the best way to prevent and reverse diseases and to stay young and vital. Testimonials from ordinary folks are endless, boasting advantages along the lines of having more energy, better skin, improved relationships with woodland creatures and so on.
But on your road to good health, the raw vegan diet would likely be a U-turn. If you are already vegan or vegetarian, you have nothing to gain and much to lose by going totally or even mostly raw. Even doctors who prescribe and live by a vegan diet caution their patients against attempting a raw diet.
The reason? You would greatly reduce the types of foods you can eat. And you would do so in vain, because most of the raw vegan principles are based on misconceptions about human nutrition, and work counter to good health. [7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe]
This article addresses five such principles that are either half true or completely false.
What is raw veganism?
First, a primer: Raw veganism is a plant-based diet that involves no cooking. No food is heated above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Foods are eaten fresh, dehydrated with low heat or fermented.
A core tenet of the diet is that heating food above 104 degrees not only diminishes its nutrients, but also makes the food toxic and less digestible. In raw vegan parlance, cooking is killing. Many raw vegans speak of "live" foods versus "dead" foods, and they aren't talking about sushi, so fresh it still wiggles.
Live or uncooked foods are said to be filled with vital life energy. In this way, raw veganism is an extension of the vegan appreciation for animal welfare, with the added spirituality of a life force, called chi or prana. Dead or cooked foods are said to be depleted of their life energy, as well as most of their nutrients.
Juicing and blending "green smoothies" often are key elements of this diet.
Now for the misconceptions:
Misconception #1: Cooking destroys nutrients
Sure, raw foods can be nutritious. But cooking breaks apart fibers and cellular walls to release nutrients that otherwise would be unavailable from the same raw food. Cooking tomatoes, for example, increases by five-fold the bioavailability of the antioxidant lycopene. Similarly, cooking carrots makes the beta-carotene they contain more available for the body to absorb. Soups are full of nutrients that would not be available in a pot of raw carrots, onions, parsnips and potatoes. [Science You Can Eat: 10 Interesting Facts About Food]
Cooking can also reduce certain chemicals in a vegetable that inhibit the absorption of minerals, including important minerals like zinc, iron, calcium and magnesium. Cooking spinach makes more iron and calcium available from its leaves, for example.
Admittedly, some nutrients are lost in cooking, such as vitamin C and certain B vitamins. But "plants are so excess in nutrients that even this breakdown is insignificant in practical terms," said John McDougall, creator of the McDougall Program, a vegan-friendly, starch-based diet.
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9 Comments
Add CommentIn general most evidence for any of these diets are based on "clinical" studies and this makes all of them suspect. The bottom line is the human body is designed to digest meat and similar products and has a host of bacteria to digest plant products on behalf of the body. Considering evolution does not occur all that fast the best diet is likely to be a decent mix of everything in moderation with a slight bias to the diets of your ancestors. If you ancestors come from northern Europe where 6 months of the year only meat is available due to winter, then it is probably a bad idea to go on a diet similar to a place like India or even pre-columbian mexico because those places have plant products available year round.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese extremes of veggies only or even meat only are likely to do nothing for you except cause problems.
"vital life energy" really? I never heard that argument from a raw vegan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Yes, "cooking" can increase the amount of some nutrients we can absorb. The question is what is meant by "cooking", 40C sounds a little too low to me. I think the maximum temperature on the earth (~55C) is a reasonable upper limit for raw food. Its quite possible that "raw" (warm room temperature) is the perfect balance between increasing some nutrients without destroying the others. Easy experiment to conduct... (if you have the equipment to measure the nutrients.)
3. "detoxifying" is problematic in general.
4. Similar issues with non-raw vegans and even vegetarians. Seems to me veggies are high in these minerals, nuts and seeds are raw and contain fatty acids. We (vegans) all know where B12 comes from: bacteria. "nuts" are high in fat? its all relative. What is the comparison between the fat content of beef and nuts for the same mass? I expect nuts are lower in fat. Still, we're not necessarily talking about a low-calorie vegan raw diet, and we do need some fat!
5. What is "natural" is a key point of discussion and self-reflection for all vegans, in particular in the relation between wild, domesticated and "food" animals. *"impossible to survive on this diet without modern convenience"* This is a strong claim with no evidence.
Regarding the the "big brain explosion" argument: Was not #4 referring to their being *too many* calories in nuts?? What about coconuts and avocados?
Survival used to be about maximizing calories with the least risk and expense. In that framework, meat and cooking are obviously highly desirable. The point is that we are no longer fighting for survival, actually this engrained need for calories is actually decreasing our survival (obesity is just a manifestation of it). The arguments that big brains require more calories than a raw diet could provide don't hold any water for me. If big brains need more calories than raw-plant diets, then raw vegans should be wasting away. I don't buy that brain evolution takes more calories than brain maintenence. Evolution so slow and incremental, giving more than enough time for other aspects to adapt/develop. For example the greater ability to efficiently gather foods, evolution of digestive systems to be more effective, etc. Still what worked for early humans and apes have little to do with what works for us now.
The bottom line is that if you're a raw vegan, a vegan or a vegetarian you have to pay attention to the nutrients you are consuming. Same thing goes for *any* other diet.
"impossible to survive on this diet without modern convenience"* This is a strong claim with no evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcusde me, but the evidence is all around you. Right now, I'm sitting here in Ann Arbor, MI. It's January and it's well below freezing outside. No raw vegetation that I can eat has been growing anywhere within a hundred miles of me since sometime last fall. How am I supposed to obtain my raw-vegan food? It doesn't fall from the sky. It has to be transported here, and kept edible along the way, and kept edible in my home, under these conditions.
Yes, it does require "modern conveniences." Roads, trucks, refrigerators, packaging - these are all modern conveniences, and are absolutely necessary to life on this diet.
Native Americans lived on the land where my house stands. They lived here on their own diet, unsupported by anything that we would call a modern convenience. They lived on a well-mixed diet that they could obtain from this land, in this climate. They did just fine.
Any more evidence you want? Just open your eyes.
"Never heard it from a raw vegan?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Steve Factor, the Pure Energy Chef, will help you restore the vital life energy you were born with. Gourmet raw vegan food helps release pure energy in your body, mind, and spirit. In this ABOUT section read Steve's bio, his story of self-discovery. Enjoy an album of Steve's photos, as well as some mouth watering recipes for Steve's famous King Kong salads...with more to come." (from http://www.pureenergyfactor.com/about.)
There. Now you have. All I had to do was search "raw vegan vital life energy" and it came up first on the list.
Look in a mirror. Your eyes face the front, like lions, wolves, bears, or T-Rex, and unlike a deer or cow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are a carnivore or at least an omnivore.
Vegan diets are not natural, cooked or otherwise.
""nuts" are high in fat? its all relative. What is the comparison between the fat content of beef and nuts for the same mass? I expect nuts are lower in fat."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, this was cute! It's not (nut?) really hard to check, even if you didn't know, and there's nothing relative about it at all. Nuts are generally more than 50% fat by weight. Macadamia nuts are more fatty than traditional butter!
"Regarding the the "big brain explosion" argument: Was not #4 referring to their being *too many* calories in nuts?? What about coconuts and avocados?"
If you can find any extended region of the world where nuts have been growing naturally in sufficient quantities to sustain even a small population of humans, I'd like to know where. Our far ancestors developed big brains *before* they could reap the benefits of agriculture, plantations and industrial harvesting.
Much the same with avocados and coconuts. Although there may have been small patches here and there, where a pre-tribal community could sustain themselves well on naturally occurring energy-rich vegetation, such patches are unlikely to have been big enough to support long-term evolution of big brains.
Indeed, there would have been little pressure to develop (very costly) big brains, if they did not use their brains for something more complicated than picking fruits. Any monkey can eat a raw avocado, unless it has allergies - if nutritious raw vegan food was so plentiful, what would they need a larger brain for? Was there some big evolutionary advantage in pontificating over Hegelian philosophy or something? For whatever reason(s) it happened, I'm pretty sure big brains didn't develop because there was a surplus and nature could find nothing better to do with it than produce zombie food.
It is true, just because our ancestors didn't eat like that, doesn't mean we shouldn't, but you just can't combine that argument with the frequent claims that these are natural diets.
It's curious, I've seen exactly the same chain of reasoning in support of "paleo" diets:
"We should eat like this, because that's how our far ancestors ate, and [some argument about how therefore that is best for us]!"
"But our ancestors didn't eat like that!"
"Well, just because our ancestors didn't eat like that, it doesn't mean we shouldn't eat like that!"
(Incidentally, "paleo" proselytes will also use the "I never heard that argument from any of us" argument, no matter how easy it is to find in a search.)
1. Yes, a raw vegan diet in some locations certainly requires lots of technical intervention. That does not mean that those diets require technical intervention in *all cases*. Living the way we all do in these cold climates also requires technical intervention. Living in cold climates requires everyone to use more resources than living in warm climates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. Yes, google will allow you to find someone who says just about anything. I don't see how that validates the "vital live energy" statement. The quote above does not even state that the food as vital energy, but that it "release pure energy in your body, mind, and spirit." As far as I am concerned that statement has no meaning nor validity.
I'm not going to argue that anything is "natural" for a human, as that term is highly problematic in the case of us "artificial apes".
3. Front-pointing eyes: this theory is in dispute. Animals have different degrees at which their eyes face mostly front, and have mixed diets including mostly vegetation, eg. Loris, megabat, Lemur. These are by no means carnivores.
4. Brain explosion: Again, I'm not arguing about some mythical "natural" human state (I don't believe such a thing exists at all). Yes, for enough calories to be foraged only a small population could evolve large brains. Just because the population it supports is "naturally" small does not make invalid.
Evolution is slow, and it is entirely possible that brains increased in size in parallel with increases of methods to gather more calories. This could include hunting, or it could also include better navigational ability, communication for social structure, etc.
Presumably great apes are the apex of non-human primates, thus their brains had to evolve to their large size (compared to "lesser" primates) by consuming more calories, and yet they are still largely herbivores. Of course you could argue that there is some hard threshold at which vegetative calories are no longer sufficient to evolve brains bigger than great apes. Again, I'm not arguing for "vegan == natural".
Why did large brains develop? I have no idea, but that is irrelevant regarding the validity of a modern human's choice to consume a raw vegan diet.
"Omnivore" simply means that an animal (human or nonhuman) is able to digest both plant and animal foods. Horses are technically omnivores. So are bears. Nearly all animals are omnivore and not all that many actually require animal foods. Cats, for example, are obligate carnivores, which means that have to have animal foods ... unless given taurine supplements. Incidentally, taurine is also completely destroyed by heat, so any cooked cat food must have taurine added to it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know some one that says being vegan is the best thing in the world. I will show her this.
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