What’s the value in raw vs cooked vegetables? I thought cooking makes their nutrients more bio-available. Do you really eat tubers raw? I can't imagine eating a potato raw. Our ancestors even always cooked them.
https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...
That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...
This is something our bodies do out of pretty desperate lack of nutrients, and it's of course devastating from an evolutionary standpoint.
The thesis of the book is that we've cooked food for so long that our digestive system is adapted to it. It even speculates that the shrunken digestive system made our bigger brains possible. All that is far from uncontroversial, but it's a well written and argued text.
Still a really fascinating and well written book.
Remember the E. Coli epidemic in Hamburg a few years ago? It started from raw bean sprouts.
That's a hygiene problem not a culinary one.
I doubt that stir frying bean sprouts would be enough to sterilise them and surely no one cooks them any longer than that.
Used to eat a lot, mostly sprouted at home and we never took any special precautions, just normal domestic hygiene. Ate a lot of them raw too.
Of course I haven't tested either the internal temperature of a bean sprout during stir frying nor have I tried infecting one with E. Coli to see if the E. Coli is neutralised by stir frying. Perhaps someone with the necessary gear and expertise could try it.
A little cooking is good for making things more digestible. Overcooking depletes nutrients.
I tend to like things like stir fry or similar high heat, short cook time approaches.
(No, I will not try to back this up with citations.)