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Comment by oifjsidjf | Hacker News Reader

You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health.

Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad.

Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vitamins) is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.

> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.

It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.

Cooking meat allows your digestive system to ingest more proteins, for example. This is why fire was such an unprecedented step in our evolution. For example: Raw egg: 3g of protein at most. Cooked egg: 6g of protein.

IIRC, cooking vegetables is generally necessary to make many of the calories available to human digestion.

You waste much more by not cooking them.

Some food a poisonous when eaten raw.

Cooking reduces availability of some nutrients and increases others.

Yes and can be beneficial sometimes. For example, in the case of something like kale or spinach cooking reduces goitrogens IIRC.

Not just heating, even simple cutting/mincing of the food promotes oxidation that can significantly influence the composition of food.

On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.

Eating heated food is a staple of human diets for hundreds of thousands of years - ever since fire was invented. I wouldn't worry about that part so much.

Unless you're on a paleo diet, heating to cook is considered minimally processed. So that's more evidence that looking for "processing" isn't a good metric.

Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.

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