I'm bound to make mistakes when talking about this stuff but my wife got her masters in nutrition, is published in journals and for what it's worth she's a big fan of the raw food diet. We both followed it closely for about 6 months but eventually we decided it just wasn't convenient enough. There were certainly some benefits to it that I miss but I phrase these much more conservatively than what most gurus would have you believe. For example, I never felt any sort of natural high or extreme mental clarity - just comforted knowing that I wasn't poisoning my body with HFC etc. YMMV.

Here is my best argument for why a layperson should go raw: it forbids you anything that even resembles junk food. Raw may be flawed but clearly it's way healthier than how most people eat. You can say it's a crutch or psychosomatic or whatever but for me once I got into the mindset of it I just stopped noticing unhealthy food. Almost everything in the modern dining world is cooked.

The major downside - because it's so damn restrictive (plus we're practically vegan) is that raw gets to be time consuming. It's really impractical for people on-the-go. Sure you can always just eat an apple or some carrots but that gets boring and so you end up dehydrating your own bread etc and turning down practically every social dining opportunity. In a way that is a Good Thing because there is a lot of harmful junk in modern food, right? But it takes real dedication and eventually we decided a totally raw intake just wasn't worth all the effort.

A cooked food diet opens up the floodgates to all sorts of unhealthy temptations. But in the end it came down to priorities like convenience. If you're thinking of going raw your best friend is the blender: there are a million nutritious ways to mix a surprisingly delicious smoothie (secret ingredient: jalepeños).