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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the idea of processed foo because I think we need the bacterias and all the life on the food. Those kids who could not play on dirt or weren't feed on mother's milk are more likely to have allergies. Bacterias bring us health, when we cook food we kill most of it's life and lower it's nutritional value to our body.

You know cooking actually increases the nutritional value accessible in our food we eat, right?

If it's pointless to cook food, we would just eat food raw.

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Yes, this. So much. And because I'm a biologist by training and can't resist:

> Bacterias bring us health

Unless it is e. coli, salmonella, listeria, botulism, etc etc. Some bacteria is helpful, most is neutral and some will make you very sick or kill you.

> I think we need the bacterias and all the life on the food

There is just as much bacteria on your skin, on the doorknob and on the basket holding you bananas to service your "daily dose of bacteria". Seriously, bacteria is everywhere. There is good evidence that ultra-clean lifestyles can increase allergies as you mentioned, but that is where you try to sterilize everything. It isn't where you simply cook food.

> Today I'm living on 90% fruits

Please make sure you are getting enough iron, or you could be on the road to anemia and serious health complications. :)

> When I eat dairy or something cooked my poop goes bad on the next day, it's like our body is the best doctor around.

Or, different foods have different molecular structure, which is digested and metabolized by different pathways in your stomach and intestines, leading to different aromatic by-products. Just because you don't like the smell doesn't mean there is something "wrong". I don't like the smell of manure all that much, but it is a very "good" by-product, if you want to label things good or bad.

There's tons of non-virulent e. coli living in your small intestine right now... E. coli is a specific species under the Salmonella genus.

And neutral bacteria are great when they help the good bacteria out-compete any virulent strains.

I remember being told that only 1% of bacteria are virulent in bacterial phys & metabolism, NIH seems to agree[1]. And that you have 10x as many bacteria on/in your body than you have cells.

[1] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/bacterialinfections.html

I'm not expert at all, but I can't understand how cooking could increase since we destroy/kill/change most things on the process, maybe something are better digestible when cooked but maybe we shouldn't be eating it in the first place, we have the habit of making things eatable, or digestible, my idea is that nature already has everything we need, just like any other life form here on earth have, why we should be exception?

I couldn't find any good source of information on it, I found this article [1] that couldn't get a clear conclusion because seems like there's a lot to be understood yet.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raw-veggies-are-he...

One possibility is that cooking the food destroys compounds we can digest(like a plant's cell wall) which ends up releasing compounds otherwise inaccessible(minerals & proteins sequestered inside the plant cell).

Mastication also does this, but I doubt it is as effective as cooking unless you chew your food very well(which I would recommend doing). The downside to cooking is that high temperatures may destroy some more fragile compounds.

I guess if you are going to cook, the best way is to steam or boil/soupify your veggies. That way any released compounds are retained in solution & the heat is limited vs cooking with lipids.

Cooking food isn't necessary, but there are distinct advantages to doing so, namely, it improves digestion. This may not seem like a big thing but it ends up significantly increasing the amount of calories one can absorb, massively expands the types of food one can eat, and greatly decreases the amount of effort one has to spend to process those foods.

Comparisons to other primates are illustrative: non-humans basically spend most of their life acquiring food, chewing it, and digesting it, at something like 85% of their entire waking lives. Cooking reduces that to roughly 10%, freeing up evolution to take advantage of that calorie and time surplus by, say, growing larger brains. In fact, studies of chimps suggest that almost their entire social structure is built around the tradeoff between eating, calories, and digestion---even a small change in habit (say, by doing something other than eating with a mere hour per day) significantly reduces calorie intake to a net deficit. Without cooking there is literally no time to do much else.

In fact, the most scientifically dependable and reproducible form of dieting is just to eat raw food.

It is becoming common now among anthropologists to hold the view that cooking food has had the single greatest impact on human evolution, even over hunter/gather, agriculture, meat, or any of the traditional attributed causes. We would literally not be human if it were not for cooked food.

Consider an egg. When raw, the white is clear and runny. When cooked, the white is white, firm, and springy. That's an example of how cooking can restructure foods. The egg has not been destroyed (it has just as many calories and protein) but the proteins have denatured (become unfolded).

In the case of starchy foods, cooking changes the starches. It breaks down long complicated starch molecules into smaller molecules, making them easier for your body to digest. This is similar to the pre-digestion roles played by chewing and saliva, both of which break things down into smaller pieces for easier digestion.