How much of your food should be cooked?  Proponents of the newly popular raw food diets claim that cooking ruins vitamins and enzymes, making food difficult to digest and therefore contributing to disease.

But all traditional peoples cooked some or most of their food.  Even in the tropics, where people did not have to build fires to keep warm, they built fires every day to cook.  In addition to cooking grains and legumes, they usually cooked their vegetables they very foods some recommend that people eat raw.

Why cook?  Cooking helps neutralize many naturally occurring anti-nutrients and irritants in food, also breaking down indigestible fiber.  Many foods, such as beans and potatoes, are indigestible until cooked.

While cooking - especially at very high temperatures - does destroy some nutrients, it makes minerals more available; and a surprising benefit of cooking is the fact that it makes proteins more digestible by gently unfolding these large molecules so that the digestive enzymes can latch on and do their work.

Though cooking does destroy enzymes, many foods we cook do not have many enzymes to start with.  Consuming lacto-fermented items such as organic sauerkraut and coconut kefir will more than compensate for enzymes lost in cooking.

The key is to lightly cook real food and avoid manufactured, non-food items - which by way of their very nature will be cooked and overly processed. 

 As I often say: Eat food that knows where it came from.  The apple knew the tree whence it came, the deep fried twinke has know clue!