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Summer is here, the secret sauce recipes are out
of the vault, and the neighbors think your house is on fire -- it's
barbecue time! Oh, it tastes so good, but it's so bad for us.
Here's the bottom line: Man was not intended to eat
cooked foods. The hotter we cook food, the more nutrients are lost, and the
more carcinogenic chemicals are produced. Grilling and blackening food
literally converts some of the food to carcinogens, creating a real
cancer-causing nightmare.
If we go back to nature and see what is natural -
cooking is not natural. Homo sapiens are the only creatures that cook their
food. How this foolish practice began no one knows, but the act of cooking
produces fundamental changes in the food. Cooked food is chemically
different from raw food. And, like all the other creatures on earth, raw
food is what we were designed to eat.
Since not all of the essential nutrients necessary for
good health have been discovered, and since cooking destroys nutrients, we
really have no idea of the damage being done to our nutrition when we cook
food. But, animal experiments and human experience show that eating 100%
cooked food results in disease and death, guaranteed. Furthermore, if we examine
clusters of historically healthy people around the globe, we see that the
diets of the traditionally long-lived populations are about 80% raw. Raw
food is essential to life!
Eating a diet high in cooked foods is not a good idea,
but an even more ominous problem occurs when we heat foods to high
temperatures, such as with barbecuing. Recent large-scale studies have
concluded that people who eat diets rich in meats cooked at high
temperatures have a substantially higher risk of cancer. A 1998 study sponsored
by the National Cancer Institute found that women who regularly consumed
blackened meat had a five times greater risk of breast cancer.
When food is heated to temperatures exceeding 375
degrees Fahrenheit, which includes frying, grilling, and barbecuing,
compounds called heterocyclic aromatic amines or HAAs are formed. HAAs are
among the most powerful carcinogens ever discovered, and minute amounts of
them can cause major damage to DNA. The higher the temperature and the
longer the cooking time, the more HAAs are formed, so (for example)
medium-rare is healthier than well done.
Even toasting bread can be dangerous. Experiments at
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory showed that toasting a slice of pumpernickel
for the second time can increase the HAAs by five times, giving it 20% of
the mutagenic activity of a well-done hamburger. People who have toast
every day for breakfast should certainly reconsider the practice.
What to do? First of all, put more fresh fruits and
vegetables into your diet, and reduce the amount of cooked food. If you
must cook, then poach or steam. The temperature of steam, while still hot
enough to damage nutrition, is not hot enough to produce the cancer-causing
HAAs that are created at higher temperatures. If you must barbecue, then
open a couple of capsules of Unique E and mix it well with your ground meat
before cooking.
Research has shown that this inhibits the reaction that
forms the HAAs. Definitely do not eat food that has been charred or burned.
If you do eat cooked food, it is best to eat raw food first. For example,
when eating out, it is best to have a fresh salad before eating the cooked
entree. Eating the raw food seems to give a measure of protection against
the bad effects of the cooked food. The main reason for this is that raw
foods have active enzymes still intact that both help to process the raw
foods being eaten, and also the cooked foods to come. (Which contain little
or no active enzymes.)
The health of the American people has entered a
long-term decline, and immune dysfunction disease has become the biggest
epidemic in history. One of the major reasons this is happening is because
we have fundamentally changed our diets. Eating high amounts of cooked and
processed foods is one of our biggest changes, and one of our biggest
causes of disease. Eat more raw foods, for the sake of good nutrition, and
definitely stay away from those carcinogenic charred foods. Don't order
"blackened" anything. Your body will thank you with the gift of
good health.
Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist, a
registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again, host
of the Beyond Health Show and an internationally recognized leader in the
emerging field of optimal health maintenance.
Reprinted with permission from: Beyond
Health® News
http://www.beyondhealth.com
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