First, I've noticed that there seems to be a group of people out there that tend to be a little overly "extreme" raw foodists, where they preach that we shouldn't eat any cooked foods at all.
Whilst I think there are HUGE benefits to trying to make a large portion of your diet raw food, we have to acknowledge that eating cooked foods as a portion of your food intake can still be healthy, and even beneficial.
For example, certain nutrients in certain vegetables are actually more easily assimilated when those vegetables are cooked.
While some vitamins may be diminished or destroyed while cooking, some vitamins are actually made more available to the body. One example is the antioxidant lycopene, which is made much more highly available to the body in cooked tomatoes vs raw tomatoes.
That's why eating a portion of your vegetables raw has benefits, but also eating a portion of your vegetables cooked can also have benefits.
Plus, we also have to realize that the human digestive system has evolved over tens of thousands of years eating a portion of food as cooked...let's face it, our ancestors DID cook a portion of their food using fire or hot water. This not only made food more palatable but also provides an internal warming sensation that relaxes and gives comfort.
So my big picture take on this subject is that while there are definitely great benefits to raw food and should be included as a good portion of a healthy diet, I think they can be balanced with also eating cooked foods too.
I don't see any reason to be an "extremist" in terms of only eating raw foods and never even touching cooked foods.
Another aspect we haven't covered in the raw food topic is that in some cases, there can also be certain benefits to raw animal products, such as raw milk. I know that's controversial and we are a long way from serving raw milk (i.e. not pasteurised or homogenised), but much of the health benefits of milk are destroyed during these processes. One good example is the Samburu tribe in Africa that subsist almost solely on raw cows blood and raw milk and yogurt, while eating very little plant matter...yet they display extreme health, strength, and lack of disease.
The big picture is that the human body can adapt and thrive to almost any type of diet as long as the diet is made up of natural unprocessed foods... processed foods are the one type of food that we cannot thrive on. Scotch finger biscuits excluded of course!
