Day +693 : Is raw food diet the best?

I am fine today.

I came across an article on Sin Chew Daily today that said that raw food diet is not necessary the best.

I was advised by someone to eat raw vegetable or take raw vegetable juice after I was diagnosed with Leukaemia. Someone even advised me to have raw vegetable juice as my main diet during my first chemotherapy. This is in fact a very dangerous advice as consuming raw vegetable juice exposes the patient who is weak in immunity during chemotherapy to infection.

If someone proposes you to convert to raw food diet, do have a second thought. An article on The New York Times talking about the best way to cook the vegetables mentioned a recent research on raw food diet.

“Surprisingly, raw and plain vegetables are not always best. In The British Journal of Nutrition next month, researchers will report a study involving 198 Germans who strictly adhered to a raw food diet, meaning that 95 percent of their total food intake came from raw food. They had normal levels of vitamin A and relatively high levels of beta carotene.

But they fell short when it came to lycopene, a carotenoid found in tomatoes and other red-pigmented vegetables that is one of the most potent antioxidants. Nearly 80 percent of them had plasma lycopene levels below average.

“There is a misperception that raw foods are always going to be better,” says Steven K. Clinton, a nutrition researcher and professor of internal medicine in the medical oncology division at Ohio State University. “For fruits and vegetables, a lot of times a little bit of cooking and a little bit of processing actually can be helpful.””

The whole article can be read here, and the Sin Chew Daily's article is attached below.
See you next post :-)