Raw versus Cooked Foods

from http://www.vegsource.com/harris/raw_vs_cooked.htm

"Raw food enthusiasts have always been a part of the vegetarian/vegan scene. Their core idea is that enzymes are still active in raw food whereas they're denatured, hence inactive, in cooked food. No contest. Next question: So what? The theory is that all food should be eaten raw to avoid the destruction of the enzymes in the food itself which are held to be essential to proper digestion. One afficionado has stated that 'enzymes present in raw foods take priority over secreted (digestive) enzymes.'

Cooking is a form of predigestion in which heat is used to hydrolyze nutrients which would otherwise be hydrolyzed at body temperature by digestive enzymes. The end result is the same, but one raw food author seems to obliquely suggest that another reason for leaving food enzymes intact is so they can be absorbed intact into the blood stream to continue their digestive work there. Such a process would be catastrophic as the absorbed enzymes would be peptide fragments and would be more likely to generate allergic and autoimmune reactions than robust good health."