We've been slammed - again

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By Robert L. WolkeWednesday, September 18, 2002; Page F01 Have you heard about the raw food movement? No, I don't mean "Please pass the sushi." I mean the fad of eating nothing but raw, uncooked foods. For breakfast, lunch and dinner. Day in, day out. For life. Or as the doctrine goes, for a longer life, because avoiding all cooked food -- quixotically defined as any food whose temperature has ever risen above 118 degrees Fahrenheit -- will allegedly make you live longer, healthier and happier.It is difficult not to have heard or read about the raw food movement because it has been riding a recent wave of media attention, sparked by the opening of several raw-foods-only restaurants. The most highly hyped (and priced: the tasting menu, printed on "tree-free paper," is $69 without wine) among them is Roxanne's in Larkspur, Calif., where Roxanne Klein, the executive chef and co-owner (with her husband, Michael), reportedly concocts astonishingly creative and strikingly presented dishes whose ingredients have never seen a stove. Her book, "Raw Food," co-authored by I'll-try-anything chef Charlie Trotter, is to be published by Ten Speed Press in January.I applaud innovation and creativity wherever I find it. And I know that breaking new, anti-establishment ground in the world of cooking -- er, I mean food preparation -- is far from easy, as evidenced by the mixed reception of Ferran Adria's experiments with novel food textures in his restaurant El Bulli on Spain's Costa Brava. Why shouldn't one do experimental research with the properties of foods in a kitchen as well as with chemicals in a laboratory? Adria and Klein have been stretching the bounds of gastronomy with inspired inventiveness, scoffers notwithstanding.What I do not applaud and what I do indeed scoff at is the raw foodists' (or is it faddists'?) apparent need to manufacture "scientific" validation of their dietary beliefs, much as some "creation science" believers assert that paleontological evidence "proves" that Earth is only 5,000 years old.I would say to these raw food apologists, "Please eat or don't eat whatever you want. Feel free to declare yourself a fruitarian (raw fruits and seeds only); a vegetarian (no meats, poultry or fish); a strict vegan (no animal products, including eggs, dairy products and honey); a lacto-vegan (milk is okay); an ovo-vegan (eggs okay); a lacto-ovo-vegan (you guess); or a raw foodist, most of whom are also strict vegans. Feel free to chew each mouthful 30, 50 or 200 times, depending on which health guru you follow. You are even free to heed the prescription of vegetarian pioneer John Harvey Kellogg (1852{ndash}1943, the inventor of cornflakes) by ingesting your yogurt via enema. It's your choice and your body. But please don't try to justify your dietary eccentricities by cooking up (if you'll pardon the expression) pseudoscientific substantiations of your dogma.Raw food disciples are not newcomers. They have been moralizing and sermonizing for decades, most especially since one Edward Howell, MD, decided some 60 years ago that (1) raw foods contain essential, life-sustaining enzymes; (2) without taking in the enzymes in raw foods, the human body will use up its own limited lifetime allotment, leading to "enzyme deficiency" diseases; and (3) cooking "kills" those raw food enzymes. Obviously, therefore, cooking is unhealthful at best and lethal at worst.What Is an Enzyme?"Enzyme" is one of those words that people toss around without knowing what it means. Put down this newspaper for a moment and ask the person nearest you what an enzyme is. (I'll wait.) Odds are that you'll hear something vague, like "one of those tiny little things that keep us healthy."Here are the facts: The chemicals -- proteins, lipids, hormones, etc. -- that must react with one another to carry on the processes we call living consist of big, sluggish molecules that are extremely reluctant to react. To do so, they must collide with a certain minimum amount of energy (Techspeak: an activation energy) that they just can't muster up. But specialized protein molecules called enzymes come to the rescue by lowering the necessary activation energy, thereby enabling the big molecules to react with due speed. (Techspeak: the enzymes are catalysts.) The enzyme molecule may be thought of as latching onto one of the reluctant reactant molecules (Techspeak: a substrate), changing its shape so that it can more easily join up with the other reactant. Without enzymes to facilitate these vital chemical reactions, life couldn't go on.The point is that each specific chemical reaction has its own specific "designer enzyme" to speed it up. For example, the human digestive tract contains an enzyme called amylase, which facilitates the digestion of carbohydrates. An apple contains enzymes designed to help it grow, ripen, mature and ultimately decay. But apple enzymes are useless for human digestive purposes; they're just not the right ones. Apples were born to take care of themselves, not to help us humans to live longer. Thus, the claim that raw foods -- and only raw foods -- supply and replenish our essential human enzymes is simply misguided. Moreover, like all catalysts, after an enzyme molecule has done its job it is unchanged; it is not used up and can go on to do the same job over and over again. Thus, the raw foodists' claim that our finite supply of enzymes can be used up unless we continually replenish them is nonsense.Why 118 Degrees?Most nonsensical of all is the claim that all enzymes are "killed" (they mean deactivated; enzymes aren't alive) at 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Not 117 or 119, mind you, but 118. Heat your food any hotter than that and your goose is cooked.It's true that heat (and most acids, and even some enzymes) can denature proteins, that is, unravel the twisted protein molecules and allow them to re-bond in different configurations, so that they no longer have the same chemical properties. But there are thousands of known enzymes consisting of thousands of different proteins that denature under different conditions. Fixating on a single denaturation temperature is -- may I use the word once more? -- nonsense. Besides, in view of what I've already said, a denatured fruit or vegetable enzyme isn't the end of the world anyway.Finally, here are a few statements made on Roxanne Klein's Web site www.roxraw.com by way of promoting the raw food lifestyle -- and the restaurant. My highly abbreviated comments follow in parentheses. (That's the trouble with pseudoscientific statements: it's so easy to make them, but it's so time-consuming to explain them away, point by point, with facts.)"Vegetables and fruits are loaded with water, and it is structured water that better facilitates our biological processes." (Structured water? What on earth is that supposed to mean?)"Cooking destroys 50 percent of the protein in our food. Between 50 and 80 percent of the vitamins and minerals are also destroyed." (The "destroyed proteins" are often much tastier, however. And you can't destroy a mineral -- a metallic element -- by heating it.) "Aging is really nothing more than running out of enzymes." (Don't we wish!)So I wish all you happy noncookers bon appétit. (And from what I've seen of your food, you need it.) Just don't try to pretend that science validates your foibles. Cooking needs no defense from me, but let it be acknowledged that it kills germs, aids (not hinders) digestion and makes foods taste damn good.And oh, about that 118-degree temperature: Is it just a coincidence that 118 degrees west is the exact longitude of Los Angeles, a historical hotbed of kooky health fads? Hmmmm.I know that in some quarters I'll get into hot water by writing this column. But please! No hotter than 118 degrees.Robert L. Wolke (www.professorscience.com) is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and the author, most recently, of "What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained" (W.W. Norton, $25.95). He can be reached at wolke. © 2002 The Washington Post Company

[Guest guest]

IMO - He sounds like a very unhappy, insecure individual, projecting

a lot of anger on to raw foodists. I've never heard any raw foodists

(or meat eater, etc.) suggesting the planet was 5,000 years old. My

food choices are just that, choices. I don't feel I have to justify

them as the author suggests.

 

He mentions " Cooking needs no defense from me, but let it be

acknowledged that it kills germs, aids (not hinders) digestion and

makes foods taste damn good. "

 

Mad Cow prions are destroyed (supposedly) when meat is heated to over

600 degrees for several hours (that's from memory of a US Gov't

website. please don't quote me) While mad cow has not been discovered

in this country, it is also true that our gov't only tests less that

0.006% of cattle (the last time I calculated it anyway.) So, my point

is that typical cooking will not kill prions in contaminated meats!

 

 

>By Robert L. Wolke

>Wednesday, September 18, 2002; Page F01

>

>

>Have you heard about the raw food movement? No, I don't mean " Please

>pass the sushi. " I mean the fad of eating nothing but raw, uncooked

>foods. For breakfast, lunch and dinner. Day in, day out. For life.