Raw vs. Cooked Veggies: Which is Better?

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is it healthier to consume cooked vegetables or raw vegetables? That’s what we’re going to cover today.

Vegetables have numerous health benefits. They are packed with important vitamins and minerals and are high in fiber.

Vegetables are also loaded with phytonutrients, which are hard to get from other types of foods. Phytonutrients have a range of incredible health benefits, from protecting against inflammation to fighting cancer.

Raw vegetables grown on soil even contain probiotics, which are friendly bacteria. Organic vegetables have a higher diversity of friendly microbes than non-organic vegetables. But keep in mind that the more you cook a vegetable, the more you’ll lessen the probiotic effects.

It’s important to note that not everyone can tolerate high amounts of vegetables. If you are immune compromised or have any inflammatory condition in the gut, you may have difficulty consuming vegetables.

If you consume raw vegetables and you feel worse, you may do better on the carnivore diet for a while. However, you could also try fermented vegetables or cooked vegetables.

When you cook vegetables, you destroy many of the vitamins and enzymes in them. Heat also kills the microbes in vegetables.

However, if you lightly steam or sauté your vegetables, you won’t lose minerals or as many vitamins. Steaming or sautéing vegetables may actually enhance the phytonutrients—but the data on this is inconsistent.

As far as raw vegetables vs. cooked vegetables, I believe it’s best to consume a good portion of your vegetables raw. But, certain vegetables should be cooked, like Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower.

The worst thing you can do as far as preserving the nutrient content in your vegetables is to fry them. You can still consume fried vegetables but don’t think you’re getting a lot of nutrients from them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Let's talk about the benefits of raw versus cooked vegetables. Is it better to consume your vegetables
0:05.7	cooked or raw? Now, to understand that question, we have to first understand what's
0:12.3	in a vegetable. Okay, how does it benefit us? You have like full-late vitamin C,
0:18.0	then you have beta-carotene, which is like a precursor to vitamin A, which doesn't really add up to
0:23.0	a lot of active retina. So if you compare plant-based vitamins versus animal-based vitamins,
0:30.3	the animal-based vitamins are much more bioavailable, like the iron in spinach versus the iron
0:36.5	in red meat, huge difference as far as how your body can assimilate it. So if you do this comparison,
0:43.4	the most of the vitamins in animal products are way more bioavailable. But when we get into vitamin
0:51.2	C, full-late, beta-carotene, those are better sources in plants. You also have vitamin E in plants.
0:59.2	So we have vitamins, and then we have minerals, especially potassium, magnesium.
1:05.9	Magnesium is at the heart of the chlorophyll molecule, and that's the green stuff in the plant.
1:11.2	So anything green that you eat has a good amount of magnesium, but we also need that potassium.
1:17.6	There's other minerals as well in plants. You have trace minerals and things like that,
1:22.6	but it really depends on what that plant is grown on. For example, if you're eating plants
1:29.5	that are grown in hydroponic in just like a water solution, they only really put 15 minerals
1:35.9	in that solution. Well, there's a lot more than 15 minerals in the soil. But then again,
1:41.1	if you're growing your plants on soil that has like no biology or microbes, chances are they're
1:46.8	going to be pretty low in minerals. What about amino acids like proteins? There's not a lot of
1:52.8	protein or amino acids in these plants. What about fat? There's not a lot of fat in these plants.
1:59.6	What about fiber? There is a lot of fiber in vegetables, and this is what we can feed our microbes.
2:05.4	And what's interesting about that is that herbivores, animals that consume plants have more than
2:12.3	double the strains of microbes versus the carnivore animals. They have less than half of the
	...

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