I remember living in China for an extended period of time and never seeing raw vegetables as part of a meal; locals I spoke with found the very concept unsanitary.

It's unfortunate that some are advocating just abandoning chapters of our local cuisine as being no longer viable in our era. I'd rather we more strongly enforce regulations so we can hold onto our salads.

China has a long history of using human waste as fertilizer on fields, so only eating cooked vegetables was good hygiene.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/...

It's more fair that many, many places have done the same thing. When I was in Ghana for a summer in 1987, I was warned that "night soil" was often used in vegetable fields, and I should watch out for my tender American digestive system not being able to deal with the uncooked results. No slight against Ghana in particular, that's typical for countries at Ghana's level of development.

I don't think it is a slight against Ghana. They may well be ahead of the curve on something we may all have to move back to, i.e. "Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming"[1].

[1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and-...

I'm all for sustainable farming, and poop is a manageable risk on fields where you cook what's grown there. But you don't treat vegetable fields with raw poop, which is what I was referring to... especially vegetables designed to be eaten uncooked.

Honestly, whatever form of cooking gets you to eat them is probably the best preparation.

Some nutrients in some vegetables are diminished by cooking (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-3841... for example). Some are also enhanced. For example: lycopene from tomatoes. Overall, it seemed to me that cooking often harms nutrition more than it helps.

This isn't my area, but I've heard that cooking is part of digestion.

I know evolutionary biology isn't as intuitive as people always assume, but theoretically this fits within my model - digestion burns precious calories (at least in a world with too many calories), breaking down the food using fire somewhat allows for the body to spend less calories on breaking it down itself. So our ancestors who used fire to cook had an advantage because they could spend less calories on digestion.

Archaeological evidence suggests that humans can control fire between 700,000 years ago and 120,000 years ago.

There's also a hypothesis that the nutritional changes allowed through cooking increased our brain size - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human....

But fundamentally, I wonder if we cook too much. Some compounds are very fragile, and cooking would harm nutrition (as you said). As I said, not my field, but I try to stick to a lot of leafy greens as is recommended by health services, and the occasional cooked proteins.

The hydrochloric acid in the stomach is pretty strong, about 1.5 ph. Cooking is mild for most compounds compared to dissolution in strong acid. I don't think we cook too much. Like you said, it is mostly just predigestion.

Cooked food provides more energy than raw food. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calori...

Is that something that most people on HN want? More energy from their food?

It would mean that they could eat less to get the same number of calories?

Food is currently so abundant that getting too much calories/obesity is large problem for both indiduals and society as a whole.

People want to eat more and get less calories, not the other way around.

"some foods" - from the article itself

FTFY.. it's a bad idea to make absolute statements like that

>Some nutrients in some vegetables are diminished by cooking (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-3841.... for example).

It's not clear that this is relevant to heart disease. Vitamin C, for example, is degraded by heat, but has no role in preventing heart disease. "Antioxidants" is the smoke signal of the woo practitioner.

>Overall, it seemed to me that cooking often harms nutrition more than it helps.

This is such a common and annoying myth that I need to call it out as such. Humans literally evolved to eat cooked food.

http://img2.timg.co.il/forums/1_142929513.pdf

http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/early/2009/10/19/sqb.2009...

https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/16498

https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/12770

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

Also, lycopene is not a "nutrient".