I’m Sorry. The raw diet doesn’t make sense.

By Ike Spry, Cooking Guy/Food Dude

Obesity is rampant in the United States: 73.6 percent of adults 20 years or older are overweight or obese (CDC.gov). Children are becoming overweight as well. Obesity numbers are climbing, and they don’t seem like they’re going to stop anytime soon. But, maybe there’s a solution, and I’m not saying solving obesity is easy. We need to consider socioeconomic conditions, physiology, and food deserts. Also the mass processing of food products is a relatively new phenomenon. Obviously companies are incentivized to use as little money as possible, and it doesn’t help when we subsidize food like corn just to make snack food companies, like Nabisco, use cheap and unhealthy ingredients like corn in multiple manifestations.

Look, pretty much everyone wants to lose a little bit of weight. We follow the fad diet, and hate high-fat foods for a couple decades, only to find out carbohydrates are the enemy, only to find out you need to go vegan, and on and on . . . . I don’t want to convince you which diet is the best, as I’m not very knowledgeable about these things, and food scientists and nutritionists are not my peers. I just want to give you the facts. The raw food movement, traced back to the 1800s when a doctor named Maximilian Bircher-Benne, proposed eating raw apples was a cure for jaundice (health.usnews.com). Since then there have been numerous studies stating whether or not eating raw foods is a plausible option for losing weight, and I want to address the elephant in the room. Yes, you can lose weight by eating raw foods, or keto, or paleo or really any other calorie-restrictive diet. Even if it isn’t necessarily a diet based on calorie suppression, at the end of the day that’s what controls weight loss. Calorie suppression controls weight loss. Even if it was by accident, eating 300 calories less a day will make you lose weight. We could argue about an energy balance in terms of weight loss, and you could talk about the carbohydrate-insulin model, and we could both be arguing about it all day.

I’m not denying genetics play a factor. I just want to tell you about the contradictions of fad diets like the raw diet. First of all, cooking food is vitally important for our human evolution. Our brain becoming larger is most importantly a metabolically expensive process. It is much harder to absorb nutrients and calories from a raw and hard potato than a cooked and starch-filled potato; just like eating raw steak, or raw eggs for example, has less protein than their cooked counterparts. Recent scientific studies have proven the homo erectus’ brain became larger as our teeth became smaller, meaning most likely, absorbing the nutrients from food made us less reliant on constant grazing, and more inclined to absorb more nutrients, and more protein (theworld.org). While some people suggest that fire, obviously the most important part in cooking food, was only used some 500,000 years ago; other scientists suggest cooking food has been traced back over 1.8 million years, which is long enough to support this evolutionary hypothesis (pnas.org). 

At the end of the day, what works for you, works for you. I’m sure following a strict raw diet can be beneficial in weight loss, just like anything that involves a caloric deficit. All I want to say is be wary of being caught up in the next fad diet, especially if their fundamental foundation is not necessarily backed by science.