Here is a List of Food You Should Avoid Eating Cooked

Sometimes it is good to turn off the stove and enjoy certain fruits and vegetables in their purest form i.e. raw.

Cooking or boiling or roasting increases the nutritional benefits of most of the daily consumed food. However, there are foods that lose their benefits and hampers your health by making it difficult for digestion or losing out on nutrition.

When it comes to eating for weight loss, it’s not just what you eat, it’s how you eat it, experts from Harvard University explain on The Conversation. The authors suggest that food processing—like cooking, blending, and mashing—affects calorie content. In every case, the more processed a food is, the more energy it releases.

This means if you eat cooked food, you’re more likely to gain weight, while people who eat raw food are more inclined to lose weight. Why? Highly processed food is more digestible; it’s softer and requires less energy from our bodies to break it down. (Keep in mind that digestibility changes and varies.) Starch becomes more resistant to digestion when it cools after being cooked so the enzymes can’t break down as easily. Stale food, like day-old cooked spaghetti, will provide you with fewer calories than a plate of spaghetti eaten straight from the stove; both technically have the same amount of calories, but very different outcomes.

To scale back on calories, stray from soft white bread in favor of rough whole-wheat varieties; reject processed cheese and reach for natural; and consume raw fruits and veggies over cooked.

Do note that some cooked or processed foods are better for you than their raw counterparts. For example, pasteurizing milk kills bacteria; cooking meat prevents salmonella and E. coli; and cooking carrots, spinach, mushrooms, and asparagus supplies our bodies with more antioxidants.

Onion and Garlic

Onion contains allicin and quercetin, which helps in prevention of cancer, reduces your blood pressure and restraint your hunger. Eat adequate amounts of onion to get rid of any fungal infection or inflammation in your body. Onion also helps you in fighting viruses like common cold. Studies have proven the fact that heating or microwaving onions can reduce the effectiveness of the same.

Likewise in garlic also, boiling the same reduces the antibacterial properties of garlic. Also a cooked garlic is somewhat inferior to a raw garlic. It loses its effectiveness by around 25%.

Broccoli and Kale

Broccoli's are high in fiber, vitamin C, calcium among many other nutrients that prevents cancer, diabetes, inflammation etc. Studies have shown that our bodies can absorb the nutrients of broccoli faster when eaten raw than cooked. Also boiling or frying broccoli depletes its vitamin C levels.

Bitterness in kale can be reduced by cooking it, however by doing so you are also reducing the nutrients mainly its antioxidants and vitamin C. Steaming can be an option of reducing the bitterness and keeping the nutrients intact.

Berries and Nuts

Everybody likes munching on dried berries, however, the drying process altogether saps out all the essential vitamins and minerals. Raw berries are full of antioxidants and any sort of baking, cooking reduces the polyphenol and calorie levels.

Nuts are a great source of fat, iron, magnesium and helps you in maintaining a balanced diet. Nuts helps you in lowering your cholesterol levels and promotes better heart conditions. Always go for raw nuts rather than salted or fried ones.

Juice and Chocolates

There is juice available to buy in the nearby departmental store, however the same will never have health benefits that you can find in a fresh glass of juice. Artificial juice contains all sorts of colour, preservative, sugar additives and many other harmful contents that lowers its nutrition.

Raw chocolate is very potent because of its antioxidants and helps you feel good instantly and also lowers your blood pressure. Factory made chocolate is mixed with sugar, oil and other ingredients that makes it a reason to develop diabetes other than anything else.

Coconut and Apple

Coconuts are rich in fiber medium-chain triglycerides that are processed by your body in an alternate manner to long-chain fatty acids. These fatty acids go straight to your liver and are used as a source of energy. Raw coconut water is more beneficial than normal water. However, processed coconut does not retain its nutrients and may not give you the same health benefits.

Raw apples are a good source of carbohydrates and protein among other necessary nutrients. Baking or dehydration of apples leads to depletion of large quantities of nutrients from it and also increases the sugar levels in it.