(This is a good explanation why 50% of our food- vegetables -need to be consumed in raw form. Catalyn® and all other Standard Process® products are not ‘cooked.’ And they are concentrated!- LGHM.com)
Raw Food Vitamins
By Royal Lee, D.D.S.
President, Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research
Address delivered before the Massachusetts Osteopathic Society (May 22, 1949).
Does cooking destroy the vitamins in our foods?
The cooking of food reduces its nutritional value in animal
feeding tests at least one-third, judging from weight gains produced. Cooked foods, however, are more insidious in their nature than the tests indicate, in that various diseases develop from the deficiency of the vitamins lost in cooking that only appear later in the history of the test animals; and the changes become more apparent and serious in each succeeding generation.
We can start with the reports of Dr. Francis M. Pottenger,
Jr., who demonstrated that cats fed pasteurized milk and
cooked meat could not reproduce after two or three generations.
They usually died from arthritis, heart disease, or gastrointestinal complications, and always lost their resistance to infections.
How Cooking Affects Amino Acids
Just what does cooking do to foodstuffs? First it tends to
destroy certain amino acids, mainly lysine, the most important of the entire group of protein components. Lysine gives us physical endurance and mental stability. Human subjects deprived of lysine become quarrelsome and ill-natured, and tire quickly at the slightest exertion. Cooking also destroys another amino factor, glutamine, the essential tissue fluid buffer without which we cannot defend ourselves against acidosis. The pains we feel from slight burns or even hot coffee are probably due to the breakdown of glutamine in our tissues, as it is one of the organic factors in all cells that cannot tolerate even slight changes in temperature or acidity. Evidence piles up to show that lack of glutamine may be a common cause of arthritis, but the investigations are hampered by the fact that glutamine in the raw state outside of foodstuffs is not available except in minute quantities at prohibitive prices.
Effects of Cooking on Enzymes
Pasteurization or cooking destroys the enzymes in foods.
We have failed to recognize the importance of these enzymes. One, the phosphatase group, is very important. Pasteurized milk fails to deliver its calcium and constipates rather than aids digestion. Cereal foods fail to release muscle sugar, or inositol, and free phosphoric acid from the germ components, the phytates.
As a result, chickens fed such foods develop perosis, a
joint disease that seems to have its counterpart in the flat feet and fallen arches of the human family.
The inositol deficiency plus the lack of other germ factors
lost in cereal processing contributes to liver disease, cirrhosis and fatty degeneration. The phosphoric acid deficiency contributes to hardened arteries and arthritis.
Dr. Garnett Chaney at Stanford University reports that he has found a new vitamin in raw cabbage juice that cures peptic ulcers. Patients put on one quart of raw juice recovered in ten days, while the best previous hospital regimes took four times as long. It is a fat
soluble vitamin also found in raw milk, whose existence has
heretofore been totally unsuspected. It has been named Vitamin U.
The Importance of Vitamin E
The next effect of cooking is to destroy in part if not wholly the oxidizable factors in foods, that is, cooking “burns” the food factors that the body ordinarily oxidizes. Heat speeds up oxidation, and so turns food to ash before it gets into the stomach.
The major function of Vitamin E seems to be to protect
certain factors in the tissues from oxidation. These factors include known vitamins as well as some that are unknown.
Among the newly discovered factors lost by oxidation is a vital part of vitamin E that seems to be necessary to protect us from such seizures of nervous pains like the doloroux and angina pectoris. Dogs fed white bread develop what veterinarians call running fits, and soon die. These fits are no doubt seizures like tic doloroux or angina pectoris, and cause the animal to go into the frenzy we call “fits.” The human victim is as ignorant of the cause of his agony as the dog, but when we read the morning paper and read that Mr. Well-Known-Business Man died from a heart attack at the age of forty-eight and seemed normal at his work the day before, we can draw our own conclusions.
Especially when we find that cattle too will drop dead just as suddenly if fed grain that has lost its anti-oxidant Vitamin E by removal of the germ. We believe the deaths were due not directly to the lack of the Vitamin E but to the loss of the oxidi-zable factor that the E was protecting.
That is why there has been such variable results in heart disease from the use of the Vitamin E (as alpha tocopherol). What the victim really needs is
the oxidizable factor itself, once it has been destroyed.
Is Bleached Flour Harmless?
We need some honest enforcement of Federal laws that are
being ignored by Food & Drug officials, as the U. S. Supreme Court decided in 1918 that it was illegal to put any kind of poison into flour, regardless of the smallness of the quantity.
Reprinted from HEALTH CULTURE
June, 1956
Note: Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research is a nonprofit, public-service institution, chartered to investigate and disseminate nutritional information. The attached publication is not literature or labeling for any product, nor shall it be employed as such by anyone. In accordance with the right of freedom of the press guaranteed to the Foundation by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,
the attached publication is issued and distributed for informational purposes.
Additional Reference:
The History of a Crime Against the Food Law by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. The book in its entirety can be found at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/soilandhealth/03sovereigntylibrary/0303
%20soccriticismlibrary/030305wylie/030305toc.html
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Westin Price.
Available at www.ifnh.org.
Pottenger’s Cats: A Study in Nutrition, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger.
Available at www.ifnh.org.