Bad science

In our office canteen, there are leaflets from the Raw Food School, explaining the many reasons to adopt a raw food diet (or rather, “a Raw Food diet”). As well as a range of general health benefits (“No matter who you are, you can experience all these changes on a Raw Food diet”), it lists 25 “illnesses, conditions and symptoms” that “Raw Food is known to have healed or helped”, ranging from mood swings to cancer.

Then, joy of joys, we get the science bit:

When we are born, we are given a limited reserve of Enzymes that are necessary to keep our body system in working order throughout the entire duration of our lifetime. The only additional source of Enzymes we can get comes from the food that we eat. Problems arise when food is cooked above 44˚C (112 degrees Fahrenheit) when Enzymes are completely destroyed by heat during the cooking process.
When eating cooked food, the body needs to draw essential Enzymes from the limited natural pool supplied at birth in order to digest the food. Imagine drawing money out of a bank account that is never topped up. Eventually, it will run out. Its exactly the same with Enzymes.
If we continue to eat cooked foods and do not replace Enzymes by eating Raw Food, we eventually begin to use up our bodies’ Enzymes reserves. Without these Enzymes, cooked food is stored in our bodies as toxins, which can than lead to all kinds of diseases and illness.
Ageing is really nothing more than the body running out of Enzymes. Stop withdrawing Enzymes and instead start depositing Enzymes to build, cleanse and heal your body.

At this point I should mention that the place I work is a medical research charity. We employ a lot of people who, to put it bluntly, know stuff. But you don’t need PhD-level expertise to be able to suspect that this wittering about Enzymes (or, as those of us without £290 ‘Raw Foods Transformation’ courses to sell call them, enzymes) is in fact bollocks.

Yes, high temperatures do destroy enzymes. But so do our stomach acids. We do not take over the use of the enzymes in the food we eat; different species have their own enzymes for different purposes. And our bodies create new enzymes all the time, using as (so to speak) raw material the food we eat – whether cooked or not. Ageing is not “running out of enzymes”, and if you eat only raw food you will still age and die.

I don’t suggest that there aren’t any health benefits to eating more raw and less cooked food, but this bullshit about enzymes is painfully bad pseudo-science.