Experts differ on health benefits of raw-food diet

By Debra Hale-Shelton
Associated Press

While proponents of a raw-food diet often speak of its health benefits, the raw truth is: Not everyone agrees.

"It's a bad diet, extremism," a fad, says Lisa Sasson, a registered dietician and clinical assistant professor at New York University.

Sasson says it's not a healthy diet because it's "very restricted and limited." A healthy diet, she says, is based on eating a variety of foods. Compounding the problem, she says, is that many of the suggested raw foods and ingredients are not readily accessible.

Raw-food authors Roxanne Klein and Suzanne Alex Ferrara, however, talk of feeling better and having more energy since they embraced a raw diet.

Klein, writing in "Raw" (Ten Speed Press), which she co-authored with Charlie Trotter, takes a position held by many raw-food advocates — that most foods' natural enzymes are destroyed when heated above a certain temperature, forcing the body to generate the enzymes needed for digestion.

She puts that temperature at 118 F. Raw-food experts vary slightly on the temperature.

In the recently published "Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods," author Renee Loux Underkoffler writes: "Raw foods have more nutrition available in a simpler state than the diminished nutritional value of cooked and processed food."

But Sasson says it's a "fallacy that the enzymes in your food are better utilized, digested when the food is raw."

She says the human body is well-equipped to make enzymes. In fact, she says the healthful components of many vegetables are better absorbed by the body when they are cooked.

Sasson also believes it is dangerous to put children on such a diet.

"Children are such picky eaters as it is, you don't want to further restrict their diet or further make them feel different," she said.

Ferrara says she does not advocate putting children on a raw diet, and Klein's own children eat food she cooks for them.

Among Sasson's nutritional concerns is that people eating only raw food might not get enough calcium, protein, iron and vitamin B12.

Sasson also believes food plays an important psychological role in people's lives. "Food should be something that's tied to our culture, our history, taste, ethnic values, perhaps religion, past memories," she said by telephone from New York.

"When you start to lose that and you only eat for health reasons, something is getting lost."