Applying heat to foods provides no nutritional benefit to the food and is detrimental to the person ingesting the cooked food. There are reported instances where, by heating food, certain nutrients are more easily released, like lycopene from tomatoes. However, this ignores that hundreds of other nutrients in that heated tomato were damaged or destroyed. And it also assumes that more of a specific nutrient is better, instead of trusting that the body knows how to extract just the right amount that it needs for optimal health. Many nutrients are deadly toxic if we overdose on them, and more is definitely not always better. Many foods that we cook would otherwise be unappetizing or inedible to humans, such as meats, grains, and starches, thus bypassing sensory safeguards that normally protect the body from ingesting unnatural and unhealthy substances. Studies have shown that the immune system often reacts to the introduction of cooked food into the bloodstream the same way it does to foreign pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Cooking food denatures the proteins, renders the fats carcinogenic, and caramelizes the carbohydrates. Many other nutrients are damaged, deranged, or destroyed by the heating process, leaving mostly empty calories. Regular consumption of cooked foods results in a detrimental enlargement of the pancreas.
As humans moved away from the tropics, they began eating the flesh of animals to substitute for missing fruits and vegetables. The farming of grains, the hunting of animals, and civilization's reliance on eating them cooked, came within the last 10,000 years, the same length of time man has been using fire to prepare food. As such, cooked foods are considered to be a major contributor to what are called the diseases of civilization: cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.