Many Benefits of Eating Raw Vegetables

We are told from birth to eat our vegetables, yet few of us do. Even when we start eating greens, it's only after we've cooked up most of the natural nutrients our bodies so desperately crave.

Many Benefits of Eating Raw Vegetables

Keep in mind, as you go, that while all raw vegetables are incredibly beneficial, raw vegetables actually serve as the basis for nearly all life on this planet. This may sound a little extreme to you, but stop and think for a moment that almost every living creature on the planet lives by eating raw vegetables or by eating an animal that eats raw green vegetables... It really is that important.

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• I know, you've probably eaten most of your cooked vegetables for as long as you can remember. Simply put, just because something is "always" done a certain way doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. You will get a lot of vegetables if you eat them raw.
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• I used the word "consume" specifically because you actually get the same benefits from juicing raw vegetables as eating them whole, usually faster. This is because raw vegetable juice requires less internal work to digest and is absorbed into the body almost instantly.
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• Most people seem to only know about eating vegetables because they remember their mother told them to; Very few people seem to understand the amazing nutritional value of vegetables.
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• Raw vegetables are very rich in minerals, vitamins, trace elements, enzymes and natural sugars. These are all the things your body needs to function properly, and raw vegetables will help stabilize and normalize normal bodily functions. In fact, they help in the functioning of almost every normal function of the body.
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• You may have heard about the need for vitamins and nutrients for your overall health throughout your life, but the concept of enzymes may be new to you. Basically, the enzymes in raw vegetables help your body digest the food. This is one reason why green vegetables are sometimes considered "natural laxatives," because they make the stomach work properly.
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• The average American diet actually consists of quite a few foods that are incredibly difficult for our bodies to digest. When we don't digest properly, food stays in our stomachs for longer than it should and we lose whatever nutritional value it had.
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• Well, at this point, you may have started to convince yourself of the need for veggies...but why raw?
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• Scientific studies have shown that all of our cooking methods reduce the amount of vitamins, minerals and enzymes in vegetables. Among the cooking methods, steaming has been shown to retain most of the vitamin content, although it still reduces them.
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• Vegetables begin to lose their valuable nutrients as soon as they are pulled, pulled or plucked from the ground. For this reason, losing extra nutrients during cooking will be less of a problem if we grow our own vegetables and cook them the same day we harvest them.
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• However, most of us do not live this way. The vast majority of us buy our vegetables from the supermarket after they have been shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away. During that time, the nutritional value was seeping out of them.

Finally, and to make matters worse, repeated studies have shown that commercially grown vegetables, fresh from the ground, are not as nutrient dense as they were 50 years ago. One contributing factor is that farmers have found so many ways to make their crops grow faster that we don't get the full benefits of naturally ripe vegetables.

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It's true to claim that any vegetable you buy from the supermarket and then cook at home will have the nutritional value of a carton when it reaches your stomach, is an extreme, but not that extreme.

Start eating (or drinking) raw vegetables as soon as you can. Whenever possible, grow them yourself or buy them at local farmers markets.