For a few decades now there has been a somewhat fringe but not absolutely insignificant movement that claims that raw food is somehow healthier, better and "more natural" than cooked food. The notion is that raw food is more nutritious and healthier, while cooking makes food less nutritious and even detrimental to one's health.
This taps strongly on the so-called "naturalistic fallacy": In other words, the notion that things that are perceived as "more natural", less changed by artificial human actions, is better and healthier.
Don't get me wrong, there is some validity to that notion when it comes to food, in the extreme opposite end of the spectrum: In other words, ultra-processed food is genuinely less healthy than less-processed food. This is a very known fact, and nutritionists and the medical community in general have been warning about this for decades now. Ultra-processed food tends to have less nutrients and more artificial additives (such as preservatives, flavors, etc) that may accumulate in the body over the decades to detrimental effects. Ultra-processed food is particularly detrimental in the sense that many people don't eat pretty much anything but. And that's because it's easy, convenient and cheap.
However, that doesn't mean that the opposite extreme is somehow automatically the best option. Just because ultra-processed food is detrimental to your health doesn't mean that completely unprocessed uncooked raw food is the best alternative.
In fact, cooking can be actually beneficial.
It might not be immediately obvious why, but cooking can actually increase the nutritional value of some foods (particularly meats and some plants).
I have seen "raw food" advocates literally laugh at and mock this notion, as if it was absolutely and obviously ridiculous. They think that cooking only destroys nutrients, and that it's completely asinine to think that cooking could somehow add nutrients to food. That criticism might sound plausible at face value, but it's just a misunderstanding of what makes food more nutritious and how cooking affects it.
It's not that cooking adds nutrients to food. What it does is that it changes the existing nutrients to be more digestible. That is what makes the food more nutritious. In other words, in the sense of how many nutrients your digestive system is able to extract from the food. In other words, using an alternative term, cooking can make certain foods easier to digest, meaning your body can extract more nutrients from it than it would otherwise.
Raw food advocates maintain that cooking destroys the nutrients in the food. That's actually true in a sense, but ironically that's precisely why it makes certain foods (like most meats) more digestible, more nutritious, than if left uncooked. This is because cooking breaks larger protein chains into smaller ones, which become easier to digest.
Indeed, your digestive system is trying to do that exact thing: Split large protein chains into smaller ones, which it can then digest. However, it can only do so much. It cannot break 100% of the molecule chains, only a fraction of them. Cooking can break up much more of these chains, thus making the food easier to digest, for your body to be able to extract more nutrients from it. The same happens to certain other large molecular chains (such as fibers).
So cooking not only kills bacteria and other harmful pathogens, and not only does it often make food better tasting, but it can actually make it more nutritious.
But try to convince a raw food advocate of that. You will fail. Sigh.
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