We are all trying to improve our health and diet – well, most of us – and there’s a lot to be said for eating more raw foods.
However, sometimes raw isn’t best, in fact it’s downright dangerous and often tastes disgusting.
Here’s our guide to foods you should avoid raw.
Potatoes
You probably shouldn’t eat potatoes raw because they taste awful and make your mouth feel chalky and it’s weird, but there is another reason you shouldn’t eat them without cooking them.
Uncooked potatoes have a lot of glycoalkaloids which can lead to bloating and flatulence and aggravate the digestive system.
You especially shouldn’t eat any that have any green on them. Potatoes with green skin have a lot of solanine, a toxic substance that can lead to headaches and nausea.
Just cook them, it’s not that hard, and they are delicious.
Another vegetable high in solanine is eggplant, or aubergine if you are feeling a tad fancy. And it’s got some bad relatives as they are part of the nightshade family.
However, you’d have to eat about a dozen before you got to toxic levels, so unless you love that sort of thing, it’s okay to toss a few into a salad.
The only thing wrong with eating eggplant raw is it’s incredibly tasteless.
Red kidney beans
They can make a meal, but only if cooked. Red kidney beans contain high levels of the active lectins, which can cause severe illness. They should be cooked for at least half an hour and be fully drained, and maybe even rinsed.
Cooking the beans ‘deactivates’ the lectin, so tinned beans are safe as they must be cooked at a high temperature before canning.
Wild mushrooms
It’s okay to eat mushrooms from the supermarket or grocer’s, but don’t go wandering off into the forest and eat a random mushroom.
As the sensational case in Victoria shows, mushrooms can be deadly, or at the least, make you very sick or incredibly high.
Don’t take chances with something you find on the forest floor. (Probably good advice for most things you find on the forest floor, to be honest.)
Unpasteurised milk
People love going back to basics and there’s been a bit of a push lately to wind back pasteurising milk. Don’t do this.
If you need any evidence, a company tried to get around the fact that they were selling unpasteurised milk by labelling it ‘bath milk’ and it was supposed to be an additive for baths. Everyone knew it was unpasteurised milk for drinking just dressed by the label as bath milk, so they bought it for drinking and a child died and four others became sick.
I know it’s good to be sceptical sometimes, but usually science is on your side.
If you have ever visited a dairy farm with all the waste products everywhere you’d damned want your milk pasteurised.
Rice
I don’t know why you would want to even eat raw rice, but don’t.
It’s a bad idea mostly because rice can harbour harmful bacteria and contain lectins.
Cooking rice deactivates the lectins, but doesn’t entirely kill all the bacteria, which is why you should always eat rice within a day or two of cooking it.
Cruciferous vegetables
These are all your bunchy-leafy-type veggies such as cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower.
It’s not so much you shouldn’t eat them raw, it’s more that cooking brings out so much more nutritional value.
Cooked cabbage alone improves the vitamin C, vitamin K, magnesium and folate levels.
Some of them are quite hard to digest raw as well and give you gas. And apart from anything else, I can’t think of anything worse than a raw brussels sprout.
Olives
You don’t want to eat raw olives because they are disgusting. They contain high levels of a substance called oleuropein, an extremely bitter compound that makes them completely unpalatable.
Back in the Greek and Roman days olives were only considered suitable for cooking oils, oiling your skin and hair, lighting lamps and as offerings to the gods. Then those tricky Romans discovered adding lye to the soaking bath removed all the nasty bits and away they went.
Techniques to make them more edible have moved on since then, but you still can’t eat them fresh off the tree.
Are there any foods you don’t like raw? Why not share your experience in the comments section below?
Also read: Seven frozen food mistakes
