Plant processes take the unorganized elements of the earth and air and organize these into related compounds, which, then, become available for animal life. Without vegetation there could be no animal life, for the reason that soil and rock are not available substances for animal replenishment. This being true, it is only natural to conclude that once plants have organized these elements into forms available for animal sustenance, any process which returns them wholly, or in part, to their primitive condition renders them, to that degree, unfit for food, and more or less disease producing. That cooking brings about more or less oxidation and disorganization in every oxidizable substance in foods of all types, admits of no doubt. When nutriment has been oxidized in the body, the resulting "ashes" cease to be usable and are eliminated. What reason have we to believe that food oxidized outside the body is more fit for use? Ralph E. Sunderland, chemist and food scientist, declares oxidation to be the chief destroyer of foods and explains the matter thus:

"The same elements (the sixteen chemical elements composing the human body), are the component parts of technically 'fertile' soil in which they are present in inorganic form and as such are not assimilable by the human body, else we could look directly to the soil for our substance. In order to convert these inorganic elements or minerals into a form which can be assimilated by the human body it is necessary for nature to create from the soil vegetation in which these same elements are present in organic form. In vegetation they remain organic until, by oxidation, they return again to their original inorganic form ready to produce more vegetation.

"True food is totally organic substance. If that organic substance is permitted to become, to any degree, inorganic, it simultaneously becomes to that degree useless as food.

"All organic minerals oxidize when they come in contact with oxygen and moisture. That is, they thus become inorganic again. In ordinary room-temperature the process of oxidation proceeds; but in the presence of heat oxidation is very greatly increased. Therefore, the cooking of vegetation in the presence of the oxygen of the air--the condition under which all home cooking and most commercial cooking occurs--changes a large part of what was organic and useful as food into inorganic oxides which cannot be assimilated by the human body."

French investigators found that when milk is boiled the complex calcium-magnesium carbono-phosphate it contains, is decomposed and precipitated in an insoluble form. This means that a natural organic salt which is directly assimilable and available for immediate bony growth, is changed into a form almost impossible of assimilation.

McCollum and Parsons in this country, found that the precipitated salts cling to the walls of the vessel or container so that part of them are actually eliminated from the milk. The excess of bases in the milk is thus greatly reduced. As this excess is low in even the best of milk, the double robbery of alkalies occasioned by boiling has grave consequences.

It is a fact, therefore, that the longer foods are cooked and the higher the temperature to which they are subjected, the more oxidation takes place and the greater is the destruction of the food. I may add, also, that efforts to cook out of the presence of the oxygen of the air, though not as destructive as the common forms of cooking, produces great ruin to the food. Cooking onions, cabbage, cauliflower, etc., oxidizes the sulphur. These foods should never be cooked.