Do you have to be a raw vegan for it to be healthy?

The objection

“If you’re going to be vegan, surely you have to eat everything raw, cooking destroys the nutrients and that’s the only ‘real’ plant-based diet.”

The answer

This one comes from inside the plant-based world, and it’s worth correcting precisely because it’s wrong in a way that can hurt people.

Strict raw veganism, eating little or nothing cooked, is not the healthy ideal it’s marketed as. A long-term study found that the more raw food women ate, the more likely their menstrual cycles were to falter: roughly a third of those on an entirely raw diet developed amenorrhoea, the cycle stopping altogether, a classic signal of too little available energy. Reviews also link high-raw diets to low body weight, low energy, and elevated rates of dental erosion, partly from constant acidic fruit and citrus bathing the teeth.

The premise is shaky too. For most foods, cooking is a net nutritional win. It makes the lycopene in tomatoes and beta-carotene in carrots more absorbable, breaks down the phytates and lectins in beans and grains that block mineral uptake, kills pathogens, and unlocks far more calories from starchy staples. A little vitamin C and folate are lost to heat, but you don’t eat one nutrient, you eat a diet, and the diet comes out ahead.

Unusually for the pages here, the honest correction runs against an extreme version of veganism. A varied, mostly cooked vegan diet is the one dietetic bodies endorse for every life stage. Raw food can be part of it (salads, fruit and smoothies are great) as a fraction rather than a rule.

The defensible claim: healthy plant-based eating means cooked beans, grains, tofu and vegetables, with raw food alongside. Anyone telling you it must all be raw is selling an idea the evidence doesn’t support.