Originally Posted by
ZHVelo
I soak my oats in water overnight and prepare them with things the next day. No milk either. No heating, faster and some nutrition as you say is lost when heating.
OMG that's still going on. The ability to make and preserve fire was a huge turning in human nutrition. It turns out that cooking food releases more nutrients which in turn meant that after fire, humans could eat less which meant less time foraging, which meant more time thinking. Most health faddists point to a small loss in vitamin content in cooked foods, true, but neglect to mention how much more digestible cooked foods are, which means we get more energy from them. Also many foods are almost indigestible raw, like potatoes. "a fragment of underdone potato?" - Scrooge. I can spend time fooling around with this because in a few minutes I'm going to eat beans with corn tortilla and fixings for breakfast, all cooked. All of that almost inedible raw. That said, when I was hitching across Yugoslavia with no money at all, I ate raw field corn stolen out of the peoples' fields in the night. Luckily it was corn season, but then I'm always lucky.