I'm not sure if this is entirely true or not, but I believe foods certified organic does have more minerals nutrients than foods conventionally grown. In the book "In Defense of Food", Michael Pollan argues that you should eat foods grown organically for this very reason.
This statement is totally true. Even organic foods lack the nutrients they had 100 years ago, and this is having detrimental effects on people. The numbers of people with diseases are going up, and I believe that these two things coincide. Our bodies are breaking down and getting weaker, creating more people with diseases, and food is our main source of nutrition. If our food is lacking what we need to survive, of course we are going to become sick.
I'm glad there are others that are seeing the same things I am.
This statement is probably overstated, but largely true. While we can't draw the direct connection between one thing and the other, the main reason is the lack of funding to do so. The money is in chemical farming. But the nutrient depletion isn't due to the lack of crop rotation, it's mostly due to chemical fertilizer. Chemical fertilizer supplies a lot of potassium and especially nitrogen, which will speed the growing of crops, but it doesn't supply any of the other minerals that are naturally found in soil. Tilling also depletes top soil. When the prairie grasses were first cut down in the midwest there were several feet of top soil; now there's none. Hard as a rock. Organic farming, if it's done right, will replenish the soil by using seaweed as part of the fertilizer. Seaweed contains every mineral ever on the planet. But it takes time, and with the current move of organic farming to monocropping on large corporate farms, the benefits are beginning to recede. We owe this to Whole Foods, which, by monopolizing the market and getting the federal gov't to issue watered down organic standards, has created the incentive for organic farms to move to corporate farming. The part about cooked food is wrong. Some food is better for you cooked, some is better raw. Broccoli, kale, collards, and such are not digestible raw because of the complex fibers, and carotenoids are actually enhanced by cooking. What is better is a balance of raw and cooked foods, and raw foods that are partially cooked without heat by fermenting or culturing them.
I'm not sure about it being overstated, I consider my health right up there on the top of the list and without the proper ingredients to maintain a healthy body, everything else is second. I agree with the "why", Money seems to control everything including farming. The only alternative I have found to maintain a healthy body are supplements, but one has to be careful in doing so. If you just take a one-a-day vitamin & mineral supplement most of the time you are wasting your money to an extent. Most of the one-a-day gets flushed right through, in order for your body to assimilate the nutrients they need to be balanced.
I also agree with your idea of cooked foods. Some foods need to be cooked and some don't. The only problem with cooking foods is that when you cook food, you destroy all the delicate enzymes that help digest it.
given the fact that the majority of our society is on a fast food diet, it worries me to think of all the undigested food in people's colon. I believe this is one of the causes for obesity in today's society. A simple act of taking some high quality enzymes every day does wonders for me.
The reason I say overstated is that throughout history diets have been extremely unbalanced due to the geographic confinement of what was available. Now we can get relatively healthy organically grown food all year round thanks to refrigeration. So though our food is relatively depleted, we have access to more of it. We're also living longer, though in the US we're also living sicker and most of that is attributable to modern water treatment. So it's not all bad news. As to supplements, the reason a good supplement has high doses and requires more than one a day is because the most absorbable nutrients can't be fit into a one a day, they take up too much space, and because manufacturers recognize a lot will end up in the toilet. But that's true with food as well. That's why taking you vitamins a little with each meal is better than just once a day, and why a multi should always be taken with meals. And digestive enzymes do help. And while cooking destroys enzymes, it makes a lot of food more digestible so our natural enzymes systems function better. Macrobiotics, for example, believe in cooking virtually everything. Me? I don't know, we don't spend the resources to find out how to eat best for different people. We spend it all on making a cheaper burger and on medication. What can I say?