We know that cooking food has some benefits:

• It can make food safer
• It can concentrate tastes and flavors
• It can reduce spoilage
• It can soften tough foods
• It increases the amount of energy our bodies can get from food
• It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments
• It denatures protein molecules

But before we get too excited about cooking, the modern diet can be overwhelmingly heat-processed. Higher cooking temperatures can create chemical reactions among amino acids, creatines, and sugars — reactions that may produce dangerous carcinogens and mutagens (compounds that can damage our DNA).

Now suddenly we have “unhealthy” compounds created in otherwise “healthy” foods — stuff like potatoes, fish, whole grains, etc.

Don’t freak out and throw…