Are fruits and vegetables healthier if you eat them raw?

If you’ve ever felt virtuous about eating a big salad for lunch, you know that there’s a health halo around raw fruits and vegetables. Many people believe that eating these foods in their natural state preserves essential nutrients, making them the best version of these foods to include in your diet.

It’s true that eating raw veggies and fruit is a great idea for your health — but you shouldn’t avoid the cooked variety entirely. Dietitian Megan Wroe of Providence St. Jude Medical Center tells Yahoo Life that while raw fruits and vegetables are generally good for you, cooking them isn’t inherently bad. While some good-for-you nutrients of fruits and vegetables can be destroyed by heating processes, such as certain anti-inflammatory enzymes and vitamin C, that’s not the whole story: Both cooked and raw foods have unique benefits, and a diet that consists of both is your best bet.

Here’s what you need to know about raw vs. cooked foods.

Why raw foods rock

It’s hard to overemphasize how good fruits and vegetables are for you. Not only are they packed with vitamins and minerals, but they also contain lots of fiber, which most Americans do not get enough of.

Guidelines set by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommend adults eat between 2.5 and 4 cups of vegetables and 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit per day. (Veggies tend to be more nutrient-dense and contain less sugar than fruit, hence the larger serving suggestion.) Raw fruits and veggies are easy to grab and go, so it’s simple to sneak them into your diet in order to meet these recommendations — think baby carrots on the side of your sandwich, or blueberries sprinkled on top of your yogurt.

Filling up on raw foods is also great if it helps you replace less nutritious foods in your diet. Dr. William Li, physician and author of Eat to Beat Disease, tells Yahoo Life that focusing on raw foods can help people avoid ultra-processed foods, allowing them to make healthier choices. So if you swap out your lunchtime bag of chips with, say, raw baby carrots and hummus, you may be eating better overall.

Why cooking fruits and veggies is OK

While you can lose some nutrients when cooking vegetables (and fruit), cooking can make other vitamins and minerals more “bioavailable.” That’s because cooking breaks down the cell walls of plant foods, making it easier for your body to absorb certain nutrients.

Dietitian Michelle Routhenstein tells Yahoo Life that cooking broccoli, for example, can enhance the availability of sulforaphane, which plays a role in reducing the risk of chronic diseases like cancer. Meanwhile, cooking carrots can increase beta-carotene absorption, which helps with the production of vitamin A — a nutrient essential for vision, immune function and skin health.

Wroe notes that whether produce is healthier cooked or raw sometimes depends on what kind of nutrition you are seeking from your food. For example, the vitamin C in a raw tomato is significantly diminished in the cooking process, but “cooked tomato sauce is significantly higher in bioavailable lycopene” — an antioxidant that can help prevent heart disease and certain cancers — “so the healthier version of a tomato depends on which nutrient your body needs more of,” she explains.

The bottom line

Eating more produce is an overall net positive, especially as American diets often don’t include enough fiber. Ideally, you can get the most nutritional bang for your buck by eating a variety of fruits and veggies, and enjoying them both raw and cooked.

If you’re going to cook your food, it’s important to consider your method for the most nutritional wins. Overboiling, Li says, can leach beneficial vitamins — such as water-soluble ones like vitamin C and certain B vitamins — out of the food and into the water.

Plus, while frying and grilling “creates tasty food,” Li says doing so can “introduce new harmful chemicals into the food as a byproduct of the cooking method.” For example, overcooking potatoes can lead to the presence of acrylamide, a compound linked to cancer, which forms when you cook starchy food at a high temperature.

Whether you eat your fruits and vegetables raw or cooked, always make sure to follow safety guidelines and wash your produce properly to help avoid foodborne illness.