There are a number of antinutrients that are denatured by cooking, goitrogens are just the tip. Only thing I eat raw is wild meat :)

Eat food that's defenseless when dead... Vegetables don't want to be eaten, we make them edible thru minimal processing, fire made us human

I think it's going to be different for each vegetable. Some have certain nutrients when raw that are destroyed in the cooking process but then the cooking process makes other nutrients available that weren't before. Personally, I really like raw spinach (with ranch dressing of course) and prefer it greatly over cooked just because of taste (and avoidance of that slimy feeling of the cooked). I've been known to pick some weeds out from the yard like mallow and purslane, rinse them off, and add them to the salad as well. Some weeds are quite healthy eating. We also grow some funky Phillipino herbs in the back yard water garden like Kangkung (another leafy green) which are also decently tasty raw. Just on a personal note, if I don't think they taste decent raw then I don't eat them raw. I figure taste buds are put there for a reason.

But other foods might be better prepared with cooking or just not eaten at all. For everything I eat often, I try to find time to research it and learn as much as I can about the best preparation methods and any upsides and downsides. Unfortunately, for many food items, there's not a lot of this kind of information out there yet. Seems like so far, most info is just on straight vitamin count, but little on how digestable the vitamins are and what kind of antinutrients might also be present. Also very little on how cooking might change the nutrient content. But I don't think you can accurately make any one big sweeping statement about raw vs cooked that is going to be accurate for all vegetables. -Eva

You have to remember that the vegetables you find in the supermarket have been bred to render them more palatable to humans, not to mentioned consistently sized, slower ripening to permit transport over long distances, less bruise-prone, sweeter, larger, thinner skinned, etc, at the expense of taste and nutrition. We didn't co-evolve with them.

The vegetables we co-evolved with are their wild ancestors. Take carrots, for example; they're edible raw, whereas their wild ancestor, Queen Anne's Lace, is not (while it's native to my area, I've never tried it because it has a repuation for unpalatability even when cooked; it's desperation food). I'd think that if you can eat the wild ancestor raw; you're probably OK to eat the modern vegetable raw, and if we didn't co-evolve with something (anything native to the Americas, such as potatoes and corn for example), it should be regarded with some suspicion.

We've had fire for a very long time. Many even say our brains were able to evolve to such a size because of cooking. Because of this I find "raw is best" claims unfounded.

A lot of people with sensitive stomachs can eat cooked veggies with no problems, which raw ones cause discomfort or other problems. My Mom always pushed more for cooked ones, as more delicate and, in her opinion, healthier. Maybe that's why soups were such a staple in Polish cooking!

I find fruits, even though they "want" to be eaten, also very heavy on empty stomach. Never could eat fruit or drink juice first thing in the morning.

As others said, it often depends on individual species and personal preferences. I eat mostly cooked for practical reasons (frozen don't go bad), but also find them much lighter on my stomach.

oh, and totally unrelated to nutrition - when I eat bigger raw salad, I am simply tired of chewing! :D

I think there is a question about how much of the goitrogenic substance is neutralized via cooking. In one study, boiling broccoli only removed about 1/3 of the goitrogenic substance. Most sources I checked didn't have any data at all on how much cooking really helped with goitrogens. I think the jury is still out. Standard advice, if you trust it, is that as long as you get plenty of iodine intake, then it's probably not a big deal. However, one question I had was how long after you eat say a load of spinach does the goitrogenic activity in the body last? If it's only a short while, I'd say no big deal, but my google skills have not yet gotten me an answer. However, my main fear when it comes to the thyroid is not temporary inhibition of iodine absorption which may be caused by goitrogens, it is autoimmune attack on the thyroid, which may be caused by unhealthy digestion and gluten intake, so for now, I am going to put most of my concern there. I think we humans have been munching on raw salads for a long time and probably did not always take the time to cook something that tasted OK raw and was easy to just grab and eat.