Before we come to cooking tips, it seems best to establish what cooking is. You may think this unnecessary, since it is something we all do. But can one take the risk?
Cooking is first of all a curse. It destroys all a food's enzymes, it grossly deteriorates its stores of vitamins and minerals, it alters and denatures a large variety of its most useful phytochemicals, to say nothing about what it does to oils and fats. Many of our health problems are at least partly caused by the fact that we now cook most of our foods. But that is only part of the story. Cooking is not devoid of benefits.
Some of the foods in our diet since our Neolithic ancestors started cultivating the earth, like grains and legumes, we cannot eat without cooking. Some other foods contain many poisons or harmful compounds destroyed only by processing; while cooking protects us from many bacteria and parasites that hole up in our foods. So cooking is also a blessing, even if in disguise.
The point is that since we now cook most of our foods, we are bound to get most of the benefits. The following cooking tips are to help you minimize the damage of the curse.