Without having read through the posts, which I will in a minute, I can say that part of this raw vs. cooked food thing for me is the dealing in absolutes. That is where the raw food AND the cooked food people go wrong. Whatever the limitations of the egg study or any other study may be (and you can't find a study without limitations) different foods react differently to different things. There is no absolute answer and this has been shown in many ways..
Some foods nutrients become more available when you heat them and some less. When you are dealing with macronutrients it still varys. For this I was ONLY talking about eggs, personally, and not saying there weren't many foods that would be much more nutritious raw. Many of the vitamins in our vegetables are damaged or downright destroyed by cooking. On the other hand it's been found that certain nutrients become more available. For intstance cooked carrots have some major advantages over raw. Cooked tomatoes can be advantageous. At the same time there is always a downside and you can be giving up a little. And the method of cooking and the degree make a difference.
If you were to start eating raw meat, well you wouldn't digest it as well as some degree of cooking. On the other hand overcooked meat may be problematic too. In the case of proteins, yes, there has been some very small cases where whole proteins were supposedly absorbed as in certain enzymes but it is extremely limited. If such is the case then denaturing those proteins would not be good. But if you go around eating animal proteins raw all you're really doing is giving up a lot of the protein and setting bacteria to work in your gut on the extremely off chance that there is some healthful enzyme or something to be had in an "active" form.
The enzyme thing in raw protein foods is one of those things clung to by the "raw food gurus" one of which is that Arthur Baker guy above. Nothing really accurate or scientific about that. You can't just say that all proteins are made uavailable by cooking without proving it with individual foods. The enzymes that are supposed to be there would only be active in the gut but they would be "destroyed" by the stomach acid in the first place. You'll notice, just like Mercola, these people like to call on ancient research. Twentieth century as the 1900's. Yeah that's where I want my nutrition knowledge from.
They do it for a reason. They want you to think that "modern" nutritional science is a sham. Like I called it before the "conspiracy theory of nutrition". It's a scaremongering tactic designed to cover up the fact they have no credentials or research of their own to back up what they say. So they call on the wisdom of the ancients
. Back when coca cola was a health tonic and a good dose of sugar was supposed to make you live longer.
It is very clear that certain proteins are made more available to us when denatured. Shit half the stuff we cook it should be enough to know you can hardly chew the stuff without cooking it. And chewing is the beginning of digestion. We're not dogs and cats who can basically "wolf" down our food all the time.
Comparing us to other species is the other way they do it. Arthur Baker makes a big thing about us being the only animal who processes their food. And then says that we feed cats and dogs processed heat treated food thus giving them "human" illnesses like cancer. Which is just ridiculous. Cancer is all over the animal kingdom. It is not unique to humans in any way. A cat or a dog can get cancer or kidney disease and frequently does and it is quite possible to see that in the wild. But what he doesn't mention is that cats or dogs wouldn't normally LIVE LONG ENOUGH to have a problem with this. But WE HAVE EXTENDED average lifespan of our pets in general. You won't see lions in the wild usually dying because their kidneys wear out. You see more of these diseases in domesticated pets for two reasons:
1. Living longer in general is going to increase your chances of seeing something like cancer.
2. Selevtive breeding which breeds in weakness. For instance Boxers seem to be very prone to bone cancer. And not because of what we feed them.
But why do the raw food gurus say stuff like this which is basically uniformed assumptions? Scaremongering like I said before. They can present a reasoned scientiific argument so they try to frighten you in to excepting their views by overstating pretty much everything.
It reminds me of Mercola talking about dogs or cats getting salmonella or something. Your dog is very likely to be able to eat a piece of spoiled meat with not problem. His stomach acid is much stronger and most food borne pathogens simply die.
But there are lots of people who have tried raw food diets even to the extent of eating raw meat and eggs. And hardly anybody sticks to it. Probably because of the diarrhea