“Vegetables provide a lot of nutritious bang for your money,” says Alissa Rumsey, RD, of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center. “They’re a great way to bulk out your meal, add fiber to your diet, and receive a lot of nutrients for a low-calorie count.” One of the activities most connected with long-term weight management, health, and lifespan is vegetable eating.
Aside from stomach pain, there are a few more reasons to avoid eating raw veggies sometimes.
10 Major Risks Of Consuming Raw Vegetables
1. Runner’s Trots
Long durations of rigorous activity, as every endurance athlete knows, can result in more than just muscular exhaustion. If you’ve recently eaten and the meal hasn’t been properly digested, it might induce stomach pain and diarrhea.
In the hours before an endurance event, avoid high-fiber roughage such as broccoli. Rumsey suggests eating readily digested carbs before a long run, such as bread with peanut butter, bananas, or cereal with milk, and experimenting until you discover a meal combination that works for your stomach.
2. Excessive Content Of Sodium In Raw Veggies
People who need to limit their salt intake due to hypertension or heart disease should avoid eating canned veggies. “Sometimes, canned veggies might have half of the recommended daily salt level,” which is between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams per day, according to Rumsey. “Choose from no-salt-added or low-sodium varieties. Certain vegetables, such as maize and peas, can also be washed to remove excess salt.” Even if you don’t have high blood pressure, Rumsey suggests lowering your salt intake for better general health.
3. A Crohn’s Flare-Up
During a flare-up of Crohn’s disease, a kind of inflammatory bowel illness, patients should eat meals that are easy on their stomach and intestines to aid in the healing of their GI tract. Although not ideal for overall health, Crohn’s sufferers should limit their intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains during an episode. “It’s such a personal issue; I see folks who can eat everything and never have a problem,” Rumsey explains. “However, low-fiber diets assist in general.” When patients with Crohn’s are feeling good, though, Rumsey says it’s crucial to eat nutrient-rich meals that include veggies, which are lacking in raw vegetables.
4. Excessive Gas And Bloating
Although beans are fantastic, many veggies generate the same gaseous effect. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and asparagus are the vegetables most commonly associated with gas and bloating due to their high fiber content. Excessive gas can also occur when someone attempts to consume a lot of fiber for the first time. Because most Americans do not consume the recommended quantity of fiber, she recommends starting with one or two servings per day for a week and gradually adding more fiber to your diet to minimize any undesired side effects.
5. Before Or After Surgery
Following gastrointestinal surgery, such as a colon resection, most patients must refrain from eating vegetables for two to six weeks to enable the intestines to recover. “We normally advocate low-fiber diets to decrease the roughage that passes through the intestines,” says Rumsey. “Then we recommend that folks reintroduce meals one at a time to observe how they react.”
6. Irritable Bowel Syndrome
People with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), like Crohn’s disease, might benefit from a low-fiber diet to help avoid the bloating, stomach pains, cramps, and diarrhea that often accompany the condition. “We don’t know a lot about what causes IBS,” Rumsey says. “It is critical to discover what foods you can accept in your diet. Avoiding high-fiber meals might be a good test to determine whether it improves your symptoms.”
7. Renal Failure
Rumsey advises those with chronic kidney illness or renal failure to avoid vegetables heavy in potassium and phosphorus since the kidneys are unable to remove those components from the circulation. Sweet potatoes, ordinary potatoes, asparagus, mushrooms, and Brussels sprouts are all off-limits to most renal disease patients.
8. Urine With A Strange Color
Beets are notorious for turning the hue of your pee into an unsettling crimson. The illness, known as beeturia, is named after the chemical betacyanin, which gives beets their color. Because the body’s sensitivity to betacyanin is thought to be hereditary as well as dependent on the quantity of stomach acid in each individual, not all beet eaters will pee crimson.
The cooked-cabbage odor that some people’s urine emits after eating asparagus is caused by the digestive process, and it doesn’t happen to everyone. According to a new research published in the journal Chemical Sense, only certain people metabolize asparagus’ sulfuric chemicals in a way that generates the scent, and not all of those who produce the smell can even notice it.
9. Heartburn
Rumsey recommends avoiding acidic tomatoes and tomato derivatives if you suffer from heartburn. She says that when stomach acid meets acidic food, the symptoms of painful heartburn and reflux condition worsen. Rumsey suggests maintaining a food record to chronicle what you eat and how you feel afterward to see whether other foods bother your esophagus.
10. Overabundance Of Beta-Carotene
In certain severe circumstances, the childhood superstition that eating too many carrots would color you orange is accurate. The illness—hypercarotenemia—renders certain people a jaundiced yellow and is harmless.
However, there may be a downside to eating too many carrots. Ohio State University researchers revealed that certain beta-carotene molecules prevent the body from absorbing vitamin A, which is necessary for eye, bone, and skin health, as well as appropriate metabolism and immunological function. More study is needed to determine the optimal level of beta-carotene ingestion.
Bottom Line
It is not necessary to fully avoid raw food or salads. But you should proceed with caution. It is preferable to reheat your salad slightly before serving, especially in the winter. This is because our digestive systems are stronger in the summer than in the winter. Also, avoid eating raw food during the monsoon season since bacterial and viral illnesses are at their highest. Washing and heating the veggies kills the germs and protects you from a variety of health problems.
