For what it's worth, my Chinese acupuncturist who is very respected in his field, maintains that raw, cold food is not good for the body. He always tells me that warm, cooked food, preferably with ginger and garlic, is best for total health.
You may want to talk to your acupuncturist again. Yes, ginger and garlic are supposed to be very good for your health in asian cultures. But in asian cultures, "cold" food isn't necessarily temperature cold and "hot" foods aren't necessarily temperature hot.
It's about (I'm spelling this phonetically) "lo" and "hey" and eating a combination of these two kinds of food to balance your personal energy or "chee" (spelled "chi", I believe).
For example, watermelon is considered a "cold" food and to eat too much of it is considered a "bad" thing. Mangoes, on the other hand, are considered a "hot" food. Potato chips are considered a "hot" food.
My coworker is from Vietnam and was trying to explain the concept to me. She said she will try to get a list from her mom of what is "hot" and "cold" and I can post more later when she does.
She said, for example, when you're talking or eating and you bite your tongue or cheek it's because you have too much "hey" in your body. So you need to eat more "lo" foods to bring yourself back into balance.
Regarding foods and the cooking process,
Dr. Andrew Weil, in a Barnes and Noble interview kind of backs up what fifi and =Mark have said:
It's good to have a mix. I don't think an all-raw diet is good. Many vegetables contain toxins that are easily destroyed by cooking. And some nutrients become more available to the body in cooked form, like the carotene pigments of carrots and dark leafy greens. These pigments are oil soluble, meaning they need fats to get transported across the walls of the gut.
