Yes, No, Because we want to, and it depends.
Yes– you can get some benefits from uncooked items. Some vitamins and nutrients will break down with heat. There are benefits to raw or raw-ish foods.
No– some things (nutritionally speaking) are only accessible to us when a thing cooks/heats, or they become more readily accessible. Complex chains can break down and become more palatable and/or digestable, cooking meats or tough roots are good examples here. (Steak and potatoes, as a for example).
Because we want to– some things, like eggs can be eaten raw or cooked. Most vegetables also fall into this category. How we prepare them depends on what we’re using them for. Or for things like tea, you CAN eat them raw but it’s more difficult, the tea makes it easier to drink, plus there is the emotional connection to a simple ritual. Tea is also easier to drink for a sick person.
It depends– depends on what you want from the item(s) and/or the feeling you’re after. Carrots in a stew and carrots in a salad are different things done for different reasons.
People brew tea because this is how it tastes good.
If you consume random tea (as in, camellia sensis) only for health benefits, following advice on Internet, to me you’re doing it all wrong:
1. good-tasting savory tea will have the same benefits than bad-tasting tea.
2. the benefits are often largely overrated, especially if you don’t change the rest of your diet.
3. the benefits, if any, depend on who consumes the tea, when, how much and how often – any simple one-fits-all rule can only be wrong…
Just adding a note about cannabis. THCA isn’t psychoactive, but once it’s heated (the technical term is decarboxylation), it becomes THC which is psychoactive. That’s to say, the chemistry of plants changes when you add heat.
Edited to add: that’s why you can eat a bud of cannabis without any harm or true high, because there are only trace amounts of activated THC in the flower.
You can because there are essentially no health benefits. Remember that “modern medicine” is just all of the bits of pre-modern medicine that were actually right. Those herbs with medicinal properties have become actual medicines now. Those that are still teas n’ shit are just teas because they taste good, nothing more.
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