Question about Raw food diet?
What are the benefits of a raw food diet? How will it improve one’s health? What do you eat on this diet? What do you do when you go out with friends to a restaurant or gathering? Thanks.
Tagged with: health • raw food diet
Filed under: Raw Food Diet
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Raw food diets are based on the simple fact that nature provides your food encapsulated in it’s natural state – raw – and it’s man’s application of fire to it very recently on the evolutionary scale that shifted our perceptions of what food is.
Cooking food, according to raw food philosophy, is unneccesary- your body was shaped through millions and millions of years of evolution, primarily from herbivorous creatures, and only in the last two million years did meat slowly enter our primitive diets, and even then only the last 500,000-200,000 years or so has mankind been bright enough to be successful at hunting, to use fire and tools to their advantage, and to eat meat frequently.
Human beings are animals as well, and animals eat their foods raw. Raw foods contain all the living, vital enzymes and phytonutrients that exist within them. Cooking breaks down nutritional content, kills off the living enzymes that make digestion easier, and kills bacteria – most of which would actually be beneficial to you!
By becoming phobic of bacteria, we’ve actually harmed ourselves more than we realize. Raw food can still be washed and rinsed so there’s nothing gruesome on it, but you don’t need to cook it. Your body builds strength and immunity by ingesting bacteria. People wonder why modern kids are allergic to dust and everything else under the sun – perhaps it’s directly related to how we coat everything with antibacterial lotion and spray and boil the heck out of food to make sure there isn’t a single pathogen crawling on it.
Typically raw food diets are linked to dramatic physical transformations – weight loss, glowing, shiny hair and clearer skin, increase in energy, changes in mood and behavior (for the positive!), decrease in digestion problems (faster digestion, less gas or problems, etc.). Decrease in incidence of cancer, decrease in blood pressure and cholesterol.
I for one enjoy eating raw foods, I enjoy eating food in the state that nature intended for them to be. I have realized that cooking food to the point where it’s unrecognizable from it’s on the vine state is an addiction – the salt, the sugar, the herbs and spices – they all make you want it more and more.
Strawberries are so much sweeter now that I don’t overdose on cookies and cakes and all sorts of processed garbage all day. Natural fruit sugars taste just fine. Celery is high in sodium, it tastes salty again for me, while beforehand I had so much salt in processed foods that I literally had to even salt bread to taste any flavor whatsoever from it.
You will learn to appreciate the goodness and vitality that is in natural, whole food without feeling it has to be zapped and altered beyond it’s natural state somehow. And that’s benefit enough – if you lose some weight or feel better, that’s all the better for you, right?
I’m not a raw foodist, but I eat quite a large portion of my diet raw. It’s kept me thin and helped me bounce back after giving birth to my pre-pregnancy weight, and I’ve been the same weight since I was 17 years old, which is a miracle in itself that I credit to a high quality vegan diet.
I’m vegan and I like steamed vegetables and I cook about 60% of my meals to some extent. But raw foods are great for you, they’re just like nature intended them to be going down into your stomach, so don’t be fooled. You don’t need to be paranoid about germs – in fact worry about germaphobes more than the germs themselves.
P.S. If you want to eat meat on a raw food diet, be careful – most meat in the grocery store has been dead for WEEKS as it’s been shipped around from slaughter house to packing plant to grocery store. While three hundred years ago you could slaughter your own livestock and probably be none the sicker eating something raw, I wouldn’t eat the pathogen-infested meat in stores now.
Obviously, there’s only so far that you can harden your immune system against what you put in your stomach, and I seriously feel nauseous even putting my all-plant groceries down on the conveyor belt after someone put down a blood-soaked tray of ribs beforehand… meat can cross-contaminate everything in sight.
Raw food diet is, in general, not a good idea. Meat is bad because of numerous diseases and parasite like tape worm. Eating broccoli raw, on the other hand, is good because the vitamins stay in it.
So I would reccomend to eat only vegetables raw, and cook meat at least to the minimum.
In my experiance, restraunts never OVER cook their food, and there dosn’t seem to be a reason not to break your raw food diet…