Before we get into that, I wanted to share some of what I learned from my on-line research. Like every other topic that exists, there's an Internet community to support it. Would you believe there are over 150 raw food blogs on the Internet? This community calls themselves "raw foodists". I don't know about you but this title sounds too close to "nudist" for me, so you don't have to worry about me showing up at your next party buck naked with a veggie tray. That said there's still much wisdom and knowledge to be culled from our naturalist contemporaries.
From one of my favorite new resources, Wikipedia, we learn: Raw foodism is a lifestyle promoting the consumption of uncooked, unprocessed, and often organic foods as a large percentage of the diet. Depending on the type of lifestyle and results desired, raw food diets may include a selection of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds (including sprouted whole grains), eggs, fish, meat, and unpasteurized dairy products (such as raw milk, cheese and yogurt).
A raw foodist is a person who consumes primarily raw food, or all raw food, depending on how strict the person is. Raw foodists typically believe that the greater the percentage of raw food in the diet, the greater the health benefits. Some believe raw food highly encourages weight loss and prevents and/or heals many forms of sickness and many chronic diseases that are seen as incurable by the medical community.
It's that last sentence that we should pay attention to. Encourages weight loss? Many of my fit friends may not have a need (or at least a big need) for this, but we can all benefit from the second: prevents or heals many forms of sickness and disease.
Is there any science to back this up? Am I really better off eating my green beans raw vs. cooked? In the little bit of research I did, I couldn't find any experiment or test results that demonstrated a direct benefit. The raw food sites and the Wikipedia resource primarily focus on enzymes and the role they play in our digestive process. More on that in a bit.
Another popular site I found was what else but rawfoods.com, "the largest Internet community dedicated to educating the world about the power of living and raw foods" - their stated purpose. Their site attempts to "re-educate" the world about how simple health can be by simply eating living and raw foods. Two questions are posed in the welcome page:
What other animal on the earth denatures its food by cooking?
What other animal on earth suffers from all the health challenges that we do?
Those are good questions. Well what's so special about raw aka living food? And what defines living food? Living foods are foods that contain enzymes. Enzymes begin to be destroyed at 102° F and are completely destroyed by 126° F. So? And what exactly are enzymes and why do we need to pay attention to them?
"Enzymes are any of the various complex organic substances, as pepsin (a protease of the stomach that breaks down most proteins to polypeptides) originating from living cells and capable of producing certain chemical changes in organic substances by catalytic action, as in digestion."
That definition is a little too scientific, but it boils down to this: "enzymes are important because they assist in the digestion and absorption of food. If you eat food that is enzyme-less, your body will not get maximum utilization of the food. This causes toxicity in the body. What is meant by "toxicity in the body" I am not sure, but a natural state it is not. (Please say that out loud in your best Yoda voice).
Is there a difference between living foods and raw foods? "Living and Raw foods both contain enzymes. In living foods, the enzyme content is much higher. Raw, unsprouted nuts contain enzymes in a "dormant" state. To activate the enzymes contained in almonds, for example, soak them in water for just 24 hours. Once the almonds begin to sprout, the enzymes become "active" and are then considered living." Ahaa (I exclaim)! That's why sprouts are so healthy. And btw, I did soak some raw almonds for a couple of days as an "experiment", and sure enough they begin to transform tho no sprouts after such a short time. So presumably my almond snacking that day was even healthier as it contained more living enzymes.
"OK Hughes, I'm about to nod off here" you say. Here's where this got exciting for me. While we really don't have any "science" to tell us why or how much raw food we should eat, we do have some population studies or observations that are very interesting. Again from Wikipedia:
In a 1936 work entitled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, dentist Weston A. Price observed dental degeneration in the first generation who abandoned traditional nutrient dense foods which included unprocessed raw foods e.g. un-pasteurised milk products, fruit and dried meats. Price claimed that the parents of such first generation children had excellent jaw development and dental health, while their children had malocclusion and tooth decay and attributed this to their new modern insufficient nutrient diet (which would have included a proportion of raw food).
Another advocate of a raw food diet during this era was Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D. He was a physician who observed the benefits of whole food nutrition, particularly with patients with tuberculosis at his father's sanatorium in California. Convinced that good nutrition formed the basis for the successful treatment of disease, Francis senior placed a priority on the quality of food he served at the sanatorium.
Junior was best known for a 10 year experiment involving over 900 cats. It was this experiment (and you can buy the book about it from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation - just don't all go at once or you'll crash their server) that most intrigued me. He raised generations of cats to a number of different diets. The two extremes were a 100% raw food diet and a 100% cooked food diet. The raw foodie cats thrived. The cooked cats did not. In addition to differences in proper teeth formation (like Weston A. Price discovered in his studies on humans) the cooked cats had significantly higher incidents of numerous diseases. And get this, by the third generation, the cooked cats were becoming infertile - you know, they couldn't make kittens.
While this experiment, and the research of both doctors is admittedly quite old, I think their observations and applications are timeless. If you'd like to watch a 6:45 video on the topic, here's the link: The Price-Pottenger Story.
OK, so there's our goal. Half our diet is raw. How do we do that? I'll share my thoughts on that in Part 2.