Raw Food Haven

As we all know uncooked (raw) foods are good for our bodies, this is because they have not lost all their nutritional value in the process of cooking. By accepting the thought of eating most of your meal in a raw state, you are well on the way to a more healthy life-style.

Now don’t expect to change your eating habits overnight as it is not as easy as you think to start eating foods in their natural state. We have been consuming most of our foods cooked, so we need to change from cooked to raw one step at a time.

Do not think you have to eat all your food raw straight off. This will lead to failure, rather mix cooked and raw (by adding one raw food weekly) and take the change slowly. Make your raw choices wisely and don’t abandon the foods you love, keep the balance (of raw and cooked) to suit your taste as some foods are better digested by the body when cooked, while others are just fine in their raw state.

What is good raw you ask?

* Most vegetables are very tasty raw (but you probably would not eat pumpkin or squash raw)
* Nuts and seeds – some do need to be cooked but most can be eaten in their raw state.
* Sprouts – still cannot get my head around these, though there are a lot of people out there who love them.
* Fruits – other than the odd baked apple I tend to eat all my fruit raw.
* Fish – some fish are very tasty in their raw state, and if you are lucky enough to have freshly caught fish on hand you will never cook it again. Sushi is probably the healthiest way to eat fish, why not give it a try.

A good starting point for changing to raw is to rather add the raw to your normal meal rather than take away your familiar and favorite foods. You may think that adding will increase your weight – nope – because of the raw state of the extra food, more energy is used to digest it thus causing more use of the extra calories you have consumed. An important point to remember here is that you do need to balance the raw foods with the cooked foods, this is to maintain the correct nutrition your body needs.

Remember, once you have started eating most of your food raw, your energy level will be a lot higher, you will feel a lot healthier and cooked food will have less appeal. So start reaching for the Raw Foods when you feel a snack attack, there is nothing healthier than a handful of mixed nuts or a juicy apple.

This change of eating habits will assist in maintaining your weight and some weight loss will occur if you are overweight (and not over eating the cooked foods).

The raw food movement has been growing rapidly over the last few years, by now you have probably heard someone talking about a raw diet, or their friend on a raw diet. What does this mean, and why would anyone want to eat raw?

Food that’s considered raw ranges from fruits and vegetables to unpasteurized dairy, raw nuts and seeds, and uncooked meat products. Most people who eat raw consume a mainly vegan diet, so raw milk and sashemi are not consumed regularly. Most who convert to a raw diet do so to achieve the health benefits that many claim to attain after changing their diet. Some of the reasons people eat raw are as follows.

1. Nature knows more about digestion and nutrition than science. It’s true that our scientific knowledge about the body and nutrition is growing steadily, but the amount that is unknown is still astronomical. Some people dislike the compartmentalization of the body by science and the isolation of singular nutrients from food, saying a holistic approach is much more effective to health and vitality.

2. Raw food contains enzymes that help with digestion. These enzymes are destroyed by heat, so once food is cooked over a certain temperature the enzymes become damaged. Some people think this is why those who eat mainly raw food tend to look younger than their years.

3. Uncooked and unprocessed foods have life force. Also known as chi or prana, life force is the energy that is contained in living foods. Consuming this life force has spiritual and health benefits for the consumer.

If these are a little too ‘airy fairy’ for you, there are more tangible reasons to eat Raw Food. People report substantial weight loss after switching to a raw food diet, and all the health problems that came with their weight problems disappear. With the help of a healthcare professional, people have ‘cured’ their diseases including (but not limited to) high blood pressure, allergies, skin conditions, bowel conditions, cancer, diabetes and more. You can find a success story for just about every condition out there, that someone has cured themselves of using mainly dietary changes.

So, how much is enough? The general consensus is the more the better. If you want to receive the best health benefits, more than half of your food intake should be raw fruits and vegetables, with a few nuts and seeds. There is also evidence to show that organic and fresh food is best. Although depending on your location, it’s more important to do your best than to stress about eating 100% organic.

The best way to get started eating raw food, is to switch one meal per day to be raw. If it’s breakfast you could start juicing your own fruits and vegetables and switch that out for your regular cereal and milk. You’re likely to lose a few pounds just making that one small change. If you don’t want to splurge on a juicer, make your lunch a raw salad every day and try making your own salad dressings to keep things interesting. Once you create the new habit for yourself, it only gets easier.

Kimberly Sawchuk has more information about raw food including easy Raw Food Recipes at http://www.realrawhealth.com. If you or someone you know is looking to lose weight naturally or just want some questions answered about a Raw Food Diet, check out the coaching services at http://realrawhealth.com/services/.

If you have ever tried dieting before, you know that there are certain foods that seem impossible to give up. There is a mental connection that attaches them to good feelings, and so we call them comfort foods. Everyone’s comfort foods are different, but there are some common ones that most people enjoy and have a hard time giving up. Unfortunately for us, this often stands in the way of getting to our ideal weight or health. One of the diet plans growing in popularity for health and weight loss is the raw diet. Eating a diet consisting of 50-100% raw foods can be an easy way to lose weight quickly, and people who go 100% raw have claimed health benefits ranging from lower blood pressure and cholesterol to fighting cancer and diabetes. As with any change in diet, there are bound to be some comfort foods that give you cravings when you try to leave them behind. One of America’s most popular foods is ice cream. Especially during the summer months, an ice cream cone is a universal treat enjoyed by many. So, what’s the problem with ice cream? For starters, it’s loaded with cholesterol and saturated fats. The next time you take the pail from the freezer, check out the nutrition label, most ice cream also states the serving size as 1/2 cup, which is about half of what’s normally served up. The good news is that there are delicious alternatives to ice cream. You can purchase non-dairy ice cream at the supermarket, but you can also make your own healthy recipes. My favorite ice cream alternative is Banana Fruit Creme. Which is just blended up frozen bananas. It comes out thick and creamy, just the texture of ice cream. It’s also a great way to use up bananas that are getting brown. What you’ll need:

• at least 5 bananas, depending on how much fruit creme you want to make
• a good blender or food processor

What to do:

1. First peel the bananas, and break each one into 3-4 pieces.
2. Put the pieces into tupperware and into the freezer.
3. Let them freeze overnight.
4. When you are ready to eat, put the frozen pieces into your blender with a little bit of water. Use less than 1/4 cup, you just want to help the blender to mash up the fruit.
5. Blend like crazy!
6. Enjoy right away, the fruit creme doesn’t keep well in the freezer, so it’s best to eat it all the first time.

This stuff is really delicious and satisfies that ice cream craving. It’s a hit at parties, especially with kids. Try making a berry sauce and drizzling it over the fruit creme.

Kimberly Sawchuk has more information about raw food including easy Raw Food recipes at http://www.realrawhealth.com. If you or someone you know is looking to lose weight naturally or just want some questions answered about a Raw Food Diet, check out the coaching services at http://realrawhealth.com/services/.

The notion of eating RAW foods sounds foreign… even odd… to most of us when we first hear it.

When I first moved to Los Angeles and heard of eating this way, the very first thing I envisioned was sushi and steak tartare (which I tried once and thought was awful). But usually when someone is talking about raw foods, they aren’t talking about these foods at all.

What they’re talking about is live, nutritionally-dense, organic (when possible) minimally processed plant-based food. Not the “food-like products” that we’ve become accustomed to grabbing on the go.

Live foods that nurture our bodies, strengthen our immune systems and help keep us healthy. Foods that consist of raw vegetables, greens, fruits, seeds and nuts. Sounds pretty boring, right? But it’s not. I promise.

Although some people are purists, meaning they eat 100% raw 24/7, you will reap benefits from ANY additional amount of raw food that you add to your diet.

My twin toddlers and I aren’t purists. We’re what is considered “high-raw,” which means that our diets consist predominately of raw, live foods.

Personally, I strive to feed myself and my sons 90% plant-based foods with 60-70% of those foods being raw. A significant portion of the other 30% is lightly steamed or gently sauteed.

There are several compelling reasons for adding more raw foods to your diet. Here are 7:

1. ASSIMILATE MANY MORE VALUABLE NUTRIENTS

When food is cooked, its biochemical structure is altered from its original state and up to 90 percent of water soluble vitamins (vitamins B and C) and lipid soluble vitamins (vitamins A, D, E and K) can be lost.

When eating a good portion of your foods raw, you reap the full nutritional benefits of your foods and every cell, tissue and organ of your body benefits.

2. REDUCE RISK OF CHRONIC DISEASE

The typical American diet consisting of mostly commercially processed refined “foods” is very acidic.

And an acidic body is also an inflamed one. Inflammation plays a central role in heart disease-the number one killer of Americans.

Furthermore, when you eat an acidic diet, you provide a fertile breeding ground for chronic diseases such as cancer. Dr. David Servan-Schreiber discusses this in great detail in his book, “Anti-Cancer, A New Way of Life.”

Vegetables, greens, sprouts and some low-sugar fruits all add to the alkalinity of your blood, making it much more difficult for diseases like cancer to breed-therefore protecting you from heart disease and cancer… and many more serious-and potentially fatal-diseases.

Then there are the nutritive components of a diet high in unadulterated plant foods: the invaluable phytonutrients, fatty acids and antioxidants that further reduce your risk of disease by adequately feeding your tissues and boosting your immune system.

3. INCREASE ENERGY LEVELS

The increase in energy is amazing.

I’ve fallen off the wagon several times in the last 5 years that I’ve been practicing a high-raw lifestyle-and there’s a huge difference in the way I feel.

When my diet is low in raw foods, I’m very lethargic. When it’s at its highest, I enjoy a natural energy.

Why is this?

It’s because digestion is a very energy-intensive process, especially when the body is faced with heavily processed foods and large amounts of animal proteins.

When we free up some of this energy by fueling it with easy-to-digest foods, we FEEL it-and our enzymes are free to do other important work, like releasing toxins and healing itself.

4. EASY WEIGHT LOSS

When I first became interested in the raw lifestyle, I lost five very stubborn pounds pretty much overnight. Weight that I’d been trying to lose for months. This weight and a couple more pounds came off easily and stayed off.

The body has no trouble digesting most raw foods. It processes them easily and fully.

According to Natalia Rose, author of “The Raw Food Detox Diet,” this isn’t the case with processed and some cooked foods. Foods that tend to create a type of waste that the body has a difficult time processing.

Some of this waste remains in the body, stored indefinitely, contributing to issues such as weight gain and toxicity.

5. BETTER DIGESTION

Raw plant-based foods contain live enzymes which actually help your foods digest themselves.

Also, unless you’re eating a lot of improperly combined, complex raw dishes (which you can easily do at a buffet-style raw food function), you won’t have to deal with much-if ANY-bloating when eating high-raw.

I never feel bloated when eating high-raw. Never. Even if I’d just had three raw brownies with sweet raspberry sauce. I definitely can’t say that when I’m eating mostly cooked foods.

6. MORE YOUTHFUL APPEARANCE

Raw fruits and vegetables will hydrate and nourish your organs and keep everything more youthful.

A lot of raw foodists report the return of youthful, dewy skin and clearer eyes when they take up the raw lifestyle.

7. YOU JUST FEEL MORE ALIVE

You just feel more alive when eating raw foods.

I’m serious. You do. I think most (if not all) raw foodists and enthusiasts like me would attest to that.

I sometimes get an amazing “high” from some of my raw soups and smoothies. I also feel happier when eating high-raw. There’s a sense of “wellness” that you feel when you nurture your body with nutrients-especially when you eat large amounts at one sitting.

The consumption of Raw Foods is one of the most important keys to good health and longevity. Do yourself and your family a favor and begin adding more raw foods to your diets today!

Jennifer Minar-Jaynes is the author of NEVER SMILE AT STRANGERS. She writes at www.ProjectJennifer.com.

What I’m about to say goes against much of the conventional conventional thinking about diet, especially in health-food and natural health circles, but here goes: Eating raw food might not be better for your health, and in fact IT COULD EVEN BE MAKING YOU WORSE!

Now wait, before you start writing to me telling me why I’m wrong, let me explain…

I’m not saying that raw food is a bad thing, or that we should never eat it, just that it doesn’t suit everyone. Raw Food has a specific effect on the body, and if you don’t understand that effect, you can easily make the wrong decisions about your diet, in the mistaken belief that raw is always better.

To decide whether raw food is a good thing for you to be eating or not, you first need to understand what the effects of eating a lot of raw food is, and then you need to know something about your own state of health of well-being to see if the two match up.

Let Me Explain…

One of the most detailed and advanced ways of understanding food ever created comes from China. Over thousands of years, the Chinese came up with a way of classifying foods according to the holistic principles of Chinese medicine.

This incredible system allows Chinese Nutritional Therapists to exactly match specific foods to specific people, depending on their own unique imbalances or health issues.

Raw-Foodists promote the ‘Raw Is Good’ mantra, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s common sense that what suits one person doesn not always suit the next, and Chinese medicine gives us the tools to easily work out exactly what kind of people will benefit from a raw-food diet, and which won’t.

Why Soup is a Super-Food

Take a second to picture the digestive system in a simple form. The food you put in your mouth gets chewed up into a pulp, then goes down into the stomach, where the digestive juices continue to break it down into a kind of a thick soupy consistency. Your body then extracts all the nutrients and goodness it needs, and the bit that’s no use is discarded.

So, it follows that the more like thick warm soup your food is when it goes in the less work your digestive system has to do, and the easier it is to get the goodness from the food. This is why soups are traditionally given to invalids, or people recovering from illness.

At the opposite end of the scale is raw food, which takes a lot of processing by the body before it’s in a useable state. The Chinese would say that we get Qi (energy) from our food, but we also use Qi in the process of digestion. The more Qi we have to use to digest food, the less net gain we have at the end.

There’s no denying that cooking vegetables destroys some of their nutrients. HOWEVER, what we’re talking about here is how available are the nutrients to the body? Although a raw carrot may have higher vitamin levels than carrot soup, it’s possible that the body extracts more from the soup than the raw carrot, because they are much more accessible.

So What Does All This Mean?

Raw food has its place. It is considered Cooling and cleansing in Chinese medicine. On the other hand cooked food is easier to digest, and is more nourishing and Warming.

So, if you have a strong physique, and good energy levels, with a strong digestion, and you tend to be more Warm than Cool, then raw food will help to you to cool down and detox.

On the other hand, if your digestion is poor, or if you are frail or weak, or feel more Cold than Warm, then too much raw food will strain your system, and on balance more cooked and warm food will probably suit you better.

As always, a balance is key, and it’s important that we eat a wide range of foods within the context of a balanced diet. But next time you reach for a salad as ‘the healthy option’ it’s worth considering whether or not it’s the right thing for you considering your personal constitution.

The author is an experienced practitioner of Nutritional Therapy and Chinese medicine, based in Bristol & South Wales (UK). For more information and Online Nutritional Therapy consultations visit his website.