The Importance of
Eating Raw Food

It is valuble to understand why eating raw food is the best way to obtain health, energy and easy weight loss. Once you have this knowledge it will be much easier to muster up the will power for starting a raw food diet to allow the miracle of live raw food to bring you excellent health and energy.

What Is A Raw Foods Diet?

A raw foods diet is one primarily consisting of uncooked vegetables, fruit, sprouts, seeds, grains, beans and nuts. The philosophy behind such a seemingly narrow selection is that the enzymes of any food heated at 118 degrees F and above are destroyed.

Some people naturally believe this diet is vegan but this is not true. Raw cheeses, milk, eggs and even fish are enjoyed by many that follow a raw foods diet. These foods will make starting a raw food diet and the transition to eating raw food much easier, but whether these foods are healthy is up for debate.

As you might have guessed, no baked, steamed or fried food will allow the live raw food to remain intact. However, it is important to acknowledge that when starting a raw food diet, it is permissible to "cheat", and I actually encourage doing so as to ensure that detoxification is not too rapid. Thus, you will still be able to enjoy variations of many of your favorite foods for as long as you feel comfortable, and still reap the benefits of this diet.

To some this sounds like another unsatisfying, impossible diet, but the simplicity of the effectiveness of eating raw food has persuaded many, and the benefits have failed to astound few.

Click HERE to learn three important tricks for sticking to a raw food diet long term.

Enzyme Depletion and Disease

The most simplified reason for eating raw food is for the enzymes. This is the most common word you will hear associated with a raw foods diet. Enzymes are proteins that help to speed up reactions in the body so that we are able to utilize the nutrients we need from food.

Without enzymes, life would cease to exist. They are often described to as the life force that utilizes every substance we deem essential to life, such as proteins, vitamins, minerals, etc.. An enzyme has a particular structure to do a specific job. It is speculated that there are millions of different kinds of enzymes; there is an enzyme to digest milk and a different one for proteins, carbohydrates, etc.

When you heat food above a certain temperature the enzymes of that food are destroyed, just as a high fever will denature the enzymes in the cells of a person and ultimately cause death if left unchecked.

Despite the destruction of enzymes in food, our bodies can supply its’ own enzymes to digest food that has been depleted of them. This is the argument many people use for justifying cooked food. Yet, the raw foodist would rebuttal that our enzymes were meant to merely assist or be a back up.

After all, enzymes do more than aid digestion. They are responsible for the growth of new cells, healing the body, and transporting every nutrient we require.

When you continually tax other systems of your body for these enzymes there is a price to be paid. The organs diminish in their ability to function and rather than giving us energy, our meals cause fatigue. Disease, depression, etc all set in, and yet, we are none the less baffled by our failing health.

Don't like veggies? No problem, because one of the best way to get in your enzymes is by drinking green smoothies. This is one of the best detox recipes on the raw food diet menu. Blend up all your greens with a sweet fruit like an orange or banana and gulp it down. A juicer is also great to use if you have one. Start by having just one glass in the morning and work your way up to more.

The Bodies Response to Cooked Food

For me, the most startling argument for eating raw food is the way the body reacts to it in contrast to cooked food. For some time now, researchers have been aware of the presence of Leukocytosis in the body when cooked food is eaten, but thought of it as standard procedure by the body for digestion since they couldn’t explain it.

It wasn’t until 1930 that Dr. Kouchakoff discovered the absence of Digestive Leukocytosis when raw food is eaten, rather than cooked. Leukocytosis means there is an increase in the number of leukocytes (white blood cells) in the blood. This can be triggered by any number of things, such as fever, infection, inflammation, etc., and is most commonly found in physically ill persons with conditions such as cancer or viral and bacterial infections.

In fact, a persons white blood cell count is often a laboratory finding used in order to diagnosis disease. Conditions, such as those mentioned, warn the body that something is wrong and help is needed.

Is there then not something to be said about eating raw food if the body responds in such a way? Cooked food triggers an immune response and over time results in a chronic depletion of metabolic enzymes from white blood cells, leaving the body susceptible to disease and infection without its main line of defense.

Weight Loss

There is MUCH to say on raw food weight loss, mostly because we are very uneducated on the reasons as to why we are overweight. This is a little intro to help you begin to see the bigger picture.

Aside from the weight you will lose from simply cutting out processed junk food and refined carbohydrates, there are deeper underlying reasons for why eating raw food leads to easy weight loss. In fact, you can even eat more calories on a raw foods diet than a cooked one, and still lose the weight.

For the reason, we once again come back to enzymes.

Lipase is the enzyme used for fat metabolism. In addition to digesting fat, this enzyme distributes and burns fat. When you are following a raw food diet plan and getting the proper amount of enzymes needed by your body, you will even notice a feeling of satiety because your fats are finally being metabolized properly.

Even as a vegetarian my weight would creep up on me if I didn’t deprive myself. I used to blame it on slow metabolism without realizing that my body lacked the resources to utilize the fat I was giving it. Come to think of it, the only thing I didn’t cook was lettuce.

The runner up enzyme, crucial for weight loss, is Protease. Protease breaks down proteins and eliminates toxins. You will need this enzyme once you start burning fat and this is because toxins are stored in fat. Whether your body is battling environmental toxins or those from the junk you have been feeding it, the human body is none the less resilient, and tries to protect you by storing the bad stuff in a safe place when there is too much for it to battle with at once.

Yet, once you begin a healthy diet, high in lipase and low in toxins, you will begin to shed pounds and these toxins are reluctantly released, causing water retention and some bloating. Protease will help flush all this junk out that has been let back into your system.

The human body is very efficient and to say it is a machine is to greatly undermine its brilliance.

You ask, “why am I always hungry even though I eat and eat and eat?” The question has become so common and yet so complicated because no one can answer it.

The truth of the matter is that you must look at the goal and design of the body. When your body tells you it is hungry it is telling you it needs fuel. This fuel is vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, etc. Only live raw food can give you all this!

It needs fuel and it is not getting enough from food that has been processed and cooked. This is why we have cravings, it is because the body is desperately trying to tell you what it is lacking!

Thus, the vicious cycle begins in which there is a threat of starvation because there is food but no nutrients, and so the body stores more fat. But you are still hungry because you have not given your body what it wants and the process is repeated. Break the cycle by starting a raw food diet.

PH and Eating Raw Food

The PH of your body is so important that I highly recommend you research it further. There is a great book called The PH Miracle, by Dr. Robert Young.

The PH of your body determines whether disease can thrive in your body or not. PH is the foundation of health. It is the most important thing you can look at if you want to learn to reverse or prevent disease.

What does this have to do with eating raw food?

Raw food is mostly all alkaline and this is a very good thing. PH is measured on a scale of 1-14 with 1 being extremely acidic, 7 being neutral and 14 being extremely alkaline. The human body goes to great lengths to maintain a slightly alkaline PH of 7.35.

You can purchase PH test strips at a health food store, specialty super market or pharmacy. Those that I know of get their readings from either your urine or saliva. You should wait about two hours after eating so the test is not altered by the PH of the food you are digesting.

7.1-7.5 is considered to be healthy but going above or below that range is a reliable sign that your body’s defenses are down.

Cancer patients often have readings of about 4.3.

It is important to note that the PH scale is logarithmic, so if the reading is 6 it is a PH ten times more acidic than 7 and if it is 5 it is 100 times more acidic.

It is interesting to note that most children are alkaline, but a very large percentage of adults are acidic.

Live raw food will make the body alkaline. There are exceptions if you want to maintain a strict regimen to alkalize the body, but for the most part eating a raw foods diet of fresh organic vegetables, sprouts, fruits, nuts and seeds will restore your body to its desired state.

Lemons and limes are very alkaline once they are in the body, despite their acidic taste. Meat and dairy are acidic as are nuts such as peanuts (which are actually a legume).

If you Google alkaline food, you will get dozens of results from which you can read lists of categorized food. I have noticed discrepancies among them, but none the less, you can get a broad sense for what you should eat. You can of course also refer to my list of raw foods.

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