Frequently Asked Questions About Raw and 811rv

Why Raw? Why Not Cooked?

Can a person survive on only raw foods?

There is no essential nutrient in meat, grains, legumes, or dairy that is not also available in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, and in a form that is easier to digest. Indeed, many essential nutrients can be obtained only from plants. People thrive on the raw diet, often telling others how it has improved their health and their lives. Fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens not only contain sustainable amounts of carbohydrates, protein, and fat, they have them in the percentages, ratios, and quality that are optimum for human health. When people integrate a proper raw diet with other healthful living practices, they rarely, if ever, develop body weight issues or chronic (or even short-term) illnesses.

What are the benefits of eating a raw diet?

The first benefit is that you stop abusing your body each meal with toxic residue that it must deal with, leaving it free to cleanse and heal itself. Next, the proper raw diet eliminates constipation, and the transit time of waste matter shortens to 24 hours or less, avoiding the buildup of toxemia from the recycling of toxins from the colon. Most people on the standard American diet experience transit times of 72 hours or more, during which time their food ferments and putrefies. The resulting foul gas and unpleasant smelling feces highlight the fact tat fermentation and putrefaction are taking place in the colon.

What is wrong with cooked foods?

Applying heat to foods provides no nutritional benefit to the food and is detrimental to the person ingesting the cooked food. There are reported instances where, by heating food, certain nutrients are more easily released, like lycopene from tomatoes. However, this ignores that hundreds of other nutrients in that heated tomato were damaged or destroyed. And it also assumes that more of a specific nutrient is better, instead of trusting that the body knows how to extract just the right amount that it needs for optimal health. Many nutrients are deadly toxic if we overdose on them, and more is definitely not always better. Many foods that we cook would otherwise be unappetizing or inedible to humans, such as meats, grains, and starches, thus bypassing sensory safeguards that normally protect the body from ingesting unnatural and unhealthy substances. Studies have shown that the immune system often reacts to the introduction of cooked food into the bloodstream the same way it does to foreign pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Cooking food denatures the proteins, renders the fats carcinogenic, and caramelizes the carbohydrates. Many other nutrients are damaged, deranged, or destroyed by the heating process, leaving mostly empty calories. Regular consumption of cooked foods results in a detrimental enlargement of the pancreas.

People have been surviving on cooked foods for a long time. What's the big deal?

People thought the world was flat for a long time. In order to progress with science, we had to come to grips with the false nature of that paradigm. Similarly, as humans moved away from the tropics, they began eating the flesh of animals to substitute for missing fruits and vegetables. The farming of grains, the hunting of animals, and civilization's reliance on eating them cooked, came within the last 10,000 years, the same length of time man has been using fire to prepare food. As such, cooked foods are considered to be a major contributor to what are called the diseases of civilization: cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Isn't it hard to switch from a cooked food diet to a raw diet?

Learning how to eat a raw food diet properly takes time, patience, and effort. Although there is a blueprint for doing it correctly, most people find it challenging to adopt the raw diet 100% the first time out, unless they get professional guidance. It seldom occurs overnight and, in fact, can take years to accomplish. Because our taste buds have experienced the excitement of salt, sugar, and spices, we may miss those tastes initially when they are no longer part of the daily diet. However, most people find that the tradeoff for good health and longevity is worth it. Once the taste buds are no longer exposed each day to these stimulating and excitotoxic substancesthey once again develop an appreciation for the taste of sweet, fresh fruits and vegetables.

How do you make the change from cooked to raw?

The best way to begin is by increasing the amount of raw food you eat, while decreasing the amount of cooked food. For example, you can replace cooked grains and milk (cereal, toast, etc.) for breakfast with fruit that is in season, such as melon in summer or grapefruit or oranges in winter. Later, a lunch made up of a sandwich (baked grains) and chips (cooked corn or potatoes) can be replaced with another type of fruit or a banana/berry smoothie. Start the evening meal with fruit, and follow that with as much raw salad as you desire before committing to the cooked portion of dinner. Eventually, you can replace the evening cooked meal with a large salad made up of lots of leafy greens and some nonsweet fruits like tomatoes.

What are some of the toxins that accumulate in the body from eating cooked foods?

Eating cooked meat creates excess uric acid and ammonia in the body, both of which are toxic to the system. The proteins in cooked food become denatured, and, as a result, the polypeptide bonds cannot be broken down into amino acids. These polypeptides are treated as foreign invaders and must be excreted through the kidneys. The cell wall of the kidneys doesn't allow for easy transport of these substances, causing the distress that leads to kidney stones and eventually to kidney failure. Cooked grains cause fermentation in the body that produces gas, alcohol, and acetic acid; protoplasmic poisons that kill every cell with which they come into contact.