Raw Foods

To me raw food means dinner isn't ready yet.

There are lots of sites about raw foods online. I am a new vegetarian myself, and am trying to eat more and more raw foods. Apparently one of the plusses is that raw foods provide their own enzymes so that your body doesn't have to manufacture them to disgest...

Here is a site that tells a little about both sides of the issue:

http://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/raw-food-diet

Simply put, raw foods are just foods that are the way nature made them. They contain all of the vitamins, minerals, and essential nutrients that are necessary for life, without all of the chemicals, preservatives, and other things we find in most grocery store food. It's true that raw food is a highly debated subject, but in truth, it's what humans ate, survived, and thrived on for the majority of our evolution. We didn't start cooking food until quite recently in terms of our lengthy history on earth. It's healthy for us. Cooking food changes the molecular structure of food, and thus the body's ability to assimilate all of the nutrients from it. So the theory behind raw food is that it provides the body with so much nutrition that it is operating at peak performance. People tend to lose weight fast on it because the body isn't working so hard to get nutrients that it has free time to "clean house"

If you want to embark on raw foods, I think they key points are to make sure you eat a variety of foods of different colors from the fruit and vegetable department, lots of greens (which contrary to popular belief, has a high protein count) and things like nuts and avocados to get a bit of fat every day which is necessary. There are some really great books out there on the subject. I think for me, the easiest reads were Green for Life by Valerie Boutenko. I have a couple of her other books too, but I like that one the best. I also have three cookbooks by Ani Phyo with raw recipes, and she explains a lot of things in her books too. Another good one is the China study, which isn't necessarily about being raw, but it is about the largest nutrition study ever done on humans.

I definitely recommend to do the reading if you have time. There are a lot of myths out there about raw foods and most of them are not true. You'll see a lot of arguments that you won't get enough protein, or that you'll be deficient in b12, and all sorts of other similar arguments, but there's more to the story than that because the body processes nutrients from raw food much differently than it is capable of doing from cooked foods. Even if you decide that a raw food diet isn't for you, it's worth reading because it's just fascinating in general.

Good luck on your journey!

To me raw food means dinner isn't ready yet.

:laugh: Or maybe only the salad course.

I would love to be 100 percent raw due to the health benefits but fear it would be too hard socially and there are processed/ cooked foods I really like and couldn't give up.

Essentially raw is not cooked/processed/messed with in any way

Try looking at http://www.30bananasaday.com/. Which is an online forum for people who are raw. A v good book is dr Grahams 80/10/10 diet , that is 80% carbs 10 fat and protein

The 30bananas crowd use the 80/10/10 book as their bible and are low fat raw vegan. If you read around a bit a lot of Poeple will talk about now raw didn't really work for them or they noticed improvement but they noticed even more improvements if they followed the low fat raw vegan, so limit nuts and seeds and get most your calories from fruit and veg, mostly fruit though as to get the calories you need from veg would mean munching all day unless you eat nuts. But high fat is not good and a lot of people in testomonials have said they struggled and gave up first time they tried cos they did high fat. The book explans why high fat is bad and why you will not be lacking in protein