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All the rage these days is the raw food diet, for compellingly understandable reasons. It’s incredibly green and great for the environment. We all secretly know that including more unprocessed foods in our everyday eating can only be good for us. And it aligns us with the celebrities over whom we gawk. Tons of Hollywood stars have given more or less unwitting promotions for the raw food diet, with one-sentence claims of success and slimness, in between paragraphs of required hawking for their latest film projects.
Besides that last point of reasoning, it would seem that there’s nothing to oppose the healthiness of raw food. One and all should dive head-first into a clean-food-only regime. But one should not be so hasty. The following website gives a candid observation of one raw dieter’s discomfort:
“I didn’t eat 100% raw but close to it. While I ate like this, I experienced A LOT of intestinal discomfort. Primarily after I ate fruit. I went through some pretty rough and painful times while on the diet. Sometimes the gas pains were so painful I couldn’t even move and could hardly even breathe. For some stupid reason though, I ignored how I felt physically and just continued with raw foods. I thought maybe it’s just some healing crisis my body was going through like so many raw foodists claimed would happen. I was so convinced that raw food was the HEALTHIEST DIET ON EARTH and that no matter how badly or sick I felt I continued eating raw food through that year long period.”
When you look further into this account of pain brought about by raw food, you see how this individual was fairly young when he or she began, at around age eighteen. His or her family suffered from some serious illnesses, and the dieter’s junk food habit was pretty consistent in its enthusiasm for sweets. It could possibly be that the sudden switch from candy bars to carrots exclusively might have prompted a response in shock in his body that really hit home.
I looked at another article, to give a very clear understanding of what exactly was entailed by a “raw food diet.” This seems to me to be a nice assessment:
“Basically the raw foods diet is exactly what it sounds like. It is a diet that consists of mainly raw foods. It is based on uncooked and unprocessed plant foods, including seeds, beans, vegetables, fresh fruits, seaweed, nuts, sprouts, and dried fruit. The basic principle of the diet focuses on the idea that heating up food too much, above 116 F, actually gets rid of important enzymes in foods that help with the absorption and digestion of food.”
The article goes on to say that raw food diets must be composed of at least seventy-five percent of the titular cuisine. It also continues to stress that one’s diet might suddenly go through a lack of certain vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that are required for healthy body function. I’m naturally intuiting that this could speak loudly to meat lovers like me. It’s easy to get enough iron and protein with a few pieces of bacon daily. But when you swap braised ham for broccoli and cauliflower, it’s natural that some deficiency could take place. It must be important, then, to take a multivitamin when on a raw diet. Also, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to get some protein shakes going as well. That might stave off any stress to the body from the sudden dearth of meat.
So suddenly I’m warm and cozy on the inside once again at the thought of raw food. A chewable Flintstone in the morning and a soy latte at night should keep me in tune, right? I imagine myself going to a grocery store. And the produce aisle starts to laugh in my face.
For all those fruits and vegetables must be extremely pricey, particularly if they are to comprise the majority of this diet. I’m sure that my future fantasy of life on some fertile island will keep my stock of coconut milk fairly steady. But living in the here-and-now reality of New York, and its high grocery prices, must rule out the raw food way for now. Right?
Again, I manage to convince myself of this diet’s feasibility. If I were to shuffle around my priorities, i.e. ditching the Snickers and Friday-night tub of ice cream, I could give some wriggle-room to a rutabaga or two.
I also must advise that you contact a medical professional, as I would plan to do, before embarking on anything like this. But despite the risks, I think I’ll continue to do research on the Raw Food Way. Perhaps pain is to beauty what skinniness is to raw.
http://www.thebestofrawfood.com/
This post was originally hosted on An Apple A Day, a health and nutrition blog.
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Sign in nowI think us flatlanders from Florida may be more susceptible! Or at least that’s what I told myself after my first trip to Denver – only 5000 feet – and acted like an angry drunk after going right to work setting up a trade show booth after getting off the plane.
Thanks for the tips!
I agree with you completely that we need to reexamine food and our relationship with food as Americans. Food is more than “fuel.” Eating should be an experience, a way in which to feed our minds, our emotions and our bodies. You make an interesting point when you say that good food habits should be taught in schools. As a public school teacher at a low income school, I constantly reinforce the importance of healthy and mindful eating. Low-income groups are most at risk for chronic diseases as a result of poor nutrition. In my classroom, I become a snack-Nazi, running around between the desks in the fourth grade and confiscating anything crunchy that comes in a bag (besides baby carrots, of course). I make the kids check the labels for high-fructose, Yellow 5, and words they can’t pronounce. What I find, however, is that families continue to send food to school that is anything but food. To be honest, sometimes I simply pretend like I don’t see the kids cramming hot Cheetos in their mouths under their desks before I can get to them. While I can lecture and explain and reinforce, what needs to happen in our country is access to good food for poor people.
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!
Excellent post – and of course WHO’s ‘emergency committee’ is claiming that the pandemic threat is “not yet over!” because that’s the message that Big Pharma is paying for.
The WHO guidelines were pepared in collaboration with a group called the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI). But what this committee did not disclose is that ESWI is funded entirely by the drug company Roche and other influenza drug and flu vaccine manufacturers.
The H1N1 scare was very good for business last year. J.P. Morgan reported that the pharmaceutical companies did very nicely during this health scare, profiting to the tune of $7 billion from the sale of vaccines alone.
While WHO may have not disclosed the entire committee’s identities, the British Medical Journal investigation revealed that two of the identified “experts” (René Snacken and Daniel Lavanchy) were not only on Big Pharma payrolls, but had actually participated in Roche marketing events.
Why would WHO even consider touching these guys with a 10-foot pole – never mind accepting credible scientific counsel from them?
More at “Did Big Pharma Fund The Swine Flu Panic?” at: THE ETHICAL NAG: MARKETING ETHICS FOR THE EASILY SWAYED – http://www.ethicalnag.org/2010/06/21/h1n1-flu-panic/
Good information here – and yet it should come as no surprise given what we already know about the devastating psychological effects of any disaster on human beings. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has been widely studied and linked with virtually every catastrophic life event on us.
PTSD is a debilitating emotional illness that can develop when you experience or even witness a dangerous, terrifying, or possibly life-threatening stressful event – an event that is outside the range of what’s considered to be a normal human experience. About 7-8% of the general population will develop PTSD, but for military veterans, rape victims and heart attack survivors, this number can go up to an astonishing 30%.
As your article reminds us, PTSD can also strike both survivors and relief workers at natural or terrorist disasters, as well as anyone who has either experienced or witnessed this kind of trauma.
New York City’s World Trade Center Health Registry reported that 20% of New Yorkers who lived below Canal Street (close to the World Trade Center) were estimated to suffer from PTSD following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, compared to 11% of all New York City residents. About 5% of trained relief workers were diagnosed with PTSD as a result of just listening to stories from survivors of the attacks.
Hardest hit among 9/11 relief workers were those who were pulled off their regular jobs to perform tasks they were not prepared for – like the city’s sanitation workers who were assigned to help with search and rescue, or relief workers who spent more than 90 days at Ground Zero. Most relief workers showed no further symptoms six months later, but Twin Tower survivors themselves reported suffering PTSD symptoms up to five years after the attacks.
A Harvard Medical School study of survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans found ‘delayed onset’ PTSD symptoms that actually increased over the first two years following. The worst-affected Katrina survivors were both close to the epicentre of the tragedy as well as abandoned on their own without help for far too long – both extremely dangerous PTSD risk factors.
“Abandoned on their own without help for far too long” sounds like an apt description of those impacted by the horrific events in the Gulf day after day, week after week while the oil continued to spew.
More on PTSD after a catastrophic life event at: “Not Just For Soldiers Anymore: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder After A Heart Attack” — http://www.myheartsisters.org/2009/08/25/ptsd/
Dengue is a Killer. My close friend’s mother pass away due to Dengue Fever.
nice article, keep the posts coming
Good show. Interesting info too about anaphylaxis.
I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you post more on this subject?
Very good post. Anticipating the next one.
One can’t help but wonder if disasters like this are the cause of cancer and other illnesses. After all, we all become affected by the contaminated water & dust eventually.
Thanks for a wonderful and informative post. As a vegetarian traveler, I know how difficult it can be to find meals in some countries! I had no idea about Trinidad & Tobago – I will have to add that to my travel list.
I didn’t realize people of mixed heritage had a more difficult time finding bone marrow donors.
I can’t wait to try finding basic recipes for some of these dishes and “veganizing” them! Great post.
I’ve heard that vegetarianism is unknown in Japan. If you say you are a vegetarian there, for example, they will just give you more vegetables with your meals (along with meat).
Haha, love that the clip has Spanish subtitles.
Sometimes I’m not sure what to think when pain is involved in anything. Medical experts say to expect pain in certain situations, but for the most part, I thought pain was indicator that something is wrong in your body.
Does sitting on a bouncy ball help at all?