Benefits of Raw Food Diet

Everyone knows that fresh fruit and veg are good for you, and that overcooked fast food isn’t so great. Many people try to incorporate fresh fruit or uncooked veg into their diets. But the Raw Foodists differ from those of use who are just trying to make healthier choices. A completely uncooked diet they insist, is the only natural and completely healthy diet there is.

Raw foodists eat mainly fruit and vegetables, but they also include nuts, unpasturised milk and other foodstuffs in their diet, so they don’t exist entirely on leaves and roots.

A diet of raw, completely uncooked food seems pretty bizarre to anyone brought up on a typical western diet. If your gut reaction is Yuck!’ then you’re not alone. But are our diets so unnatural and skewed that this old fashioned, cave-man way of eating is actually the right diet for good health?

Hype and fashion aside, there are some very real health benefits to leaving your beans unblanched. Much of the vitamin content and all of the natural enzymes in a plant are destroyed when it’s heated above a certain temperature. Eating your veggies raw means you get all the nutrition, plus your precious enzymes get to go off and do useful work elsewhere in your body – fixing your skin or keeping your organs healthy. Enzyme levels deplete as we grow older, and this contributes to aging, both inside and outside the body.

On the whole raw foodists do have incredible skin. Scientists and nutritionists continue to debate the value of detoxing the body. But a raw food diet of just 2 weeks makes your skin glow and your eyes brighten. If you’ve ever looked closely at the skin of someone that exists on burgers and chocolate milkshake, go figure.

They also tend to be pretty trim. You lose a lot of weight on a raw food diet. But is this weight control and peachy glow to the skin because they’ve added raw food or taken away greasy burgers?

It looks like a bit of both to be honest. The diet’s devotees have devised many elaborate recipes and delicious combinations of food. You could eat a different raw meal every day of the year. But the diet is as much about what you don’t eat as what you do. We’ve all sat there and devoured a whole carton of French fries. But who is going to sit there and eat that amount of raw potato? Going raw automatically cuts all junky foods out of your diet.

It’s pretty much impossible to be overweight on a diet of mainly fruit and vegetables. You couldn’t physically eat enough of the stuff. There’s also a real lack of inflammatory foodstuffs in the raw diet, which contribute to acne, greasy or dull skin and other unsightly problems.

All the fibre in the raw diet helps with elimination, meaning that the digestive system is functioning in a healthy way. This can prevent all sorts of major and minor illnesses, from spots to bowel cancer. The body is also able to better absorb the huge amount of nutrients present in raw food as opposed to cooked.

Some experts believe that cooked, refined and pasteurized foods induce a stress reaction’ in the body that does not occur when raw foods are eaten. This causes the body to attack itself, almost as if it were attacking a virus. Others insist that cooked and refined foods cause allergies and other health problems in different ways.

Raw Foodists will tell you that their diet makes them feel fantastic and look much better than before they went raw. It seems undeniable that adding a lot of raw food to your diet is really very good for your health and your looks. But some nutritionists warn against going completely raw. Some raw fans find that they lack essential vitamins and minerals, while others have contracted food poisoning from raw eggs and meat. This number is a drop in the ocean compared to all the people that have died of heart attacks following the western style junk food diet. But it’s still a real danger.

Some people see raw foodists as cranks, while others believe they are brave pioneers of a new approach to nutrition. I believe we can learn a lot from the Raw Foodist’s experiences, and that we should appreciate their advice and experience in this dramatic reversal of the western diet. Adding a lot more raw foods to your diet, while taking away the worst foods will have positive and noticeable impact on your health and appearance. But Raw Foodism is still in its infancy and like all new ideas, it certainly takes a bit of getting used to!