Raw Food Health

Twenty years ago when I first heard of raw food health, I wondered how people could eat their meat raw. Little did I realize that for most people the raw food diet did not include meat. At the time this was a foreign concept for this Midwesterner who grew up on the big three—meat, potatoes and a cooked vegetable.

Benefits of Raw Foods

Today a raw food diet is no longer uncommon. More and more people are choosing to stop cooking their food and learning how to vary the raw foods they choose . These include raw salads, greens, fruit, nuts and seeds. How much of your diet needs to be raw to be considered a raw food diet varies among proponents. Some altruists say it must be 100 percent raw, others like the Halleluiah Diet say 85 percent, while others settle for 70 percent. But why eat raw? What's the benefit of eating raw food?

Raw foods help your body to eliminate toxins that cause disease from the cooked food you ingest. Toxins you ask? Disease? From cooked food? Before we get into this, let's touch on the positive reasons to eat raw foods.

Live Food Dead Food

We've all grown up hearing that fruits and vegetables are good for us. However, not many people hear about the affect that cooking has on those products. Cooking your food destroys the enzymes and other naturally occurring nutrients. Raw foods are living and offer life to your body on a cellular level. Consider this: If you cut off the top of a carrot and put it in water, it will sprout because it contains life. If you cook that same carrot, cut off the top and place it in water it will rot because it is dead. This is why raw foodists call cooked food dead food. Which do you want to feed your body?

Living Enzymes

Living enzymes in raw foods are key in raw food health. They help to prevent chronic disease in a variety of ways. Here are a few reasons to include living enzymes in your diet:

• Living enzymes help in the digestion of food
• When enzymes are killed by cooking, your body must produce enzymes to do the job. This in turn depletes your body's enzyme function which is also needed for your brain, heart, muscles, lungs and more.
• Short changing your diet of living enzymes can lead to premature aging.
• Research suggests a diet deficient in enzymes contributes to the early maturation of children and teens today.
• This same research points to an enzyme deficient diet as a contributor to children and teens being overweight.

The thing to remember is that cooking kills enzymes but does not remove them. When cooked food is eaten, we ingest altered enzymes and other nutrients like vitamins, proteins, minerals and fats. Cooking transforms all of them. With what result?

Once the chemical reaction of heating the nutrients alters them, people are feeding their bodies things like acrylamide which is produced when cooking carbohydrates like potatoes. This product is known to cause cancer in animals and is a naturally forming chemical in some foods when cooked at high heat. The longer the food is cooked the higher the levels of acrylamide.

Effects of Raw Food Health

Stories of healings from cancer and other diseases by following the raw food diet are plentiful. Most times, people are not ready to change to a living food diet until they are faced with a life-threatening disease and even then some don't want to give up cooked food.

While accolades for the benefits of eating raw foods are proclaimed, others suggest taking supplements along with eating a low fat diet of cooked food. To be proactive in regards to your health, you will have to decide who you want to listen to. Take a look at current health statistics. Of the people who are obese, how many eat a diet high in cooked food? How about heart disease? High cholesterol? Raw food health is available without a prescription. Why not try it?.