Hints for Creating Raw Foods ‘on the fly’
Sometimes, when I haven’t made time to plan my raw food meals, make a list and shop for the ingredients, and ‘have it all together’, I find it hard to throw something together that’s quick, satisfying, and still 100% raw. I’m tired, hungry, and don’t feel like thinking, let alone, preparing a time intensive gourmet feast. Sometimes, it’s easier to just rely on the same old boring recipes we’re used to and grew up with. Do you ever feel that way? Yet, for me, I almost would rather go hungry or just have my juice instead of eating the ‘old way.’
There are so many great, yet simple, recipe ideas that make a lot of difference in helping us to stay on our raw path. I’m sure many of you have a full collection of recipe books that produce wonderful and tasty meals, but require many ingredients, days of preparation and aren’t very helpful when you want something quick and fast.
I’ve heard that most people really only use about 7 to 10 recipes on a regular basis! I raise my hand, that’s true for me. I have my favorites, like raw enchiladas, raw lasagna, raw tacos, etc.
The beauty of raw food, is that it can be as simple as it can be complex. It’s always easy to put together a few ingredients and have a lovely meal. We just need to think outside the box, and look at what’s in our vegetable/fruit bins, in our freezer and pantry to come up with quick, simple ideas and yet taste delicious and satisfying.
So here are 6 quick and easy recipe ideas that work for a snack or a meal.
Zesty Orange Smoothie
I love fresh-squeezed orange juice. Have you ever just peeled the oranges and dropped them into your blender? It makes for a delicious and very satisfying quick snack. Of course, use organic Navel oranges, they are the sweetest.
Simply peel the oranges with your knife, keeping some of the “white” pith, cut into quarters and blend them whole in your blender. If necessary, add a little water.
This drink tastes milky and sweet. And you can add other fruit too, if you want. But sometimes it’s best to just keep it ‘mono’ fruit. Orange ‘smoothies’ like this are more nutritious that way too! You get all the fiber and all the goodies in the white pith. That’s where all the calcium is. Orange juice is a joke, in comparison, in terms of taste, satisfaction, and nutrition.
Note: if this drink tastes too bitter, then it means you’ve not cut the oranges properly. Avoid any of the peel. Also, find the juiciest, sweetest seedless oranges you can find.
Frozen Berries
I always make sure that I have some frozen strawberries and blueberries. You can make any smoothie taste amazing by throwing in some berries. Especially my favorite: blueberries!
I generally use frozen berries all year round, but when seasonally available, you can use organic fresh berries, if they are not too expensive! Check out your local farmer’s market for a great deal on organic berries, you can freeze them to use in your smoothies. Or simply buy frozen berries (or even frozen wild blueberries) at your market or health food store.
Keep in mind, I recommend buying fresh organic berries, because you have to remember that berries are often the most sprayed fruits, so by buying organic frozen berries, or freezing them yourself, or buying wild berries, you avoid that pesticide exposure.
Berries are also the richest fruits in natural anti-oxidants, which are compounds that protect against cell damage inflicted by molecules called oxygen-free radicals, major causes of disease and aging. It’s been found that most berries rank higher in antioxidant activities when compared to other cultivated fruits and vegetables. The USDA Human Nutrition Center ranked blueberries the #1most antioxidant rich berry. Strawberries came second on the list. The antioxidants are usually found in the pigment that give berries their color. They help protect us from cancer naturally.
Berries also contain a higher amount of phytochemicals than most other fruits. Phytochemicals are components of plants that have been shown to help prevent certain diseases, or at least influence our health in a positive sense.
Berries are generally high in vitamin C. For example, a cup of strawberries contains as much vitamin C as a cup of orange juice. Without having to go through the list, let’s just remember that berries, especially wild ones, contain plenty of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other phytochemicals, more than most cultivated fruits.
A quick word about freezing: although freezing is not ideal, it’s still better than cooking or drying, and preserves most nutrients. Some people experience problems when eating frozen fruits ice cold. So you may want to thaw your frozen berries before adding them to smoothies.
A Berry Good Smoothie:
1 cup water
2-3 bananas
1 1/2 cups blueberries
A big handful of greens, or 1-3 stalks of celery
Blend an enjoy!
Need a Quick Salad Dressing?
It’s easy to get stuck when trying to come up with a quick and easy salad dressing, because we grew up with making the dressings with oils or artificial ingredients.
Try this delicious salad dressing from whole foods.
Raw French Dressing:
Start with tomatoes. Take 1 - 2 tomatoes, and put them in your blender, with the juice of half a lemon or some apple cider vinegar. Add in some sort of fatty food such as avocado. Then throw in some herbs of your choice (dill, chives, etc.), and some of your favorite seasonings (if desired).
This makes for an incredibly tasty dressing that only took all of about 2-1/2 minutes to prepare!
Here’s another quick salad dressing recipe.
Mango Tango Dressing:
In your blender, blend 1 cup of tomato (in chunks), 1 cup of mango (flesh only), 1/4 cup of water, and 2-3 Tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.Let me know how you liked it!
And I have one more dressing for you…. My favorite quick and easy salad dressing:
Avocado Dream Dressing:
I never really measure anything, just kind of ‘eyeball’ it - that’s the beauty of raw food preparations, it’s all based on taste, not exact scientific measurements!
1 – 2 avocadoes
2 tbsp of fresh lemon juice or Apple cider vinegar
2 tsp minced garlic
Dash of sea salt
1 2 tsp Italian Seasoning (to taste)
Enough water to smooth it out
Blend and enjoy on your salad. Keeps refrigerated for a couple days.
Most raw foodists always keep plenty of bananas on hand, and if they don’t get used up before they start turn black, peel them and freeze them for delicious smoothies. Bananas and chocolate (or cacao) are just about one of my most favorite combinations. It’s always so satisfying and very yummy!
Banana Cacao Shake
1 ripe banana, peeled
½ cup raw coconut flakes (soak until softened)
2 tsp raw chocolate powder (crushed cacao beans or nibs)
4 tsp cold-pressed hemp seeds
1 tsp of cold-pressed hemp oil or flax seed oil
1 tbsp raw honey or raw agave (I prefer honey, tastes better)
handful of ice cubes
Blend and enjoy!
In Summary
I’ve just given you some of my easiest and quickest recipe ideas. I love simple recipes because when our days get full of other obligations, sometimes there just isn’t enough time to plan ahead. Most of us are busy and having some easy recipes up your sleeve to whip up will help to us to stay on the raw path!
Look for raw food books that offer recipes that are easy to prepare, ready to eat in a few minutes, and use simple, easy to find ingredients. Steer clear of recipe books that only end up gathering dust on your top bookshelf somewhere in your home!
Mike Adams, The Health Ranger, is one of the few vocal advocates for our rights to health freedom. Below is a post from his site: Natural News regarding plans to remove the nutritional value of our fresh produce. Please write your legislature and request that foods that are irradiated be labeled, and become active to block the mandated requirements of all foods being pasteurized.
See all CounterThink cartoons…
Comments by Mike Adams,
the Health Ranger
There’s a new plot underway to sterilize your food and destroy the nutritional value of fresh produce. The players in this plot are the usual suspects: The USDA (which backed the “raw” almond sterilization rules now in effect in California) and the American Chemical Society — a pro-chemical group that represents the interests of industrial chemical manufacturers. The latest push comes from USDA researchers who conducted a study to see which method more effectively killed bacteria on leafy green vegetables like spinach.
To conduct the study, they bathed the spinach in a solution contaminated with bacteria. Then, they tried to remove the bacteria using three methods: Washing, chemical spraying and irradiation. Not surprisingly, only the irradiation killed nearly 100 percent of the bacterial colonies. That’s because radiation sterilizes both the bacteria and the vegetable leaves, effectively killing the plant and destroying much of its nutritional value while it kills the bacteria.
The USDA claims this is a huge success. By using radiation on all fresh produce, they claim, the number of food-borne illness outbreaks that happen each year could be substantially reduced. It all makes sense until you realize that by destroying the nutritional value of all fresh produce sold in the United States, an irradiation policy would greatly increase the number of people killed by infections and chronic diseases that are prevented by the natural medicines found in fresh produce!
Why fresh, living produce helps prevent sickness
The USDA, you see, has zero recognition of the difference between living produce and dead produce. To uneducated government bureaucrats, pasteurized or irradiated vegetable juice is identical to fresh, raw, living vegetable juice. They believe this because they’ve never been taught about the phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and life force properties that are found in fresh foods, but that are destroyed through heat or irradiation. This, the USDA is operating out of extreme ignorance when it comes to food and nutrition.
Even a simple leaf of spinach contains hundreds of natural medicines — phytonutrients that help prevent cancer, eye diseases, nervous system disorders, heart disease and much more. Every living vegetable is a powerhouse of disease-fighting medicine: Broccoli prevents cancer, beet greens cleanse the liver, cilantro removes heavy metals, celery prevents cancer, berries prevent heart disease and dark leafy greens help prevent over a dozen serious health conditions while boosting immune function and helping prevent other infections. But when you subject these fruits and vegetables to enough radiation to kill 99.9% of the pathogens that may be hitching a ride, you also destroy many of the phytonutrients responsible for these tremendous health benefits!
This means that while irradiating food may decrease outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, it will have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of people who get sick from other infections (and chronic diseases) due to the fact that their source of natural medicine has been destroyed. For many Americans, you see, salad greens are their one remaining source for phytonutrients. Given their diets of processed foods, junk foods and cooked foods, there are very few opportunities for these consumers to get fresh, phytonutrient-rich foods into their diet. And now the USDA wants to take that away, too, by mandating the irradiation of all fresh produce.
Let me make a rather obvious prediction, on the record: If the irradiation of fresh produce goes into effect in the United States, rates of infection among consumers will sharply increase, not decrease, due to the removal of immune-boosting natural medicine from the food supply. Consumers will also experience higher rates of cancer, heart disease, dementia, eye disorders, diabetes and even obesity. By destroying these thousands of healing phytonutrients, irradiation will leave many consumers defenseless against modern society’s many health challenges.
It is no exaggeration to say that a policy of mass irradiation of fresh produce is as blatantly stupid as the Romans building their aqueducts with lead-lined waterways. As historians have explained, after the aqueducts were built, the water delivered to the Roman population was contaminated with lead — a heavy metal that causes numerous health problems, including insanity. Many historians blame the lead-lined aqueducts as one of the primary reasons why the Roman Empire fell: Its leaders went mad, and the rest is history.
I would argue that America’s leaders are already mad, but that’s beside the point. If we start irradiating our food, thereby destroying its nutritional value, we are going to unleash a cascade of unintended consequences even greater than the Roman’s aqueducts. Absent the protections of phytonutrients found in plants, the health of most consumers will rapidly decline, and we’ll see the U.S. thrust into a quagmire of chronic disease and medical bankruptcy. (It’s already heading there, of course, but killing the food supply will only accelerate the downward spiral of health.)
Let’s sterilize all the food!
The USDA has never met a food sterilization plan it didn’t like. It backed the recent almond sterilization law that went into effect in California last year, forcing all almond growers to sterilize their almonds by subjecting them to toxic chemicals or cooking them at high enough temperatures to kill anything that might have been alive (such as the almond itself). Now, all the raw almonds consumed in America are purchased from overseas growers, where raw still means raw.
Raw milk has also been under attack in California and elsewhere. The USDA supported laws that essentially banned the sales of raw milk, requiring milk to be sterilized, too. If you now irradiate all the fresh produce, you have a food supply that is predominantly sterilized — otherwise known as “dead.” And dead foods lead to dead people.
That a society’s health regulators would want all foods to be dead should be downright shocking to anyone who knows anything about health and nutrition. Live foods keep people alive, but dead foods make people dead. It’s really not a complicated concept. The USDA’s definition of “food safety,” however, is based on the idea that the health of one immune-system-compromised individual who can’t handle a little E. Coli is more important than the ongoing health of the entire population. Thus, all foods must be killed for everyone.
I strongly disagree with this approach. Foods should not be expected to be sterilized. In terms of food safety, emphasis should be placed on boosting the health and immune systems of individuals so they can survive occasional contact with E. Coli rather than trying to create a sterile environment in which nothing is alive. As it turns out, the people susceptible to food-borne illnesses are precisely those individuals who have compromised immune systems due to their intake of vaccines and antibiotics. Thus, it is modern medicine that has made these people vulnerable to food-borne illnesses. Blame the drug companies, not the bacteria.
But the USDA would rather blame the food. Blaming conventional medicine for the harm it has caused to the human immune system is not politically correct. It’s better to blame the food, then use scare tactics to announce yet more outbreaks and hope for a public outcry for widespread food irradiation. And that brings me to the “final solution” on food irradiation.
How the USDA plans to join the FDA in keeping everyone sick
There is a corporate-sponsored plot underway in the U.S. today to keep people sick and deny them access to information about natural cures (such as medicinal foods) that would prevent disease and keep people out of the hospitals. In more than 1,500 articles on this website, I’ve documented the FDA’s criminality, the USDA’s indefensible actions, and the criminal behavior of drug manufacturers who only earn profits if they can find a way to keep the entire population sick and diseased for another generation or two.
Destroying the natural medicine in the food supply sure would be a highly effective way to create more customers for Big Pharma, wouldn’t it? I think it’s all part of the “keep the population sick and diseased” plot being carried out by an evil partnership between drug companies and the U.S. government. We already know that the FDA and USDA work for the corporations, not the People. We already know that they will do practically anything to boost their profits (including conducting medical experiments on infants, drugging schoolchildren, lying to the public, fabricating clinical trials and more). Is it any surprise that they would now attempt a “final solution” on the food supply that kills the food and thereby results in a huge reduction in the population’s intake of the disease-fighting nutrients found in fresh produce?
The social engineering recipe
Pulling this off, of course, requires a bit of social engineering by the USDA in order to force the public into demanding something be done. If you’re the USDA, you can’t just suddenly announce a national food sterilization plan; you have to prime the pump with a bit of dirty work. Here’s the simple plan for accomplishing that, if you’re the USDA:
1) Conduct poor inspections of fresh produce on purpose, in order to cause a large increase in food-borne illness outbreaks. (We’ve seen this increase happen over the last 12 - 24 months.) This can be easily accomplished by reducing the budget of food inspection offices, or removing inspectors from the payroll altogether (which has already happened).
2) Wait for the outbreaks to happen. When consumers get sick, run national press releases announcing how dangerous the food supply is.
3) Watch the consumer reaction as people and lawmakers demand “something be done!”
4) Fudge a study with the American Chemical Society to show that washing doesn’t work and that irradiation is the only solution. Time the release of this news to coincide with the public outcry that “something be done!”
5) Once the public is demanding a solution to food-borne illnesses, roll out a national produce irradiation requirement that sterilizes all the food.
Mission accomplished! This, of course, leads to point #6:
6) Watch the population become increasingly sick and diseased (thanks to the lack of phytonutrients that used to be found in the fresh produce), and cash in on your Big Pharma shares as the population is herded into hospitals for lucrative treatments with monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals.
It’s the same old social engineering trick that’s been used to hoodwink the American people hundreds of times. How do you get the public to support a war in the Middle East? Stage an attack on U.S. soil first, and wait for the public outcry. How do you get the People to support the mass sterilization of their own food supply? Lower your inspection standards, let the sickness spread, and then wait for the public outcry. It’s the way governments get things done these days: They manipulate the public into demanding the things they wanted to accomplish in the first place. These are sometimes called “false flag operations” in a military context, and they’ve been conducted by the U.S. government on numerous occasions, just like they were conducted by Hitler in Nazi Germany to justify his invasions of neighboring countries. You can read about False Flag operations on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
What “they” really want: A dead food supply
Let’s be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don’t want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don’t want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).
Don’t you find it curious that this attack on the food supply is coming out now, right after all this incredible news about the healing power of foods has been hitting the science journals? Every week, it seems, we find out about another amazing health property in a food. Black raspberries reverse oral cancer. Pomegranates halt prostate cancer. Green tea halts breast cancer. The list goes on. Just on this website alone, we’ve probably published 1,000 stories over the last two years on the disease-fighting properties of foods.
The thing to realize here is that many of the healing properties of these foods are destroyed through pasteurization or irradiation. If you’re a government that wants to “take away the People’s medicine,” the fastest way to accomplish that is to mandate the sterilization of the food supply. Kill the foods and you take away the People’s medicine, and that forces the population to use pharmaceuticals instead.
The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs. But apparently that wasn’t enough: The Internet came along and people found a way to educate themselves. So since the FDA couldn’t keep the truth about natural medicine bottled up and censored, the government has now apparently decided to just sterilize all the foods, thereby destroying the natural medicine and transforming Mother Nature’s gifts into dead calories.
The USDA’s decisions here are not based on public safety, folks. They’re based on corporate greed. Just look at how they handled the raw almond controversy in these related articles: http://www.naturalnews.com/almonds.html
The USDA as operated today is a front group for wealthy corporations. It is not interested in helping the People. It’s interested in protecting the profits of corporations… even if that means destroying the food supply and turning the population into “dead eaters” who die from other diseases caused by the lack of phytonutrient protection.
How you can help stop this latest atrocity against our food supply
What can you do to stop this? Be prepared to fight irradiation plans with a massive outcry that demands our food supply be protected from radiation. There are two things that need to be accomplished, and of course the USDA and FDA oppose them both:
1) Require the labeling of all irradiated foods with a large “Irradiated” label or sticker.
2) Block any attempts to mandate the irradiation of fresh produce.
Stay tuned to NaturalNews.com for more on this story. We’ll be joining with other pro-consumer groups (like the Organic Consumers Association) to rally our readers in opposition to this food irradiation effort.
I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there’s a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it’s nothing that a healthy body can’t handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you’ll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.
The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.
You see, it’s not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods… and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.
Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don’t ask too many questions.
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Have you heard the latest national ’scare’ regarding families that use drugs for their supposedly ‘ADHD’ children? They are now telling parents, who trusted the drugs to be safe for their kids that they need a ’simple’ EKG to test their heart… And who’s paying for that, may I ask? You can find it on msnbc.com, or any other news site. It was on the morning news, and I have to say that I was appalled!
First off, ADHD is a disease that was ‘invented’ by psychiatrists to categorize certain symptoms that children exhibited while at school or at home. Usually, the teachers are the ones who call the parents to say that their kid is misbehaving, or being disruptive in class.
This happened to my brother when he was in elementary school, around 30 years ago. He was hyperactive (as they called it back then) and the teacher insisted my parents put him on Ritalin. My mother learned that the teacher was putting my brother inside a large cardboard box at the back of the classroom, if you can imagine that! So he was put on Ritalin and I guess it helped.
Fortunately, my parents consulted with a nutritionist who put my brother on a vegetarian diet with lots of vitamin supplements. As long as he stayed on the diet and supplements, he didn’t need the Ritalin. Remember, I said this was 30 years ago, and the quality of our food was not as bad then as it is now.
Fast forward to 2008. “Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term ‘research,’ has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically–the “epidemic” having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between 5 and 7 million today–this remains the state of the ’science’ of ADHD.” http://www.adhdfraud.org/
So after pushing this drug down the throats of unsuspecting children (and adults, too), they’re saying that if the child is susceptible to congenital heart disease, they may be at risk. Do you think they really care?
MSNBC.com says: “Stimulant drugs can increase blood pressure and heart rate. For most children, that isn’t a problem. But in those with heart conditions, it could make them more vulnerable to sudden cardiac arrest — an erratic heartbeat that causes the heart to stop pumping blood through the body — and other heart problems.”
“About 2.5 million American children and 1.5 million adults take medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, according to government estimates. Stimulant drugs, like Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta, help children with ADHD to stay focused and control their behavior.”
Nowhere do I see any mention of controlling this so called hyperactivity with diet and natural food. We already know that most kids consume more sugar and dietary fat than their little bodies were meant to handle. Especially when sugar and fat are hidden in so many foods nowadays. Unless you avoid processed and packaged foods, and fast foods, you can’t get away from it. The only way is to prepare all natural fresh organic vegan foods, and raw foods are even better.
Dr. Fred A. Baughman Jr., is a psychiatrist who claims that ADHD is a fraud, perpetrated on the general public. On his website he says:
“In addition to scientific articles that have appeared in leading national and international medical journals, Dr. Baughman has testified for victimized parents and children in ADHD/Ritalin legal cases, writes for the print media and appears on talk radio shows, always making the point that ADHD is fraudulent–a creation of the psychiatric- pharmaceutical cartel, without which they would have nothing to prescribe their dangerous, addictive, Schedule II, stimulants for — namely, Ritalin (methylphenindate), Dexedrine (dextro-amphetamine), Adderall (mixed dextro- and levo-amphetamine) and, Gradumet, and Desoxyn (both of which are methamphetamine, ’speed,’ ‘ice’). “
It seemed my brother reacted to food colorings and preservatives. Very interesting, since the applications of these chemicals used in processed foods has increased significantly today. Dr. Fred Baughman, Jr., says on his website: “They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive–termed them a ‘disease.’”Children are not born hyperactive or ADD or ADHD, or whatever. These symptoms are induced by the quality (or lack) of the food they are fed. Dr. Fred Baughman, Jr., actually says “these ‘diseases’ were created when the child met 8 of 14 requirements to be classified as ADD or ADHD.”
So now on top of the false diagnosis of ADD and ADHD symptoms as a result of poor food choices, parents are urged to give their children these very potent and addicting drugs, that can cause heart problems in the child. Even though the heart problems may have already been genetically present in the child, taking these drugs aggravate the situation, and adds additional stress to the parents and the children too. Not to mention the cost of the EKG that they are requiring now, as well.
Great stuff, huh?
So what’s the solution? First of all, get your kids off the drugs. Starting kids on drugs at an early age, only sets them up to take more drugs later in life, including illegal drugs. After all, a drug is a drug, right? Soon it becomes a vicious cycle. Second, remove all processed, packaged foods that have man-made toxic chemicals, preservatives, food colorings, fillers, free-flowing agents, MSG or hydrolyzed vegetable protein, malt extract, maltodextrin, natural flavors, pectin, plant protein extract, potassium glutamate, sodium caseinate, soy protein, textured vegetable protein, and so many other hidden names. Just do a Google search for MSG, and learn a whole new language regarding our ‘food’! This is a partial list from: http://www.carbohydrateaddicts.com/msg.html. It has been shown that MSG and their derivatives have been classified as ‘Excitotoxins’. See Excitotoxins by Dr. Russell Blaylock. For more detailed information about excitotoxins, check this site: http://www.dr-jo-md.com/excitotoxins.html. Good info here!
Kids NEED to be able to expend large amounts of energy everyday. It helps their minds and bodies to grow. When they spend a lot of time in front of the TV, or a computer, or a video game, or anything that is sedentary, then they are not releasing the ‘pent up’ energy that needs to be released. Add to this problem the SAD (standard American diet) that most kids are eating, and you have a walking time bomb. I won’t go into the details because I think we all know how disruptive an unhappy and unhealthy child can be.
I remember reading a few years ago about a Natural Hygiene doctor (I think it was Dr. Bernard Shelton but can’t find the web article) when he visited a family in the ’60s with several children. The entire family was totally vegan and he was amazed at how calm, composed and polite the children were. They were aged from infant to 12 or 14, I think. He observed this family quite regularly and the children were consistently very calm and polite, busy with their activities, while looking out for the younger ones. He attributed their polite behavior to the quality of nutrients in their diet, and the lack of junk foods and sugar.
Suffice it to say, that parents need to wake up! They need to connect the dots between the foods their children are eating and their disruptive behavior. It’s so very simple, and yet the medical and pharma industries want to make it complicated. Hyperactivity did not exist before food manufacturing became the norm. Children raised on the farm eating fresh fruits and vegetables, performing chores and lots of other physical activity were normal functioning children, and most grew into normal functioning adults. Unfortunately, those times are gone, just like the farms… All the more reason to encourage your children to get away from the TV and computers and get outside in the fresh air!
Having said that, I think I’ll go outside now and enjoy the sunshine. Yes, it’s finally here!
Riff on all the raw food approaches, by Nomi Shannon
Water only
Juices too
Just green smoothies
What to do
Do it like Ann wigmore did
Just be sure to alkalize
Food combining is the way
Acid fruits are not OK
But yes they are –just before 10
Now I hear you should only eat the pineapple stem
Have you heard of 80-10-10?
What about Fit for Life and Zen
Let’s be reasonable apples only
But haven’t you heard of the grape fast
What about Joanna Budwig-quark and flax
What is quark and is it raw
I haven’t time to grow the sprouts
If they don’t sell it at McDonalds I have my doubts
Can I eat sweet potatoes, rutabagas and tomatoes?
What do they mean by mono meals?
Mr. Aajonus vonderplanitz says eat raw fat and meat
That sounds gross -but how will I get my protein
Better only eat low glycemic
I’m afraid I’ll become anemic
Fruits til noon and then my veggies
But where do I buy them and how do I make them
I need help and what did they say about nightshades
Don’t they go on top of lamps?
I think I’d better wait for awhile
and put if off until I know –just
Exactly the one right way
to eat better every day
If you are confused about how to begin… or want to renew your enthusiasm, Join Nomi and Friends today:
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Join Nomi Shannon, The Raw Gourmet, with Kevin Gianni of LiveAwesome.com and David and Katrina Rainoshek of juicefeasting.com for this FREE webcast event on Saturday April 19th, noon EST, 9AM PST.
Learn Nomi’s three secret fail-safe steps to success on starting and continuing your raw food diet.
Learn Kevin’s 8 step process that will prepare you to soar beyond the health and fitness goals you thought you could never achieve.
Learn about David and Katrina’s experiences in their 50th day of juice feasting and how it can affect you in your quest for better health.
EVENT: Spring Renewal, Begin 21 Days to Better Health
DATE & TIME: Saturday, April 19th at 12:00pm Eastern 9AM Pacific
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
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This is from Raw Family monthly news letter for March/April 2008
Ode to Organic Farmers
Dear Friends,
We like shopping at stores that carry organic foods. The organic industry is a fast- growing industry in the United States. We’re not the only ones who notice that - large corporations do too. Recently I ran across a unique website created by assistant professor of Michigan State University, Philip H. Howard, PhD. From this website I learned that my favorite frozen fruit company, Cascadian Farms, is in fact owned by General Mills. I contacted Dr. Howard and he graciously gave me permission to publish his research link.
You will find out many more connections:
Odwalla - owned by Coca Cola
Naked Juice - owned by Pepsi
Spectrum Organics, Garden of Eden, Celestial Seasonings and others - owned by Heinz
Boca Foods and Back to Nature - owned by Kraft
Dagoba Chocolates - owned by Hershey
Morningstar Farms - owned by Kellogg
Horizon and White Wave - owned by Dean
Nature’s Farm- owned by Tyson
Annie’s Naturals- owned by Solera Capital
Maranatha- owned by American Capital Strat. Ltd.
Power Bars- owned by Nestle
Seeds of Change- owned by M&M Mars
You may see for yourself; look for your favorite companies at this link:
http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustry.html
One can imagine how difficult it is to maintain small organic food factories. A lady I knew once ran a raw food bakery with piroshkis and scones and was only able to survive four weeks before they got stuck in debt and had to close down. Since learning of her experience I consider all organic farmers and health food companies to be heroes, as they are competing with those who sell sugar and white flour products. Even though the prices of organic products seem high to us, very often they earn as little as a charity.
I completely understand how the smaller companies often feel forced to crawl under the wing of larger corporations. The good news is that we have a way to support small corporations: by buying locally grown food.
Below are two amazingly comprehensive websites that will help you find organic sustainable farms, stores and restaurants in your area.
http://www.localharvest.org/… and http://www.eatwellguide.org/
We have a weekly farmer’s market from the end of April till the middle of November. I go every Saturday and depending on the season, purchase anywhere from $40 to $80 worth of produce. Then I don’t have to go to the grocery store for my fruits and vegetables. I receive great benefits in buying from local farmers:
~ I save quite a bit of money
~ My produce is of the best quality
~ I support my local organic heroes
~ I receive the enjoyable experience of communicating with the people that grow my food
~ I help save gasoline and the environment by buying food that wasn’t shipped thousands of miles
~ I feel connected to nature and the seasons, even though I spend my life in front of a computer.
~ It tastes so good!
To better understand what it takes for small farmers to make a living, I invite you to watch this heroic video, in which Jaime Jones, owner of The Date People (www.datepeople.net), climbs a 60 foot ladder, to reach the tops of high date palms.
Turn on the volume, listen to the funky music and enjoy!
Check out this Youtube video of The Date People.
I hope you’ll be inspired to get to know and support your local heroes.
Part of the raw food lifestyle is going green in every other area of your life besides the organic food you eat. From recycling your garbage wastes and composting your veggie trimmings, to using low energy lightbulbs and hanging your laundry on the clothesline in the summer. There are so many ways to cut down on energy consumption, but what about the fuel you use in your vehicle? With gas prices rising to over $4.00 a gallon, is this even possible?
Well, there is a new technology that allows you to run your car on water in your gas tank instead of gasoline. Incredible sounding, I know!
Convert Your Car to RUN on WATER as well as Gasoline
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How Is This Possible?
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HHO, also referred to as Hydroxy burns effectively and supplies significant energy, while the end product is just Water. HHO has the atomic power of Hydrogen and maintains the stability of Water…
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This awesome video is a must need for ALL people that are clueless that the food they eat is connected to their health and general feeling of well-being. The raw food lifestyle eliminates most all debilitating and chronic health issues, helps in losing excess weight, and gives you so much energy, it is absolutely unbelievable!
This video below is from Raw for Life and Raw for 30 Days. I urge you to seriously consider getting a copy to share with family and friends. Learn all you can about how you can improve your health, save money on health bills, and live a long, productive and high quality life.
Make it Fun!
By Frédéric Patenaude
The scene looks like this: you’re hungry, you’re alone, and you’re going to eat another meal of romaine lettuce, tomatoes and avocados. And you’re bored. And these avocados are starting to be less interesting than ever. And it’s raining outside, and cold, and damp. And you’re wondering, is the fun of eating raw gone? Will I be able to eat like that forever? Can this really be healthy?
As pure and as simple as our raw meals can be, there comes a point for most of us where boredom can set in, when we require more variety or friends to share food with, else we will might face one thing: lack of enthusiasm.
I’ve told people that simplicity is best. That a simple meal of ripe mangoes when you’re hungry beats the best raw or cooked pie you’ve ever had. That making a great salad doesn’t necessarily involve putting everything but the kitchen sink in it and that, too often, raw recipes are too complicated and, as a consequence, difficult to digest. However, I did not mean that it is better to be a sad ascetic than a merry epicurean.
It may be because I’m a bit of an epicurean myself. I love food and, since I seem to be endowed with a few culinary talents, I get never bored. I like to vary my diet and introduce new fruits, new nuts, new vegetables and new recipes. And I encourage you to do the same for two things. First being bored isn’t fun. Second, it might not be healthy either.
I’ve noticed a few things in raw foodists. They don’t seem to vary their diet a lot. They often stick with the few foods that they like. I’ve noticed for example that many raw foodists eat avocados everyday. Others eat almonds everyday. Many raw-foodists told me that they eat a meal of romaine lettuce, avocados, sprouts, and tomatoes everyday. Sometimes they add some red bell pepper. Others bananas for lunch and nothing else almost every day of the year. Is this supposed to be what simplicity is about? Always eating the same thing? Is this natural?
Chimpanzees are known to eat over 120 different varieties of plant food in a year. While carnivorous animals always eat the same and never get bored, frugivores seek variety. Most of us, too, have been raised on a varied diet. When someone only eats porridge and potatoes every day, we know that things are not going well for him. As human beings we are used to variety and, if we don’t have variety, it’s usually because of a lack of means or sheer incapacity to cook (many divorced men find themselves in that situation!).
On a raw food diet, variety is even more important because raw fruits and vegetables provide nutrients in a less concentrated, more diluted form. Thus, a certain vegetable may lack in many important nutrients, which are compensated by what other vegetables can provide. It is not enough to look at the charts and calculate our nutritional intake because these numbers are wrong. A tomato grown in a farm in California doesn’t have the same nutritional value as another tomato grown in a local garden or one grown in a hothouse. The only way we can insure proper nutrition on a raw food diet is by constantly varying the foods we eat according to the season. Let’s review a few pieces of advice and add some more:
1) Vary the fruits — It’s easy to get stuck eating one food that we like and forget everything else. I know, personally, that when mangos are in season, I eat mangos. But fruit is fun. Fruit is what makes the raw food diet a lot of fun, especially when we include exotic fruits in the menu. So I suggest constantly varying the fruits that you are eating and discovering as many tropical fruits as you can. A durian cure once a year is allowed.
2) Eat according to the seasons — When I tell people to eat seasonally, most of them don’t understand. They think, if something can be bought in a store, it means it’s in season, right? Partly. It’s in season somewhere, but not necessarily in your hemisphere! Let’s consider the following: cherries are in season during the summer, but in our side of the world. So the cherries you may buy may be imported, but they are in season for you. If you find cherries in the stores in the middle of the winter, this means they have been imported from a far away country like Chili, which is situated in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed! It is not only completely un-ecological to import foods from that far away, but the fruit is also picked way too early and eating it at that time doesn’t follow our own biological rhythm.
3) Eating simply doesn’t mean eating just one food at a meal — I don’t believe in mono-eating in the sense that every meal should be ideally composed of one food alone. I think this way of eating leads to abuse. For example, pineapples and oranges are acid. If we eat only these fruits at one meal, we’ll likely eat too many of them to satisfy our hunger and introduce too much acidity in the system. Dates are too sweet. Plums contain a particular acid which can give you the runs if you eat too much. Melons and papayas are rich in water but a meal of them doesn’t satisfy. So I recommend, when eating fruit, eating 2-3 varieties, ideally not more than that. And if you like, you can eat them one at a time like a true mono-eater.
4) Vary your vegetables — Your mum told you “Eat your vegetables!” And she was rights. But the chances are that even as a raw-foodist you may not be listening to her. First you may not be eating enough vegetables, and second you may not vary them enough. To eat enough vegetables, you have to be creative. A salad can get boring. So put your salad in the blender and make a raw soup sometimes! Check out some raw soup recipe books for ideas. Green vegetable juices are also extremely beneficial, and I recommend to drink some every day, if possible. I like my green juice to be tasty, so I mix enough celery juice in it and sometimes add a little bit of carrot and beet juice too. And as for variety, the key is to make the base of your salad out of a different vegetable every time and discover the unknown varieties.
5) Don’t eat avocados everyday — This is my advice for raw-foodists. Most of them tend to eat too many avocados and too often. Consider the avocado as one type of fatty food, not the staple of a raw food diet. I suggest eating avocados no more than once every other day. Try to eat some nuts instead, and discover new varieties. Seeds are also excellent. Hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds and sesame seeds should be added to the menu more often. This will help provide a wider range of nutrients that avocados alone could not provide.
6) When in doubt, blend it up — Why shun all modern developments and insist to eat only whole fruits and vegetables when we have diabolical machines such as the blender that can transform them into liquid meals of unsuspected nutritional power? Hey, a little technology is good. One of my friends says, “I love my car.” With the same unabashed mien I say “I love my blender,” which just happens to be a Vita-Mix that I use almost everyday. Smoothies and raw vegetable soups are great ways to vary your diet and avoid boredom. And when we add young coconuts, soaked nuts, avocados and carob powder to the blending orgy, the possibilities for fun creamy treats are almost endless.
7) When wondering what to eat, go to the Chinese — The Chinese themselves like to say they’ll eat anything with four legs except a table. We‘ll close an eye on some of their unscrupulous ways and concede that they have helped us get out of the dark ages of raw eating in northern countries, when no durians were available. Chinatowns are full of surprises waiting to be discovered. I even found durian toys. Then you can learn to say “thank you” in Chinese (shiay shiay), or in whatever language the store owners happen to speak.
I gave you some basic recommendations on varying the diet. However, I didn’t tell you exactly how you can make your raw meals fun and exciting. I will now give you some ideas for quick and fun raw meals, which will hopefully open your mind to try out more.
A friend of mine, for whom I was un-cooking, told me with a shrewd look one day, “It’s all salad anyway.” I was probably preparing a raw spaghetti from zucchini lasagna with eggplant, and he told me, just like that, “It’s all salad anyway.”
Okay, it may all be vegetables, but first it doesn’t look like salad, and second it doesn’t exactly taste like a salad. The difference between a salad that looks like a salad and a vegetable mix that looks and tastes like something else is, as Mark Twain once put it, “the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!”
Here are some ideas:
1) Take a nori sheet. Spread some mashed avocado on it or one tablepsoon of tahini. Add grated courgettes and rinsed dulse. Roll up like and eat like a sandwich. Everyone will think you’re a genius.
2) For a great smoothies, blend some papaya and two whole ripe mangoes. Add any other fruit in season. Blend with some water and beware of flying socks if you have your friends try it out.
3) Soaked sun-dried tomatoes really add flavor. Put them in everything that is not sweet and be ready to discover great combos.
4) Blend frozen durian with other fruits. Let it thaw for a few hours and then blend it up with coconut water, mangoes, or other fruits. You can even blend it with some carob powder, coconut water, and a few dates for an “out-of-this-world experience.”
5) For a quick nut spread, blend in your food processor raw tahini and carrots together. Use more vegetables than nut butter. Add your favorite seasonings.
6) An easy dressing idea: blend 1-2 whole oranges with a small avocado. Add other herbs or vegetables if desired. Simple and delicious.
7) Here’s an easy soup that will surprise many: blend tomatoes with celery. Use 2-3 stalks of celery per tomato. Add diced tomatoes or cucumbers to the mixture. This will take care of any salt cravings you might have.
These were just a few ideas to vary your diet and avoid boredom. My motto is it should be tasty, healthy, and easy to prepare. When I open some raw cookbooks and find a recipe with a page long worth of ingredients I ask myself, “Do they really expect me to spend that much time just to eat?” Then I think of all of the time it will take to wash all the dishes and I give up. Are they kidding? I can prepare something in 10 minutes and it will be just as good, easier to digest and will leave me enough time to do the things that I really like to do, such as writing articles for Get Fresh!
So in conclusion, varying your diet doesn’t have to get complicated. It doesn’t involve becoming a raw gourmet genius. It just means having the attitude of, “Hey, I’m going to have fun with this and try something new everyday.” It’s about being open to try new foods you’ve never tasted before, and making sure you don’t eat the same thing every day.
And remember, the cure for boredom is curiosity. But there is no cure for curiosity.
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My husband, Larry, says that I’m too vigilant, too radical sometimes when I share with others about vegan raw food and the health benefits. And he’s probably right. But since he’s lost over 30 pounds, he also agrees with me!
I care too much, love too deeply, and want so desperately to share with others that are blinded by today’s rich, greedy corporate bureaucracies. These societies and bureaucracies have a very strong hold on the general public as to how much good food they will allow the public to eat, let alone keep the information for real healing buried deep in the medical journals where no normal person will every find it. They control what is considered acceptable ‘good’ food, even the empty stuff that is processed, packaged, irradiated in pretty colorful packages that cost more than what’s inside.
It’s dead food, and dead food cannot build life. Living food builds life, health, and healing. You cannot put a price on that. Health is literally priceless. Almost everyone knows someone who has cancer, or some chronic health issue. I was just at an open house party the other night. Most of the guests there were in their 40’s - late 50’s. They ALL had health issues, had family with cancer; one lady I spoke with is getting ready to go into the hospital for surgery, and on and on about that hospital vs. this hospital, that doctor and this doctor…. WAKE UP PEOPLE!! Don’t you see what you are doing? You are doing EXACTLY what ‘they’ want you to do… pay attention to them, talk about them, see them and give them YOUR money. They don’t care about your health.
The other sad thing is that most people in the general public DON’T care about their health either. Because their confidence is in their doctors to fix whatever problem they will ever have. A simple prescription will take care of their ills. And the plot continues to thicken. Fix a problem with drugs, that will in the long run create more toxic issues, requiring more drugs…. and that’s what keeps the pharmaceutical companies RICH!!
I had a great chat with my lovely daughter Erin. She’s 21, beautiful and fit, in the prime of her life and tells me on the phone that she’s been told four different times that she has high blood pressure. Well, I began to ask her what her personal life is like… is she under stress, stuff like that. She didn’t think so. But when I asked her about what kind of food she was eating, it was mostly SAD stuff… coffee, cereal, milk, bagel/cream cheese, hamburger, tea or soda, cup ‘o noodles… “whatever,” she says.
I felt absolutely awful. I had been a health ‘freak’ most of my life, but failed to teach my daughter before she left home. Of course, that was four years ago, and I didn’t know what I know now. I was kind of just following the ‘flow’ back then, doing my own thing I guess….
I’ve learned so much… my raw journey is finally coming full circle. I am grateful to God for opening my eyes to see His truth. Genesis 1:29: “Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.” No where do the scripture say “I have given you hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, drugs, dead animals and their byproducts, preservatives, food coloring, flouride, chlorine, denatured, junk and empty food to sustain your life with.”
I am so very grateful that I have overcome all my health issues with a raw food lifestyle and at 54, that is considered pretty unusual. I can share this wonderful testimony with my family, the community, even my church. If it helps to open the eyes of others so that they may see out from under the ‘cloud’ that they are under. That’s how I see so many people… I’m outside of that ‘cloud’ looking at the people and see them in the cloud, completely oblivious to it. Accepting whatever the ‘powers that be’ say.
So I spent about the next 30 minutes explaining to my daughter how food relates to her health. About the difference between raw and cooked food, enzymes and nutrients in the raw food, how it’s a better eco green way to live for our environment, to how we are all being manipulated and conveniently kept ’sick’ to keep the money coffers full for those in control. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have internet access in her studio apartment, but she can check her email from a friend’s computer, or an i-cafe. But at least she is very interested, and wants to know more. Thank you! At last my daughter is finally listening to me LOL!!!
I told her that if she went on a raw food lifestyle program, or even a high raw and vegan diet, that she would be able to retain her lovely youthfulness for many, many years. She would age so much slower than her peers. She will never have a weight problem. Her high blood pressure, and all other health issues, will go away.
I’ll send her some books, my Smoothies for Health, and help her get started with some of my favorite vegan, natural and organic recipes. First off, she can start very simply by making smoothies. Once she starts doing that, she’ll be on the path to improving her health.
If you haven’t gotten your free copy of my Smoothies for Health, then feel free to click here to learn more and subscribe to my free raw food weekly recipes.
In his book, Your Natural Diet, David Klein writes about how he got fed up with seeing doctors, having a myriad of tests run, and taking tons of prescription medicine for his Colitis and Crohn’s diseases. Someone told him about eating a whole living food diet, and to eliminate all animal products. It wasn’t easy, but when he started to make that transition, his colitis and IBS flare-ups began to subside. He committed to a 100% raw food vegan diet, and immediately began to feel better than he ever had felt before. This was almost 20 years ago. He went on to get his Ph.D in nutrition, and has been counseling others in transitioning to a natural vegan diet ever since. Today over 1,000 clients have been healed since 1993 on his medically endorsed vegan diet healing plan. On one of his sites: http://www.colitis-crohns.com/ he says:
Shelly Keck-Borsits went to hell and back with her health issues for many years before she made the connection of a raw, vegan food diet and her health. I wrote a post about her testimony here: http://raw4healing.com/health/dying-to-get-well and how she documented her story in a free ebook that you can download and read here:
http://www.abcinternetmarketing.com/dtgw/ebook/free/rawfoods/DTGW.pdf
She also bravely writes about the little known corporate conspiracy and cover up by the food manufacturing industries, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries. They are not concerned about improving your health, they’re primarily in business to make money, at the risk of your health!
I could write for days about all the testimonies of people getting healed by simply following a pure, natural, vegan diet. Not even necessarily 100% raw food, as it may seem pretty radical to some people. I’ve heard of health improvements on an 85% raw food diet. The main thing is to make the decision to stop eating packaged, processed, canned, pasteurized “food”. Food manufacturers spend more money on packaging and fancy color pictures on the boxes than they do on the junk inside!! More money is spent on preservatives, food colorings, and MSG than on the so-called food itself! It’s all about getting the consumer to see it, and then want it. They don’t care if it’s healthy for you. Remember, like I’ve said in my other posts, just follow the money trail.
But let me focus on the title of this post: Raw Food Diet Cures Fibromyalgia. I recently read Alissa Cohen’s book: “Living On Live Food” (which includes a DVD) and enjoyed it very much. She teaches a raw food certification course, and she shares many tasty recipes as well as her own
personal story. She was, what she calls a ‘quasi-vegetarian’ when she was sixteen. She wasn’t specifically concerned about health benefits, animal rights issues, or environmental concerns at the time. She just didn’t like red meat that much. Around this same time, she started working out in a gym, and began reading books on health and fitness. She read “Fit for Life”, “Diet for a Small Planet” and others promoting the vegetarian philosophy.
When she read John Robbin’s “Diet for a New America”, she immediately became a confirmed vegetarian. She was fascinated with Robbin’s theories on the physiological impact of eating animals, his exposition on its social, ecological, and economic consequences really blew her away. (It really impacted me, too, when I read John’s book; highly recommended reading!) As a result, she began reading more about how whole foods have a major influence on the overall health of our bodies.
Alissa thought that since she wasn’t eating meat, chicken, fish or eggs, that she was healthier than most people. But she was experiencing chronic illness, including constant yeast infections, and bladder infections. She was tired a lot, her skin was breaking out, she was having frequent headaches, and she couldn’t keep her weight down.
Seeing the doctor only aggravated her problem. He put her on antibiotics, which helped for a week or two. But she was constantly getting colds, her immune system was being weakened due to the continuous round of drugs she was taking. The various doctors she was seeing kept telling her she had a yeast infection, and kept prescribing her antibiotics and other drugs. This regime went on for two years! And she was getting worse. At the age of twenty-two, she began to feel like a very old lady, with no energy, tired and achy all the time.
Finally, a doctor recommended laparoscopy. This was to be exploratory surgery involving a fiber optical instrument to be inserted into the abdominal wall through the navel in order to examine the organs. It was painful and intrusive, and yielded no new information. And yet, further exploratory surgery was suggested. That’s when she said NO! No more!
As her depression grew worse, she began to listen to her gut feelings and researched holistic practices. When she wandered into a local health food store, and discovered a book call “The Yeast Connection”, she writes that “Purchasing and reading that book was a life changing decision for me.” She learned how the food she was eating was contributing to her yeast infection. She visited a holistic practitioner who confirmed what she had read in the book and he told her that changing her diet will help to rid herself of the yeast infections, and improve her immune system as well.
She had Candida and Fibromyalgia and a host of other ailments and after seeing the holistic practitioner, she immediately changed her diet to nothing but 100% raw vegan food. She found that when she ate so called good vegetarian foods (steamed veggies, rice, tofu, etc.) she would feel lethargic and foggy-headed. But her body would buzz and her energy began to soar when she ate raw fruits, vegetable, nuts and seeds. Her back didn’t hurt, her Candida went away within days! She couldn’t ignore how she felt when she ate raw compared to when she ate cooked food. The concept of eating whole foods full of life energy and enzymes made so much more sense than eating dead cooked foods.
At the time, the only information available was Dr. Ann Wigmore’s book “Recipes For a Longer Life”. She teaches how living foods create live bodies, dead foods produce dead bodies. This impacted Alissa so much she began eating only raw foods.
After just a few months on the raw food diet, Alissa had no symptoms of Fibromyalgia, her Candida was gone and she felt better then she had since her teenage years. Her energy shot through the roof and she began to look younger and younger, and was more positive and happy. Soon, she began to share this diet with others and found they got the same kind of results. She knew she had found the perfect way to eat for her and, for others as well.
Since then, Alissa became a nutritional counselor, polarity therapist and personal fitness trainer. She has certifications in energetic bodywork, holistic counseling and nutrition, and opened her own health food store. She was experimenting with raw food before much information was out there, and as result, began to teach herself and work with many well-respected teachers and trailblazers in the raw food movement.
So what is the best way to get into raw foods?
Everyone is different. The very first time I learned about raw foods was actually several years ago. I was researching the benefits of a vegan diet, and stumbled on some information about raw foods. I had also read Dr. Ann Wigmore’s book back in the late 1970’s about the health benefits, and cancer fighting properties of a raw food diet, but it just seemed like too much work. And that is really what many people first think when learning about a raw food diet. There is a little bit of a learning curve as well. Preparing meals with fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds is VERY different than what we grew up with. Learning to make a ‘cheese’ with raw cashew nuts or pine nuts, corn tortillas with a dehydrator, and noodles with zucchini is radically different than what we’re used to. But the benefits are so awesome, I can never go back.
I’ve been almost 100% raw for nearly a year now, having been a total vegan for many years before that. But it wasn’t until I started eating more raw fruits and vegetables, and learning to prepare delicious raw food meals, when my own health issues began to disappear. My skin rashes and scalp problems cleared up, my muscle and joint pains are gone, I no longer wake up with stiff, swollen hands in the morning (water retention), my hypoglycemia is gone, I sleep less, I weigh less than I did in high school, and I have more energy than I’ve ever had in my whole life. And my husband has lost over 30 pounds in less than three months, is able to reduce his asthma medicine, and has more energy than ever before.
For some people that decide to start eating a whole, living and raw food diet, they feel they need to transition slowly, while others are ready to jump right in. Generally, it is recommended that people should start 100% raw right away. Usually, when people go slow they simply just never get there. They’re not committed, and get side tracked and eventually lose momentum. When you’re not eating 100% raw, the results are slower and the motivation is lost since the results are not quick enough. Read books, search the internet, attend some local raw food classes and find out for yourself what the best way to do this diet is. I do think that raw food is for everyone but that doesn’t mean that everyone should have the same raw food diet. This diet can be tailored to your needs and your situation. No one way will work for everyone, some people eat mostly fruit, some more fats and proteins, others more of a mono diet and so forth. You need to experiment and see for yourself what works best.
I have found that for those new to this lifestyle, the easiest and healthiest way to transition is to go on a ‘juice feast’. A juice feast is simply blending fruits and vegetables in a high speed blender, and literally ‘drinking your food.’ This provides your body with the maximum amount of nutrition, is very filling and satisfying, and at the same time, it allows your body to detox. Many health issues are the result of built up toxins and poisons in your system from eating a standard American diet (SAD). On a juice feast, you don’t have to worry about preparing special raw food meals, take the time read some raw food books with recipes, and do some shopping. Some juice feasts can last from three days to 92 days, like the current Global Juice Feasting program.
There are some problems when people transition to a raw food diet. They might get too strict. They try to eat a mono diet. They start fasting. They cut out nuts. They start thinking one food is not good, that fruits are too high in sugar, they shouldn’t have as much fat, they should not eat too much, etc. Eating raw food is drastically different to what most people are used to eating. What makes people think that eating an extra piece of fruit or more raw nuts will be the worst think in the world when just a week before they were eating pizza, ice cream and Mexican food? On this diet, people tend to go to the extreme. Raw food is extreme enough for most people. Just relax around it and have fun with it. And some people think that a raw food diet consists of nothing but fruit and salads all the time. Oh, it is so much more than that! There are so many awesome and wonderful, easy to prepare raw food recipes that are alive with flavor, and full of nutrition and enzymes.
Another major pitfall is not having food in your house. You need to make sure you have enough food so that when you get hungry you can eat! For some reason when people go raw, they don t think they need to have a lot of raw food in their home. But you would have cooked food if you were eating a cooked food diet! Make sure you know how to make some good raw food meals so when you re hungry you know how to whip something up so you don t find yourself driving to the nearest fast food chain restaurant.
In summary, if you are really serious about improving your health, losing weight, and having more energy than you know what to do with, then you want to learn all you can about how to change your diet to a natural, vegan raw food lifestyle. Think of it as an investment, not only in your own health, but in your family, children and even your friends. Once you begin to share the benefits of this new lifestyle, think of the impact you will have on those