Some people are thinking that I've gone wonky when I decided to incorporate raw foods into my diet. Why raw? Aren't you going to the extreme? I've extracted excerpts from
an article from health 101 to help understand this move. Don't worry, aunts, uncles and friends, that I have become a tree hugger and grass grazer........It is all in keeping with living an engaged, exciting and responsible life. Until a better way ahead is found, I'll be off on this journey....ahoy!
When food is cooked above 118 degrees F for three minutes or longer, its protein has become denatured, its sugar has become caramelized, its natural fibers have been broken down, which means it will take longer to move through the intestinal tract, up to 90% of its vitamins and minerals have been damaged or destroyed, and 100% of its enzymes have been destroyed. Cooked food depletes our body's enzyme potential and needlessly drains the energy we need to maintain and repair our tissues and organ systems, and shortens our lifespan.
Dr. Virginia Vetrano writes, "Heating any food, destroys much of its vitamin, mineral, and protein content, and poisonous inorganic acids are formed. The all uncooked diet is most healthful."
Marilyn Willison, of Hippocrates Health Institute, writes, "We should not cook our food. During this apparently harmless process, vital enzymes are destroyed, proteins are coagulated (making them difficult to assimilate), vitamins are mostly destroyed with the remainder changing into forms that are difficult for the body to utilize, pesticides are restructured into even more toxic compounds, valuable oxygen is lost, and free radicals are produced. According to Viktoras Kulvinskas, nutrient losses can be as high as 80% or more. Other studies suggest that cooked proteins (coagulated) are up to 50% less likely to be utilized by the body."
Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr., wrote about his experiments with 900 cats over a period of ten years. Pottenger fed some of the test cats raw meat and other test cats he fed cooked meats. Pottenger wrote, "Cooked meat fed cats were irritable. The females were dangerous to handle, occasionally biting the keeper..." The cooked meat fed cats suffered with "pneumonia, empyema, diarrhea, osteomyelitis, cardiac lesions, hyperopia and myopia (eye diseases), thyroid diseases, nephritis, orchitis, oophoritis (ovarian inflammation), arthritis and many other degenerative diseases." Over the years, the cooked food group gave birth to more unhealthy kittens, and became less able to conceive at all.
No cooked food is benign. Cooked foods act malignantly by exhausting your bodily energies, inhibiting your healing, and decreasing your alertness, efficiency and productivity.
Cooked foods suppress the immune system. The heat of cooking destroys nucleic acids, and damages fats, making them indigestible. The fatty matter becomes a local irritant and an oxidant.
Heat disorganizes protein structures, leading to deficiency of some of the essential amino acids. The fibrous or woody element of food (cellulose) is changed completely from its natural condition by cooking. When this fibrous element is cooked, it loses its broom-like quality to sweep the alimentary canal clean. The fibrous matter is changed from its natural state to an irritant. Raw food has the best balance of water, nutrients, and fiber to meet your body's needs.
Cooking causes the inorganic elements to enter the blood, circulate through the system, settle in the arteries and veins and deaden the nerves. After cooking, the body loses its flexibility, arteries lose their pliability, nerves' ability to conduct electrical signals diminishes, the spinal cord becomes hardened, the tissues throughout the body contract, and the human being ages prematurely. In many cases this matter is deposited in the various joints of the body, causing joint disease. In other cases, it accumulates as concretions in one or more of the internal organs, finally accumulating around the heart valves.
Raw foods are easily digested, requiring only 24-36 hours for transit time through the digestive tract, as compared to 40-100 hours for cooked foods. This unnatural transit time increases the threat of putrefaction and disease. When you eat cooked carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, you are eating numerous mutagenic (carcinogenic) products causes by the cooking process. Dr. Karl Elmer experimented with top athletes in Germany, producing improvement in their performance by changing to a purely raw food diet. Dr. Douglas Graham achieved similar results with athletes he trained. Raw food provides you with more strength, energy and stamina.
On raw foods, the mind (memory and power of concentration) will be clear. You will be more alert, think sharper and more logically.
Raw foods will not leave you with a tired feeling after the meal. There is a tendency toward sleepiness after a cooked meal. Eating a healthy raw food diet allows a more restful sleep and eventually requires less total sleep.
When we treat foods with thermal fire, we lose up to 97% of the water-soluble vitamins (Vitamins B and C) and up to 40% of the lipid soluble vitamins (Vitamins A, D, E and K). We need only one-half the amount of protein in the diet if raw protein foods are eaten rather than protein foods which are cooked. Heating also changes the lipids. These changed fats are incorporated into the cell wall and interfere with the respiration of the cell, causing an increase in cancer and heart disease.
After eating cooked foods, the blood immediately shows an enormous increase of leukocytes of white blood cells - corpuscles. The white blood cells are a first line of defense and are, collectively, popularly called "the immune system". This spontaneous multiplication of white corpuscles always takes place in normal blood immediately after the introduction of any virulent infection or poison into the body since the white corpuscles are the fighting organisms of the blood. There is no multiplication of white corpuscles when uncooked food is eaten. The constant daily fight against the toxic effects of cooked food unnecessarily exhausts the body's strength and vitality, thus causing disease and the modern shortness of life.
Cooked foods quickly ferment and putrefy in the intestinal tract. On a healthy raw food diet you will experience the elimination of body odor and halitosis. Cooked food causes allergies (hypersensitivities)....
Hannah Allen wrote, "Raw foods contain enzymes, which influence digestive efficiency - cooking destroys all enzymes. Moreover, the consumption of raw foods stimulates gastric enzyme secretion, necessary to initiate good digestion. Besides, the more raw foods you eat as your first course, the less cooked foods you will be able to eat. Ideally, we should never cook any foods."
Arthur M. Baker in "Awakening Our Self Healing Body", writes, "Cooked foods literally wreck our body. They deny needed nutrients to the system since heat alters foodstuffs such that they are partially, mostly, or wholly destroyed. Nutrients are coagulated, denatured, caramelized, and rendered inorganic and become toxic and pathogenic in the body."
Baker adds, "Virulent bacteria find soil in dead food substances only and cannot exist on living cells. Cooked food spoils rapidly, both inside and outside our body, whereas uncooked plant foods are slow to lose their vital qualities and do not as readily become soil for bacterial decay."....
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