Article: Eating Raw: The Benefits of an 'Uncooked' Diet

[Guest guest]

Eating Raw: The Benefits of an 'Uncooked' Diet

 

Kyle Ellen Nuse

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

 

Five years ago, 28-year-old Angela Stokes, found herself morbidly

obese, chronically ill and depressed. " I had no interest in health

and was eating myself into the grave with junk foods, " she says.

 

Frustrated with conventional medicines and yo-yo diets, Stokes looked

for alternative methods of healing, and discovered that making

changes in her diet was the ultimate medicine.

 

Stokes slowly shifted away from eating highly processed meat,

pasteurized dairy products and other cooked foods to a more natural

and less-altered diet of raw and “living” foods.

 

Full Story:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289000,00.html

[Guest guest]

Great article, Jeff, thanks for posting it. Amazing to see an article like this

in a popular

mainstream news outlet without the normal admonishments from nutritionists about

how some very

" nutritious " foods (that a human body would presumably be unable to manage

without) require cooking.

The only part I found misleading was this:

 

" When your body is infused with thousands of unaltered digestive enzymes, it can

process healthy

fats like nuts, olive oil and avocados in their raw forms without any weight

gain. "

 

While it's true that eating raw fat does not make a person fat, I think it's

important to question

the implication that this is because of the " digestive enzymes " in the foods.

It is commonly

claimed in the raw food world that eating enzyme rich foods spares us from

having to use our own

'bank' of digestive enzymes to digest food, but this is not true. Enzymes are

contained in all

living matter, and in plants they are the chemical catalysts for thousands of

different living

processes such as growth, ripening, decomposition, etc. Our bodies also make

thousands of different

enzymes, each responsible for a different process in the body. Digestive

enzymes do the job of

breaking down food. They are like the keys that unlock the chemical bonds of

the nutrients in

foods. The enzymes in plants cannot perform this function in the body, and in

fact they are killed

in our stomachs by the acids present there. Enzymes in plants serve the plants'

needs, not ours.

In this way they are indirectly beneficial to us, of course, but not directly so

as is so often

claimed.

 

I suppose the enzyme myth does serve to convince some people to try eating raw,

but the harm it does

to our credibility is not worth it, especially considering the mountain of

truthful evidence we

could be using instead.

 

Even with the mistake, this article shines because on the whole it is truthful

and balanced (which,

ironically, means that the mainstream nutritionists did not have their say this

time). Thanks

again, Jeff.

 

Best,

Nora

www.RawSchool.com

[Guest guest]

The raw-related articles, overall, do seem to be losing the

pessimistic " nutritionists' " comments.

 

Regarding the enzymes, I'd like to remind people that, even though

there may be varying opinions about the " enzyme theory " , our

ancestors evolved eating all raw foods up until they discovered

cooking (after fire), so our bodies have been designed to use raw

foods (and likely the enzymes within, in whatever way that may be).

 

Jeff