Why Raw, Why Organic?

It's funny the things people will ask you when you tell them you live on a raw diet or even a mostly raw diet. Why do eat raw? No meat? Where do you get your protein? What do you eat? I love answering these questions as it is my time to share and hopefully help someone to live a healthier more nutritious life. It is sad to think how far away we have come from the food we eat. Over 90% of what the typical grocery store has to offer is a processed chemical preserved taste bud confusing concoction that's stored in a box for months.  How can this have any nutritional value left in it? It doesn't, food starts to loose it's nutritional value the moment it is harvested. We are no longer eating food any more we are eating food like products.

Too help people realize that you don't need a disproportional amount of protein as this is always seems to be the first question people ask look back to when you were first a baby when you went through the biggest growth stage of your life doubling your body size in months, your mothers milk contained only 10% protein 80% carbs and 10% fat. Now if that proportion of protein, carbs, and fat could nourish you in your biggest growth stage in life I'm sure it can support you as your growth becomes more dormant. To understand this huge push of protein onto people you have to understand the american food system, it all revolves around subsidies, which I'm not going to bring into this article as it is not the scope but encourage anyone interested to investigate this miss guided story. Remember it's hard not to believe what is shoved at you from child hood every day, a one sided thought with no discussion.

Why raw and why organic?

Simple, you are what you eat. Somewhere along the line we always become to smart for our own good and don't take the time to sit back and ask ourselves what are we doing. The evolution of farming has definitely made it easier, more profitable, with higher yields but at what cost? Think about the harm we cause every single day to the soil, the air, and the water we use from farming and industry. We spray tons of chemicals a year on plants that you would never consume directly but these chemicals are being taken in by plants and sprayed directly onto to the food that goes into our bodies so how are we not ingesting these harmful toxins. Our soils have become so striped of their nutrients from over farming and mono farming that we have to fertilize the soil just to get something to grow. The down side to this is that fertilizer is made up of mainly 3 ingredients: nitrogen potassium and phosphorus so where are the other 52 minerals our bodies need to survive coming from? The calcium, zinc, iron, magnesium, and the dozens of other that follow? They are gone. Our typical forms of farming are causing our soil to be deficient in minerals and nutrients making our plants deficient, weakening their defenses to fight fungicides and pests; so the farmers go to the chemical companies and of course the chemical companies are happy to sell them all sorts of fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides continuing the life cycle of an inferior food option. And that's exactly what it is, an option, so remember every time you buy organic you are voting with your dollars, inspiring change.

When we consume these nutrient deficient toxic food containing chemicals that are supposed to be life sustaining we can't help but to be deficient and toxic. Then we cook our food which destroys all the enzymes within the food that are used to help aid our body with digestion and to help us absorb the nutrients from our food. The cooking process also changes the food structure in a way that the body can not even recognize that we are ingesting food treating the cooked food as a toxic even lightly steaming food has the same effect. Dr. Paul Kouchakoff M.D. studied this phenomenon of eating cooked foods, discovering when more than 51% of the food we consume is cooked our white blood cell count rises this reaction is called leukocytosis. Not only that 50% of the protein is destroyed in cooked food and around 70% of the vitamins and minerals. We are literally destroying our food by cooking it. 

Certain toxins and carcinogens are formed when using high heat in cooking as well. Heated high high fat, high protein animal foods create advanced glycation end products AGEs which have been shown to increase blood pressure, create wrinkles  in the skin and accelerate aging. Heating Starches with oils examples: french fires, potato chips, breads, cookies, crackers, creates acrylamides, substances known to cause cancer in laboratory animals; when you see browned bread that is acrylamide. Cooking meat creates heterocyclic amines HCAs another carcinogenic compound. HCAs are most abundant in well done fried and barbecued meats and have been linked to stomach, pancreatic, colorectal, and breast cancers according to the National Cancer Institute. [1] It's no wonder cancer cases are on the rise when you think how frequently individuals consume these foods day after day year after year. 

How can you build strong buildings when you use poor building materials? The same applies to our bodies, we need the proper building blocks, we are what we eat. This deficiency in nutrients causes us to be tired in the afternoons, we're not supposed to be tired but alive and vibrant yet many reach for caffeine and stimulants. Digesting food is the hardest task our body goes through, so hard in fact that our bodies stop healing themselves while digesting food. It takes massive amounts of energy to make a steak absorb-able into your body. So why not give your body organic raw food in its pure form that is easy to digest and absorb? Many will say because it is expensive or inconvenient. I believe we have our values inverted. Most would rather spend their money on rent or a house or a car that they saw an add to rather than some of on the healthiest food they can put into their body and we haven't eve discussed super foods that exist now like: wheat grass, goji berries, spirulina, ginger, raw honey which helps us to live longer and have healthier skin, cocoa beans which is the highest natural source of magnesium and contains vitamin C but our food industry insist on heating cocoa to make chocolate; heat destroys all vitamin C which is an antioxidant that helps protect us from cancer and protects our DNA. 

When we continue to eat a Standard American Diet (SAD) we create a deficiency with in our bodies that is never corrected from the deficiency the day before, sooner or later you will pay for it. The choice is yours to make but I hope this helps to bring more raw organic alive food into your diet.

[1] Going Raw, Judita Wignall 2011Quarry Books