Raw deal?

Is your health in danger if you don't eat all your food raw?

By Anthony Colpo.

A recent UK newspaper article reports that the raw-food diet has hit an all-time high of popularity in the US. Apparently, raw-food restaurants are opening on the East and West coasts, and celebrities like Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson and Robin Williams are purported to be following the diet.(1)

Gee, if those guys are following the diet, it must be good for you!

According to the article, followers of a 100 per cent raw-food diet eat only uncooked plant food, avoiding animal flesh of any kind, and processed and refined foods such as dairy, cereal grains, salt and sugar.

"One might assume that a raw-food diet can be limiting, but it doesn't have to be this way," says Lean Phong, manager of London raw food restaurant Vita Organic. "Ideally, someone following a raw diet will incorporate a wide variety of foods into their eating plan, and despite popular perception, they don't just eat salads."

"Fruits and vegetables, for example, can be combined to make juices and smoothies, and although traditional cooking methods aren't used, food can be prepared in a dehydrator, which circulates warm air to dry food rather than cook it. Using this method, we even make things like raw pizza and raw noodles."

Advocates of the raw-food approach look back to the diets of our ancestors and argue that we didn't evolve to eat cooked food. They also point out that no other creature on the planet does so, and, given that raw plant food is presented to us in abundance in nature, raw fooders argue that our bodies recognize it as the food of choice, unlike cooked food, which, they believe, is at odds with our genetic make-up.

They claim that, in the 1930s, a study from the Institute of Clinical Chemistry in Lausanne, France, showed that the body recognizes cooked food as a harmful invader and employs a process called digestive leucocytosis, where multiples of white blood cells rush to either the mouth or the stomach, in an attempt to get rid of the intruder.

"The problem with this," says the health and nutrition consultant Dr Gina Shaw, "is that when this defense mechanism is happening three or more times a day, the rest of the body is left undefended and the immune system is put under considerable strain."

According to raw-food chef and co-author of Raw, Roxanne Klein. cooking food above 48C (118F) destroys natural enzymes, forcing our bodies to generate enough for digestion. According to Klein, this causes problems: "The body cannot produce enzymes in perfect combinations to metabolize foods as completely as those created by nature. This results in partially digested fats, proteins and starches that can clog the body's intestinal tract and arteries."

Raw facts versus fiction

Aaaagh, where do I start?

Let's start with the contention that man has not evolved to eat cooked foods: an extensive review conducted back in the eighties, which examined all the available archaeological evidence, concluded that humankind's controlled use of fire began somewhere between 230,000 and 400,000 years ago.(2) New research reported in a recent issue of Nature suggests this figure may in fact be closer to 800,000 years ago.(3) Regardless of who's right, humans have been cooking food for hundreds of thousands of years.

Rather than transform our foods into harmful, immune-assailing toxins, cooking can actually increase the availability of certain nutrients. The carotenoids in foods like carrots and tomatoes, for example, become far more bioavailable after cooking. Cooking can also destroy nasty microbes lurking in the foods we are about to eat.

As for raw fooders trying to hi-jack the evolutionary-correct diet argument, hominids have been eating meat for over two-and-a-half million years--and there is plenty of evidence to back this up, in the form of skeletal radioisotope analyses, findings of stone tools and cut marks on animal skeletons, observations of recent hunter-gatherers, and an examination of human nutritional requirements (vitamin B12 for example, can only be obtained in nature from animal foods--they didn't have health food stores back in the Paleolithic era).

In contrast, the evidence showing that Stone-Age man sat on the savanna mixing up wheat grass chasers in his Breville juicer, while occasionally glancing over at his Sunbeam dehydrator to see how the dried apricot halves were coming along, is non-existent.

This whole 100% raw food kick is by no means new, having experienced cyclical bouts of popularity over the years. I must confess that, after reading all the miracle stories in Leslie Kenton's Raw Energy book some fifteen years ago, I actually gave the diet a try. I stuck to it for an entire day-and-a-half--which is about how long I would expect any highly-active young male to last on such a nutritionally and calorically inadequate diet plan.

Ironically, Kenton recently wrote a book titled The X-Factor Diet based on Paleolithic style nutrition (as in cooked meat-containing Paleo nutrition). "It's not advisable for people to eat nothing but raw foods for long periods," says Kenton in her latest book, The Powerhouse Diet, "but an all-raw diet can be a wonderful tool for short periods, especially if you are healing something like cancer, Aids or depression."

References

1. Independent.co.uk, 14 June 2004.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=531234

2. James SR. Hominid use of fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene. Current Anthropology, Feb, 1989; 30 (1): 1-26.

3. Neumann N. Earliest fire sheds light on hominids. Nature, Apr 30, 2004.

Source: The Omnivore

How To Eat

by Stephen Byrnes, PhD, RNCP

*NUTRITION GUIDE FOR HEALTHY EATING*

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