Raw Food Benefits

When food is heated above 118 degrees F for three minutes or longer, its protein becomes coagulated, its carbohydrate becomes caramelized, its natural fibers have been altered. This means this meal will take longer to move through the intestinal tract, up to 90% of its vitamins have been damaged, and 100% of its enzymes have been destroyed. Cooked food depletes your body’s enzyme potential and requires energy that you would otherwise use to maintain and repair your body. In simple terms, it shortens your life. 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. When the proteins are coagulated they are slower to benefit our body. The enzymes are no longer part of the food we are eating after it has become cooked because the high temperature breaks them down. “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.”

Willison describes the breakdown of nutrients from food being cooked. If the raw food is left untouched and only cleaned before eating, it is extremely beneficial to the skin, organs, tissue and preventing disease. 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 starting in 1946. Pottenger fed one group of the test cats raw food and other group he fed cooked food. Pottenger wrote, “Cooked meat fed cats were irritable. The females were dangerous to handle, occasionally biting the keeper…”

The “cooked food” cats suffered with “pneumonia, emphysema, 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 are exhausting your energy, inhibiting your healing, and decreasing your alertness, efficiency and productivity. Cooked foods suppress the immune system. The heat of cooking destroys vitamins, enzymes, nucleic acids, and it damages lipids (fats), making them indigestible, and even toxic. The cooked fats become a tissue irritant. The heat disorganizes the protein structure, leading to deficiency of essential amino acids. The fibrous parts of food are changed from their natural state by cooking. When cooked, the fiber loses its ability to brush the digestive tract clean, turning it into an irritant.

Raw food has the optimal 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 damage the nerves. When ingesting cooked food, the overall flexibility is diminished, arteries lose their pliability, nerves’ ability to conduct electrical signals diminishes, the spinal cord becomes hardened, the tissues throughout the body stiffen, and the human being becomes prematurely old. In many cases toxic exhaust is deposited in various joints of the body, causing joint disease. In other cases, it accumulates in one of the internal organs, even 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) nutrients. 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, although this could be more likely caused by incorrect food for your Metabolic Type.

Eating Raw Foods will decrease your total sleep time, and support a more restful sleep.

When we coagulate our foods with heat, 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 when we eat raw protein foods. Heating also changes the lipids. Lipids are the building material of all cell walls, and when these changed fats are incorporated into the cell walls, they interfere with cellular respiration, causing an increase in cancer and heart disease incidence. When grasses are fertilized by manure from raw food eaters, they grow 400% more tonnage than grass fertilized by manure from cooked food eaters.

After eating cooked foods, the blood immediately shows an enormous increase of leukocytes. These white blood cells are the first line of defense of 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 protective mechanisms of the blood. This rise in white corpuscles is not seen when people are eating uncooked food. The constant daily battle with the toxic effects of cooked food wears down your body’s strength and vitality, thus causing disease and the modern shortness of life.

Cooked foods move slowly through the intestinal tract, causing putrefaction. On a raw food diet you will experience the elimination of body odor and halitosis. Cooked food causes allergies. Flavor-enhancing additives can irritate your digestive system and over-stimulate other organs. Avoid these harmful additives: refined sugar, refined salt, refined oils, food coloring, MSG, black pepper, sweet condiments, ketchup, mayonnaise, dressing and toppings. 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, “Overly 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. All this written, we still need to recognize that some foods are better when steamed or stir-fried. Some vegetables (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) will suppress your thyroid gland. Rice, quinoa or potatoes need to be baked or steamed. The least beneficial are baked goods made with milled flour …