Fresh, unprocessed, live, raw food benefits every creature on the planet, so why are humans so confused about what to eat?

Eating raw food benefits health and human longevity in so many different ways. I find that most raw food diet reviews and articles I have read are a bit repetitive. This is alright, but in this article I touch on many of the facts that are usually skipped over by other authors. After this you'll be convinced of the power that live raw food plays in your diet for longevity. The following nutrients are some things not available in cooked food, but you can get them by eating raw foods:

~Hormones: Various live superfoods and herbal adaptogens contain natural hormones and hormone precursors that are very beneficial (such as maca, mucuna pruriens, cacao beans, various sprouts, bee pollen and royal jelly). The addition of plant based hormones and natural steroidal compounds in a living food diet for longevity becomes more crucial as you gain years.. These raw food benefits help maintain the proper levels of hormonal health commonly associated only with young people.

~Oxygen: We get oxygen from our food and water as well as through breathing pure clean air. Cancer and many other diseases simply cannot exist in an adequately oxygenated body (which is why hyperbaric oxygen chambers are such powerful life saving tools in Hospitals). This is why it is crucial to get the raw food benefits of extra oxygen, the worlds most deficient nutrient and basic fuel! Most people are starved of oxygen through: 1. not doing proper diaphragmatic breathing, 2. eating cooked food which uses up more oxygen to metabolize, 3. eating animal products which uses up more oxygen to metabolize, 4. not engaging in the benefits of physical exercise on a regular basis, 5. living in houses which are full of stagnant oxygen depleted air, 6. living in cities which are full of stagnant oxygen depleted air.

~Phytochemicals: Perhaps the greatest recent discovery in nutrition has been the role that phytochemicals play in health and longevity in humans. It is more clear than ever that eating raw food benefits your endocrine (hormonal) system because of these powerful chemicals which include all natural antioxidants, polysaccharides, nucleic acids, alkaloids, etc.

~Enzymes: The pioneering research of Dr. Edward Howell demonstrated how critical the role of enzymes play in digestion as well as every other bodily function. He discovered that humans are born with enough enzyme stores to theoretically live about 200 years! The downside to this is that cooked food (which always has all of the enzymes within it destroyed when heated above 115°F) uses up your body's metabolic enzymes (the type that are required for basic biological functions of life) to convert into digestive enzymes. Eating enzyme rich raw food benefits these limited stores since on average, a live raw food contains half of the enzymes needed to break itself down during digestion.

~Paramagnetism: Live raw food benefits your body's electrical field simply because it still has it's own paramagnetic field. Kirlian photography is one way that this has been demonstrated (thanks to Christian Joubert for the kirlian photograph of cabbage from his site www.esseniaecovillage.com). Live foods add a paramagnetic charge to your body, thus increasing the radiance of your vital life force. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Fritz Popp discovered that humans retain, absorb and emit photons (light energy). 97% of human DNA has also been shown to give off photons. You absorb the photons from food to fuel your bio-electric field. Cooked food literally requires your body to fill the dead matter with photons so that it can be assimilated, thus weakening your body.

~Water: Cooking begins to dehydrate food. Some forms, such as grilling, baking and frying do it more than boiling or steaming, but in the end, all cooked food has less water in it then it started out with. A living food diet retains the natural moisture of food that is requires for digestion. The body shouldn't have to contribute excessive amounts of water to the digestive process. Add on top of this the severe chronic dehydration that most people suffer from and you have accelerated aging. If you want to look juicy and fresh for as long as possible, you have to eat juicy and fresh as much as possible!

You can find raw foods rich in the above mentioned qualities by clicking on this link or any of those in the sidebar to the right. →

One of the top raw food centers for healing, The Hippocrates Institute, has been conducting research on raw food benefits for over 50 years.

The founder, Dr. Ann Wigmore often talked about how one of her most thrilling experiences was the day she first observed cancer cells taken from a human body and placed under a microscope begin to thrive on cooked food, yet dying off when in the presence of only live raw food. It is now a well established scientific fact that cooking destroys all of the raw food benefits listed above. Some people will exclaim that they mostly only steam or boil their food and that this is a "happy medium". When someone does this, the resulting loss of the above nutrients aren't perhaps as great as someone eating mainly barbecued, fried and/or baked foods every day, but it's still degrading these basic necessary benefits of raw food.

The Linus Pauling Institute has found that boiling cruciferous vegetables for a mere 9 minutes results in a 59% loss of the phytochemical indol-3-carbinol, which in other studies done abroad, as well as at this same institute, is the key nutrient that is being promoted as one of the most powerful anti-carcinogenic compounds in the human diet. Absolutely nothing of value has been added by only slightly cooking this food! The following list further outlines this bio-chemically destructive insanity that is known as cooking. There are live raw food benefits listed above that are lost through cooking, but below is a list of the toxic compounds created through cooking:

~Water soluble vitamins are destroyed by heat which leaves a toxic ash-like waste residue to burden the immune system.

~50% of all of the essential amino acids (the building blocks of protein) are coagulated at temperatures exceeding 115°F making them unusable carcinogens and leading to protein deficiencies, even in people who eat very large quantities of protein! Raw food protein is the only complete protein.

~All fats turn into trans-fats or hydrogenated fats at temperatures exceeding 115°F. These fats are all rancid, unusable carcinogens (with the exception of saturated fat, which we shouldn't be eating much of, if any, anyways).

~Carbohydrates carmelize or even carbonize (which are both carcinogens) when cooked at high temperatures.

~Acrylamides are carcinogens formed by cooking starches of all types (breads, pastas, potatoes, etc).

~Ally aldehyde, butyric acid, nitrobenzene and nitropyrene are toxins formed by the heating of fats and oils in foods. This is stated in the book "Diet, Nutrition and Cancer" published by the FDA's Office of Toxicological Sciences.

~Epoxides, hydroperoxides and unsaturated aldehydes are formed from the heating of fats from meat, milk, eggs and fish.

~Furfurals and furans are very toxic compounds formed by the heating of sugars.

~Heterocyclic amines are toxins formed by the heating of certain amino acids.

~Indole, skatole, nitropyreneptomatropine, ptomaines, leukomaines, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, cadaverine, muscarine, putecine, nervine and mercaptins are all toxins found in cooked cheese. Keep in mind that pasteurization is cooking and virtually all store bought dairy products are pasteurized!

~Methylglyoxal and chlorogenic atractyosides are toxins formed by heating coffee beans.

~Nitrosamines are created when the gas flames of barbecues and gas ovens interact with fats.

~Polycyclic hydrocarbons are created from the charring of meat (barbecuing men everywhere should pay attention to the raw food benefits in this article :p).

~Lipofuscin is an acidic residue that accelerates aging. Is is formed by the residue of cooked foods building up in your body over time. It appears as the unsightly "liver spots" that show up on your skin and often contain a variety of toxic heavy metals. This substance also collects in the liver, nervous system and brain and is a free radical, causing the destruction and degeneration of living tissue. Taking ginkgo biloba and eating raw food benefits the body by helping to clean up this toxic residue.

Is it no wonder that the phenomenon known as leukocytosis occurs in the digestion of people who eat cooked foods that are full of all these toxins? Leukocytosis is when the body's immune system goes into attack mode, characterized by a rapid increase in while blood cell count, due to the body thinking that this dead matter entering it is an invader (and it is!). This reaction to cooked food was discovered in 1930 by Dr. Paul Kouchakoff at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland. All of these toxins are a burden to the immune system and decrease your human longevity potential.

Humans only began eating a primarily cooked food diet a mere 12,000 - 15,000 years ago when agriculture began.

This is the blink of an eye in evolutionary history. Raw food benefits were abandoned for the benefits of quickly cooking grains, meat and vegetables. More calories could be consumed with less effort (by avoiding having to constantly forage for berries and wild edibles) and the plus side of this was the amount of human progress that could be made. Humans have now reached a point where they no longer need to cook food to preserve it. Raw living food is available everywhere and is no longer time consuming to prepare and create. Bacterial contamination of food (an argument used by those addicted to cooked food) can be resolved through proper farming practices that avoid manure for fertilizer and using proper natural sanitation after harvest. Cooking food was a short fad in humanity's history that is now obsolete.

Humans may had been consuming small amounts of cooked foods ever since fire was discovered and brought under control long before agriculture began (various estimates on this date), but again it is but a blink of an eye in evolutionary history. Humans are not adapted to eliminate the large amounts of toxins produced by heating live raw food. Some of the greatest live raw food benefits were shown by the work of Weston A. Price and Francis M. Pottenger. They both showed that the consumption of denatured cooked foods quickly leads to disease, organ malformations and abnormal bone structure development in humans and animals. These problems increased in severity with each successive generation of the species when they continued eating this way.

Animals in the wild live an average of ten times the number of years it takes them to reach maturity (Chimpanzee's mature by the age of 5 and live to be about 50). The average human lifespan is barely five times the number of years it takes to reach maturity. What could possibly be causing this difference between humans and the natural world? If there is anything you've taken from this raw food diet review, it's that cooked food creates a massive toxic load in the body. Is it possible that raw food benefits human longevity and that it could actually create drastic changes in life expectancy for the global population?

Many skeptics of all of these live raw food benefits often claim (seemingly without any evidence) that there is not a single longevity society eating raw foods. They're wrong.

In the blue zones around the world, many longevity cultures are eating quite a bit of raw food (on top of that, all of them have an extremely low consumption of animal products). In Vilcabamba their diet does contain cooked grains but they eat all of their fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds raw! They get plenty of raw protein and it shows in how the elders are able to stay vibrant and healthy up to the ages of 110 and beyond (super-centenarians).

In Abkhazia (in the Caucasus mountains of Russia) they eat a very similar diet to the Vilcabambans and have a very similar life expectancy too. With rare exception, fruits and vegetables are picked and eaten right away in their live raw food state. They also eat nuts on a very regular basis. They even get raw food benefits with the goats or sheep milk which they usually consume as a fermented unpasteurized yogurt.

In the most famous longevity society, Okinawa, they may eat much of their food lightly steamed, but the small amount of animal products that they do eat are mostly in their live raw food form. Raw food protein from fish (eaten in sushi) is much better than eating the cooked alternative. It must also be noted that the fish in the Okinawa diet would have been eaten fresh, meaning it was caught the very same day that it was eaten. The fats in fish which have been touted as so healthful become rancid very quickly when exposed to air, heat and light. Cooked omega 3's (both long chain and short chain) contribute to diseases, not prevent them. Cooked fish is worse for your health than cooked beef.

Hunza is perhaps the longevity society that is the most aware of raw food benefits. They eat fresh fruit for most of the year and keep large stores of dried fruits to last them through the colder seasons. In the summer they eat as much as 80% of their diet raw. Fresh corn on the cob, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and even soaked and sprouted beans, lentils and peas are eaten during the winter! They have freshly ground flaxseed with most meals as well. They avoid cooking as much as possible since wood is a precious resource in their remote mountain valley (as it turns out cooking fires are the largest contributor to atmospheric pollution in the world, not the burning of fossil fuels! Going raw is good for the environment).

Dr. Gabriel Cousens has noted that the ancient Rishi's of India often practiced eating only live raw food as well. They clearly knew that eating raw food benefits your mind, body and spirit more than any other diet for longevity and health. I consider myself a Taoist (another ancient tradition) and often find that there is a pervasive belief in modern Taoism/Chinese medicine that you have to cook your food. This is simply a belief system that is actually out of alignment with the core of the Taoist philosophy which is basically P'U meaning "The Uncarved Block" (or live life as naturally as possible). Cooking is the ultimate in doing something unnatural!

All of these live raw food benefits I have written about in this raw food diet review can be summed up in this poem by the Taoist Immortal Sun Bu-er:

Once you can feed on the living energy,
Your lungs will be in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.
Forget the spirit, and there are no appearances to cling to;
Merge with the ultimate, and the existent emptiness is gone.
For breakfast look for wild taro roots;
When hungry at night, pick wetland mushrooms.
If you mix in smoke and fire,
Your body will not walk on the jewel pond.

Sources:

~"Healthy At 100" by John Robbins (Ballantine Books, 2006)
~"The Sunfood Diet Success System" by David Wolfe (North Atlantic Books, 1999)
~"Lifeforce" by Dr. Brian Clement (Book Publishing Company, 2007)
~"Superfoods" by David Wolfe (North Atlantic Books, 2009)
~"Hippocrates, Healing Our World" magazine, Volume 28 Issue 3, article on page 14-17 by Dr. Ginger Southall
~www.healingtaousa.com/bigu.html

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