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Why Does the Media Completely Misunderstand Raw Food Diets?

  • July 01, 2008
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This is an older article that may not reflect Dr. Mercola’s current view on this topic. Use our search engine to find Dr. Mercola’s latest position on any health topic.

raw food dietThis piece from the London Times discusses the ins and outs of switching to a raw food diet -- meaning, according to the article, a raw vegan diet, cutting out "meat, fish, eggs, dairy foods and cereal grains."

Raw-food followers maintain that the diet can help you lose weight and feel more energized. The author of this article recommends mastering a "nutritionally complete vegan diet before progressing to raw food," and possibly taking a vegan-approved vitamin and mineral supplement for micronutrients.
 
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Nearly every article written on raw foods in the media, including this London Times article, makes the SERIOUS mistake of excluding meat and animal protein from the raw food diet. Why do they completely ignore the abundant and plentiful examples from the animal kingdom that show us the importance of raw animal foods?

I suspect most of you have seen Planet Earth. If you haven’t I would STRONGLY encourage you to purchase the DVD and if possible watch it on high definition. It is clearly one of the most spectacular DVD sets ever created.

If you watch the four DVDs, you will see numerous examples of raw food eating in the animal kingdom. And while there are a fair share of vegetarians in the wild, there are many examples of animals eating RAW animal protein.

Do you think for a moment that a great white shark is going to subsist on seaweed? Of course not. But it would be even more ridiculous to believe that the shark or snow leopard would capture their prey and take it home to cook it before they ate it.

It simply is not done at all in the animal kingdom. Animals do NOT cook their food. That is why your pet cats and dogs do MUCH better on raw foods and why YOU will also do much better if you don’t cook your food.

However, if you restrict your foods to raw plant foods only, as is mistakenly advocated in many raw-food diets, you will likely start a radical decline in your health. The slope of that decline is directly related to your nutritional type. Strong carb types will not decline much at all, while strong protein types, who have a far greater need for animal protein, will find that their health declines very rapidly when eating only plant-based foods.

Why are Raw Foods So Good for You?

They exist in their natural, unaltered form, the way nature intended. When you cook foods, enzymes that are necessary for metabolic purposes in your body are destroyed. Meanwhile:
  • Nutrients, like vitamins, minerals, and amino acids are depleted, destroyed, and altered.
  • Unusable waste material is created, which has a cumulative congesting and clogging effect on your body.
  • Eating enzyme-dead food places a burden on your pancreas and other organs and overworks them, which eventually exhausts these organs.
  • Putrefactive bacteria, particularly from cooked meat, dominate the natural population of beneficial intestinal flora resulting in dysfunction in your intestine.
Cooked food also contains no biophotons, the light particles or “stored sun energy” that exists in raw foods. Biophotons contain important bio-information, which controls complex vital processes in your body. The biophotons have the power to order and regulate, and, in doing so, to elevate the organism -- in this case, your physical body -- to a higher oscillation or order. This is manifested as a feeling of vitality and well-being.

Yet because of the widely circulated fear of germs, and the mistaken notion that everything must be cooked literally to death before it’s safe to eat, most people are scared to death of eating a raw egg, raw dairy products or, gasp, raw meat.

And this is a shame.

Raw Animal Foods Won’t Make You Sick

Ok, it is possible to get sick from raw animal foods. But it’s also possible to get sick from raw vegetables, as we’ve seen from the organic spinach scare in 2006 and the more recent recall of tomatoes.

The key to making sure that any food you eat is safe is to get it from a high-quality source. I can’t stress the importance of this enough. When you are getting your meat, raw dairy, and eggs from animals that are healthy and raised in natural settings, as opposed to factory farms, there is very little risk in eating these foods raw. The same goes for produce, as well.

I realize that it’s hard for many people to get their minds around the concept of eating raw meat, dairy and eggs. But once you grasp the enormous health benefits that come from eating foods in their natural state -- and begin to do it for yourself -- it’s easy to break free from this myth.

If you like, start slowly with a raw egg or glass of raw milk. Little by little you will see that these foods the public health agencies warn you about are not only safe, they’re healthy and delicious.

My personal goal is to consume 85 percent of my diet raw. Unless I’m traveling, I am almost always over 50 percent, and typically around 85 percent. And yes, that includes animal proteins, as I am a protein nutritional type.

You have to do what feels right for you, but I believe once you venture too far from the natural order of things you are setting yourself up for some serious health consequences.

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