Raw Food Diet For Health
I don't think even vegetarians could get away with a 100% raw food diet, because beans produce a poison to prevent pests (including humans) eating them. So we must cook them long enough to destroy the poison.
Meat-eaters like me should think very carefully before eating raw meat. Even after the meat has been inspected, parasites such as tapeworm and liver fluke can get through, and some countries don't inspect meat properly in the first place. Supposedly you can eat raw fish safely, but I would be dubious about eating rare steaks. The Masai tribes drink raw blood from their cattle, but I don't know how healthy they are.
I think the best idea is to make raw food about 80% of your daily diet. Now, as we get older, our bodies become more and more resistant to change. So if you decide to change to an 80%-raw diet, don't do it tomorrow. Start with a delicious fruit or two. As the days go by, eat more fruit until you are eating five or six servings of fruit (all of them different).
Next you can start nibbling on stalks of celery snacks throughout the day. What other raw vegetables do you like? Perhaps you could start nibbling carrots each day. Don't eat too many carrots, because the carotene in them will turn your face yellow, and your doctor might think that you have yellow jaundice. One raw carrot per day should be fine.
If you're not worried about your cosmetic appearance, too much carotene won't hurt you (It creates vitamin A, and too much vitamin A from supplements can kill you, but carotene doesn't have this limit. This is a good thing, because I turned yellow when I added lovely sweet raw yellow pumpkin to my diet, which gave me far too much carotene!
You get the idea. Switch over gradually to 80% raw food. Raw hen eggs are great, but raw duck eggs can have parasites in them.
If you are losing your teeth, like me, you won't be able to chew all this lovely healthy raw food. So I drink my 1.5 liter (three pints) raw-food breakfast straight from the blender. In there I usually have a couple of raw shiitake mushrooms, a tomato, half an orange, a carrot, three tablespoons coconut oil, 2 cloves garlic, heaped soupspoon each of brewer's yeast and ginger root powder, one apple (core removed because agricultural chemicals concentrate in the core) three florets of broccoli, a handful of raisins. Then I eat a banana.
My cooked meal in the evening is only small, because I haven't recovered yet from drinking 3 pints of fruit and vegetables for breakfast, and eating some cabbage for lunch, with perhaps half a handful of raisins, and drinking two and a half liters of water during the day. Later in the evening I snack on half a handful of almonds as I go for my one hour walk, and I finish off my raw food diet with some sticks of celery.
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