The What and Why of Live and Raw Foods

A Brief History (Wikipedia)

Artturi Virtanen (1895 d. 1973), a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, is often quoted as supporting a Living Foods diet. He showed that enzymes in uncooked foods are released in the mouth when vegetables are chewed. These enzymes interact with other substances, notably the enzymes produced by the body itself, to produce maximum benefit from the digestion process.

It gained more prominence throughout the 1900s, as proponents such as Ann Wigmore and Herbert Shelton claimed that a diet of raw fruits and vegetables could cure various diseases. Raw food diets continued to exist as radical off-shoots of the vegetarian diet until 1975, when computer programmer-turned-nutritionist Viktoras Kulvinskas published Survival Into the 21st Century. It is considered to be the first modern publication that deals with a raw food diet.

Sometimes mentioned is Dr. Edward Howell, an Illinois physician born in 1898, who was interested in how enzymes played a role in a person's diet. He concluded that eating cooked food leads to health problems. In 1985, at the age of 87, Howell published a book called "Enzyme Nutrition". Some raw food diet proponents believe that Howell's book gives evidence that the pancreas is forced to work harder on a diet of cooked foods and that food enzymes are just as essential to digestion as the body's self-generated enzymes.

Additional research was conducted by Dr. Francis Pottenger in 1932, who conducted an experiment to determine the effect of cooked foods in cats. For 10 years, Pottenger fed half of the cats a diet of raw foods, the other half a diet of cooked foods. At the conclusion of his study, he reported that the cats who were fed raw foods appeared to be in better health. In addition, the exclusively cooked diet led to congenital problems including birth defects and deformities, after several generations. Research was also conducted by Dr Weston A Price as embodied by the Weston A. Price Foundation and The Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

In 1930, under the direction of Dr. Paul Kouchakoff, research was conducted at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland. The effect of food (cooked and processed versus raw and natural) on the immune system was tested and documented. It was found that after a person eats cooked food, his/her blood responds immediately by increasing the number of white blood cells. This is a well-known phenomena called 'digestive leukocytosis', in which there is a rise in the number of leukocytes (white blood cells) after eating. Since digestive leukocytosis was always observed after a meal, it was considered to be a normal physiological response to eating. No one knew why the number of white cells rises after eating, since this appeared to be a stress response, as if the body was somehow reacting to something harmful such as infection, exposure to toxic chemicals or trauma.

Around the same time Swiss researchers at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry found that eating raw, unaltered food did not cause a reaction in the blood. In addition, they found that if a food had been heated beyond a certain temperature (unique to each food), or if the food was processed (refined, chemicals added, etc.), this always caused a rise in the number of white cells in the blood. The researchers renamed this reaction 'pathological leukocytosis', since the body was reacting to highly altered food. They tested many different types of foods and found that if the foods were not refined or overheated, they caused no reaction. The body saw them as 'friendly foods'. However, these same foods, if heated at too high a temperature, caused a negative reaction in the blood, a reaction found only when the body is invaded by a dangerous pathogen or trauma.

Anthropologist Peter Lucas of George Washington University in Washington DC, US, was reported in NewScientist magazine on 19/2/2005 as having the theory that man being the only mammal with chronic poor dentition, and the only mammal to significantly process and cook his food, are causally linked. He believes that the adoption of food processing and cooking reduced the size of our jaw through evolutionary processes, but not the size of our teeth. Hence the expanding science of orthodontics. Conversely, the research suggests that a diet of unprocessed and uncooked food is more likely to promote health.

Lucas is not the first anthropologist to observe physical degeneration with increasing use of food processing technology. In a 1936 work entitled Nutrition And Physical Degeneration, dentist Weston A. Price observed dental degeneration in the first generation who adopt diets high in processed and cooked foods. Price claimed that the parents of such first generation children had excellent jaw development and dental health, while their children had malocclusion and tooth decay.

Beliefs and research

Those who follow this way of eating generally believe that:

Raw foods contain enzymes which act as catalysts to regulate the digestive process in the body.

Heating (or freezing) food degrades or destroys these enzymes in food.

Food without enzymes is thought to lead in the longer term to toxicity in the body, to excess consumption of food, and therefore to obesity.

Living and raw foods are thought to usually have much higher nutrient values than foods which have been cooked.

Raw foods contain bacteria and other micro-organisms that stimulate the immune system and enhance digestion by populating the digestive tract with beneficial flora.

A main idea behind raw food diets is that cooked food is often toxic. Another idea is that cooked food is less digestible than raw food because cooking destroys the enzymes contained in food.

Raw food proponents claim that a raw food diet consisting of enzyme-rich raw foods will prevent many health problems, promote health and strengthen the immune system. The benefits of the diet are said to include: a stable body mass index; clear skin; more energy; and minimising a range of common illnesses, from the flu to obesity-related illnesses.

Foods cooked at high heat contain toxins not found in raw or boiled foods, such as acrylamide, benzopyrene, and methylcholanthrene. There is no consensus as to whether these toxins introduced by high-heat cooking methods are cause for alarm, and the World Health Organisation is sponsoring continued research.

German research [Nutr Cancer. 2003;46(2):131-7] on the effects of raw food on cancer incidence, has shown significant benefits in reducing breast cancer risk when large amounts of raw vegetable matter are included in the diet. The authors attribute some of this effect to heat labile phytonutrients.

Inviduals such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Gillian McKeith and Professor Colin Campbell (see the China project) advocate diets high in raw, unprocessed foods. They claim that social trends over the past several centuries that have diverged from this diet, together with increasingly less active lifestyles, have contributed in large measure to the development and continued increase of noncommunicable diseases and obesity-related illnesses which are prevalent in developed countries. These include cardiovascular illnesses, some cancers, diabetes and some auto-immune diseases.

. Norman W. Walker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dr. Norman W. Walker (January 28, 1867 - June 6, 1985) is recognized throughout the world as one of the strongest proponents for raw foods and vegetable juicing in the 20th century and a daily practitioner of raw food eating until the age of 119 years old, observed that "while such [dead] food can, and does, sustain life in the human system, it does so at the expense of progressively degenerating health, energy, and vitality."

Norman Walker popularized fresh vegetable and fruit juices in the US and Canada. The English-born businessman discovered the value of vegetable juices while recovering from a breakdown in a peasant house in the French countryside. Watching the woman in the kitchen peel carrots, he noticed their moistness under the peel. He decided to try grinding them, and had his first cup of carrot juice.

When he recovered, Walker moved to Long Beach, California. With a medical doctor, he opened a juice bar and offered home delivery service. From 1910 to 1930, they devised dozens of fresh juice formulas for specific conditions. Walker believed colon cleansing with fresh juices was the key to good health. Walker designed his own juicer, the Norwalk, in two parts--a grinder to grind the vegetables and a press to extract the juice. When the San Francisco health department banned unpasteurized vegetable juices, Walker began manufacturing his juice machine in Anaheim, California. He kept the plant going in spite of the steel shortage during World War II.

In the late 1940s, he moved to Utah where he found an old cotton mill, ideal for his juice plant, but he was again hampered by health department regulations. He sold the factory to his two sons, and started publication of his own health magazine, The New Health Movement Review. For several years, Walker ran a health ranch in Arizona. Eventually he gave up the ranch to devote himself to writing and published a lot of books.

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