Living in a society as food-obsessed as ours is, simply the idea of never eating cooked food again–let alone any meat or dairy—is enough to make many dash to the nearest oven or microwave and give it a full-body hug. We use food–apart from sustenance purposes–to make us feel better emotionally, as a way to celebrate, and as a reason to congregate socially, to name a few. For many people, the nutritional aspects of food and eating are not even taken into account.

The more awareness we have about how what we eat affects us, the more we realize how responsible we really are for our own health. This is a very empowering discovery. Though the “raw fooders” may be considered somewhat offbeat extremists by many, most of them consider it extreme to eat cooked and processed foods—foods which they believe prevent one from living within the flow of nature and from attaining optimal health.

Even if you never choose to adopt the raw and live foods lifestyle yourself, there is a lot you can learn from it. The movement, which has been around for decades, is now being recognized socially and scientifically in a way it never has been before, as we see thousands use it to successfully heal or retard catastrophic diseases, slow down the aging process, gain increased energy, and live in optimum beauty and health.Although the current diets and media buzz today is focused largely on the benefits of eating animal protein, leaders of the raw foods movement provide very convincing arguments–even to a meat-lover like myself–to the contrary (keep reading.)

First of all, what exactly are raw and living foods? Raw foods are just what they sound like—foods that are not cooked. Living foods are very fresh foods which are generally still growing at the time they are eaten, such as sprouts or wheat grass. The raw and living food diet is typically vegan as well, excluding meat and dairy products as well.

Raw foods have the highest content of oxygen, electromagnetic charge, phytonutrients, enzymes (which we naturally lose when we get older), and nutrients—all of which support our body’s highest functioning. When foods are cooked, these natural components are either lessened or destroyed, which results in food that is lacking in nutrition. Additionally, certain chemical reactions occur in cooked food which are detrimental to our health. “When steak is cooked, for instance, nitrosamines are created which are strongly carcinogenic,” explains David Wolfe, vegan raw foodist, worldwide lecturer, best-selling author of The Sunfood Diet Success System, and author of his latest book, Eating For Beauty. In his new book he stresses the dangers of cooked oils and fats, in particular. “Cooked oil, margarine, and animal fat are particularly destructive because they are not miscible with water. Since we are a water-based life form, this makes the metabolization of cooked oil difficult at best. Cooked oil, margarine, and animal fat are inflammatory to the tissues, cloud the brain, harm the cardiovascular system, and accelerate the aging process.”

Brian Clement, vegan raw foodist, worldwide lecturer, author of seven books on nutrition (his latest entitled Living Foods For Optimum Health), and Executive Director of the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach (where many go to heal catastrophic diseases), asserts that food loses the elements mentioned above when it reaches 115 degrees. “That’s the cut off point between raw food and living food, and cooked food.”  Clement goes onto explain that eating cooked food allows bacteria, mold, virus, fungus, cancer, etc. to crawl more easily into our systems—and that the consumption of raw foods actually works to prevent the invasion of such intruders.

As a meat and dairy eater who considers herself healthy, I expressed my skepticism about how important is it to eliminate all meat and dairy from one’s diet. “Meat and dairy are not digestible by most human bodies,” says Clement. “They carry with them the animal fat and uric acid that is probably the #1 contributor to most diseases today, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.” Well, maybe so, but what about that satisfied feeling and sense of well-being many get from eating meat? Can that be bad?

“It has nothing to do with true satisfaction or nutrition, it has to do with emotions,” responds Clement, who used to be severely obese. “We don’t use food nutritionally or rationally. Our bodies have a biological chemistry that require certain chemistries to propel it. So what we‘ve done, to not deal with our own emotional state or to look at ourselves, is put heavy substances into our intestinal tracts so that all the energies go down there to digest the food. It diverts the attention that you have to deal with thinking about your own life and what you do. So when you say that you don’t feel full without meat, it’s really that your level of awareness starts to elevate, and you’re not feeling the same demonstrative digestion going on [like before] that takes several days to occur.”

Neither Clement and Wolfe believe that some people need meat while others don’t—as is what many other popular nutritionists/authors today profess–as they believe that everyone would be better off getting their protein from sources other than animal protein. They both also point out that a lot of beef and other meats is actually fat, and that protein can be attained in more pure forms from a variety of other foods. “For example, avocados have a very high ratio of fat and protein, very much like red meat in that respect,” offers Wolfe. “They’re very satisfying. Same with nuts and seeds. So there are other ways you can make sure you’re getting enough protein.” Clement asserts that the Hippocrates program is the most protein rich program on the planet. They use sources such as sprouts, wheatgrass, and a lot of blue and green algae (which is approximately 50% protein.) Additionally, the protein acquired from these sources is free of the uric acid, hormones, and fat contained in meat.

ı letting some steam out of the idea that we need to eat meat because our ancestors ate so much of it in early times. “We tend to think the rural kind of life included eating a lot of meat, but that’s very unlikely because resources are scarce in that kind of environment. You just can’t be slaughtering animals every day for dinner.”

“Sixty percent of the world’s population is still vegetarian,” adds Clement. “So this romantic idea that we were cave people and eating the legs of turkeys that you see in the movies, there were only a percentage of people who were doing that. All I can say is I brought up four of my children on a complete vegan diet, and they’ve never been sick. Never. They’ve never missed a day of school.”

As far as cow’s milk is concerned, vegan raw foodists typically don’t believe that a human body is meant to digest it. Both Wolfe and Clement mention studies that show that women who drink cow’s milk are more likely to develop Osteoporosis. Wolfe explains that if you’re going to eat dairy, unpasteurized goat’s products are the easiest to digest, and contain higher quantities of alkaline minerals. For Clement, when he started eliminating dairy for prolonged periods of time, he realized the effects it had on him when he would eat it again, after his body was not used to it anymore. “I started to feel that my brain wasn’t functioning the way that it ought to; there was an allergic reaction that was occurring. Also my mucous membrane was activated and I started to choke up mucous. As a child, I literally was declared dead at two years old in a hospital from asthma. My uncle happened to be a physician at that hospital, came and revived me even though they had the sheet over me, and once I gave up dairy food, all of those symptomologies–even though they had dramatically waned from the time I was 2, and I was in my early 20s then–were gone. When I finally made the decision [to quit], the fogginess in the head, the constant mucous in the nose, all of that was gone. I realized that dairy food had been the biggest culprit in my life.”

Clement also points out that even Dr. Spock, in the seventh edition of his infamous, best-selling Baby and Child Care, recommended that kids should have a diet free of dairy products and meat.  “Remember, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population do not consume dairy foods,” observes Clement, who adds that the number one source of calcium is that in green vegetables.

When one is not used to eating fruits and vegetables, these foods are typically harder to digest at first. When starting out, it is also a good idea to eat most fruits and vegetables separately, as they are even more difficult to digest when mixed. “There are a couple of exceptions, like cucumber, tomatoes and apples,” says Wolfe. “And to some degree hard pears.” 

“Assuming you don’t have a serious digestive disease,” adds Clement, “If you slowly start to eat more and more raw foods, you develop a [digestive] muscular structure just like you would at a gym with weights, and at the initial stages you take enzymes and bacterias to help you break down the food.” Wolfe explains that when you have a fully mineralized diet, such as that acquired by eating raw foods, one’s digestion improves tremendously. He also suggests introducing your body to vegetable juices initially, since that is the easiest way, in terms of digestion, to get the raw nutrients into your system.

Both Clement and Wolfe advise against an extreme, sudden change in diet, unless one wants to heal a serious illness. “Denial is not really a good strategy,” says Wolfe. “You just add it the plants in and let them work their way into your body, and let the food itself change your taste buds. Once you start acclimating to natural foods, it’s sort of a one-way street because you realize that those natural plants really have taste. As it becomes accentuated tremendously, you end up getting your taste buds back, and that’s what keeps you going. People are not going to make it on willpower alone. What they’ll make it on is two things: one is that they’ll just feel better, so they’ll eat and feel pleasure, and the more pleasure you feel, the more healthy food you’ll eat; and the other is that things taste better.”

“You don’t do something like this for a week and decide if it’s a success or failure,” says Clement. “You have to put three or four months aside with the lifestyle, and then look at the benefits. I would also suggest doing medical blood tests, as we do at Hippocrates, at the beginning and end of the time period. I would also suggest making sure that you’re being informed and educated. I don’t think anyone ought to be doing anything without knowing why they’re attempting it–because your neighbor said it, or because Brian Clement said it in an article. You have to read and then do it because you have the desire to improve, to become healthier and stronger, and to stay younger.

“We tend to have skewed our priorities,” states Clement in regards to our present eating habits. “What we literally do is we move towards the convenient things rather than the right things.” If you don’t have it in you to cut out all meat and dairy (hey, I don’t!), both men agree that the less of them you eat, the better. After all, it’s just common sense that if we eat healthier, cleaner foods, we will be healthier, brighter, and more attractive people.

“Since we are what we eat,” speculates Wolfe, “It’s possible that we could’ve been built out of the wrong stuff, and that if we start bombarding our bodies with the right stuff–vegetables, vegetable juice, fruits, sprouts, etc.—our body gets built out of the right stuff, and the blueprint comes through more clearly. And that’s the promise of raw foods; that’s what happens–you start to become more of your real self.”