Raw Superwoman

Whole food =  real food

The key to any healthful eating plan is whole (unrefined and unprocessed) food. Natural whole food has had nothing removed from it, nothing added to it, and has not been processed or refined in any other way. Think apple.

Consider this. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years – during this time our bodies have evolved to extract maximum benefit from whole foods, as they appear in nature. The human tribes which had not figured out how to thrive on whole foods have long ago died off, because that was the only food available for the 99.995% of the time that we have been in existence.

Processing and refining food is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only 180 years ago that we started to store our food in cans, that the mill was invented (thereby allowing us to produce flour), that we started to refine sugar. Currently, the standard modern diet has little whole foods in it.

Why are whole foods so important?

The reason is because our bodies have learned to thrive on the nutrients in food as they are packaged together, in their natural state. When you eat a certain whole food, all the substances in that food are involved in specific reactions required for the optimal digestion and assimilation of that food. When you take things out of those reactions or introduce new things into the reactions, especially if those new things the body simply does not recognize and has a very hard time dealing with.

I don’t know all of the compounds and chemical reactions that the food we eat is broken down into, nobody does and most likely nobody ever will. But the fact of the matter is, our bodies have learned how to benefit from the substances in food, as they are packaged together. For optimal digestion and assimilation, the combined activities of food substances in a whole food are required.

RAW IS BEST

How long have we been cooking our food? While man has been using controlled fire for ages, the matches weren’t even invented until the 1900’s. It’s possible that before then, the daily cooking of every meal might not have been practical for most people. It cannot be argued that once upon a time we did in fact all eat raw food and that is the food on which we evolved on.

Raw food is very different from cooked food on a very fundamental, chemical level. When heated above above 46 °C (115 °F), food loses a lot of its nutritional value, including enzymes.

But what are enzymes and why should I care?

Enzymes are protein catalysts. A catalyst is a special molecule present in a chemical reaction which allows the reaction to occur very easily. It does so by lowering the amount of energy that the reaction needs to get going. Without the catalyst, the reaction could not easily occur. Not all chemical reactions need catalysts to occur, but most of the billions of chemical reactions that make up our body metabolism do need such catalysts. Without them, these reactions would need thousands of degrees of heat to occur or thousands of years to come to completion. Not very useful for us!

With the help of enzymes however, these reactions occur effortlessly.

You could not live without enzymes, as enzymes are required for almost every chemical reaction in your body. Enzymes are absolutely vital and essential to life. This is why our body temperature must stay at 37 C. High fevers are dangerous: at 45 degrees Celsius, enzymes begin to denature, and life in the body begins to shut down.

Here are some of the things that enzymes help do inside our bodies:

• Our immune system needs enzymes to attack and kill bacteria, viruses or any other enemy agents (such as cancer cells)
• Inside our cells, enzymes are required to repair DNA as well as duplicate it for cell division
• The gut releases enzymes which aid in the digestion of foods

Our body is capable of making any enzyme that it needs. This is why if you ate nothing but cooked food, you could still survive. However, enzymes are very complicated molecules. They are made up of thousands of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) arranged in a very particular order. And the body needs to make kajilions of these molecules everyday – this is a huge job, one which requires a lot of energy and puts a big stress on your body.

But guess what. Living food already has in it, stores of enzymes, which we can eat and readily use!

The enzyme difference is an essential key to vibrant health.

But raw food cannot be looked upon as enzymes only. If it could – then we could just take enzymes (from a bottle) and enjoy the full benefits that a raw food diet provides. But we can’t do that. Benefits exist, but they don’t come close to the real thing. We cannot mimic or out-smart nature. What we can do is consume the gifts we get from it in their whole, natural state.

The PLANT-BASED diet

The Raw Superwoman diet is one based on plants. Plant-based foods are very distinctly different from animal-based foods.

First of all, let’s just start out by saying that there are no nutrients in animal-based foods that cannot be found in plant-based food. Animal-based foods may contain more cholesterol, vitamin A, D and B12, (plant foods contain no cholesterol, however our body can make cholesterol and it makes only as much as it needs), but plant-foods have dramatically more antioxidants, fiber and minerals. On average, they have less fat, and the fat that they do have is healthful fat. In addition, plant food alkalizes your body pH. Disease cannot exist in an alkaline environment. Countless studies have shown that cancer and other degenerative disease can be prevented or reversed with a plant-based diet. And in addition, most plant foods are a lot easier for your body to break down and digest, leaving lots of energy for you to enjoy!

So in conclusion,  raw foods, whole foods and plant foods are the way to go! Don’t take my word for it, try it for yourself. Get plenty of them into your diet and observe as your health and energy dramatically improves.