Spring is Here – Get in the Raw!

Enzyme-Rich Raw Foods Bring Clean Green Energy to the Tired Western Diet

By Paul Henderson

Waves gently waft out of the kitchen — garlic sautéing in olive oil, a softly simmering marinara sauce, a loaf of freshly rising bread. Even for those eating a healthy balanced diet — whether vegetarian, vegan, or macrobiotic — the lure of cooking good food is hard to resist.

But there is a case to be made against cooking at all. Raw foodists are a small but passionate group of foodies who argue that heating any food above a certain temperature destroys the nutritional content of that food. Important enzymes are killed off. The vitamin activity is decreased. To those advocating a raw food diet — in its varying degrees — adopting a diet of uncooked foods will help your system absorb all the nutrients available. Raw foodists say that adopting this lifestyle diet will maintain health, increase energy, and even cure disease.

“You could put a raw almond in the ground and you would get an almond tree,” says Jennifer Italiano, owner of the raw food café, Live. “But you could put a roasted almond in the ground, nothing would grow. Imagine that life force in your body. You can look at somebody who eats a lot of raw food, especially a raw foodie — they have a glow to them. They are naturally high and they feel great.”

Those who live on at least a partial raw food diet have an energy to them that is hard to ignore. Raw foodists argue that is because eating foods in their natural, uncooked state allows all of the enzymes to be available to the body. The generally accepted rule is that when food is heated above 118^oF for more than 20 minutes, all the enzymes are killed.

Living foods are packed with enzymes, according to holistic nutritionist and author of Living Food for Health: 12 Natural Superfoods to Transform Your Health, Dr. Gillian McKeith (PhD). When food is heated above this temperature “there is complete and total devastation of all enzymes within that specific food.”

To defend the case against cooking McKeith uses the well-known Pottenger Cat Study. Starting in the 1930s a chance discovery led Francis Pottenger, MD to conduct a formal 10-year study of 900 cats. The cats in the study that were fed an all raw milk and raw meat diet had optimal health — good bone structure, were free from disease, were easy to handle, and procreated well. The cats fed with a cooked meat and pasteurized milk diet didn’t fare so well. Degenerative disease was an issue, and three generations in, the cats could no longer produce viable offspring.

McKeith uses this case to demonstrate the power of living enzymes in food. (The Pottenger Cat Study’s relevance has been criticized not least of which for the reason that cats — unlike monkeys or mice, usually used for studies to correlate with humans — are pure carnivores. Also, no one, McKeith included, is advocating humans adopt a raw meat diet.)

“Low enzyme activity is perhaps the most prevalent problem among modern Western people today,” McKeith writes.

Making sure you get lots of enzymes from raw foods is important to protect yourself from food sensitivities and digestive disturbances down the road, according to Leslie Kenton, author of a number of nutrition books including Raw Energy and The Raw Food Bible.

“[T]he enzymes in raw fruits and vegetables also improve digestion since they support the body’s own enzyme systems,” she writes in The Raw Food Bible. “Each food contains just the enzymes and co-factors (vitamins or minerals linked to an enzyme) needed to break down that particular food. When we destroy these enzymes by cooking or processing our foods, then our body has to make more of its own digestive enzymes in order properly to digest and assimilate them.”

Over time, cooked food creates more work for the body, making a partial (at least) raw food diet easier on your system. Not only are important enzymes destroyed with cooking but protein is denatured, or even rendered useless. McKeith cites a U.S. Department of Agriculture study that concluded cooking steaks at 400oF caused a marked decrease (four- to thirty-fold) in the soluble protein in the meat. Vitamin activity is degraded as well. In Living Food for Health, McKeith quotes “one of the world’s leading researchers on the topic,” Dr. Viktoras Kulvinkskas who argues that cooking causes up to 85% nutrient loss.

On top of vitamin degradation, enzyme destruction, protein impotence, McKeith argues that cooking food adversely alters blood structure, which weakens immune response. Basically, raw is the way to go.

The case against cooking
Most of us eat cooked food for the most part, and have done so for our whole lives. But when you think about it, it’s hard to account for the fact that we find it so necessary to roast, bake, fry, sear, boil, poach, braise, and generally put a flame to our food when every other living thing in the history of the planet eats raw. It may sound like hyperbole to some, but that alone is a compelling case for raw foodism.

No other animal on Earth denatures its food by cooking. And no other animal suffers from the health challenges we humans do. As they say on the extensive raw food community website www.living-foods.com: “What did people eat before there was fire? They ate it raw!”

Other vocal raw foodies say similar things. “Every living organism on planet Earth is naturally a 100% raw food eater; not 99%, not 70% not 50% — 100%!” says raw food advocate Stephen Arlin in his book, Raw Power! Building Strength & Muscle Naturally.

Hardcore raw foodists like Arlin and David Wolfe (the “rock star of raw foodism,” according to Italiano) have an almost evangelical cadence to their writing. At first blush it appears that they preach rather than teach.

Arlin — who eats a diet of 60% raw organic fruits (by botanical definition of fruit, i.e. seed-bearing; tomatoes, avocadoes, peppers, etc.), 30% raw organic vegetables, and 10% raw organic nuts and sunflower seeds — advocates an entire lifestyle change to raw foodism. The detoxification process from adopting a raw food diet will be so complete that old illnesses will come to the surface, you may even taste old medications and foods as they are released, he writes. But the challenge at first is worth it and should be endured. Arlin says things like, “I can sincerely tell you it is magical . . . Everyday is a great day,” and “The level of health I have attained is indescribable, incomprehensible and unfathomable to people who haven’t experienced 100% raw-foodism.”

But hardcore raw foodies such as Arlin have blinders on when it comes to the realities for most people. It is surprising it could have been allowed by an editor or publisher, but he foolishly even advocates that readers should, “Immediately throw out all medications.”

While his logic may be correct — namely that all medicine is toxic to the body and taxes the system as it tries to get rid of it — haphazardly discarding medication is dangerous and downright dumb. While much of what Arlin and David Wolfe promote probably has a great deal of validity, the ideology of raw foodism can blind and distract from some practical problems with the almost religious attitude about eating 100% raw.

Why 100% raw might be a mistake
While Jennifer Italiano runs the popular and critically acclaimed raw food café Live, her attitude about raw foodism is balanced and tempered with a good dose of reality. She eats mostly raw herself (being at the restaurant most of the time) but she has no devotion to what she calls the “rawligion” that some raw foodies preach.

“I’m not fanatical,” she says. “You become very excited about it. You find this new way of living and you are all gung ho, but people go so hardcore, and then they crash. Food is important but when did it become about living?”

The more you talk to those interested in raw food in Ontario, the more you hear these sort of blasphemies against the 100% rawligion. Barry Tull runs Livia juice bar (located in clothing store Lileo in the Distillery District). At first he was offering a lot of raw food options, but in the winter people just weren’t that interested. So despite his devotion to raw food and juicing, he decided against banging his head against the wall, and started making veggie burgers and sandwiches.

Even Italiano at Live has a hot soup, and in the café’s 30-seat reincarnation this summer a few doors further west on Dupont St., she says the menu will diversify with some cooked foods.

“I think people should eat a lot of raw food,” she says. “I think it’s very good for you, but I think it is also good if you incorporate different things with it; brown rice, cooked quinoa, even vegetables, so that it’s a lot more soothing.”

Most holistic health practitioners agree that raw food is healthy and important, but 100% raw is too much. Especially in Canada.

Neemez Kassam teaches at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine in Toronto. He is an ND and has a masters of science in acupuncture from Bastyr University. His take on raw, from the Chinese medicine perspective, is that you can end up depleting the body’s digestive energy, especially if you already have digestive difficulties.

“It is not something that is recommended from a Chinese medicine perspective,” he says. “In small batches it is okay if there is an abundance of warmth and energy that you can tap into.”

In TCM, the Yin is the nutritional aspect, and Yang is the energetic aspect. If you have not cooked your food, your Yang aspect has to cook the food in your stomach. This is fine in small amounts and/or if you have an excess of Yang. For most people a partial raw food diet is okay and if you are going to eat raw, you can even balance the cold of the raw food with uncooked foods and spices that are warming such as ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, or licorice. And for someone with gastritis, a condition where there is too much acid in the stomach, a raw food diet will work okay because the system has an excess to burn off anyway.

But for about 20 to 25% of the population that have digestive complaints, Dr. Kassam says a raw food diet is a mistake. However, there are some definite health benefits.

“From a naturopathic perspective it is a great way to reduce the allergenicity of your food,” he says. “A raw food diet tends to be a cleaner source for food; you end up eating a lot of vegetables since that is what is available raw.”

A raw food diet, from the TCM perspective, is also good for the febrile diseases — with a lot of inflammation — such as rheumatoid arthritis.

McKeith in Living Food for Health also advocates raw food but not 100%. She suggests finding a balance of raw foods and cooked. It is important to eat some raw, or low-heated, food with your cooked foods to stem the destruction to the blood cells.

Unless you live in warmer climates such as southern California, it is just too hard on the system to eat all raw throughout the winter. There is a reason that in the depths of a snowy January night the body craves a steaming bowl of hot soup, and on a sweaty July day the body craves an icy fruit drink.

“[F]rom my own clinical experience, I can assure you that eating all-raw simply does not work for the majority of the population in modern Western society,” McKeith writes.

Tackling Disease With Raw Foodism
Despite all the caveats and hesitations about eating 100% raw, there is no question of the health benefits of a partial raw food diet. McKeith recommends doing a cleanse every seasonal change. Certainly many advocate a cleanse now that spring is upon us. You’ve been stagnating all winter. Warmer weather is here so your body can handle the cold foods. Now is the time to go raw and juice it up.

Those who start eating raw and drinking juices may find themselves feeling bloated and gassy at first. Diarrhea and even rashes are symptoms, but this is the body detoxifying.

“It will do a good job of cleaning out the system because of the amount of fibre,” says Dr. Kassam.

Italiano encourages those eating a raw diet on a cleanse to try to endure the gas and diarrhea and “get to the other side . . . you are detoxifying,” she says. “So you’ve got to get past that.”

Hallelujah Acres is a North Carolina based organization that advocates a biblical approach to health and eating that leads them to a diet that is 85% raw, and 15% cooked. They have a retreat also in Shallow Lake, Ontario. While for the secular it is tough to get beyond the rhetoric of “living the way the good Lord created us to live” and following “His plan for ultimate health,” the nuts and bolts — and the results — of their diet are amazing.

Judy Fleming worked at the Shallow Lake retreat, and has now set up the Get Healthy! Resource Centre in Newmarket, where she does workshops, runs support groups, and even has cooking classes. Fleming is a healthy ball of energy, enthusiastic without being pedagogical about the Hallelujah Diet. In her mid-40s she developed serious rheumatoid arthritis in various places in her body leaving her incapacitated much of the time. She had to move her bedroom on to the main floor of her house because she couldn’t climb stairs. After working for eight to 10 hours a day, and too long sitting on a couch after dinner, she would require help from her husband and son just to lift her upright.

“I had excruciating pain,” she says. “I just thought it was something I had to put up with.”

This defeatist attitude was fed to her by her medical doctor – a doctor who told her this was something “you have to get used to” and “you are getting older, this is what happens” – who did nothing more than prescribe Tylenol 3s. Fearing the addictive quality of those, she used Extra-Strength Tylenols — seven to 12 per day just to function; that did not eliminate her pain.

“It wasn’t really a good life,” she says.

Then she discovered the Hallelujah Diet and gave the 85% raw, 15% cooked diet a try. She lost 35 unnecessary pounds and within two months of eating raw, 75% of her pain was gone. She even went to 100% raw for a six month period and has been energetic, with the same healthy weight for 6-1/2 years. While she is as extreme a raw foodie as they come in Ontario — she still eats mostly raw from May to September — she doesn’t think 100% is really the way to go. Even her stint at 100% left her feeling cold (as Chinese medicine would predict) and she lost too much weight. But now at 56-years-old and back to an 85% raw diet, she says her weight is perfect, and her energy is through the roof.

“I’ve challenged raw foodists from down south to come live 100% raw in Ontario,” she said. “No one has done it yet.”

More Hallelujah Diet Testimonials
Duane Francis is a chiropractor from Utah who weighed 210 pounds, otherwise had been healthy, but developed arthritis in his hands. As a chiropractor who manipulates necks and backs for a living, arthritis in the hands was a real problem. His main problem was an affection for juicy hamburgers, and big steaks with potatoes. He decided to try the Hallelujah Diet, much to the joy of his wife who had been trying to eat healthier. They went on the diet and after nine months he lost 42 pounds and his arthritis disappeared.

Part of his problem, according to the experts, was that his diet of animal products was causing uric acid buildup in the body. Eliminating those food, shifting to a predominantly raw diet, and his problem disappeared. It was that simple.

Rhonda Malkmus is the wife of Hallelujah Diet founder Rev. George Malkmus. After a horrific car crash with a train she and a friend escaped unscathed. But years later she developed arthritis so bad that when she got up in the morning she had to run hot water over her hands to make them work. She simply saw the seminar went home and applied the principles, and one day woke up with no pain.

“I would encourage anybody and everybody to give it a try,” she said in their promotional DVD. “It certainly can’t hurt, and if you’re like me, it can be a life changing experience.”

Osteoporosis is reaching epidemic proportions in North America as a result of our high salt, high animal food diet. Mistakenly, say the experts on the Hallelujah DVD, too many people think they lack calcium and then over-supplement. But the real problem is calcium excretion in the urine. The body does what it needs to in the short term to regulate the delicate balance of calcium in the bloodstream required to keep us alive. As Tennessee chiropractor Rowen Pfeifer says, the body leaches calcium out of the bones to get this balance in the “hope” that the person will eat less protein at the next meal. But if the cycle continues, by the time it shows up on X-rays, 50% of the minerals in the bones are lost.

Carla Curry of Palm Bay, Florida had arthritis in every bone in her body, had extreme osteoporosis, and had large painful cysts in both breasts. She gave the 85% raw diet a try and after three months she was 80% pain free and her arthritic bumps were beginning to disappear. At the end of a year on the diet, all her problems disappeared and she now looks youthful and energetic.

Doing active weight-bearing exercise and reducing your protein load to less than 60 grams a day will help those with osteoporosis, according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman (MD) a family physician and author of Eat to Live and Fasting and Eating Healthy. Getting the right kind of protein from green leafy vegetables, and nuts and seeds is critical.

Like diets of any kind, even very healthy ones, many feel it is just too tough to stick to. But those challenges for raw food diets are easy to overcome. If you are going to eat 85% raw and stick to something challenging like the Hallelujah Diet, it might be tough. But eating raw can (and should) be done transitionally, or even just in small amounts. Simply adding some more salads to your weekly regime and less cooked meats will help. Make or buy a big tasty fresh juice even once a week. Even adding one more raw carrot to your diet every day will do your body good. It doesn’t have to be about sacrificing what makes you happy, it can simply be about adding what makes you healthy.


Raw Food Resources
• www.living-foods.com – Raw food community website
• www.hacres.ca/gethealthy – Get Healthy! Resource Centre 905-853-7014
• www.davidwolfe.com – David Wolfe
• www.rawfood.com – Stephen Arlin
• www.rawganique.com – raw foodists selling hemp clothing
• www.alissacohen.com – California raw foodist
• Living Food for Health: 12 Natural Superfoods to Transform Your Health, by Dr. Gillian McKeith, , 2004, Piatkus Books
• The Raw Energy Bible, by Leslie Kenton, 1998, Vermillion
• Raw Power! Building Strength & Muscle Naturally, Stephen Arlin, 2002, Maul Brothers
• The Sunfood Diet Success System, David Wolfe, 2002, Maul Brothers