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By Marie-Lise Pelletier
Why eat raw? Well, I'll try to persuade you!
To begin with, you should know that the craze for raw food is worldwide. Whether it is on the Internet or in new books, there is no shortage of information on the subject.
There are even Hollywood stars who make a point of saying they are fans, like Demi Moore or Barbra Streisand.
In the United States, there are more than twenty restaurants specializing in this field. There are even living food centers where people can recharge their batteries by eating raw. It is important to understand that most people turn to raw food for health reasons.
Enzymes are energy and life. There is no way to see enzymes with the naked eye, but we can feel the life and energy that comes from the enzymes.
Here is a good example: if I take a raw and a roasted sunflower seed and plant them in the soil, after a month the roasted sunflower seed will disintegrate in the soil and the raw one will start its germination process, which in turn will give birth to a beautiful flower filled with sunflower seeds.
As this example shows, the difference between a raw and a roasted sunflower seed is that one has enzymes and the other does not.
One has life potential, the other has had its life destroyed by cooking.
When you eat raw food, you are eating a food full of living enzymes and while you are enjoying the good taste of a living food, the enzymes, like a small army, are working throughout your body like a team repairing what is faulty.
You feel the benefits because the food eaten raw is full of energy and because it carries within it the enzymes necessary to digest itself.
You don't need to put in extra effort to be able to digest that food because it already has its own digestive enzymes, so you are not mortgaging your own enzymes.
When you cook food, you destroy its enzymes. So after eating cooked food you feel tired and sluggish, simply because inside your body your own enzymes have to leave their job, which may have been to cleanse the liver, protecting you from disease, and instead come to digest the cooked food that no longer contains its own enzymes.
It is clear that we are wasting our own enzymes every time we eat cooked food.
Cooked foods do not contain living enzymes, so they require our body's own enzymes to digest the food.
If there are no enzymes left in the food, then we must rely on our own metabolism to produce the enzymes needed to digest and assimilate the nutrients.
An overproduction of digestive enzymes overtaxes our potential to produce metabolic enzymes.
These enzymes are like a small, specialized army that activates and directs biological processes such as digestion, nerve impulses, detoxification, the immune system, repair and healing of the body and furthermore they are essential for tasting, thinking, breathing and even dreaming.
For people with obesity problems, in raw food we find an enzyme called lipase, which is able to penetrate saturated fat deposits, break them down into smaller pieces and facilitate their elimination.
The lack of enzymes is directly linked to several health problems such as
The principle is to eat raw to save your own enzymes!
Moreover, cooking destroys not only the enzymes but also a good part of their vitamins.
In the best of worlds, the ideal would be to eat fresh products, young shoots, germinate cereals, legumes and vegetables.
Sprouting is a growth process during which enzymes are at work and nutrients develop, hence the term LIVING food.
And we find in living foods a large quantity of active organic nutrients, enzymes, phytonutrients, quality water and energy.
Did you know that a sunflower seed eaten raw contains lots of good things to nourish your body? If you eat that sunflower seed that you sprouted, what we commonly call seedling, well, you get ten times more vitamins, minerals and enzymes!
Also, when you start eating raw, you will start to discover the taste, flavors and smells of the food. If you cook a food, all of that changes, from the texture to the smells.
Of course I don't want to turn you into raw food eaters, but I think that if I could make you realize the importance of eating raw I am satisfied. On the other hand, if you feel like it, there is nothing to stop you from starting slowly, simply by adding a few raw elements to your meal, the ideal moment being the beginning of the meal because you will already have the enzymes of the raw food which will start their enzymatic work.
Well, imagine that I start to cook the meal at home (I can tell you that with four kids it's not long before they come around me and try to pick at my dishes!) Well here's your chance, that's when I put raw food on the table and like magic they eat it all.
If I put the raw food on the table at the same time as the meal, my chances of them all getting eaten are pretty slim. Why force yourself to chew when there are cooked foods that are easy to chew? You will probably laugh but it is a reality, I have one of my boys who is like that, if there are foods that take longer to chew, he eats them less!
Try it and see.
The 12 steps to a raw food
Victoria Boutenko
The delights of living foods
Jalissa Letendre
La guerre du cru
Guy Claude Burger
Roger Faloci éditeur
To contact the author:
Marie-Lise Pelletier
mlpelletier@videotron.ca
Published in the Gazette des thérapeutes
September 2003 edition
Reprinted with permission of the author
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