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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Stick your
knife and fork in the dirt: It's time to talk pure naked food.
That's naked as in natural, not preserved, processed,
pasteurized, adulterated or irradiated. Not baked, boiled,
braised, barbecued or browned in any way. While vegetarians
have gone green for generations, an increasing crop of
health-conscious Americans is now going raw.
The raw food movement is not
new, but it has grown significantly in the last decade. When
most of today's chefs were kids, you couldn't find a raw food
"cookbook." Today Whole Foods stores can have a
dozen on display in the produce section alone.
Louise Meyers, owner of Pryde's
Old Westport, a kitchen and home appliance store in the Kansas
City, Mo., area, is seeing so much interest in raw food, she
has stocked up on blenders, food processors, dehydrators and
other devices used in raw food preparation.
Then there's the Bliss Fest.
The Kansas City-area celebration of raw food and healthy
living that started in a backyard a year ago with a handful of
people grew so large this year it had to be moved to
Parkville's English Landing Park.
While there are numerous
variations on the raw food diet — most don't include meat,
cheese or eggs, but some do — the bulk of raw foodists
follow a largely plant-based diet that features vegetables,
fruits, nuts, seeds, sprouts and nothing heated above 118
degrees.
While not all raw foodists (or
"conscious eaters," as some prefer) are 100 percent
raw, they all share a common belief: the more raw, the better.
"When you cook, it
(changes) your proteins and causes you to over-consume,"
said Heidi Van Pelt, a vegan chef and former personal chef for
actor Woody Harrelson. "You need to eat more because
you've cooked out the vitamins and nutrients your body
requires."
Anthropologists Richard
Wrangham and Nancy Lou Conklin-Brittain of Harvard University,
however, say humans were meant to consume cooked foods.
Heating foods, they say, renders them more digestible,
allowing better absorption. In fact, the practice of cooking
foods — humans have done it for more than 250,000 years —
has produced biological adaptations including smaller teeth,
longer small intestines and smaller colons.
Translation: we're not built to
eat an all-raw diet.
Furthermore, Susan Bowerman,
director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, sounded this
warning for extreme raw foodists in the Los Angeles Times.
"A raw vegan food plan ...
is likely to be deficient in vitamin B-12. A compound found
naturally only in animal foods, vitamin B-12 protects nerve
fibers and genetic material. In a recent study of 201 raw-foodists
in the Netherlands, published in the Journal of Nutrition, 38
percent were vitamin B-12 deficient, and more than half had
elevated blood levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that
requires vitamin B-12 for processing and that, when elevated,
increases heart disease risk."
Maureen Veto-Slater, who
organized Kansas City's raw-food Bliss Fest, said lots of
people are vitamin-deficient.
"To be fair, if they
tested people on a standard American diet they'd find a lot of
processed foods, which are devoid of many nutrients, including
B-12 and many more," she said. "That controversy has
been going on for years with B-12. So take a supplement and
get over it. It's not a big deal."
As far as humans not being made
for an all-raw-food diet?
Nobody said you have to go all
raw, she said. Just take it slow, listen to your body and use
common sense.
"If you just eliminate the
processed foods you've come a long way toward health,"
she said.
Andrea Giancoli, a
Los-Angeles-based registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the
American Dietetic Association, said she has seen a steady
increase in interest in raw food over the last decade. The
reason?
"There is an explosion of
communication, and everybody wants to feel good," she
said. "We have fast-paced lifestyles, stress, we work a
lot, and we're bombarded with junk food, and people want to
feel better so they tune in to something they think might do
that for them."
Giancoli supports eating more
raw fruits and vegetables but worries that the most religious
raw foodists are taking the diet to extremes, making claims
not supported by science and possibly harming their health in
the name of helping it.
It's just not clear that raw is
always best. In some cases, she said, cooking foods makes
important nutrients more bio-available for the body. This is
true with the beta carotene in carrots and spinach and the
lycopene in tomatoes.
A LIFESTYLE CHOICE
Say what you want, raw foodists
counter, you can't argue with the way they feel.
Like many living the raw-food
lifestyle, Veto-Slater says eating raw helped her regain her
health after a serious illness. She still remembers the
desperation she felt a few years ago.
Facing the stress of raising
four children as a single mom and working 12-hour days as an
advertising and promotions director, she began to fall apart.
She couldn't sleep, was anxious and depressed and was
diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Doctors gave her a pill for every
ill, 15 prescriptions in all. She just kept getting worse.
Finally, bed-ridden and more
than 200 pounds, she landed in the hospital. She was convinced
the drugs that were supposed to help her were making her
worse.
That's when she found raw
foods. She threw away her pills and began to eat a healthy
diet of fresh, real food — greens, cucumbers, carrots, nuts,
seeds, fruit and soups. Her weight melted off, her energy
returned and the depression and anxiety vanished. Ecstatic,
she started a raw group at meetup.com and began to hold a
monthly potluck.
"I thought if I could just
meet five other (raw food) people," she said.
Today her group has 637
members. And she's not surprised.
"Heart disease is rising.
Obesity is rising. Diabetes is rising," she said.
"It's like something is wrong here. What is it? Look at
your plate. Unless you're shopping in the produce section or
around the edges, everything else is not real food. It's
chemical. It's from a lab. Your body doesn't recognize
it."
But isn't eating just raw food
a tad extreme?
"It's not a
religion," she said. "You don't have to eat 100
percent raw food. But even if you eat 50 percent of whole
plant foods, then you can build your immune system up and
handle that other stuff. I'm 52 years old and I feel
healthier."
Nationally the same thing is
happening. Supermodel Carol Alt, now 48, credits her raw food
diet with helping her overcome an array of chronic health
problems while making her feel better than she did in her 20s.
She has even written two raw food books, "Eating in the
Raw" and "The Raw 50."
Feeling good on a raw food diet
is fine. But dietitians and scientists say that before you
embark on a raw food regimen, there are scientific claims to
check out.
For instance, proponents of raw
food diets say cooking food destroys naturally occurring
enzymes that help us absorb and digest our food.
"That's not an untrue
statement," said Giancoli, the Los Angeles dietitian.
"But enzymes are also rendered inactive by your stomach
acid. We have our own enzymes that we make that are perfectly
capable of digesting the food. We don't need the enzymes from
food."
Despite all the books and
festivals, there's a lot of misinformation about raw food
diets. Just ask Heidi Van Pelt.
"The first thing (people)
say is, 'What are you, a rabbit? You just eat lettuce?' Then I
talk about raw fettuccine Alfredo. I let them know how a
recipe goes, and their mouth starts watering. It's got to be
tasty. If it's not tasty, it's not worth it."
Eating raw food is not as
extreme as some make it out to be, wrote Sarma Melngailis in
her new book, "Living Raw Food."
"What's so revolutionary
about eating only plant foods that grow naturally from the
earth and are fed by sunlight? What's so crazy about eating
only plant foods that haven't been sauteed, boiled, roasted,
flame-broiled, grilled over flaming coals, fried in sizzling
hot oil, zapped in a microwave or otherwise manipulated into a
state of altered molecular structure? Why not leave the
molecules how they were meant to be?"
Natalie George, a 31-year-old
raw foodist and holistic nutrition consultant from Edgerton,
Kan., has been virtually 100 percent raw for two years. She
discovered raw foods on a business trip to San Francisco where
she ate lasagna at a raw food restaurant called Cafe
Gratitude.
It was a revelation. Not only
did it taste good, "but for the first time in years I
didn't worry about how many calories something had, or whether
it was going to make me fat," she said. "I didn't
even know that was possible."
She liked it so much she and
some friends are hoping to bring a Cafe Gratitude to Kansas
City.
George usually eats blueberries
and a frozen banana for breakfast. She loves kale with sea
salt or with an avocado chipotle dressing. She eats carrots,
broccoli, chia seeds and vegetable rolls and blends maca, a
powdered root from Peru, and raw rice protein powder into
smoothies and other recipes.
"I have more energy
now," she said. "And it's a lot easier to get in
touch with when I am really hungry. Before I would eat and eat
and eat and I was always hungry. Now it's like I can listen to
my body more."
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