August 28, 2009

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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