Eating Raw Foods for A New You
by Joe Alexander
 There
are dozens and hundreds and thousands of diets, diet books and diet experts in
the world today. Most people live on an omnivorous diet -- that is, anything
that is possible to chew up and swallow and live long enough to tell about it,
they will eat. But for one reason or another, many people have decided to adopt
some restrictions.
Sometimes the reason is one's alignment with a religious tradition. For
instance, some people won't drink wine or eat pork, or they won't eat meat on
Fridays, or they eat unleavened bread on certain holidays. There is little
health value in following these customs, but many people do it anyway because
they feel there's something virtuous or holy about following some ancient
tradition.
Some people don't want to kill animals for food, thinking it unjustified
cruelty; so they become vegetarians and won't eat any meat.
Some people hope to gain better health through some dietary restriction; one
wants to lose weight, or overcome disease or prevent disease, or feel one's
best. When people want to go about changing their diet to become healthier,
there are two basic approaches to follow in deciding what changes to make. The
first is the approach of most doctors, dieticians, diet authors and so forth,
and that is the "one baby-step forward at a time" approach. For
instance, you may be a little better off if you sweeten your pies with honey
instead of sugar. Or you may reduce your risk of heart attack by eating lean
beef instead of the fattier sorts. Or you may get less constipated by eating
brown bread instead of white.
The other way is the "quantum leap" approach. This approach starts
off with the common-sense premise that what is most NATURAL for us is likely to
be best for our health! So following this approach, we say, never mind what we
have gotten used to, but let's consider, if we didn't have thousands of
generations of gradually more and more unnatural dietary habits behind us now
determining what we eat, what would our natural diet be like? The logical
conclusion seems to be that the natural diet would consist of foods we could eat
and enjoy -- whole, unprocessed and uncooked, just the way Nature gives them to
us.
An interesting fact to note is that the most idealistic emotional feelings
tend to lead people to feel that a diet of raw fruits, nuts and vegetables is
"lightest, purest and most beautiful," while unprejudiced reasoning
leads us to the conclusion that these things must be our natural diet because
they are the foods we are attracted to and enjoy in their raw, natural state.
The most pure hearted intuition and the most thoroughly rational science always
lead to the same point.
The greatest value of the raw food diet is its transformative value. To a
great extent, when you take up the raw food diet, you become a new and different
and better person. You don't just stay the same old person, only a little
healthier. You become, to a great extent, a new being with new interests, a new
philosophy and outlook on life, new goals and desires. You become more of your
essence, your true and natural self. You become a person who is more a part of
the one great life of Nature and less of the confused human world. You become
less "of the World" and more "of the Earth."
Such transformations of course are impossible to imagine before you have
experienced them. So the raw food diet doesn't so much "improve you"
as "replace you" with somebody better! One of the most common
statements of people who take up raw food diet in middle age or later, is that
they now feel younger than they did even as teenagers. And yet at the same time
they feel possessors of an ancient and ageless and eternal wisdom. The spirit is
old and wise, and fresh and young at the same time.
Raw foodists get new insight into how much better (than we commonly imagine)
life can and should be, how Nature intended it to be. The common little miseries
of life, such as frequent colds and flu, indigestions, chapping of the hands and
lips in cold weather, bad breath, sluggishness and depression, disappear, and
become seen as not natural and normal parts of life at all, but indications of
an unbalanced and unhealthy, chronically poisoned condition.
Unfortunately most of us who take up the raw food diet in our adult years
have already been badly damaged by our preceding years and generations of
unnatural living. Most of us already have decayed teeth and other deformities.
But we do the best we can, and hope that by writing books and spreading this
knowledge we can influence a widespread return to more natural living so that
future generations do not have to suffer as we have. And of course there is the
matter of reincarnation: we want to propagate knowledge that can help make this
world a better place to be reborn into! That is one reason why I am trying to
spread the knowledge and practice of a raw food diet. If reincarnation is true
and I am to be reborn into this world, I want this knowledge widely available so
I can rediscover it again!
Certain studies by eminent scientists have shown that unnatural diet in
childhood leads to certain irreversible physical deformities. They studied
primitive peoples living on natural food and then noted the changes in
succeeding generations as they took up "civilized" diets including
sugar, white flour, liquor and so forth. Most noticeable was a narrowing of the
structure of the facial bones with teeth developing poorly. It then becomes
logical to speculate that other bone structures, such as the pelvis, may also
develop abnormally on unnatural food, and this may be one of the main reasons
that civilized women often have such a difficult time in childbirth. And if the
body cannot develop normally, how can we expect the mind to? As Arnold Ehret
wrote, once you have taken a few steps on the road back to Paradise Health, you
see that modern man is not at all a highly intelligent and advanced creature,
but a degenerated shadow of what he ought to be.
I have read in farmers' magazines, that if you want your hogs to fatten up
quickly, feed them boiled potatoes, not raw; that if you want your cattle to
gain weight, cook their grain; don't feed it to them raw. The huge American
overweight problem is probably due to the unnatural eating of cooked foods,
rather than any specific types of "fattening" foods.
Why does raw food provide such better nourishment, such superior vitalizing
and health-giving qualities, than cooked food? Well, we can look at it from two
angles, the material and the immaterial. On the one hand cooking destroys the
natural chemical composition of the food. The vitamins are altered and
destroyed, the proteins are scrambled, the enzymes are torn to pieces. Even
simple mixtures of just a few inorganic elements can often be totally changed in
character through cooking over a Bunsen burner. What then of foodstuffs,
composed of thousands of the most complex organic chemicals poised in fragile
balance?
Taking it from the immaterial angle, the great harm of cooking is that it
destroys or drives off the life-force in the food. Just look at how strong and
alive a fresh raw carrot looks, and compare that to the limp and decaying
appearance of a cooked carrot. Some people are able to dowse the life-force in
foods via a pendulum. The wider the circle the pendulum swings in, the greater
the life-force. They find that the pendulum indicates much greater life-force in
raw foods, as our common sense would expect.
But the most convincing test is that of your own experience. You can make a
comparison between a meal of raw vegetables, and a meal of the same types of
vegetables cooked. The raw vegetables leave you feeling light, fresh and alert,
whereas the same vegetables cooked will make you feel lethargic and sluggish. It
is common experience, how one feels lazy, dull and sluggish for hours after a
big meal, such as Thanksgiving dinner. But meals of raw food don't produce such
lethargy and dullness. Vegetarians don't believe in killing for food, but too
often they kill their food by cooking it!
Raw food diet is a sort of rational and healthy austerity. It is the sort of
discipline that makes you more free. For example, a skilled draftsman and
painter is free to make pictures that look like anything he or she desires to
create. The unskilled person is free only to fool around and make
childish-looking pictures. The raw food diet is a healthy discipline that frees
you to be more creative, work harder and think more clearly. It also makes you
more free to enjoy the beauties and wonders of the natural world.
There is a popular saying, "You are what you eat." Well, this is a
partial truth. There are many, many factors that go into making up just what and
who you are. Food is one of them, and one of no small importance. Diet has much
to do with the health of the body and much to do with the basic attitude of the
mind, whether it is aspiring, searching for truth and growth, or just wants to
stay stuck in the same old rut.
 This
article is excerpted from Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda!, ?1990, by Joe
Alexander. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Blue Dolphin Publishing.
http://www.bluedolphinpublishing.com
Info/Order
this book.
About the Author
Joe
Alexander is an eclectic artist who finished 11th grade and two first-year
college courses. He has no degrees, credentials or qualifications of any sort.
He is not married and has no children. His major lifelong interest has been art,
specifically painting. Joe makes a living painting signs, portraits, landscapes
and mandalas.
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