Hi!

What do you guys think about this extract of an article?

"Percentage Cooked Food to Raw Food
Consumed and Percentage Nutrition Assimilated


% of raw food % cooked food % assimilation
5 95 .03
10 90 .06
25 75 .1
50 50 .3
75 25 1.0
99 1 3.0
100 0 30.0


"I'd like to explain this table by way of an illustration. We'll call the main character Jim, age between 40 and 50. Jim eats very little raw food. He is always hungry because he is not getting enough nutrients. He has a big belly because he eats a lot to try to fill the hunger in his body. He has a weak back because of the big belly, and he's always tired. Jim consumes a diet that is 5% raw. Anyone who makes sandwiches or buys hamburgers is eating about 5% raw because the tomatoes and lettuce make up the 5%. At this point Jim's body is assimilating approximately .03% of the nutrition in the food. Let's say Jim got really, really sick. He goes to a health store and learns that he might feel better if he eats a vegetarian diet. He adds a lot of fresh food to his diet and cuts out the meat. He is now consuming 25% raw food and 75% cooked food. His assimilation increased three times to .1% or 1/10%. He's starting to feel better and he has a little more energy. He hangs out with his new friends who are also vegetarians. One of them invites him to a raw food potluck. Jim is so impressed with the dishes and the presentation that he increases his raw food intake to 50%. He is now assimilating 1%. 1% is a lot, a good number, 30 times more than he used to have. He begins to look like an interesting man. Jim used to think that no woman would ever look at him, because he was getting old and aching. Now he looks healthy, he's looking younger and his color is coming back.


"Jim begins to read a lot of books on raw food eating and he even begins to teach his own raw food class. He is now consuming 99% raw food and 1% cooked food. And he is assimilating about 3%. Jim is so healthy now that he looks 10 years younger. He has a lot of friends and he is very social. Everyone loves him. We check in with Jim several years later. He has read many raw food books and has gone to every possible retreat and class offered on raw food. One morning he wakes up and hears his inner voice telling him to give up cooked food all together and to go 100% on raw food. He makes that choice. Within two or three months of consuming only raw foods, his assimilation becomes 30%. His assimilation has increased form 3.0% to 30% in just two to three months. Why did changing his diet from 99% raw food to 100% raw food make such a difference in his assimilation rate? The 1% is significant because his body's defense against cooked food is now taken away. He now begins to eat only once a day, a small bowl of salad, that's it. He only needs one small bowl because he is assimilating 30%. Remember when Jim was eating 95% cooked food and ate a lot to feed his starving body? AT that point he was only assimilating .03%. Now on a 100% raw food diet, Jim is assimilating 30% nutrition. This is why he only needs a small amount of food to satisfy him. That's enough for this man. That's how much I eat. That's how much my husband eats. That's how much my children eat.


"When my son Sergei, who is 16, goes snowboarding, he leaves at 6:30 a.m. and comes home at 7:00 p.m. He takes with him two organic oranges to eat on the shuttle bus. He eats one on the way up to the snow and one on the way back home. That's enough because he assimilates 30%.


"Sergei says that his snowboarding friends go several times to their lunch bags to drink hot chocolate and eat sandwiches because they get so hungry. They get hungry and have energy crashes and have to go eat. Meanwhile, Sergei is snowboarding all day and he's never tired, and all this on two oranges. The secret is that he is assimilating 30% while they are assimilating only between .03 and .1%. Going back to Jim is an example, why did the final 1% shift from eating 99% to 100% raw food make such a difference in the assimilation rate? I gleaned the answer to this from the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) literature.

% assimilated, cooked or raw, will be different for every single micro- and macronutrient and phytochemical. Cooking will destroy some but for others, there may be no or minimal loss.

One study found cooking losses to be 34.6, 30, 52.2, 45.9 and 32.2% for ascorbic acid, thiamine, riboflavin, beta-carotene and folic acid respectively. Ref is: Agte V, Tarwadi K, Mengale S, Hinge A, Chiplonkar S, Vitamin profile of cooked foods: how healthy is the practice of ready-to-eat foods?, Int J Food Sci Nutr. 2002 May;53(3):197-208, PMID: 11951583

There are more details on nutrient losses here:
Souci SW, Fachmann W, Kraut H, Food Composition and Nutrition Tables. Boca Raton, Fla. CRC Press 2000.

People get fat not because their bodies are starving for nutrition but because they have trained their bodies to ignore the signals to stop eating (or more often stop eating junk) when they are full. It is REALLY HARD for people to overcome this. Victoria herself has this problem.

Victoria is very intelligent but she sometimes stretches the truth in her enthusiasm. Enjoy her enthusiasm but don't take any particular claim as gospel.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2008 02:53PM by arugula.

Being a 100% fresh raw food eater I found the last data on the table (100 0 30.0) to be very interesting. The all raw food eater gets a lot more nutrition for their food dollar.

That was a great read, very inspiring. >8) Thanks for sharing!

Well, is it further explained how she comes across those numbers?? Or does one have to read up on AA?

Here I found that article:

[www.wtv-zone.com]

Very inspiring and most of it does make a lot of sense but some parts are waaay to exaggerated.

I do not think anybody in this world could proof any numbers like that.
There are also many flaws like for example somebody who eats 95 % cooked (like many many people do, which are not ailing too much visibly for many years) absorbs only 0.03% nutrition. After that theory that person would die within a month. No chance of survival if in the diet hardly any nutrition and absorbation rate is only 0.03% of it!!!

But on the other current Victoria Boutenko thread with an article excerpt:
[www.rawfoodsupport.com]
she says that she spends over $300 per family member on food,that's more than $10 a day. These articles were obviously written at different times.

The article even says that they're not based on anything scientific. I'm not denying that eating 100% raw is better than eating cooked, but I just can't accept those numbers as being accurate just because she says so - which is basically what that article is - her opinion.

Gary

The article is feel good BS really.

Positive feedback loops are quite powerful, though. =D

Wierd thought-things happen when I thought-experiment with those numbers.

According to that article, if "Jim" puts non-raw salad dressing on his one salad, he magically erases 27 percent of his food assimilation for the day.

-DaveK

Actually a somewhat fatty dressing with a salad has been proven to increase the uptake of fat soluble vitamins. Obviously a raw dressing is preferable.