What do you eat or not eat? And why? I have seen many differing opinions. Bryan said he doesn't drink green drinks. Is there a particular reason? And I already read about Rawgetarian's distaste for cashews. Rawgosia doesn't eat legumes...something about starch, but I'm not sure why. Are nuts and seeds only appropriate to eat when sprouted?

I have read a couple of books, but am still looking for the most healthful diet. I know it is a personal decision, however, I would like to know how and why each individual arrived at their chosen path.

Thanks so much.

Julie

Nobody knows the most healthful diet. People have opinions, that is all.

I am wary of eating too much sweet fruit because wild fruits that our hominoid relatives and ancestors eat (ate) were not so high in fructose as the ones we have today. Milton discusses this in one of her primate diet papers.

Fructose does terrible things to the skin when a lot of it is consumed via glycation reactions (AGES--advanced glycation end products or glycosylation end products) because it accumulates in the long-lived tissues such as collagen. Once the tangled crosslinks are formed there is no way to unkink them. Prevention is much better.

This has been shown in humans and nonhumans. But in the experiments, pure fructose is given, not fruits, and surely fruits have some antiglycation protective substances. We just don't know how much.

I still eat legumes because I don't want too much fructose and I don't want too much fat. But if you choose wisely you can have your fruit and not too much fructose, too. You can see this at nutritiondata.com, using the search tools to display foods highest in fructose, and avoid too much of those.

Aside from that, prudency is to eat a wide variety of foods, not to develop any deficiencies, and not to fall in love with dogma or acetism but to keep an open mind.

refs.

Mikulikova K, Eckhardt A, Kunes J, Zicha J, Miksik I.
Advanced glycation end-product pentosidine accumulates in various tissues of
rats with high fructose intake.
Physiol Res. 2007 Feb 8; [Epub ahead of print]
PMID: 17298207 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Yu Y, Thorpe SR, Jenkins AJ, Shaw JN, Sochaski MA, McGee D, Aston CE,
Orchard TJ, Silvers N, Peng YG, McKnight JA, Baynes JW, Lyons TJ; The DCCT/EDIC
Research Group.
Advanced glycation end-products and methionine sulphoxide in skin collagen of
patients with type 1 diabetes.
Diabetologia. 2006 Oct;49(10):2488-98. Epub 2006 Aug 29.
PMID: 16955213 [PubMed - in process]

Lingelbach LB, Mitchell AE, Rucker RB, McDonald RB.
Accumulation of advanced glycation endproducts in aging male Fischer 344 rats
during long-term feeding of various dietary carbohydrates.
J Nutr. 2000 May;130(5):1247-55.
PMID: 10801926 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Levi B, Werman MJ.
Long-term fructose consumption accelerates glycation and several age-related
variables in male rats.
J Nutr. 1998 Sep;128(9):1442-9.
PMID: 9732303 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


g fructose
/200 kcal
serving
24 Grapes, red or green (European type, such as Thompson seedless), raw
23 Dates, medjool
23 Apples, raw,
22 Watermelon, raw
21 Pears, raw
18 Figs
17 Blueberries, raw
17 Cherries, sweet, raw
16 Melons, honeydew, raw
16 Persimmons, japanese, raw
15 Strawberries, raw
14 Kiwi
14 Cherries, sour, red, raw
14 Dates, deglet noor
13 Plums, raw
13 Currants, raw
12 Strawberries, frozen, unsweetened
11 Blackberries, raw
11 Abiyuch, raw
11 Melons, cantaloupe, raw
11 Bananas, raw
9 Oranges, raw, navels
9 Tangerines, raw
9 Raspberries, raw
9 Pineapple, raw
8 Grapefruit, raw
8 Peaches, raw
7 Clementines, raw
6 Nectarines, raw
4 Apricots, raw
3 Cranberries, raw
1 Rowal, raw
0 Avocado, raw

This is really fascinating information, arugula - thank you for posting!

I don't know whether to worry about GI or not, but plainly the ranking of fructose is quite different from the ranking of GI - Cousens, for instance, would say that bananas and cantaloupe melons should only ever be rare treats, but blueberries are fine to eat freely!

Who is Cousens? I assume he has written a/some book(s) as I have seen his name pop up now and again.

What are the most read books on raw food eating?

Sorry for all the questions (I'm not done yet for sure), but I have no patience with the learning curve. I want instant knowledge.

Thanks as always.

Julie

I love green smoothies. Check out Victoria Boutenko's green smoothie book titled "Green for Life." From my experience, the quest for "instant knowledge" and possessing "no patience with the learning curve" in nutrition/raw foods/healing, etc. is none too wise. Be patient, study, experiment, and give your body and mind the time to figure out what's best for you. Stay open-minded. Create your own diet. If at all possible, shun dogma and overnight, universal cure alls; the yuppie plagues of the raw foods community.
[www.amazon.com]

Cousens is one of the "raw food gurus"; he has written many books over the decennia and recently represents the low-sugar school of raw eating, at least in print. He published a book called RAINBOW GREEN LIVE CUISINE, which spread the ideas of basically one person called Young (he writes the books in THE PH MIRACLE series), who says that we are all, even by far most rawists, being eaten alive and composted by fungi, yeast and molds and poisoned by their metabolic wastes that they excrete into our bloodstream after they eat up what we meant to nourish ourselves. These wastes are called mycotoxins. As you may imagine, it is a compelling image if not theory and it freaks a lot of people out! I don't know about you, but I don't want to be composted until I am dead - so you can see, it has some power as a theory and a model of how things are. It is also controversial!

The Cousens/Young theory holds that what the fungi, yeast, and molds love most is fruit and next grains. Cousens promotes a raw vegan dietary with very little fruit, and only fruit of a certain moderate sweetness, so he ends up using a lot of raw fat and a lot of salt and even miso to make things "pleasurable" and something you could, he says, follow for life. The opposing camp is the camp that says that that is too much fat, and that if you try to keep it somewhat low-fat, you don't get enough calories. They say that all that fat, all those seasonings like salt, and (or or) not enough calories leads people who try to follow the plan feeling wiped all the time and unhappy, so that they end up taking lots of supplements (which Cousens sells, funnily enough) in order to feel even slightly functional. The solution, this camp says, is to eat lots of fruit, simple meals with no condiments (Cousens's book suggests very complicated meals to follow), much less fat, and some greens.

I've said all this because you wanted to know; but I would not like you to worry about all the denominationalism right now. Maybe you will never have to. What I emphatically think you should do instead is read some of the classic inspirational works of the raw-food movement, to make you enthusiastic about staying raw as you figure out what way works for you. David Mason was saying to just eat the fruits and vegetables that you like best and keep full! If you like prepared foods, you could go shopping at a raw vegan online store like Natural Zing and pick out the items from all the different categories that appeal to you.

They probably sell some of the classic books - BLATANT RAW FOOD PROPAGANDA and NATURE'S FIRST LAW are good for beginners, because they drum it into you that "cooked food is poison" and that on raw anything is possible. I think that's important at first, to get that under your skin.

xo - don't give up. It's fun. It's the right thing, and we are here with you. Meg

Here is an old post about what I eat. I must caution you that when I first started eating raw foods, I would not have been able to thrive or be happy on such a diet. My body has gone through many adaptations and healing to be able to enjoy and love this style of eating, though in the beginning of my transition I definitely wanted more fats, more heaviness in my stomach, and more taste stimulation than the simple whole foods I eat now. If I were to go back to my old self and old body at the beginning of my raw journey, it would seem like there is no way to get from where I was to where I am today. Certainly no book or no person could tell me the route that would get me there.

Here are a few tips of what worked for me. The first thing is to accept where I was. I started from eating SAD, and my body was used to getting a large portion of its energy from meats and fats. So when I started eating raw, I was naturally drawn to eating a lot of fats. This worked for a while, but my body was very gaunt and my face was gaunt and I always had dark circles under my eyes. Fortunately for me I happened to hear Doug Graham speak at a raw festival and this opened my eyes to how much fat I was eating. When I checked my fat intake on the nutritional calculator, I was eating 60% to 80% fat. When I lowered my fat intake, my healing on the raw diet accelerated.

There were times where I didn't accept where I was. I had some non-acceptance of my body's needs in the early days around fat. After hearing Graham speak, I put myself on a 10% fat diet. I kept myself there for perhaps 6 months, but I was not so comfortable with it during the cold season. So I let go of the 10% fat goal, and ate all the fat I wanted. Well, it turned out that 20% was enough fat to keep me happy. And after a few years of staying at 20%, I found my desire fell to 10% at some point and it goes even lower at times, even during the winter.

Our bodies are constantly adapting to the current diet we are eating. If we are eating a cleaner diet than before, this prompts the body to cleanse itself and heal itself to the current diet. After that happens, it is possible to stretch the diet even cleaner or simpler and this starts another process of cleansing and healing. This process of moving the body towards healing can be easeful and enjoyable, or it can be harsh and difficult. Being easeful and enjoyable means taking small enough steps such that the shifts the body needs to make don't upset your balance and homestasis in the body. Taking large steps can result in the body needing to have some downtime to make the adjustments to the new diet.

Another tip I offer is to listen to your body. Because at any given point in time, the body's needs are going to be different, especially if the body is constantly cleansing and healing itself. This means that what you can eat changes over time on the raw diet, and your body will guide you there, if you can bring yourself to listen to what it is saying. Listening to the body seems easy and intuitively obvious, except for the fact that there is a mind involved, and the mind has its own agenda and messages and habit patterns that need to be addressed. Our minds are used to seeing and understanding how systems work, and then treating these systems as if they were machines or automata that will always behave this way. In general, this works pretty well, except that on this raw journey, the body is constantly changing and adapting as you improve your diet, so the body you had yesterday is not necessarily the same as the body you have today. It takes having a flexible mind rather than an open mind to adapt to what's in front of you today rather than working from your memory of yesterday.

And at any point in time, the body knows what it needs, where as the mind thinks it knows. There is a big difference between the two of these. When the desire comes up for a Snickers candy bar, is it the body letting you know of a need, or is it the mind going through some kind of emotional release and needing some food for comfort or emotional relief? There is no easy answer for this but to try a solution and see if it works. If a solution works, this means you are happy with the consequences of your actions. It if doesn't work, try a different solution the next time and continue changing your response until you get a working solution.

Another tip I offer is there are going to be mistakes, and how you handle your mistakes will determine whether you thrive on this diet or whether you end up going back to your old diet. Mistakes are opportunities to learn something new via personal experience. If you see them in this way, your mistakes will move your towards thriving on the diet. Many people use mistakes as a reason to judge and criticize themselves, to increase the pain around some consequences of an action or choice that didn't work. When I put myself prematurely on a 10% fat diet, and my body/mind wasn't ready to eat that little fat, I could have judged myself for being so stupid as to make myself uncomfortable and not happy around what I was eating, or I could change my approach. You would be surprised how many people opt for the judgment approach to dealing with their mistakes, and then give up because the pain is too great.

Briliant post, Bryan - too many good parts to quote, but if it were a book it'd have lots of underlinings and "how true!", "that's me!" in the margins.

I am definitely a judgement type, but yesterday I saved myself by being an adjuster type.

But one thing is strange - when I went raw the first time, I was coming from high-carbohydrate, low-protein eating (essentially, lots of rice and bread and cereals); would you say that that sort of transitioning person would go for high-carbohydrate fruit rather than high fats? Anyway, that is what I did. And I TOO got very gaunt with dark circles under my eyes. I liked it because I thought I was detoxifying, but then I started to hear about how it's a sign of too much potassium and not enough sodium, and I did the thing you talk about, did a lot of judging myself for being so stupid as to make myself unhealthy when all I wanted was perfect health. And once you start judging yourself, you aren't good enough to be raw foods, you DESERVE eating cooked and being what you eat. But isn't it interesting that we both experienced that gauntness and dark circles when we raw-approximated our pre-conversion eating, even though we chose opposite ways to eat? Makes me think that it WAS detox after all, that whatever the problems with what we were doing were, we still had switched from unhealthy eating to essentially much healthier eating, and the body recognized it even as imperfect as it was for us! It was still "going from inferior fuel to superior fuel", and taking advantage of that to do some catabolic cleaning! At least, that is what the similarity suggests. Unless the explanation is that we were both not doing enough greens to balance what we were doing so much of.

Meg xo

Julie,

I have been raw for barely two weeks, but before I got to this step--which I consider a big one! --I spent a lot of time (like 2 years, actually) reading and asking the same questions as you. There are SO many different raw food gurus and philosophies, (many of them opposing each other) that when I first started reading about raw foods I was more overwhelmed by trying to figure out which way was which than even by the idea of giving up cooked food.

I think it's important to read as much as you can, and I don't mean buying every gurus book, since you will go bankrupt, but rather of the information that is widely available in articles and forums, and familiarze yourself with the different raw paths and then choose one for yourself. I think the advice I just gave is very general (read and learn basically!) but there is no other way, no fasttrack. Since your original question was what do you eat (and why) I figure I should answer that too.

First I should say that I came to raw foods seeking clarity of mind. I thought I could get rid of my depression by having a healthy body. I wanted to eat lighter and more naturally--that seemed to be what I needed. But when I first started learning about raw foods, I e-mailed all my friends pictures of raw gourmet foods. Raw burgers, pasta, pizza etc like the kind you find on Alissa Cohens or Shazzies sites, and that was what I thought rawfoodism was. I actually really think that way of eating is helpful in the beginning--if I could afford to buy all those nuts maybe I would try it!

But then I would read the diets of people like Bryan, and became interested in the basics of the raw food as a philosophy rather than a diet. Surely replacing the oven for the dehydrator wouldn't work! I started thinking about what a human being--the animal- would eat and became very attracted to natural hygiene which has the basic rule that human beings will flourish most if they eat biologically appropriate raw foods in their most natural and simplified state. That just makes sense to me. And having that foundation, something that makes sense has really guided everything that I have done since. Of course, even when you have this foundation it can be so confusing. For example, technically juicing is a no-no, since it isn't natural and yet I am even as we speak, reading reviews on juicers and planning to buy one, because I have been influenced by the many people who sing its praises. Nor, do I claim to be even close to an ideal diet, since I just starting and am (as all beginners should) just trying to stay raw. Basically, I am just experimenting, but if something strays too far from the idea that in the wild humans eat mostly, fruit, some greens, a few nuts and all raw, then I just work it out my brain that it is not the truth.

Ok, since your question is what do you eat, here is what I eat. Note that, like I said I have only been raw 2 weeks, and am in no place to be giving diet advice. But honestly, I am very happy with how I have been eating. It really works for me.

I eat every 3 hours.

When I wake up, fruit salad with 1 red Asian pear and half a cantaloupe. I slice them both into a bowl together.
Later, a few bananas.

Around noon, I ussually make a raw soup (of some sort of green, some bell pepper, cilantro, tomato, lime, red onion and cucumber). Or if I have some defrosted durian I eat half of one. Or (like today) I make a coconut shake with the meat and water of one young coconut.

Later, some almond butter with an apple.

In the evening a BIG salad with boston lettuce, baby spinach, tomatoes, bell pepper, cucumber, red onion (basically the same as my soup) and the dressing is some tahini blended with a bell pepper and some salt.

And then a few hours later, banana ice cream made with a frozen banana and a red Asian Pear.

With some exceptions (onion salt, cilantro, lime, tahini, almond butter) these foods are all pretty simple and biologically appropriate. While far from an ideal diet, it works for me. And I hope to simplify as I go along, until I can eat like Bryan!

This is a super long post--sheesh! Hope it was helpful.

Jen

[bellpepperdesign.blogspot.com]



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/2007 09:04PM by jenontheshore.

You all have been so helpful with your responses. This change would be immensely more difficult if I did not have this bulletin board as a link to others who have similar health goals…whether they agree or disagree. I think the thing that I got the most from all of your replies is that where you start out on your journey is dynamic and that has seemed to work well for everyone. I am more comfortable now with not doing the “wrong” thing.

I have signed up for a food preparation class at a local raw café. I’m really looking forward to it.

For now, my goal is to get as much of nutrition from foods that are as they occur in nature. I have to say, my hunger has changed. I do not get ravenously hungry between meals anymore. You know? Like when blood sugar takes a sharp drop? I always thought I ate properly to avoid that.

This is the first board that I have actually posted in (I always just listen in). Thanks for letting me into your circle.

Julie

My goal is to get my body to the place where it is running so well it can take what it needs from mostly fruit and occasional greens and occasional fat. This can, as Bryan has said, take many years for some of us. But the good thing is you don't have to wait several years to start feeling much healthier.

For me the journey started several months back with the green smoothies, not exactly the way we find greens in nature but as with the juicing I take advantage of the technology our scavenging ancestors did not have access to.

My basic menu these days is to eat three large servings of fruit during the day (papaya, banana, oranges, mangoes) and a big green smoothie when I get home. After that I do have some steamed veggies in the evening, right now my favourite is brussell sprouts and potatoes with a bit of Namu Shoyu and no salt Becel. Also like yams.

Am keeping 100% raw in my sights and don't beat myself up because I'm not there yet. I continue to negotiate with my cravings for cooked and flavoured foods in the evenings and so far still feel I'm making progress.

thanks bryan for ur post it was very insightful and gave me an opportunity to be look objectively at my own decisions and actions.

Julie, you look so beautiful and good-natured - are you a mutt?

It seems that in order to stay raw, it's important to lose that fear (I have it, but it's under control just now) of doing the "wrong thing" - we're orthorexics (I'm proud of it, but it's a pain). I think there are two things you gotta do - avoid as much as possible eating the things you KNOW are wrong (whatever for you that is, based on how your body reacts or what you believe to be true or both - for me, that means not eating raw chocolate or a lot of dehydrated concoctions with poorly-combined ingredients: they don't feel good afterwards and also I don't think they are healthy), and not freak out when it turns out you did make a mistake and eat something wrong (too many nuts, straight orange juice, coconut-date balls, my downfall), either because you didn't know you'd feel junky afterwards or because you truly thought you were staving off eating something worse, responding to an emotional cooked craving in the best raw way you thought you knew how.

I like how you say "where you start out..is dynamic"; maybe ideally the whole thing is dynamic, as Bryan says, a constant hodiernally shifting thing depending on what you need today (psychologically, emotionally, socially, and physically), what you did yesterday and how it made you feel, and whatever strengths and stresses are shifting around; the more you do it, the more you can do it, because you learn to have strengths you didn't have, and even confidences and commitment you didn't have - and, as you see, your appetite changes, and your attitude changes, on its own! Since I went raw a few days ago, I had one day just liquids, one fruitarian day with green juice, and one Cousens day (anti-mycotoxic) - today I have a social engagement and asked the person to make me organic raw broccoli soup and guacamole with "crudite platter" (means "rawies", doesn't it, "crudite"?) - normally, I wouldn't eat so elaborately, but I am going with the flow and trying not to be hung up about it. I know that even with that level of gourmet, I'll feel so good I'm not joining in eating all the hummus and potatoes I used to gorge on.

Arugula, every fruit has sucrose, fructose, and glucose, right? In some proportion. The best of these is glucose, and the others can make someone a bit wary when it comes to ageing factors. What fruits are highest in glucose?

Meg xo

Thanks Arugula for the very useful and helpful information.

right now i am eating sparingly...cause of the weight loss program i am on.i think later as long as i exercise-i can eat more calories a day.i eat mostly veggies.and a small amount of nuts.so far i have lost 75 pounds.i am worried about maintaining.but i will get to eat a larger variety later.

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