I'd love some recommendations for books to get me started. Recipes, but also the philosophy and science behind a raw/vegan diet.

Thanks!

I don't think you'll find a book that is for everybody. Your body will go through changes and at every moment, different food could give you different results. If you are comming from a SAD diet, it could take a long time for your body to overcome the momentum and redo itself. People that decide to test the raw diet for a week may never reach anything positive unless they are healthy to start with. It is said that it takes 1.5 years for every 15 years to finally reach homeostasis. There are some scientific raw books like 'becoming raw' but at the end of the day they are blah. Read books but make your own book.

I have so many raw food books and they each have their own charms. I used to believe that some of the elaborate ones were the "best" because of their mimicking cooked dishes. But they are very labor-intensive and at the end of the day, is that the sort of lifestyle that is genuine?

Even within the raw lifestyle, there are various beliefs. Dr.Douglas Graham preaches high-fruit, low-fat. Dr. Cousens believes in low-sugar, if I am not mistaken. I don't know his view on fat intake. Alicia Cohen has a couple of cookbooks and some (or most) of the recipes are high in fat. Of course, it's plant fat so we cannot judge it the same as that derived from animals.

I would get a few books that sample different ideas: "80-10-10" by Graham, not only for the diet philosophy itself but the simplicity, "Live Food Factor" for its overall coverage of the lifestyle from the various angles, and "Everything Raw" cookbook, with a variety of recipes.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I"ll definitely go through and check them out. The point of needing to take 1.5 years to clear every 15 years of SAD eating is really interesting.

I don't quite eat a SAD diet, but I'm a long way from RAW/Vegan.

I keep seeing this "80-10-10". I'm guessing it is diet proportions, but of what?

80 = 80% carbs
10 = 10% protein
10 = 10% fat

The body goes through phases of adaptation depending on circumstances. Food/diet is the soil of your body. The gut flora is the bacteria of the soil. When you change the diet, it is like moving a tree to a different location. Try different diets but the inmediate results are different than the long term effects.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2013 12:50PM by Panchito.

'Live Foods - Natures's Perfect System of Human Nutrition' Including 192 recipes by George and Doris Fathman.

'Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda!' by Joe Alexander (quite humerous in places and will give you a laugh)

'The Cause and Cure of Human Illness' edited by Kranke Menschen by Professor Arnold Ehret.

'The Mucusless Diet Healing System' The Scientific Method of Eating Your Way to Health (With Contemporary Insights to Ehret)

I've gained much from these books, though the second on this list is a beauty, and is very much under-rated; nevertheless, I beleive that most if not all these books are available from the Arnold Ehret Society. Just google it.

I hope you enjoy your search and your subsequent reading. I find that, while some books may not enlighten you much, I always find something that I can use, or something to add to a missing bit of information that I've been searching for.

Cheers, jalan

A really great book is How I Conquered Cancer Naturally because it follows someone who was eating SAD and then made huge changes and got well. It has a few recipies but it's mostly an autobiography.

[books.google.com]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2013 05:26PM by Ifeelgood.

Ifeelgood Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Fit for Life" by Harvey Diamond is good for a
> newbie because it explains how the body detoxes
> (what used to be commonly called natural hygiene),
> and why SAD is bad. It's not a totally raw or
> vegan book but it really pushes fruit and explains
> how to eat it without getting candida (by itself
> on an empty stomach). It's also a very common book
> and I keep running across it in thrift stores.


Wow, good catch! I bought a copy from a thrift store in the '80s and it took years before I actually read the thing. But I actually prefer and recommend "Fit for Life II" over the first one. It explains Natural Hygiene principals much better, IMO, not to mention other things to accompany the diet, such as rebounding.

Ha ha, you replied while I was editing. I recommended Fit for Life and then I thought that the Edyie Mae book would actually be more interesting and more of a raw food book :-)

Ifeelgood Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ha ha, you replied while I was editing. I
> recommended Fit for Life and then I thought that
> the Edyie Mae book would actually be more
> interesting and more of a raw food book :-)


???? What's that?

Actually Edith Mae Hunsberger did not get well. She died at her Dulzura (San Diego County) CA residence at age 56 on June 23, 1984. Her California death certificate gives her immediate cause of death as a "heart attack" (1 hr.), as the consequence of "carcinomotosis" (3 years), as the consequence of "carcinoma of breast" (11 years).

If I recall correctly, her book came out sometime in the mid-1970ties, and was republished in the early or mid-1990ties, at which time she had been dead for something like 8 years.