Hello,
I am four weeks into eating and switching to a raw foods diet. I have been doing well and lost eight pounds my only struggle is that I am not eating enough of a variety of foods that are raw. I do have health issues such as a hypothyroidism and slightly elevated b.p.

I have been drinking fresh juices (green mostly) twice a day.

My question is this, I went to my dr today an endocrinologist and discussed diet with her. It seemed she thinks everything I have been doing is wrong. She thinks I should count calories and eat a small portion of dairy, carb and proteins and that they way I am eating is basically starving myself. She said that drinking green juices raises insulin levels. But yet later on she told me that i could eat unlimited greens. I found this confusing. She said that juicing is of no value to my health and that i need the fibre to
eliminate fat. I was also eating nuts and she said they were high in fat. So basically everything that I was doing, she said that was wrong, even though i feel wonderful drinking green juice, gives me energy. I find i am actually now craving it. I am having no problems digesting it at all either.

And the other thing, was that I asked her about enzymes in living raw foods and she said that there are no enzymes in food but that they are in people .

I am not sure if you would like to respond *this is my first time posting here
but I am sure you guys are not only knowledgable but have first hand experience with nutrition, it's value & health performance .

thanks v much if you feel like responding.

I really want to be healthy & active and eat well.

How is she a doctor yet she doesn't believe enzymes are in food. First of all, humans evolved from plants. Second, plants evolved from cyanobacteria. Bacteria have enzymes. All life has enzymes.

I wouldn't listen to her. Maybe making smoothies would be a better option for more fiber, but maybe she's just scared that your diet won't be feeding her paycheck because she won't need to write you prescriptions for diet related ailments?

When I first changed to a raw food diet, I entered everything I ate on www.fitday.com because I was afraid that I was doing something so radical that I thought I needed to monitor it closely. (There are other sites for doing this too.) However, I came to realize that I was actually getting more nutrition eating raw food than I ever had before and now don't even bother checking. It's been nine months and I feel fantastic. There are people on this site and others that have been on raw diets for many years. We absolutely are not starving.

I am thrilled to eat as much as I want without counting calories and have lost weight to where I am at a good weight that I like. I eat a LOT of fruit - yes, a LOT!!! I eat some nuts, but just a few. And I have avocado now and then. I get lots of fiber from fresh, raw fruit and eat a salad every night. Although I make green smoothies sometimes, I don't yet own a juicer. I wish I did, but someday! I used to try more raw food recipes from sites like www.goneraw.com, but now I tend to eat more simply - fruit and more fruit, some seeds and nuts, salads, green smoothies.

I keep reading and learning about nutrition because I believe that I am in charge of my health. Doctors can be wonderful and are needed at times, but most know very little about nutrition. There was a time when doctors advocated that people should smoke! I know that was long ago, but my point is that doctors don't know everything even though they are well-intentioned.

In addition to the articles on this site, there are lots of other sites about raw food to explore for information. A couple that I have liked include www.rawfoodexplained.com and www.rawforlife.co.uk.

I hope you keep reading, learning, and trying different raw foods until you find what you are comfortable with and what works best for you.

Best wishes!


My favorite raw vegan

It's a good plan to go with how you're feeling. If your body says yes, you might be doing something right

I second the idea of using an online nutrition tracker like fitday too. Keep a daily log to present to "health" care practitioners who don't understand what you're doing. It will help you see what you might be missing too, if anything at all. You can compare the diet that your doctor recommended against what you are eating and see how they measure up while you're at it.

Also, the enzymes in food myth has been debunked for a while now, it's a moot point. Better to focus on the nutritional benefits of a healthy plant based diet. If you need more digestive enzymes you can take a supplement or boost your own through diet and good self-health care.

One thing you will learn is that many doctors don't understand the raw food diet, and many who have studied nutrition will have a mainstream view of nutrition. The raw food diet is anything but mainstream!

I don't think juicing greens will raise your insulin unless you are eating a ton of fat. Another reason (in addition to Trive and coco's input) to use the nutritional calculators to make sure you fat intake isn't too high (30% fat is high, 40% fat is very high).

Getting fiber is a good thing though. Make sure you do eat some amount of whole greens. And plenty of fruit.

And as coco stated, let go of the food enzyme myth. There is only one person (Dr Howell) who claims to have positive proof of the enzyme theory, but a lot of people debunking it. There are plenty of other scientifically proven reasons to eat a raw vegan diet - low toxins, high nutrient, high water, high fiber, high phytonutrient, etc, etc.

JoyfullyHis Wrote:
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>
> And the other thing, was that I asked her about
> enzymes in living raw foods and she said that
> there are no enzymes in food but that they are in
> people .
>

Hi JoyfullyHis,
Your doctor probably meant that the enzymes in plants are not always the ones we need. Plant enzymes are great for plants and what makes them "living" foods for us. Sometimes these enzymes work in our favor, sometimes not. A living seed can be tough to chew and digest and might have enzyme inhibitors until soaked or sprouted. A fruit or vegetable with enzymes intact is fresh food.

JoyfullyHis,

First, your doctor would make a terrible farmer : )

Second, if it is fresh, raw, and ripe, and you feel good after you eat it, and healthier over time when eating it, that's your body's way of encouraging you to feed it correctly.

Third, greens do not raise insulin levels(insufficient carbs). Don't know where your doctor got that from.

Lastly, do plug your dietary info, as suggested, into a nutrition calculator to ensure you get optimum levels of nutrients and to have something concrete to show the doctor. They love paper with charts and graphs and strict ratios written on it; that is the sort of data they are trained to understand. Make your doctor your partner in raw healing, and she may learn something as well as you : )

JoyfullyHis Wrote:
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>
> I have been drinking fresh juices (green mostly)
> twice a day.
>

Any juices that you're drinking that are based on lots of sugary fruit can raise insulin levels, the body's response being to store away any excess glucose as fat. That's what your doctor may be referring to.

Are your green juices 100% greens? Most will juice some fruit along with the greens to make it more palatable (I use carrots). There are some who down straight green juice though, i.e. wheatgrass shots or kale juice.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/24/2010 03:38PM by loeve.

First of all, I want to thank you ALL for your input. It means alot to me, your responses.

I am going to use the nutrition tracker as you suggested.

cyclopopsicle, I agree with you, I wondered if maybe the idea of people getting healthier and happier thru raw life giving food is a threat to the fact that illness is really how they make their money.

Hi Trive,
Congratulations on your health and how well u are feeling. I think that I am concerned I will be getting all the nutrition I need (especially after the visit)
It is something I think I will do - the food tracker. I guess we have been trained to think that the doctors are the people who know everything even nutrition but they don't. I agree, ultimately we are in charge of our healthiness and it really is about being healthy and eating according to how our body is telling us, and listening to our bodies. I will check out those websites.

HI there Coco
that's a good suggestion to focus on the nutritional benefits. I think as I said I am a bit concerned i may not get enough calcium or proteins so this wil help me (the tracker).

HI Prana,
Thanks for your input. I will check the fat out, the only fat I am getting now is in dressings for salads and in nuts. I will check that out in regards to the fat and the greens.

Hi loeve
what do u mean that living seeds that need to be soaked, i uinderstand your saying they may inhibit the process of digestion unless they are soaked. What would be some examples of these types of foods.

Hi Tamukha
That would be great if my dr would be my partner with me in this. I am thankful to hear you say that juicing greens doesn't raise insulin levels,
it's true drs love charts,

Hi Loeve
what greens would be considered sugary? yes I am just juicing greens, sometimes I have put a few green grapes in with it but haven't been even doing that. I don't mind it without fruit at all.

Thanks everyone again.

JoyfullyHis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hi loeve
> what do u mean that living seeds that need to be
> soaked, i uinderstand your saying they may inhibit
> the process of digestion unless they are soaked.
> What would be some examples of these types of
> foods.
>

Good question. First, you probably noticed this is a "Living and Raw Foods" board. An example of a "living" food would be a grape, especially a seeded grape because it is able to grow a new plant. If that grape were sundried to a raisin it would still be a raw food but lose some of its "living" quality.

>
> Hi Loeve
> what greens would be considered sugary? yes I am
> just juicing greens, sometimes I have put a few
> green grapes in with it but haven't been even
> doing that. I don't mind it without fruit at all.
>

I'm not sure why you ask me. If you mean "leafy greens" then I don't know of any sugary ones.

You're in a minority of those who will drink their greens straight. Many add an apple, banana, carrot or some such sweet food which will call for an insulin response more or less depending on the glycemic load.

Juicing takes away much of the insoluble (and probably some soluble) fibre from food, maybe you should eat the whole fruits and vegetabes in addition to juicing. A balanced diet and regular exercise is the secret to good health. A varied diet allows you nutrients that might be deficient in one food but abundant in another.

Cyclopsicle I never heard that plants are descendants of cyanobacteria and that we evolved from plants. I find it very counter intuitive as they are such different life form. Do you have a reference for this?

Yes, my biology books and the theory of evolution. If one believes that everything that ever lived evolved from a common ancestor, plants were around before animals, and we are animals, and algae was around before land plants, so... Certain shared characteristics between algae and land plants make it very likely that they are close relatives.

I have never learned that humans evolved from plants. This would require us to have gone from micro-organisms to flora and then back to micro-organisms. Fish to hippo to whale is one thing, but Nature hopscotching nomenclaturae willy nilly, that's another.

Some of the earliest evolution of life on Earth isn't really understood. I find it logical to imagine that the evolutionary schism between plants and animals probably occurred around the single-cell organism stage or not much after. Since micro-organisms don't leave fossils, I think that this era is mostly theory and guesswork.