marksquire Wrote:
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> Victoria's science makes no sense. Bless her
> heart, but she has zero credentials, and while she
> can talk from experience, any scientific
> information she throws at you is fluff.

She doesn't make a big deal about it but she was trained in the medical field, she was a nurse in Russia and before she started writing books she also worked for a health retreat that specialized in raw food kind of like the Tree of Life, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't that one.
[greensmoothiesblog.com]
"Many years ago, back in Russia, when I was studying to be a medical nurse, our professor told us, that the cholesterol in our food did not contribute anything to the blood cholesterol level, because our own liver makes it all."

well as far as her chart goes, I'm fairly certain that if anyone was only absorbing 3% or less of the nutrients from their food, they would be dead within months, a year at best... I seriously don't think her tables have any basis in science, I would really like to know how she came up with these numbers, anybody have any idea what process was used to come up with her figures?

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Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Re phrases used by posters here, such as 'healthy cooked food' and Victoria 'lightening up'...

there is no such thing as 'healthy' cooked food. Remember 'health' comes from the word 'whole'. The best we can say of certain cooked foods is that they are 'less unhealthy' than other cooked foods. And I'd be very happy if people I knew swapped their KFC for steamed vegs and brown rice.

Before being pilloried (OK - perhaps not on this forum but has happened before!) for being 'purist' (but-not-in-a-nice-way), 'judgemental', 'zealot' etc etc, could I please ask those who disagree to read my article here?

[debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com]

Eating cooked food is not 'lightening up' in any positive sense. Cooked food is a compromise, or in less generous terms, a cop-out. BTW, I eat the occasional cooked ingredient in otherwise raw salad myself when out, so am not 'looking down' on others!

But cooked food, whether it's 1% of our diet, 5%, 20%, whatever, is always a compromise and we compromise our health by eating it. It's simply that we each have to make a decision as to how far we're going to go at this stage on our journey.

The '1%' that Victoria talks about in her book has been much-discussed, and, no, there doesn't seem to be any scientific basis for it. And a high-raw diet is a great diet - RELATIVELY speaking.

rab Wrote:
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> According to Victoria, if we eat 99% raw and 1%
> cooked food, our bodies assimilate 3.0% of
> nutrition from the food. If we eat 100%, our
> bodies are able to assimilate 30% of the
> nutrition. That is a big difference. Also, in this
> table of hers, the more cooked food one eats, the
> less nutrition is assimilated, so that people who
> eat only 5% raw actually assimilate only 0.03% of
> nutrition from the food they eat.
>
> I am puzzled by this - I have found it in her book
> "12 Steps to Raw Foods" and it was fascinating to
> me. Can the difference be really that drastic?

Victoria Boutenko does seem to know how to use numbers. The number 3 is sometimes considered whole, complete or perfect, and the number 12 divine. The often quoted paper by Paul Koushakoff, M.D., divides foods into 3 groups (raw, heated, processed) and studies their affects in 300 experiments, a substantial effort studying digestive leukocytosis, or white blood cell count (rather than the "protective layer" study approach) --

[www.seleneriverpress.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2010 07:31PM by loeve.

loeve,

I think the point is that arguments such as VB makes cannot be taken seriously if they come from the realm of the mystical, and for my part: beware Soviet "science."

Victoria Boutenko was born in the Soviet Union? I'm of that generation and visited the Soviet Union and found the people there trustworthy.

loeve,

Of course she was! Curious that you found Soviets trustworthy; I am making a generalization, of course, but before glasnost, they were socialized to always be on guard against the Western Mentality and were among the most guarded of people I'd met. This does not indicate dishonesty, merely that frankness was a trait I found hard to gauge in them. Soviet science was reknowned for its secret programs, you know, producing spoonbenders and stuff like that. I can see where VB's preoccupation with certain numbers comes from. In any case, this is not scientific.

Anyway, the raw study referrenced is Swisse --

[www.seleneriverpress.com]

Paul Kouchakoff, M.D., of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry, Lausanne, Switzerland --

[www.living-foods.com]

-Tom Billings didn't have a clickable link to the study in his article included in the RawFoodSupport collection.