well, what I have noticed is that few of us have actually provided useful information. Yes, my life may be an experiment, as is anything and everything. I am choosing the life where my kids are much more likely to live past 100. My family will probably not suffer gray hair, or hair loss......or degenerative oldness. I see so many people who look old everyday at my job, in fact i see a wide spectrum of everybody who supposedly eats "healthy". I am a cashier at whole foods currently so I see a full cross section of "healthy" society. What i see is that cooked food makes people look old. The more animal products people buy also relates to how old people look at any given age. Like the salmon and veggie people look pretty good, but still have advanced signs of degeneration. the people who eat meat as the main diet, as I used to, look really bad. Skin looks like a zombie's skin. Hair is either gone or so gray it looks like its been soaking in peroxide for 20 years(which it has essentially). The vegetarians vary in levels of health appearance, depending on how many veggies they actually eat. They can range from the potato-chip-atarian, all the way to the 90% raw vegan, who still eats cheese or dairy of some sort. they look generally one step better than the I-eat-salmon-cuz-its-supposed-to-be-healthy people. humans have been around for a serious long time. 99% plus of our beneficial evolution occurred BEFORE industrialized food and cooking. So anyone that thinks raw food is a potentially dangerous experiment just doesn't have very great aptitude in my opinion.
My children have NO NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES! they don't eat animals at all. therefore the b-12 argument and the taurine argument are bunk. case closed.
guess what guys, I HAVE PROVEN RAW FOOD IS HEALTHY !!! YAY!
you can stop reading info on websites and accept the reality now !!!! YAY!!!
no more arguing about stuff that hasn't been experimented!!
I can't speak for others that have had issues on raw, because I don't know how smart they are about nutrition, or how varied their diet is or was on raw.
I know people that are "raw", and the mainstay of their diet is seed based crusts with almond butter on top. If this is the way you wanna eat raw, you will end up massively nutrient deficient like most cooked fooders too. nowhere in the wild can you go forage a crust!
Also, the cooked food addiction experiment HAS been done. It has been proven time and time again that humans and all animals are drawn to the highest calorie lowest fiber food sources naturally as a survival mechanism. Therefore steamed broccoli is higher on the scale of addictiveness than say an unsteamed piece of broccoli is because cooking destroys the fiber. Imagine cooked food in a bowl, all mushy and fiberless compared to a bowl of fresh, fiber and enzyme rich vegetables in another bowl. The food with no fiber has a much higher glycemic index and requires the body to do less in order to utilize the calories.
And yes, a bowl of rice is STRAIGHT UP addictive to some of us. I believe many people just don't see how blinded they are by their own addictions to modern life and foods that are cooked. People will argue cooked food versus raw all day, saying how important certain random nutrients are, but then they say they feed themselves or their kids steamed rice or something......a food which has NO benefit to us at all when compared to raw food.
If we keep looking at why a something is bad, or deficient, or wrong, or whatever, then that is what we will keep finding.......If we look for truths, and strengths, then we will be open to finding truths and strengths. If we turn our minds to a NON-open state, we won't see truths right in front of us.
It can be important to have skeptics around like powerlifer. But it is also important to learn to ignore people like him also, as they are always going to disagree with subjects no matter what information is provided. This is much like society. We have to be strong and know TRUTHS in our own hearts. We can't be swayed by the Haggard NORMAL populous. In this way, if we trust the "norm", then we will all end up gray and saggy and old and tired one day. I am choosing vibrancy and LIFE !!!
My newest addition to the family is now five months old and about 20 pounds. He is HUGE ! His head is almost as big as my 3 year olds. he is strong and so smart for his age. All the nutrients he recieved in the womb have helped his brain advance beyond that of a cooked food kid. He is different than other kids by a long shot. If this is an experiment, then i am VERY happy with the results. and for the record, the favorite food during his gestation was sauerkraut!!!

Were your children breast fed rawlion, if so i suspect those stores of vitamin B12 and taurine will run out at some point.

If your children have been fed on pure raw vegan food since birth then id love to hear what they have been eating.

[www.vegankingdom.co.uk]

rawlion, you are brilliant. thanks for the post.

banana who Wrote:
>
> However, Coco, I was referring to the MOTHER'S
> diet and the baby's birth weight. So were you 100%
> raw during your pregnancies? From your comments, I
> sure doubt it. If you were eating nori sauerkraut
> wraps and coconut water almost exlcusively
> throughout your pregnancy and your kid came out at
> 9 lbs., I would be shocked LOL


Oh no way was I raw throughout! After 6 months I was starving, all I could think about was food no matter how many nuts and avos I ate. So hungry... it's impossible to ignore those signals whilst pregnant, I don't have a clue how other mothers do it for the whole 9 months. The day I caved and ate a bowl of lentil soup was the day my body nearly literally stood up and shouted "HURRAY! More Please, Right Now!". LOL.
Still, I gained a very moderate amount and both my babes were in the low healthy range. No sickness either, ear infections and the like. Niether any problems for myself, completely healthy issue-free pregnancy, birth, and beyond.

Cravings, ie, strong desires, during pregnancy are virtually impossible to ignore. I hadn't eaten cheese or dairy food in years, but boy oh boy, I wanted pizza (no meat) so bad I can't describe it. The feeling I had when I wolfed down my first pizza in maybe 8 or 9 years, I can't describe. Like you with your lentil soup. LOL LOL LOL By the 4th month, all those cheezy desires were gone.

Raw baby is very feasible but vegan raw baby may be hard to achieve