Hi.I just waunted all your opinion on this.

I'm not goin to say why but I know some people that beleive onions and garlic(and that family of plants/foods) produce negative energies to the body.
I think it's more a mental/spirituall aproach.

I'll share an experience and it's still something I think about a bit.

Well I didn't eat garlic or onions for a year.I mean I took it as if they were BBQ ribs...didn't touch them.
I'm gonna be completely honest when I say I noticed,gradually, that my thoughts were noticably,almost forcebly, strongly positive and very compassionate.
It's really something I contemplate.I mean it was noticable.I can't explain it.


All this said there's a million other factors to it all so it may mean nothing.

BUT-I waunt your opinion about it.

Thx kindly in advance

See you at the top!!

I love italian food, zuccuni pasta with red and green bell peppers & sun dried tomatoe marinara,raw olives and garlic. I also love red onions in my salads.

Garlic & onions keeps the parasites aways, are natural antibiotics, and just yummy.

And I've always had romances with garlic and onion lovers.

So, garlic and onions give me good vibes.

*shrugs*

At an old Portland raw food festival, there was a panel of Graham, Cousens, and Kulvinskas answering question. When asked if garlic was healthful or to be avoided, all panel member agreed it was to be avoided.

Here's an article based on some research commisioned by Robert O. Beck.

Also, yogis and meditators avoid garlic, as it disturbs their peace/serenity.

Do a search on Google with "garlic toxic animals" (without the quote). You will find that garlic is toxic to household pets.

Here is the Garlic And Onions section of rawfoodexplained.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2007 07:25AM by Bryan.

Wow! Thats wild! I never knew that, but it sounds like it could be true.

No wonder it kills parasites! haha!

When I was in college, a single parent with two young children, and no health insurance, I always gave my children garlic when they were sick, and they always got well way faster then the kids of my friends taking antibiotics.
It was a God send back then. They had good grades and were mellow kids. I wish I would have known this about garlic years ago.

I'm definately going to research it.

Thanks Brian!

i notice since i have gone to raw foods-onions seem to really hit me as so strong...it seems they just stick with me too long.like since i have been doing alot of fruit-they seem to just overpower my system.however odd this may sound.taylor

I never eat garlic, but when my wife does (she likes gourmet raw, I don't, I prefer just fruits), then she gets moody and lunatic. And overall, it doesn't smell very nice in the bedroom at night...
That's a love killer for me, sorry

maybe a tiny tiny bit.

I put a little little bit in my pets food. I hear it keeps fleas off them.

When I eat garlic, I get the mad farts (sorry TMI!).

But I do think there's a place for garlic and onions medicinally. Many people have used them successfully to treat minor parasitic infections. I don't think it's bad. But, overall, I do think they're irritating to the system.

From rawfoodexplainded linked by Bryan:
"Of course we know the names of these substances in onions and garlic. They are allicin, a poison on the same order as digitalis (an extract from foxglove) and mustard oil, a highly volatile oil that goes through cell membranes and gets into the cells with great ease. The body cannot digest either of these poisons nor make use of them."
So if garlic and onions are bad, so are mustard greens? I know I can't eat mustard greens with my salad, I pick them out.

Raw Fruit Festival
[www.raw-fruit-festival.net]
Health, Fitness and Fasting Retreats in Spain
[www.fit-in-nature.net]

well all that I can say is the moving toward less and less onions and garlic has seemed natural to me. I'm more of a gourmet raw food dude who loves the simple stuff... if that makes sense. Recipes that call for 4 cloves of garlic now only get 1 and I greatly prefer scallions to other onions now. It's nice not to be so centric on the stuff too. I do use a lot of green onions though. Maybe in a couple years I won't.

Matt

yep, just a dab will do yah.. I used to use powdered garlic, which has no odor. After going raw, a tad goes a long way with onion and garlic.

My sweetie is not finicky, and he likes onions & garlic so, not prob there. It hasn't killed me yet and the Germans & Russians eat onion on the street like an apple. No wonder... forget it.. haha..



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2007 05:21AM by Rawrrr!.

If a person is a cooked meat eater, and they've got 2 pounds of bacteria living in their intestines, garlic is probably a health food for them, as it will keep this bacteria under control and keep them from being sick.

If a person is a low fat raw vegan, and has under 2 ounces of bacteria living in their intestines, garlic is going to wipe out all those beneficial bacteria. For them, it is not a health food as they will need to consume probiotics to help their digestion work again.

lol...then what is going to happen to the rotting food with no bacteria?

I am so impressed we are so smart here.. I mean you should hear the things I hear from normal men everyday about health. they are experts they say, and LOL wow..

Bryan,

by wipe out, do you mean wipe out completely?

I did notice that when I went raw, I don't crave it like I used to, and as someone above said, they are using it less and less. Maybe this is a natural process, needing less or none.

The 'garlic and onions' section of the rawfoodexplained.com site reminded me of all the natural hygiene people on this site who used to post volumes of material pronouncing opinions as facts, no research, no personal experience, just flat statements of 'this is how it is'.

There's a famous old tale of a renowned vaidya (ayurvedic physician) in ancient India who gave his students one last task, their 'graduate thesis' so to speak. He sent them away for a year with the instructions to find a substance with no medicinal value. At the end of the year all the students returned. None were able to find such a substance. The story has a moral: there's value to everything, sometime, and someplace.

Yogis avoid garlic and onions because they are considered 'tamasic' (bringing the energy down) and they stimulate sexual desire. But ayurveda recommends garlic and onions for certain body constitutions and conditions.

I like the way the Boutenkos approached going raw: Everything was ok as long as it was raw and vegan. They let their bodies and natural tendencies work everything out.

That said, the information about garlic being toxic to pets was news to me. I'm going to eliminate it for a while and see if I notice a difference.

As always, thanks to all, especially Bryan, for the great links and stimulating discussion.

anaken,

I don't know to what extent the flora will be destroyed. If they are all destroyed, once the body has detoxed the garlic, this flora will start to grow and repopulate. Bacteria reproduce so quickly under ideal conditions that a few days is all it would take, assuming bacteria was coming in via the food supply, or the person was taking probiotics.

But some raw foodists can't digest food without probiotics. And they don't just take one dose and everything is OK. They need to continuously consume the probiotics for their digestion to work. These folks are killing their probiotics. I posted an old article I wrote in this post.

Also, a healthy raw vegan who normally doesn't eat garlic, if they took a large amount is going to have a nasty experience with a very rapid expulsion of that garlic from their system.

You can have your own experience of this. Don't eat garlic for 3 months. Then blend a few cloves into your salad dressing and see what happens! I did this once.

greenie,

You can have your own experience of a garlic free life. You might find that you like the way you feel without garlic than you did with garlic. Try garlic free for a few months and see how you feel. I used to love garlic, and when I was first raw, I would eat a few cloves in my salad dressings (and I made 2 large salads a day).

I took it out, and I never missed it. And I don't feel less healthy, I feel more healthy (of course, there were a lot of other factors, like 60%+ fat down to 20% fat).

The Boutenkos changed their ways after a few years of living like they did in "Raw Family". What they noticed after a while was that they were always getting sick. At some point, Victoria realized that the fat was causing their family to get sick, and thats when she wrote her book about green smoothies and reducing fat consumption (of course, Doug had been saying this for years when her book came out).

Ayurveda is a ancient practice that restores balance to the bodies that have been taken out of balance by eating cooked foods. Yes, they recommend garlic. I don't question that garlic has medicinal qualities. All medicines suppress symptoms rather than remove the cause of disease. And after a while, these medicines quit working. Even garlic will cease to work if the person doesn't remove the cause of what is making them sick.

What I like about the hygienic approach is that they say remove the cause of disease rather than suppress its symptoms. In my experience of the last 5 years, this has always served me in my healing. But this is not what doctor are taught, this is not what people in our society are taught. We are taught to take medicine. Ayurveda teaches taking herbal medicines. We are taught that "healthy, balanced, cooked meals" don't cause disease.

I question these teachings. I have had so many chronic symptoms in my life disappear, things that for most people never go away. Most people are happy to go to the drug store, and buy the pill, ointment, or cream, or if they are a little more hip, they go to their Ayurvedic physician or traditional chinese medicine or their naturopath and get herbal medicines that make them feel better.

3 things I used to eat everyday for years, were yogurt, pumpkin seeds and garlic. I rarely was sick. I had a huge doberman dog, and read that dogs have parasites so, I obsessed with the garlic and pumpkin seeds. I also know that we are exposed to them everyday in our produce. Any suggestions on how to get rid of parasites, without garlic?

The way to get rid of parasites is to increase health and remove their food source. Increasing health might mean getting more rest and sleep, eating a non toxic diet and living in a non toxic space using non toxic household products and toiletries, drinking purified water, breathing fresh air, etc.

If you are sure you have parasite, fasting will kill the parasites. I met a man who worked in Africa for a while. At one point he found himself without water, and the only available water was a polluted water hole. He thought to himself, "well I'm raw. and while it looks like this water has parasites in it, maybe I won't get them". Well, he got them.

So he came back home and fasted a week. That didn't handle it. So after he recovered, he fasted 2 weeks. That didn't handle it. Then he tried 3 week, Nope. Then he tried 32 days. This did it. Perhaps if he had done 32 days in the beginning, he could have only done one fast. Unfortunately, he needed to eat some food and get his digestion going again to see if he still had the parasites.

If your dog has parasites, or worm, I think this is much easier. A woman who used to post here would rescue dogs that were to be killed in the pounds and she would nurse them back to health and then find new homes for these dogs. She would just feed the dogs a raw foods diet appropriate for a dog and their worms would disappear in a very short time.

Garlic tends to make me erm, musical <G>

Bryan,

I'm going to omit garlic and onions for a while as you suggest and see how I feel.

There are some misconceptions about Ayurveda, however:

>
> Ayurveda is a ancient practice that restores
> balance to the bodies that have been taken out of
> balance by eating cooked foods.

I agree that much of Ayurveda does this, but not all. AV was designed to restore balance regardless of the cause of imbalance. Not all imbalance is caused by diet.

Yes, they
> recommend garlic. I don't question that garlic has
> medicinal qualities. All medicines suppress
> symptoms rather than remove the cause of disease.
> And after a while, these medicines quit working.
> Even garlic will cease to work if the person
> doesn't remove the cause of what is making them
> sick.

The purpose of av is to restore balance not mask symptoms. I've seen many ayurveda treatments do that, including cure MS and other supposedly incurable diseases.

>
> What I like about the hygienic approach is that
> they say remove the cause of disease rather than
> suppress its symptoms.

Ditto

In my experience of the
> last 5 years, this has always served me in my
> healing. But this is not what doctor are taught,
> this is not what people in our society are taught.
> We are taught to take medicine. Ayurveda teaches
> taking herbal medicines.

Western medicine suppresses the disease and calls it a cure. AV medicine does not suppress the disease. They (aim to) restore the body's wholeness and in that healthy body the disease will disappear. AV does not suggest taking herbs forever. They are taken for a while, the purpose being to reawaken the body's intelligence.

> We are taught that
> "healthy, balanced, cooked meals" don't cause
> disease.

As above, AV believes disease can be caused by many things, including faulty diet. Their notion of healthy diet is different from ours, obviously.

> I question these teachings. I have had so many
> chronic symptoms in my life disappear, things that
> for most people never go away. Most people are
> happy to go to the drug store, and buy the pill,
> ointment, or cream, or if they are a little more
> hip, they go to their Ayurvedic physician or
> traditional chinese medicine or their naturopath
> and get herbal medicines that make them feel
> better.

The system of AV is far more comprehensive than that. I'm not suggesting that you or anyone follow it, but it is far more than and far different from a system of herbal medicines to replace chemical medicines.

The whole thrust of AV is to restore the body/mind's intelligence and balance, in which the body is in bliss and the consciousness is fully awake in its own nature (enlightenment). It has degenerated into a system of herbal medicine because the aspect of consciousness hasn't been so clearly understood or experienced for a long while. In the hands of a good practitioner, some of those herbal medicines still work, but AV is way way vaster in its scope and effect than just that.

I don't do well on the AV diet, which contains a lot of cooked food. But the panchakarma and other treatments I've had are phenomenal. There are other aspects to ayurveda that are also great. For instance, Yoga is considered one of the branches of ayurveda. I met a yoga instructor from India who ran an hospital there, a yoga hospital. He said that in his hospital they cured all sorts of diseases just through yoga alone, no herbs, no anything else, just asanas and pranayamas - very effectively. Pretty cool, eh?

Ok, I'm dismounting my soap-box now. ;-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2007 03:13PM by greenie.

I get thirsty and a bit sloggy when eating onions or garlic. Gives alot of tastes for RAW-new-beginners in their food, but I keep follow my body's answers when eating something.

I had some olives stuffed with garlic last week, I didn't feel so good after that. I am going to aviod them. I hardly ever use any dried spices anymore and aviod most legumes, they just dont seem to do me any good.

Personal experience only of course.

I still eat olives occasionally, I won't pay for the raw kind. I will get off those too eventually.
I try to look at food as fuel, like "If I just ate this for week would it sustain me in a comfortable state?".

Sounds like garlic and onions can be useful in certain situations though. Most things have a use for something, I guess it's just a matter of careful consideration and trial & error to see if a particular food fits in your own diet.

Phil.

--------------------------------------------------

"Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it" (Chinese Proverb)

Inulin is good for you and is very friendly to the normal microbiota, so much so that it is marketed as a prebiotic.

Wikipedia gives some alternative natural sources of inulin. A better approach to have a healthy flora is to quit taking substances that kill the flora.

I'd like to share an experience. My son had been suffering from a very bad breath before raw. Once I gave him some probiotic drink for two weeks and his sympotms went away, but only for a short time. I would have to keep giving him that drink. Anyway, after him going raw, he no longer has a bad breath problem. His flora is healthy now. No need for probiotics. One day my son overdosed on some garlic spice which he found somewhere in a cupboard. His stinky breath the next day was the give-away of his crime.


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