ForewordThe Raw-Foods-Dominant Diet
ForewordAnyone attempting to learn about nutrition can easily become confused by contradictions, controversy, and the many different approaches. New parents and parents-to-be are, additionally, often apprehensive about how best to provide nutrition that is as nurturing and complete—once feeding with solid food begins—as breast-feeding was before. Add to this the fear of toxins in the food chain, persistent misinformation touting the inadequacy of a vegetarian-based diet, antiquated information guiding mainstream nutrition generally, and the convoluted picture is complete.
Our purpose in writing Baby Greens is to provide a nutritional primer of informative support, recipes, resources, and activities to help you and your children begin to resolve these issues and either start a living-foods lifestyle or deepen the one you already practice. By “informative support” we mean the ABCs of bioenergetic nutrition. Bioenergetic nutrition simply means consideration of the much more subtle, or energetic, qualities as well as the solid, physical presence of both foods and the human organism. We feel that an elementary grounding in how nutrition and health are viewed bioenergetically is essential for building the confidence that is so helpful in maintaining a doubt-free transition from cooked and processed foods to your own style of a raw-foods-dominant diet. Since the cooking of food renders it largely devoid of enzymes, life force, and many nutrients, these foods require energy from us to digest and assimilate. Living, raw foods, on the other hand, add far more energy than they take away for digestion. It is important, therefore, to create meals in which raw or uncooked foods dominate. A fifty-fifty mix is a minimum recommendation of where to begin. An important distinction to make is that not all raw foods are necessarily living foods. Raw nuts and seeds, for example, need to be soaked in order to once again become truly living foods. From this point they can sprout, or be processed otherwise for use in raw-foods-dominant recipes. Produce that was a living food after harvest might not continue to be so if too much time passes. Fresh produce in the sense of locally grown and less than a few days old is one ideal way to go. Fresh, same-day garden produce is obviously then the best choice, if available, for fully living food.
Whatever degree or style of natural foods diet is your practice, interacting with your child’s enjoyment of these living foods and fostering his/her intuitive fulfillment of unique nutritional needs can become a mirror—a wonderfully intrinsic encouragement to your own process of returning to a more balanced relationship with food, for children learn by what we do and what we say. When they can witness us living new modes of life, they can easily follow in natural synchronicity. Because of their small physical size, babies and young children are so much more susceptible than adults to the thousands of toxins in the environment and the commercial food supply today. Elimination of food-related toxins from our children’s diets is a powerful boost to all levels of their health. You could say it is an investment, an insurance of incomparable value. The growing and learning that children are here to do is far freer to progress when a living-foods-dominant diet underlies the living innocence of non-possessive, non-authoritarian parenting.
We have tried to write from a fully contemporary, naturopathic point of view—a view too often marginalized, lost, or omitted from mainstream thought and nutritional practice. We offer an effective framework that will help provide the confidence and knowledge necessary to move beyond the fear, doubt, misinformation, and controversy surrounding child nutrition, and allow the innate order of living foods and the naturopathic point of view to be your guides. We hope the support and insight offered here will ease the transition, acting as a bridge toward living nutrition and away from the standard dietary wasteland of over-processed, dead, and contaminated fare. The short, medium, and long-term rewards of this transition are priceless for you and your child. The costs of reliance on the standard American diet are tragically apparent for anyone with eyes to see.
Much of the confusion and controversy in nutrition today still originates from one source: the loss of the concept of our foods and the soil from which they grow as a living system. Even if we have the concept intellectually, we might still be disconnected from its meanings and thus disconnected from the active understanding that we achieve vibrant health by maintaining an intimate connection to the living earth through consumption of living foods.
In matters of healthcare a similar situation exists: we’ve become doubtful about our innate abilities to heal. When we rediscover living, non-toxic nutrition as an irreplaceable part of our daily therapy, namely our daily regeneration, recreation, and relaxation, then we can truly go further. Nutrition need not remain a missing link to the larger reality of authentic wellness.
In the midst of the confusion surrounding child nutrition, few have had the opportunity to visualize clearly the incredible potential for vibrant health and depth of wellness, far beyond current norms, that exists for children who are raised with living foods. This is especially important in a time when toxic interferences throughout the environment demand that we establish a foundation of genuine health quickly for our kids, by the most efficient and effective means possible. An impressive accumulation of research says conclusively that a living-foods-dominant diet is a major component of such efficient and effective means.* We hope this book will help unlock a door or two and allow you to step back and say something like, “Hmmm, this works!”
Take a look around at the kids in your schools and the growing statistics. There are more cases of childhood obesity, allergies, and illnesses. More children are on Ritalin and other dangerous drugs including vaccines than ever before. It is the authors’ belief that much of the behavioral chaos and learning inability so common in many homes and in many public schools could be significantly cleared if standard food service meals were replaced with living-foods-dominant meals. Of course, a living curriculum at home and/or in school would not hurt either.
The false disease labels of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) created by the medical cartel to “help” even the youngest children (and these days, maybe even their parents) are, in nearly all cases, symptomatic pictures of nutritional deficiency not diseases in need of toxic “cures.” Indeed, a crucial difference between the naturopathic and mainstream medical allopathic models is that pure naturopathy generally places all manner of illness not in categories of disease but under the more causal reality of nutrition. Nutrition in this broadest and deepest sense is the vast arena of not only food but also detoxification, hydration, healing, and regeneration of the whole person, in other words, of all that nourishes.
We are still free to exchange confusion and controversy for our rightful, innate clarity anytime. As we do, our children will be the beneficiaries of this one simple yet profound shift. May we all continue the process.
— Michael Chrisemer
Patagonia, AZ
January 2003