written with
dr. nicholas j. gonzalez, m.d.
Diets, workouts, and nutritional supplements. Books, magazines, videos, and workshops. Gyms and health-food stores. They’re everywhere. Our relentless search for the road to a better, healthier lifestyle has created and fed a multibillion-dollar industry. The reasons are simple: We’re tired of feeling and looking the way we do. We’re restless and hungry. We know something isn’t right, and so we search. But you can have a map and a compass and be headed in the right direction with the best of intentions and still end up lost. Yes, completely lost.
That’s how it was with me. I just couldn’t seem to find my way in the thick jungle of health-and-fitness options and diet possibilities, and I was tired and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. And especially when it came to food, I was completely without hope. No matter what I ate or how often, I was never satisfied. I was always hungry. Deep inside I knew life wasn’t supposed to be that way, but I didn’t know there was any other way.
Cooked food can and does sustain life. If it didn’t, most of us would be dead. But while it may keep us alive, it doesn’t do so optimally.
Of course, we humans are hardy creatures. In World War II, some prisoners in concentration camps who received only three hundred or four hundred calories a day and managed to survive. Some of the soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Japanese and walked the Bataan Death March for almost a week—without being allowed to eat or drink any water—went on to survive in prison camps on five hundred calories a day for months, and in some cases, years. When they were released, many weighed only one hundred pounds and were grossly malnourished, but they had been able to survive.
The differences between merely surviving and being in optimal health are vast. In terms of functioning, it’s a lot like the difference between a junky old car that barely runs and a brand-new high-performance Mercedes. You can get around town in either if you have to. But given the choice, who in their right mind would actually choose to limp along on the edge of breaking down? Not everyone can afford a new Mercedes, and some simply choose to settle for something in between. But when it comes to our health, fitness, beauty, and overall wellness, it seems as we learn more about ourselves we start to wonder: can I afford not to make the changes that will transform me into the reliable, high-performance creation I really want to be? This is the very hope that keeps the health-and-fitness industries booming.
If you’re reading this book I suspect you want something better for yourself. I know I did. You’re not interested in just struggling through life eating what really amounts to garbage. Garbage is a strong term, but I use the word because distasteful (no pun intended!) as it may be, that’s what you get when you expose living plant and vegetable matter to intense heat.
No, I’m not talking just about going to fast-food places or sitting down to brownies and ice cream. I’m also talking about food that is cooked—all food that is cooked. Not just deep-fried foods. Not just the guilty pleasure known as chocolate. I’m talking about pasta and rice and even cooked vegetables and breads. That’s right: plain old cooked food—including the so-called healthy variety. Yours may be high-end, uptown garbage, but I believe it’s still not what your engine needs to carry you smoothly and happily down the road of life. It may be gourmet, it may even be low fat, but I’m sorry to have to tell you if it’s cooked—it’s garbage to me.
I can hear the objections already. What is there about skinless chicken breasts and steamed broccoli with a side order of spinach pasta that could possibly be garbage? Whatever the food may be, if it’s cooked it’s no longer living. If it’s not living, it’s dead. If it’s dead, it’s decaying—or, worse, it’s beyond decay. So it may taste delicious and be low fat and have been keeping you alive for many, many years (thanks to our bodies’ innovative and resourceful ability to make something out of virtually nothing). But contrary to what most of us believe, from a pure, nutritional standpoint cooked food is more like garbage, refuse, waste, than it is like real food. And the overloaded state of our health care system proves we are getting sicker, not healthier. And chances are you have never heard this before because we have all been raised to assume that cooking is what food cries out for. It’s not. But it is what we do. And in the process we lose a lot.
So if cooked food is garbage and that’s what we’re eating, why don’t we simply starve? If the enzymes in our food don’t function and the proteins in what we consume have been seriously damaged, what is it that is actually feeding us?
Our bodies are indeed amazing! Throughout the ages we as a species have survived every sort of adversity. Humans fight to overcome even the most adverse conditions. We take some of our bodies’ challenges for granted without even thinking about them. And that’s precisely how it is with cooked food. The enzymes that are most beneficial to life become inactive above 116 to 118 degrees F. When you cook food, the temperatures are typically much higher than that. (Think about it: when was the last time you set your oven to a temperature that low?) Since cooking denatures the enzymes—and it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about plant foods or meat—you’re inactivating the enzymes and changing their structure. But being a very efficient organism, we humans still have the capability to further break down those dead proteins into their constituent amino acids, and then our own body rebuilds them into enzymes once again. That’s how we’re able to survive eating cooked food. However, this process accelerates aging and encourages weight gain.
So what we’re doing is this: We’re taking a perfectly good nutrient, destroying it by cooking, eating it after it has been destroyed, and then our bodies set about the process of re-creating it to feed us. When we eat cooked food, we’re adding a step that’s totally unnecessary. If you eat raw food, you don’t have to expend so much energy re-creating the enzymes. You’re getting them intact in an active form, and you can absorb them and use them directly. That’s what other animals do. And it’s what humans did too—before we started cooking.
There are other problems with cooking. Certain vitamins—especially vitamin C and B vitamins like folate—are heat-sensitive and are simply destroyed in cooking. Yes, destroyed in such a way that they can’t be reclaimed or rebuilt. Once destroyed, they’re simply gone. Generally speaking, minerals aren’t going to be destroyed by heating, but it is believed by many that by cooking food you change the absorbability of minerals. For example, we know that the calcium found in raw cow’s milk is more easily absorbed in the human body than is calcium in the pasteurized (which is a fancy word for “cooked”) milk in your grocer’s dairy section. This makes sense because minerals are usually associated with proteins, and when you cook food you change the protein associated with the mineral. So even though cooking may not affect the mineral itself, it may change its absorbability—it’s there, but it’s not available to your body to use. And cooking can cause the opposite effect as well—too much absorption. Oxalic acid, which is found in spinach and rhubarb, has been linked to kidney stones. It seems that if you eat too much cooked spinach, you may get more oxalic acid than your body can handle and the result is the painful malady that never passes easily—kidney stones or canker sores. But there is no indication that this is the case with raw spinach. The body seems to know how to regulate absorbing oxalic acid when it comes uncooked.
What raw food gives us is optimal, maximally efficient nutritional support for health. By God’s design, raw food is in itself complete. I frankly think “cooked food” is an oxymoron. We may be able to ingest it, and our bodies may be able to process it into something that allows us to survive but never to thrive. It’s not real food once it has been cooked. Out of a lack of something better, our bodies treat it as though it is food, but real food is hardly ever cooked.
I don’t want to give you the impression that the answer is simply for us to eat whatever we want so long as it’s raw. Unfortunately, like most things in life, the world of food isn’t quite so simple. There are raw foods that aren’t really good, efficient foods if eaten just as we find them. The sections below will help you make the most of them.
Beans have certain enzyme inhibiters that keep their valuable, nutritious enzymes from being released. Cooking destroys the enzyme inhibitors but it also kills the enzymes—so it’s a mixed blessing: neutralizing the inhibitor, releasing the enzymes, and then killing the enzymes by cooking is self-defeating because you’re not really getting at the nutrients you want.
A simple solution that enables us to access these nutrients is sprouting. Even if you have never tasted sprouts, everyone has seen alfalfa and bean sprouts and maybe others in the supermarket produce section. Not all nuts and beans when sprouted look like those. They can keep their unsprouted shape or become sprouts depending on how long they soak. When beans or seeds are sprouted, their enzyme inhibitors are neutralized. This way you can eat the raw, sprouted bean and absorb the bean’s proteins and enzymes intact. The same is true of germinating nuts. (See here for a simple guide to sprouting and germinating.)
And it may be that some foods simply are better off cooked if you are going to eat them at all. Take potatoes, for example. The eyes of a potato have a toxin in them that’s neutralized when you cook the potato. If you’re going to eat potatoes, you don’t want to ingest the toxin. So even though many people eat uncooked potatoes, they know to remove the “eyes” before eating. The point is that there are specific foods you have to be careful with if you choose to eat them raw.
A few foods can actually be more nutritious when juiced than when eaten whole—but they are very few. Carrots are a good example. The beta-carotene found in them is better absorbed in our bodies through juicing than simply raw or cooked. This is because the cellulose cell wall of a carrot—nature’s best source of beta-carotene—is pretty tough. You can cut a carrot into pieces and its beta-carotene is still trapped inside. Research shows that if you cook the carrot and eat it, you’ll absorb more beta-carotene than if you eat a carrot raw. But here’s the trade-off: in a raw carrot you get all the enzymes and some beta-carotene, whereas if you eat a cooked carrot you’ll get more beta-carotene but all the enzymes are destroyed. So the overall benefit is still going to be better if you eat a raw carrot than a cooked one.
What if you juice that carrot? Whenever you juice a vegetable you’re traumatizing its cell walls—but without destroying the enzymes because you’re not heating it. In a good-quality juicer, the juicing process doesn’t seem to destroy the enzymes at all. (See chapter 7 for more information about juicing and juice.) Juicing traumatizes the vegetable’s cell walls enough to release the nutrients but not so much that you’re destroying the enzymatic proteins’ structure. Juicing a carrot releases the maximum beta-carotene and keeps the enzymes fully intact as well. That’s why I believe in drinking juices. Juicing is an excellent way to make nutrients more accessible—without cooking. But once you have blended veggies into a juice, releasing the enzymes from the cellulose, the juice comes into contact with oxygen in the air and the oxidation process begins, chemically changing the juice and neutralizing certain vitamins. That’s why you should drink fresh juice pretty quickly. Even in the refrigerator the oxygen rapidly depletes the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables. Still, even with all these limitations, eating fresh is always best!
A lot of raw foodists and alternative-food proponents in general treat everyone the same, and think everyone should be eating the same foods. But people come from a variety of environmental and genetic backgrounds. When you look at anthropological literature, there is no escaping the truth of humans having inhabited a variety of ecological niches. As a result, different people need different foods for optimal health. I may dream of living in a tropical paradise, but my ancestors come from—and I live somewhere—very different. Humans always have and probably always will live in places as different as the perennially frozen Arctic, the equatorial jungles, and everywhere in between. As a result, we have eaten very different diets. That is, until the last several decades, when preserving food and transporting it across half the world has become common. Now we have become pretty homogenized.
It used to be that we ate whatever we could get locally and in season. The Eskimo who live in the Arctic were classic meat eaters, and people in the rain forest were principally vegetarians. The traditional Eskimo diet was well studied at the beginning of the twentieth century by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and the great Arctic explorers, and it was established that their diet was about 20 percent protein and 80 percent fat. Of course, in the Arctic Circle there is no growing season, there is no soil to till, and there are no sources of fruits, nuts, seeds, or grain. When the traditional Eskimo were eating the traditional meat diet, they were among the healthiest people that had been studied anywhere—with no heart disease, low cholesterol, low arteriosclerosis, and none of the degenerative diseases from which much of the world suffers. However, when the Eskimos went into the towns and cities and began eating a lower-fat diet, a Western diet of breakfast cereals and junk food, they started to get obese and they developed the degenerative diseases that plague them today. The famous Masai in Kenya, and the Nuer and Dinka from the Sudan, for example, have a largely milk-blood diet in which most of their calories come from animal protein. It’s an extraordinarily high saturated-fat diet, and yet these traditional peoples are unusually healthy.
The idea that humans are vegetarian by nature simply isn’t validated by anthropological literature. Not only do we have the teeth of omnivores—those who eat a mixed plant- and meat-based diet—but even today the Eskimos are people who really need to eat red meat to be healthy. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that Eskimos lack some of the enzymes needed to break down cooked complex carbohydrates—something they never developed because they never used to eat our “well-rounded diet.” No complex carbohydrates grow in the far northern reaches of North America. So if they eat white sugar (which in my view isn’t good for anyone!) or even whole grains, they’re not going to do well. Eskimo cell metabolism requires fat to produce energy; they don’t produce it from carbohydrates very effectively. They actually need saturated fat, and they thrive on it.
On the other hand, if you go to the equatorial regions—the Amazon, for example—you’ll find peoples who eat largely a plant-based diet, and they derive sufficient proteins from it. It’s estimated that some of the North American Indians east of the Mississippi knew of a thousand edible plants and, like the Amazonian Indians, they lived principally off the vegetation. And they did so very efficiently and were traditionally very healthy. But further west, the Plains Indians largely lived off the buffalo herds—very successfully. So even within North America there was a great variation in indigenous diets.
So I’m not an across-the-board proponent of a raw, strictly plant-based diet for everyone. I have no doubt it’s right for some people, but it may not be (and probably isn’t) right for everyone. My boyfriend is an athlete. He’s originally from Russia. He’s extraordinarily healthy and eats mostly raw foods. But what does he crave? Red meat. And he eats a lot of it. I occasionally eat meat too, as well as fish and dairy; I just eat it mostly raw. When I was first introduced to eating raw by Dr. Brantley, the question of possibly becoming a vegetarian or a vegan never came up. Only recently have I met more and more raw vegans whose philosophy of life opposes humans consuming animal products. It seems that many, if not most, of the prominent raw foodists are vegans. I can’t speak for them. But I do share the concern that many of them express over the torture of animals who become our food. It’s important, therefore, to seek out organic, free-range meat to ensure that the animals were properly treated.
Unlike the millions of people who deprive themselves on diets, I eat as much as I want—so long as it’s raw. I don’t limit myself to one piece of raw coconut pie or thirty germinated almonds or any other measured serving. If I want to eat more, I do. I don’t count raw calories or raw fat grams. I don’t calculate how much of a given raw food I might eat. I don’t weigh anything. That’s something I let my body dictate. What freedom!
At age thirty-two, when I was eating cooked food, I was starving myself yet still had trouble keeping extra weight off. Now in my forties, I eat what I want—but just raw—and maintain my weight without even trying to. If anything, I may have trouble keeping weight on because I’m almost never hungry and always satisfied when I eat. I don’t walk away from the table still wishing I could have more. I walk away full, satisfied, without thinking about what I wish I could have eaten but had to sacrifice to stay in model/actress form.
Our society is beset with obesity. It is a growing problem, even in kids, but it is something that becomes more and more of a problem as people age. It doesn’t take someone who eats raw food to see that the obesity problem is reaching epidemic proportions. I’m struck that there are very few overweight raw foodists, young or old. But there are lots of them who are trim and beautiful and look younger than their years—or at least more beautiful and younger than many others their age who eat cooked food and seem to be aging prematurely.
And what about beauty? Though we women would like to pretend that we’re flawless (or at least magazines present models that way), I confess I’m not. In case there are any men reading this, pay attention: most women have some cellulite, models and actresses included (sorry, guys, I really do hate to ruin the illusion). Most magazine photos are retouched! (However, the cover of this book is not!)
Here’s a confession: I have never liked to work out, and I really don’t have a strict regimen I stick to. Okay, I’m an exercise slacker (and I’m not saying you should be). But there was a time, back in my cooked-food days, when slacking off at the gym meant I would suffer the consequences in a serious way. There was no way I could go for two days without doing my five hundred sit-ups because it would show. Now, when I work out I see changes faster, and muscle tone and definition last longer. I have better ab definition now without even trying than I ever did before. I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression—it didn’t happen overnight. But I recently realized that one of the cumulative effects of eating raw over these years is that I have lost the fat and there is muscle where I could never quite see it, even though I worked out all those years. There’s almost a six-pack where before there was a suck-it-in layer of fat. So I strongly believe in the positive effects eating raw can have on staying toned.
Critics of eating raw foods often assume something must be missing in a raw diet. Some think eating raw will make you sick. For me in fact, since eating raw I no longer suffer from the headaches, heartburn, colds, flu, allergies, or sinus problems that once seemed to plague me. And my overall mood has changed. I’m no longer sluggish, and I don’t lack desire for work or sex.
I’m amazed sometimes at how some people care a lot about how they look but don’t really care about their health. Maybe I have been eating raw for too long to recall what it was like not to make the connection among health, the appearance of beauty, and true vitality. But it makes sense to me that if you are healthy you’ll look healthy. And if you look healthy you’ll look younger. Vitality and youth go hand in hand. So it should come as no surprise that if there is a fountain of youth to be found it’s as close to you as what you put into your body and how it is prepared. And if you have to choose between consuming dead food that your body has to reprocess or living food that provides you with what you need to sustain and foster life, well, I prefer life over death and the living over the dying. And people tell me it shows. I’ve already told you how I can see the difference in my skin. The same is true for my hair, and even my eyes are different. Eating raw, the whites are whiter and the blue got lighter.
I do look younger. My skin is more supple now and I have fewer wrinkles than I did before eating raw. I remember the day my mother, who can be my most loving but honest critic, came up to me and told me that she couldn’t believe how my skin had changed. Of course, I’m not the only one. I believe you see the change in people when they switch over from cooked to raw food and it only grows with time. I see it a lot in the raw foodists I meet. There is a youthful appearance and a happiness. They simply look better.
The proof is in the proverbial (yes, uncooked) pudding—and that doesn’t mean just Carol Alt. I have seen it in the health and beauty and wellness of countless raw foodists, women and men from all walks of life who, whether they understand exactly how raw foods nourish them or not, have been able to experience a vitality they never imagined was possible.
You could be one of us.