If we don’t take responsibility and care for our individual health, how can we have more than limited abilities, limited happiness and limited control over our lives?

Understanding Food That Nourishes Us With Radiant Health

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

WHY DOES LIVE FOOD ASSIST HEALING?

We are born with a given supply of nutrients in our bodies to facilitate all bodily functions. Enzymes, vitamins, minerals, sugars, fats and proteins are just some of the known nutrients. As we grow, we require greater quantities of all nutrients. We eat to supply this need so that we develop fully, healthfully. Many nutrients are expended during bodily processes. Those nutrients must be replaced. We eat to supply them and maintain or achieve the most efficient bodily functions and optimal health.

Enzymes are catalysts for every metabolic process from thinking, to smiling, to healing, to cleansing, to cellular regeneration. Vitamins, minerals, sugars, fats, proteins and all other nutrients cannot be digested, assimilated or utilized properly without a myriad of active enzymes.

Raw foods contain a myriad of active enzymes and have plentiful supplies of vitamins and other nutrients. Eating raw foods ensures optimal digestion and functioning, and replaces expended nutrients, promoting excellent health.

HOW DO COOKED AND PROCESSED FOODS CREATE DISEASE?

I have found that all sickness is rooted in malnutrition, pollution and the accumulation of toxins. This includes allergy-related conditions and genetic diseases. Malnutrition results from a person not getting the nutrients (or combination and balance of nutrients) that his or her body needs. Disease most often results from a combination of malnutrition and accumulated toxins, or an instant poisoning, such as results from many vaccines and other industrial substances. Under this heading, the toxins that result from cooking food will be our focus.

Cooking and processing foods destroy nutrients by altering their shape, size and chemistry. This causes biochemical confusion, and toxicity in the body (the accumulation of harmful substances, residues, and debris). Immersing fully charged batteries into boiling acid would cause batteries to lose charge, be destroyed and become debris. That is analogous to the destruction of nutrients by cooking.

Because nutrients have been destroyed in cooked and processed foods, eating cooked and processed foods forces the body to leach enzymes from its own supply to digest, assimilate and utilize whatever is eaten, breathed and absorbed. Enzymes are not the only nutrients that are leached. Our bodies leach cells, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and hormones from our constitutions, gradually weakening us. Leaching increases work that the body and enzymes must do. Consequently, increasingly, work does not get done. Gradually, inert and volatile toxins accumulate. Cells weaken. Cellular functions decline, causing bodily deterioration and disease. We call this aging.

Therefore, cooked diets lack what the body needs to more easily build, protect and cleanse itself. Many people over age 20 easily succumb to gravity and lose muscle tone because they eat cooked and processed foods. Most people have at least one ailment because they eat cooked and processed foods.

If instinct and intuition were not muddled with traditional dietary habits, and if healthy foods were available, we would eat only for good health and the body would never get to the state of gross toxicity that is disease. Disease would be a concept rather than a fact. However, while we lack intuitional and instinctual connectedness, symptoms of illness are as necessary to achieving good health as ears are to good hearing. A body that does not manifest symptoms would behave like a little girl who had no feeling of hot or cold. Sadly, she burned off her backside from her waist to her knees when she sat for five minutes on a hot radiator.

Symptoms are the body’s way of telling us that something needs to change. In all cases it is a change in diet that is needed. But in some cases, other changes may be necessary in conjunction with a dietary change. Simply avoiding certain foods and environmental pollutants, such as smoke, poisonous fumes and radiation, sometimes corrects an ailment with time. In others cases, besides a change in diet, physical or psychological changes may be needed. For instance, leaving a cynical mind-set and becoming more open-minded, accepting and creative. Or sometimes what is needed is to leave an unhappy or inappropriate or non-improvable relationship.

Sabotaging symptoms with drugs puts a person in greater danger of disease, suffering and early death. Correcting the causes of illness is the cure. Adopting a healthy diet and environment naturally lessen and eventually eliminates symptoms, indicating that health gradually improves.

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE HEALTHY EVEN THOUGH THEY EAT COOKED AND PROCESSED FOODS?

The body, as a whole and on a cellular level, always strives toward good health. The changes in shape, size and chemistry of nutrients from cooking forces the body to invent and manufacture unusual forms of enzymes to facilitate all metabolic processes. We will call those ENZYME-MUTATIONS. Some individuals have a full spectrum of enzyme-mutations, and are better able than others to digest, assimilate, and utilize the mutilated nutrients in cooked and processed foods, as well as discard the enormous waste. Consequently, those people are healthier than people who do not have a full spectrum of enzyme-mutations. Each body handles nutrients and toxicity differently.

There are so few people who do very well on cooked foods that we are genetically an unstable species. As a whole, mankind has not come close to altering himself to live on cooked and processed foods without disease. Diseases are changing form and increasing. They are not being eradicated.

Genetic illness is the same malnutrition carried on for generations; that is, dietary habits are learned and followed from generation to generation. When a deficiency is continued in a particular family, the genetic plan for proper functioning of one or more body parts or systems is misplaced, but usually not lost, at birth or during the lifetime. Most genetic illness can be corrected in time if the right nutrients are eaten.

The onslaught of pollution has created a need for more nutrients and enzyme-mutations to neutralize, constrain, and eliminate more toxins. We have an even greater need to eat fresh raw foods, especially raw fat, today than we have had in the past.

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE MORE ILL-AFFECTED BY COOKED AND PROCESSED FOODS?

Some ailments are a direct result of a lack of enzyme-mutations for handling certain cooked foods. This causes the toxic resins and residues from those cooked and processed foods to accumulate. These ailments are basically allergies to those cooked and processed foods. Therefore, some people are more sensitive to and ill-affected by cooked foods than others.

Fat resins, especially from vegetable oils, and protein residues from cooked or processed green foods first collect in intestinal cells. Secondly, they collect as gummy resins in the glands (as in prostatitis leading to prostate cancer). Thirdly, they collect as gummy resins in the brain (as in Alzheimer’s disease). Finally, the gummy resins frequently crystallize, hardening cells and creating disease such as hardening of the heart, arteriosclerosis and multiple sclerosis.

The resins and residues from cooked or processed red fruits and vegetables most often collect in the lymph and skin cells, causing acne, sickly looking tongues, hard and brittle bones, and deep lesions in the skin when the weather turns very cold. Most children with chronic illness within their lungs and nasal passages, like colds, sore throats, tonsillitis, and swollen adenoids, lack enzyme-mutations for eating cooked or processed red or orange fruits and vegetables. By simply eliminating cooked red and orange fruits and vegetables from their diets, and by eating raw red and orange foods, most often those symptoms normalize so that those children will have only occasional colds, flu, and/or sore throats.

People who lack the enzyme-mutations for digesting, assimilating and utilizing cooked or processed yellow foods most often look pasty around the nose and eyes, and have very slow digestion, especially after eating a cooked or processed yellow or orange food.

People who lack enzyme-mutations for eating all three food groups - cooked or processed green, red (including orange) and yellow (including orange) foods - have a predisposition toward HIV positive.

IF I LACK ENZYME-MUTATIONS, WHAT FOODS SHOULD I AVOID?

If a person lacks enzyme-mutations to digest, assimilate or utilize cooked or processed green foods, she or he should avoid eating or drinking cooked or processed green foods such as ordinary olive oils, cooked leafy vegetables (including steamed), artichoke, celery, green beans (string beans), green peppers, broccoli, any pastas made from green foods such as spinach, cooked vegetable juices (canned or bottled), teas (including herbal unless sun-steeped) and food coloring.

If a person lacks enzyme-mutations to digest, assimilate or utilize cooked or processed red fruits and vegetables, she or he should avoid eating or drinking cooked or processed red or orange fruits and vegetables, like store-bought strawberry preserves and jams, cherry, cranberry, tomato, vegetable and orange juices and drinks, tomato sauces, catsup, carrots, peppers (including cayenne and paprika), red and brown beans and food coloring. Other cooked foods to avoid that have red in their pigment are coffee, chocolate, boysenberries, grapes and blueberries. Therefore cooked or processed apple, strawberry, cherry, boysenberry, grape and blueberry jams, juices, syrups and pies should be avoided.

If a person lacks enzyme-mutations to digest, assimilate or utilize cooked or processed yellow foods, she or he should avoid eating or drinking cooked or processed yellow or orange foods, like ordinary corn oils, cooked corn (including steamed or popped), carrots, yellow squashes and onions, corn bread, banana bread, pasteurized or frozen juices (including pineapple, lemon and orange) and food coloring.

COULD I BENEFIT FROM EATING VITAL FOODS?

Sick and healthy people have benefited from eating vital foods. If you are a person who is in perfect health, does not have disease, is balanced emotionally, physically, mentally, and sensually, is happy, has great patience and stamina without intoxicants such as coffee and chocolate, and ages without deterioration, you have mutated to eat cooked foods completely. You are an evolutionary wonder! You can eat cooked and processed foods. Please give this book to someone who needs it.

If you are like me and most people who have some kind of health problem, including genetic, you have not mutated well enough to handle a cooked diet without sickness or disease. We can struggle to try to change millions of years of dietary evolution in our short lifetimes, or we can experiment and probably discover that this raw Primal Diet is healthier.

WHAT SHOULD I EXPECT IF I CHANGE TO EATING A VITAL-FOOD DIET?

People who have completely changed to a raw diet have had different experiences. In thousands of cases, every person experienced improved health. Coincidentally, some people entered a detoxification period at the same time they began this Primal Diet. However, the detoxification was not directly caused by the change of diet. Their bodies were detoxifying accumulated toxins that were in their bodies from the mass quantities of toxins from cooked, processed and chemically grown food prior to the diet change. I have never seen a bad physiological reaction directly caused by a complete change to the Primal Diet.

Squeamishness toward eating raw meat, especially raw chicken (even though antibiotic-free and hormone-free), was a psychological block in some instances that was overcome by those people eating a few bites of raw meat several days weekly until their bodies developed a craving for it. Another psychological block I encountered was that people, especially women, who were thin-conscious and fat-phobic, and who gained weight and size in the initial stages of a raw diet, got upset. Sometimes those people chose to discontinue the raw diet so that they would stay slim, even though a cooked diet made them anxious and irritable and gave them one or more serious health problems. I tried to reassure them that their tissues were being hydrated, cleansed and strengthened, and that the increased size is temporary, lasting no more than 30 months (except in women who had cesarean surgery or disease, in which cases size retention averages 74 months). If you are a person who is thin-conscious and has one or more health problems, you must ask yourself, “Would I rather gain and retain 10-20 pounds and put on a few inches while my body cleanses and improves my physical, mental and emotional health, or would I rather continue with my present state of heath and progression toward more disease?” See Weight and density, page 339.

Some bodies are so starving for nutrients that some people eat twice as much on a raw diet as they do on a cooked diet. However, most people’s hunger is easily satisfied on the Primal Diet. Eating excessively usually lasts only 1-2 months. Eating more is healthy, especially if you are underweight. Even if you do not crave food, it is good to eat more if you are underweight.

Some bodies crave so much sleep that some people sleep more during the first month or two on a raw diet. Sleeping more is healthy because it promotes healing. Most healing occurs during sleep. Yet some people sleep less than before they began the raw diet because they don’t spend so much energy on digestion and toxicity. Occasionally a person will feel sluggish because her or his body has to slow or rest certain functions to cleanse and rebuild.

In my thirty-one years of experience, everyone gained general vitality within a month and maintained it, except during some detoxifications. Digestion significantly increased. Bad breath was either eliminated or reduced significantly in most people but increased in some for awhile. Usually, bowel movements were easy, except in people with a history of constipation. For them, it took 1-2 years to produce relaxed, smooth bowel movements. However, some people did not have bowel movements for 2-5 days when they began the diet because their bodies utilized almost everything they ate without discarding much. After many months on a raw diet, a perpetually increasing calmness of body and clarity of mind usually were beneficial results.