Living Food for Living People

Living Food Monthly Talk & Buffet
Living Food Preparation Class

What is Raw & Living Food?

First of all, let me make it clear that the raw lifestyle does not include meat, fish, eggs or dairy products. Raw and living food consists of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, sea vegetables, pro-biotic food and sprouts, often made into a variety of gourmet dishes. Contrary to popular belief raw foods do not have to be cold. It can be heated up to 38°C, which is surprisingly warm.

Specifically, living foods are those with active enzymes. Think of the sprouts you can buy in the health food shop like alfalfa, mung beans, chick peas, lentils, sunflower seeds, etc. These are typically "living foods". These foods have a powerful healing and rejuvenating effect because they contain 20 to 30 times the enzyme content of unsprouted foods. Probiotic or fermented food and beverages like Sauerkraut, Kefir, Kombucha and Rejuvelac are also “living foods”.

In raw food preparation nuts and seeds (which have enzymes which are dormant) are soaked to release the enzyme-inhibitors that stop them from sprouting. Soaking makes nuts and seeds more digestible by enabling fat-splitting enzymes like lipase.

Raw and Living Food is rich in enzymes, vitamins and minerals.

Heating destroys enzymes, as they start to deteriorate at 106˚F. Heat also changes the molecular structure of food. Cooking destroys 50% of protein in our food. The other 50% is damaged or denatured, making it more difficult to digest, reducing nutritional value. The heat from cooking also destroys between 50% and 80% of vitamins and minerals. If pesticides are present in food, they are broken down into more toxic substances which our body absorbs more readily. Oxygen is also lost and damaging free radicals are produced.

Morbid Matter

Colon therapists and researchers in degenerative diseases have shown that much of the body weight is waste accumulated within the 60,000 miles of blood vessels, the lymphatic system, joint spaces and intra-cellular regions, caused by incomplete digestion. Partially digested food in the small intestine & colon, passes into the blood stream and is deposited as waste or morbid matter, throughout the system. If it is calories it can show up as obesity, if excess minerals we have arthritis, excess protein can be built into cancer, fat leads to fatty tissue deposits and sugar to diabetes. The largest accumulation of waste is within the colon. Up to 50lbs of waste can be accumulated over the decades from undigested food. An enzyme-rich diet can begin to break down this partially digested stored food.

Enzymes

There are two different types of enzymes, metabolic and digestive. We produce over 100,000 different enzymes, each doing a unique task. Metabolic enzymes initiate every biological function in the human body. Without them, cells cannot divide in reproduction, the immune system cannot function. There can be no energy production or brain activity. Without enzymes, vitamins, minerals and hormones cannot do their work. Only raw food has functional "live" enzymes. Therefore the liver, pancreas, stomach and intestines must come to the rescue and provide digestive enzymes if you exist solely on a cooked food diet.

Enzymes are what make seeds sprout. Sprouts are, in fact, one of the richest sources of enzymes. They cannot be artificially reproduced, because they are the energy of life itself and are important because they help to digest and absorb food. If your food contains no without enzymes, your body cannot get maximum utilization of the food.

Living food is the secret to optimum health and long life. It allows our bodies to operate in peak condition. We are the only mammals in nature that cook our food and the only ones with a significant incidence of disease such as cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

The Enzyme-rich Diet

Our bodies cannot make enzymes in the perfect balance required to metabolise our food as the enzymes in natural food are able to do. As already mentioned, this leads to partially digested fats, proteins and starches that clog the body's intestinal tract and arteries. To illustrate the importance of enzymes, let us look at the diet of the Eskimo. The work Eskimo means "one who eats raw". Eskimos have lived for hundreds of years on a diet of raw whale and seal blubber. With this kind of diet, established medical thinking would predict a high occurrence of heart disease, stroke or high blood pressure. In fact Eskimos suffer almost no heart disease, stroke or high blood pressure. This is because even raw blubber will digest itself completely if not cooked and its enzymes remain active. Once you heat even the finest refined olive oil above 118 degrees, you will not be able to digest it completely.

Aging

It has been proven that our bodies produce a limited supply of enzymes. Every cooked meal we consume makes enzyme production necessary, which draws on those precious reserves. A meal of living food does not cause this drain. This helps us to understand why an 85 year old has only 1/30th the enzyme activity level of an 18 year old. Aging is really nothing more than running out of enzymes. Cells stop dividing, our immune system fails to handle challenges it managed easily when we were younger. Our enzyme reserve is exhausted over a lifetime of eating cooked food.

In 1930, Dr. Paul Kouchakoff discovered that when we eat cooked food, our bodies attack it with leukocytes, the white blood cells that make up our immune system. These cells bring enzymes to the cooked food in an attempt to break it down and dispose of it, treating cooked food as it would a foreign invader. No leukocytes are produced when living food is eaten. It is a tremendous burden on our body to produce digestive enzymes and leukocytes. It takes ten metabolic enzymes to make one digestive enzyme. The pancreas of humans and our domesticated animals is twice the size as a percentage of body weight, as mammals in nature. This is a direct result of the overwork we place on it to create digestive enzymes.

The Standard Western Diet

Nearly all chronic degenerative diseases are caused or aggravated by digestive problems. After the most extensive study on nutrition ever undertaken by the government, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs concluded in its 1978 report entitled "Diet and Killer Diseases" that the average Standard American Diet (SAD) high in cooked, canned and processed food, is responsible for the development of chronic degenerative diseases and premature death.

Sprouting & Juicing

Sprouting your own seeds and pulses is a very practical way of providing a steady supply of enzymes packaged with its own vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. Juicing is also a very good way of providing the body with the essential nutrition it needs. Juicing has many advantages because the nutrition is in liquid form and therefore bypasses the digestive system, is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream (about 20 minutes) and its nutrients assimilated efficiently.

Wheatgrass Juice

Wheatgrass juice is an exceptional form of liquid nutrition and enzymes and is referred to by many health food experts as a green superfood. It is widely used as an essential part of a healing diet. Wheatgrass contains over 80 enzymes as well as all the B group vitamins, B12 and Vitamins A C E & K. It is also rich in many minerals, containing calcium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, zinc and selenium plus many more trace minerals. Its structure is very similar to that of chlorophyll, which is the life blood of plants. The benefits of drinking wheatgrass juice daily are numerous, and it should be considered essential as a part of a living food diet. If you find the taste of wheatgrass unpleasant, try sucking on an orange just before drinking your wheatgrass shot.

Dehydrating Food

Using an electric dehydrator is a modern and convenient way of preserving living and raw food by extracting most of the water, while keeping the nutrients intact. Dehydrators have an adjustable thermostat so that the temperature can be controlled allowing preservation of vital enzymes and nutrients. Fruit and vegetable chips, snacks, cakes and many gourmet dishes can be made using a dehydrator. Seasonal vegetables can also be dried and stored for long periods of time without spoiling.

Where to start with Raw Food

How much raw and living food you eat is a personal choice and certainly eating 100% raw does not suit everyone, although there are many people thriving on an entirely raw, vegan diet. However, you will find a diet of about 50% raw food very beneficial and gradual increases can always be made from this starting point. Remember that over and above everything else, it is important to enjoy the food you eat.

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