“Why don’t you go raw?”

You might have had this asked of you at some point, if you have been talking to people about some of the new and innovative diet plans out there today. A raw diet plan has been gaining traction lately as far as popularity, and that has led some people to dismiss it as just another silly fad diet.

But hold your horses – this is not another quick weight loss miracle plan. If you take the time to really look, you will find that eating raw can offer you a lot of benefits. It is not always the easiest diet plan to follow, but the best things in life often require a little bit of hard work.

So, why go raw?

There are all sorts of benefits to consuming less cooked foods. For one, when you cook many of the foods we eat today, you leach away a lot of the benefits that your body could really use.

With vegetables, common cooking practices often include steaming or boiling, both of which pull out valuable nutrients and vitamins, leaving you with soggy, mushy carrots that are not nearly as useful or nutritious as they were before they hit the heat.

By cooking, you are also killing off the natural living enzymes in many foods – enzymes that can help with healthy digestion and processing of food within your body. Without those additional sources of enzymes, your body has to work hard to process, digest and pass foods, and often does a poorer job of it, meaning that what few nutrients are left in food are sometimes not fully absorbed by your body.

Another example of the killing power of cooking is milk products. These days, every milk product you can buy in the store – milk, cheese, and yogurt – has gone through a pasteurization process, killing off all of the bacteria in the milk. While this does protect you against the bad bacteria, it also destroys the good bacteria that can help your body.

Want proof?

Look at the new trend in yogurt – adding back in certain active bacterial cultures in order to benefit your overall health. Without pasteurization, those bacteria wouldn’t have to be added in – they would already be there.

So, how do you go raw? The best way to get into the groove with raw foods is to add them slowly, and little by little, remove the cooked items from your diet. Start off by substituting your side dishes at meals with raw items – cold raw soups, fresh salads or mixed vegetables instead of the usual hot items. Then, once your body begins to get used to these new sources of vitamins and nutrients, you can replace a meal a day with a raw alternative.

Breakfast is often the best place to start, as a smoothie for breakfast can really get your day going. Again, small steps are the best, and before you know it, you will be eating nothing but raw foods, and feeling great for it. And not only that, you will be able to sustain that sort of eating plan for the long term.