When it comes to eating for energy, you may at times find yourself falling into familiar routines that become, well, dull. You might start off eating exotic and interesting fruits and vegetables until you discover your very favorite one; at which point, you begin to settle your habits around your new comfort foods, and lose the thrill of discovery in favor of convenience and habit.
But have faith, all of you who have found yourself in a dreary (but still better than cooked!) existance – there are still new foods out there for you to try. All it takes to break out of those raw food doldrums is a trip to your favorite alternative supermarket or local farmer’s market.
For instance, you might find yourself missing regular old pasta, or getting bored with the zucchini alternative, thinly slicing the fruit into long, pasta-like strands for your raw tomato sauces. But there are other options, like kelp noodles, that will give you your pasta fix and help you to discover new flavors.
Kelp noodles are made, of course, from kelp – an abundantly available plant in the oceans, sometimes called seaweed. But there is nothing weedy about this great plant, which can be reduced down to a noodle that requires no cooking before you eat it. Kelp is also low in calories, assumes the flavors of whatever sauces you partner it with, and is perfect for people with gluten allergies or those who want to avoid adding additional carbs to their diets.
Another area where raw food enthusiasts might find themselves lacking is in the sweets department. Gone are the processed sugars; in fact, some people will even avoid honey, depending on the method of it’s preparation. That doesn’t leave you with many options with which to sweeten your foods, but agave nectar can be a great solution for raw eaters. This thick liquid is often compared to maple syrup or molasses, but can be purchased raw. It comes from the agave cactus, which is also used to create tequila. It also contains many more nutrients, vitamins and minerals than sugar could ever hope to hold!
Last but not least, many raw food eaters have shied away from certain kinds of nuts, due to the way that many nuts are processed in certain countries. California, for example, uses a fast pasteurization process on all almonds, rendering them, by most standards, cooked. This kills off many of the key benefits of the almond, and leave a lot of raw food people to look elsewhere for their fiber. But if you search enough, you can find truly raw almonds. Spain, for one, does not subject their almonds to these cooking processes, so a Spanish almond should be safe for your raw diet, and beneficial to your body the way it was intended to be. The key with almonds, and indeed all nuts, is to carefully read the labels, or ask your grocer. With the proper research, you can find nuts that are truly raw, instead of simply being “not roasted”.
