Posts Tagged ‘raw diet plan’

Why Eat a Raw Diet?

April 8th, 2010

“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.

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What is an Alkaline Diet?

December 22nd, 2009

We’re going back to basics on this one. Many of you have asked what makes an alkaline diet. So I thought I would give you some of the basics in this post.

The first thing you need to understand is what an alkaline food item is. These are foods that, once digested, leave behind an ash that has a basic pH rating of seven or higher. Rather than use this as cooking information, followers of the acid alkaline diet use this combustion as a comparison to how the body breaks down and uses food as a fuel source.

These foods leave behind minerals like calcium, copper, iron, magnesium and zinc when they are consumed by fire. Foods that leave this kind of residue include low-glycemic index fruits and vegetables, citrus fruits, tubers, roots and nuts. Switching your diet to solely these food items, it is believed, will help keep the body’s overall pH balance at a slightly alkaline level, which is thought to be a natural and healthy state. Foods to avoid on this plan include animal proteins, processed foods, unnatural sugars, and stimulants like caffeine.

One of the benefits of following a raw diet plan is that it is inherently alkaline in nature!

A diet rich in alkaline foods is also thought to reduce the body’s reliance on stored pH balancers such as the calcium in bones. Some studies have even shown that an alkaline-rich diet, or a regular use of supplements, can increase the amount of bone mass and muscle mass in older people, helping to offset conditions like osteoporosis in women and degenerative muscle wasting in the elderly. And while many say that more research is needed on the benefits of an alkaline diet, there have been studies done that show that the formation of kidney stones is largely prevented with an alkaline-rich diet.

Followers of an alkaline diet say that their food consumption is closer to what our ancestors would have originally eaten. They say that, before the onset of Western civilization, a typical human diet was unprocessed and uncooked plant matter. Grains were not edible until the discovery of tools like the mortar and pestle, and meats were an uncommon addition, depending on the hunting prowess of the tribe, rather than domestication of meat-bearing animals. Instead, people had to rely on the plants, fruits and vegetables that could be eaten without problematic preparations.

Proponents of an alkaline diet may do so to alleviate symptoms that they believe are due to larger amounts of acidic foods in the modern diet. Practitioners say that people suffering from frequent illnesses and headaches, or an overall lack of energy, and women who have ovarian and benign breast cysts might benefit from an alkaline diet, or at the very least, a reduction in the amounts of red meat and processed grains that a person consumes.

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