Why Is Raw Food So Good?

“I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” Genesis 1:29 NIV

“I think we better do it,” my husband said, as I ate a big bite of lobster at an exotic seafood restaurant on St. Simon’s Island. We’d gone away for a week trying to recuperate emotionally and physically from the stress of our youngest daughter’s illnesses.
“Do what?” I asked without a clue.
“You know, the diet Dr. Loraine Day talks about.”
“Really?” I asked. Now I understood. Before we left home, we had watched one of Dr. Day’s videos about recovering from breast cancer by changing her diet to mostly raw food. We’d been through so many diets and seen so many doctors in the ten plus years of our daughter’s illness that I had little hope for this one. Besides, I couldn’t believe that my husband would be willing to embark on such a dramatic change from our normal lifestyle.
“We have no choice,” he replied. “We’ve tried everything else.” It was true. We’d gone to many doctors, tried so many things, traveled to specialists in Mexico and Dallas, Texas from our home in Oregon. Then my sister-in-law sent us the video.
“It’s the original diet our bodies were designed for,” Dr. Day said on the video and referred to the verse above.
“Okay, if you think we should,” I agreed.
That night we called our daughter and asked what she thought. She agreed to try, so when we returned home, we went to a mostly raw fruit, vegetable, nuts and seeds diet. Slowly over the next months she recovered from the chronic fatigue. She healed from the multiple chemical sensitivities as a result of an emotional healing.
So why is raw food so good for us? After all, some societies eat all, or almost all, their food cooked. What’s wrong with that?
When we heat food above 107 degrees, the enzymes that are in the food to help our bodies assimilate the nutrients, begin dying. Heated to 118 degrees for half an hour, the enzymes in food are destroyed.
Why should we be concerned about enzymes? Each kind of food has the enzymes within it that make it usable by our bodies. If they are killed by high temperature, the body has to call out enzymes designed for other purposes—like repairing body organs and fighting off disease. If we keep them used up in the food digestion process, we are the losers. We age faster and die younger.
You may not be as desperate as we were. Nor may you want to change your diet as drastically. However, if you’d like to be sick a few less days a year and have a little more energy each day, I encourage you to make a move closer to the original diet for which our bodies were designed.
One thing you might want to try is my favorite snack. I love to take a banana or an apple slice, frost it with nut butter and eat it. Here’s one of my favorite nut butter recipes.

Crystal’s Nut Butter

2 cups almonds*
1 cup cashews (if you don’t have cashews add an extra cup almonds)
1/3 cup almond or olive oil
1 teaspoon Celtic sea salt
2-4 pitted dates
3 -4 tablespoons carob powder (if you like it)

Blend the almonds and cashews in your blender or food processor until it is the consistency you want—smoother, the better. Be careful, however, not to over heat the blender. Add the oil, salt, dates—and carob, if you use it. Blend until smooth.

*Raw nuts are most nutritious when soaked over-night before being used. If you have a dehydrator, dry them a couple of days until they are crunchy again. Soaking nuts releases the enzymes to their full potential.

Let me know how you like it.


Websites you may want to visit:
For diet and physical health: www.hacres.com
www.drday.com
For emotional/spiritual healing: www.akwellspring.com,