The Raw Food Lifestyle Makes You Healthier

Raw foodism or rawism is a daily routine diet style which promotes un-cooked, un-processed, and often organic foods as the major diet. Raw food diet enthusiasts characteristically consider this: the more raw food diet you consume, the greater the health benefits. The raw food diet is a diet that comprises of unprocessed and uncooked plant foods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, sprouts, seeds, nuts, grains, beans, nuts, dried fruit, and seaweed.

It has been proved that heat above 116 degrees F when applied to food destroys enzymes in food which help in digestion and help to absorb food. Cooking is also known to reduce the nutritional value and "life force" of food. Raw food experts recommend that on average, at least 75% of the diet must be raw. Advocates of the raw food diet deem that it has plentiful health benefits, including greater than before energy, enhanced appearance of the skin and hair, better digestion, weight loss, reduced risk of heart disease and cancer etc. The raw food diet is low on trans fats and saturated fat than the typical Western diet. The sodium content is also low and content of potassium, magnesium, folate, fiber and health-promoting plant chemicals called phytochemicals is high. These properties are connected with a reduced danger of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. For example, a study published in the Journal of Nutrition found that consumption of a raw food diet lowered plasma total cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations.

Raw food diets may possibly comprise a selection of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds (including sprouted whole grains such as gaba rice), eggs, fish (such as sashimi), meat (such as carpaccio), and non-pasteurized/non-homogenized dairy products (such as raw milk, raw milk cheese, and raw milk yogurt), depending on the results and benefits desired. Specific cooking techniques like steaming make foods more digestible and add variety to the diet. Other techniques are sprouting seeds, grains, and beans, juicing fruit and vegetables, soaking nuts and dried fruit, blending, dehydrating food etc.

It has been seen that some people would undergo a detoxification reaction when they start the raw food diet, especially if their previous diet was rich in meat, sugar, and caffeine. Symptoms can be one or more of bad breath, chills, headaches, daytime drowsiness, mental fogginess, concentration problems, low libido, and unsettling of alertness and emotional states. People who shun raw food diet say while it"��s true that some enzymes are inactivated when food is heated, it doesn"��t matter because the body uses its own enzymes for digestion. They also say that cooking makes certain phytochemicals easier to absorb, such as beta-carotene in carrots. Another point they put forwars is that the human body has changed in response to eating cooked foods.

Nevertheless, raw food diet is undoubtedly worth trying and in fact many people have warmed up to it.