by Dr. Bernarr, D.C., D.D.
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When food is cooked above 118 degrees F for three minutes or longer, its protein has become coagulated, its sugar has become caramelized, its natural fibers have been broken down, which means it will take longer to move through the intestinal tract, 30% to 50% of its vitamins and minerals have been destroyed and 100% of its enzymes have been destroyed. Cooked food depletes our body's enzyme potential and drains the energy we need to maintain and repair our tissues and organ systems and shortens our lifespan.
Dr. Virginia Vetrano writes about an authority who contends that irritation from putting extremely hot foods into the stomach, can cause cancer. Dr. Vetrano also writes that "Heating any food, destroys much of its vitamin, mineral, and protein content and poisonous inorganic acids are formed. The all uncooked diet is most healthful."
Marilyn Willison, of Hippocrates Health Institute, writes, "We should not cook our food. During this apparently harmless process, vital enzymes are destroyed, proteins are coagulated (making them difficult to assimilate), vitamins are mostly destroyed with the remainder changing into forms that are difficult for the body to utilize, pesticides are restructured into even more toxic compounds, valuable oxygen is lost, and free radicals are produced.
According to Viktoras Kulvinskas, nutrient losses can be as high as 80% or more. Other studies suggest that cooked proteins (coagulated) are up to 50% less likely to be utilized by the body."
Dr. Francis M. PottengerJr., wrote about his experiments with 900 cats over a period of ten years. Pottenger fed some of the test cats raw meat and other test cats, he fed cooked meats. Pottenger wrote, "Cooked meat fed cats were irritable. The females were dangerous to handle, occasionally biting the keeper..." The cooked meat fed cats suffered with "pneumonia, empyema, diarrhea, osteomyelitis, cardiac lesions, hyperopia and myopia (eye diseases), thyroid diseases, nephritis, orchitis, oophoritis (ovarian inflammation), arthritis and many other degenerative diseases."
No cooked food is benign. Cooked foods act malignantly by exhausting your bodily energies, inhibiting your healing, and decreasing your alertness, efficiency and productivity.
Cooked foods suppress the immune system. the heat of cooking destroys vitamins, enzymes, minerals, nucleic acids, chlorophyll, and damages fats, making them indigestible. The fatty matter becomes a local irritant. The heat disorganizes the protein structure, leading to deficiency of some of the essential amino acids. The fibrous or woody element of food (cellulose) is changed completely from its natural condition by cooking. When this fibrous element is cooked, it loses its broomlike quality to sweep the alimentary canal clean. The fibrous matter is changed from its natural state to a poison. Raw food has the best balance of water, nutrients and fiber to meet your body's needs.
Cooking causes the inorganic elements to enter the blood, circulate through the system, settle in the arteries and veins and deaden the nerves. After cooking, the body loses its flexibility, arteries lose their pliability, nerves lose the power of conveying impressions, the spinal cord becomes hardened, the tissues throughout the body contract, and the human being becomes prematurely old. In many cases this matter is deposited in the various joints of the body, causing enlargement of the joints. In other cases, it accumulates as concretions in one or more of the internal organs, finally accumulating around the heart valves.
Raw foods are easily digested, requiring only 24-36 hours for transit time through the digestive tract, as compared to 40-100 hours for cooked foods. This increases the threat of putrefaction and disease. When you eat cooked carbohydrates, proteins and fats, you are eating numerous mutagenic (carcinogenic) products causes by cooking.
Dr. Karl Elmer experimented with top athletes in Germany, producing improvement in their performance by changing to a purely raw food diet. Raw food provides you with more strength, energy and stamina.
On raw foods, the mind (memory and power of concentration) will be clear. You will be more alert, think sharper and more logically.
Raw foods will not leave you with a tired feeling after the meal. There is a tendency toward sleepiness after a cooked meal. Raw foods require less total sleep and achieve a more restful sleep.
When we treat foods with thermal fire, we lose up to 97% of the water soluble vitamins (Vitamins B and C) and up to 40% of the lipid soluble vitamins (Vitamins A, D, E and K). We need only one-half the amount of protein in the diet if raw protein foods are eaten rather than protein foods which are cooked. Heating also changes the lipids. These changed fats are incorporated into the cell wall and interfere with the respiration of the cell, causing an increase in cancer and heart disease.
When grasses are separately covered with fertilizers that are both raw and cooked, the grass grown with the raw fertilizer grows 400% more tonnage over that grown with the same amount per acre of cooked food fertilizer.
After eating cooked foods, the blood immediately shows an enormous increase of leukocytes of white blood cells-corpuscles. The white blood cells are a first line of defense and are, collectively, popularly called "the immune system". This spontaneous multiplication of white corpuscles always takes place in normal blood immediately after the introduction of any virulent infection or poison into the body since the white corpuscles are the fighting organisms of the blood. There is no multiplication of white corpuscles when uncooked food is eaten. The constant daily fight against the toxic effects of cooked food unnecessarily exhausts the body's strength and vitality, thus causing disease and the modern shortness of life.
Cooked foods quickly ferment and putrefy in the intestinal tract. On a raw food diet you will experience the elimination of body odor and halitosis. Cooked food causes allergies.
If you consult the ancient scriptures and sacred writings, you will read that in Eden, people did not eat cooked food with "burning fire". In fact, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian and Hebrew accounts, indicate that people were expelled from Paradise for using fire to cook food. Methuselah, it is contended, because he ate only raw foods, lived to an old age.
The Bhagavad Gita says, "Pious men eat what the brilliant forces of nature leave over them after the offering. But those ungodly, cooking good food, sin as they eat it." They're speaking of the ill health to the individual, our race and the world caused by fire-cooked food.
In the Essene Gospel of Peace, a third century Aramaic Essene manuscript, Jesus is described as saying, "Cook not your food with the fire of death, which is the fire that blazed outside you that is hotter than your blood. Cook only with the fire of life," that is, the natural heat of the day. Raw foods are delectable and have more flavor than cooked foods. There is no need to jazz up its flatness with unhealthful additives. These flavor-enhancing additives can irritate your digestive system or over-stimulate other organs. Avoid these harmful additives: sugar, salt, pepper, spices, condiments, ketchup, mayonnaise, dressing and toppings. Hannah Allen wrote, "Raw foods contain live enzymes, which influence digestive efficiency-cooking destroys all enzymes. Moreover, the consumption of raw foods stimulates gastric enzyme secretion, necessary to initiate good digestion. Besides, the more raw foods you eat as your first course, the less cooked foods you will be able to eat. Ideally, we should never cook any foods."
Arthur M. Baker in "Awakening Our Self Healing Body", writes, "Overly cooked foods literally wreck our body. They deny needed nutrients to the system since heat alters foodstuffs such that they are partially, mostly, or wholly destroyed. Nutrients are coagulated, deaminized, caramelized and rendered inorganic and become toxic and pathogenic in the body."
Baker adds, "Virulent bacteria find soil in dead food substances only and cannot exist on living cells. Cooked food spoils rapidly, both inside and outside our body, whereas living foods are slow to lose their vital qualities and do not as readily become soil for bacterial decay."
Professor Edmund Szekeley wrote concerning the Essene scrolls, "Eat nothing, therefore, which a stronger fire than the fire of life has killed... Cook not, neigher mis all things one with another, lest your bowels become as steaming bogs."
I have been a 100% raw food eater, for over 50 years. To get more information, motivation and discipline so as to always eat 100% raw foods, contact me. I will help you. Or come to our FREE Raw Food Potluck-Lectures held every month, year-round.
Dr. Bernarr, D.C., D.D. God Healing, Inc.
Http://www.HealSelf.org
