Raw food diet
Article from
www.healthy-eating-guide.com
We begin with a recommendation of uncooked food. Much can and should be said in favour of raw or uncooked food. Less boiling, roasting and fermenting, and more of raw food would undoubtedly do away with a great deal of weakness and disease.
Nature did not create man with a cooker by his side. Man existed on this planet for ages before he knew how to start a fire, and in those days of unfired food he was, undoubtedly, like all the rest of God's creatures who live in the freedom of nature, healthier and stronger physically than the present day diseased and degenerate product of artificial living and hypercivilization.
The constant use of cooked, highly spiced and fermented food takes away the relish of natural raw food. It deprives man of the natural instinct and intuition for the right selection and combination of foods. The majority of people in the West, reared from infancy on the most unwholesome and haphazard food combinations, have lost the capacity for tasting and enjoying the delicate natural flavors of fruits, nuts and vegetables. Mankind, for ages, has lived almost entirely on cooked and highly seasoned foods and stimulants. This has atrophied the taste buds in the tongue and palate. Natural sensitiveness for the finest flavors of fruits, nuts, vegetables and other uncooked foods can be restored only by using the latter much more liberally in the daily dietary.
Fruits
The most delicious and wholesome raw foods are the juicy fruits. While they run low in starches, fats and proteids, they contain large amounts of the positive organic mineral salts (vitamins).
They are, therefore, nature's own medicines, splendid tonics, natural stimulants, cholagogues, purifiers, antiseptics, anthelmintics and febrifuges. Acid fruit juices diluted in water are very effective in the treatment of inflammatory, febrile diseases.
The finest medicinal fruits are the acid and sub-acid varieties, such as lemons, oranges, limes, grapefruit, pineapples, tangerines, apricots, apples, green gages and other plums, and certain sub-acid varieties of cherries, pears, peaches, nectarines, and similar fruits. While these fruits contain highly organized acids, such as malic, oxalic and citric acid, they are very rich in the positive, alkaline mineral elements, and have, therefore, an acid binding and acid eliminating effect upon the system.
Lemon Juice the Most Efficient Antiseptic
The fruit acids, instead of being injurious to the system, are powerful solvents for morbid accumulations of an alkaline nature.
In the (external) treatment of wounds and bedsores, even of a most serious nature, the use of lemon juice diluted in water gives excellent results - Use the juice of one half lemon in a cup of boiled or filtered water.
Lemon juice is a wholesome food and at the same time is the finest natural antiseptic in existence, while most of the medicinal antiseptics and germicides are powerful protoplasmic poisons which benumb and kill, not only disease germs, bacteria and parasites, but also the healthy cells and tissues of the body. Since lemon juice is such an efficient antiseptic externally, it must have similar effects internally. This is true, not only of lemon juice, but also in a modified degree of all other acid and sub-acid fruits and vegetables.
Fruit Juices good for babies and children
In the fruit juices the infant receives an abundant supply of the bone and tissue building materials. To give lime water, iron, sodium and other minerals in the inorganic mineral form, when the luscious fruits contain all these elements in the live, organic, vitamin combinations is, to say the least, very short sighted. The acid fruits also contain considerable amounts of fruit sugars - the finest forms of organic sugar in nature.
Sweet Fruits
The sweet, alkaline fruits, such as figs, dates, grapes, persimmons, melons, cantaloups, and certain varieties of peaches, pears, and the like, are very rich in highly refined, organic sugars, all ready for assimilation, and contain considerable amounts of the positive, organic mineral salts. They are, therefore, nourishing, purifying and stimulating.
Dates rank highest in sugar, but are comparatively poor in organic salts. Figs make a much better showing. While they contain in round figures sixty percent of saccharin elements, they are also very rich in the positive organic salts, containing over ten parts, per thousand of sodium, seven per thousand of lime, four per thousand of magnesium. This explains their excellent relaxing, laxative properties. Sweet grapes rank low in proteids, but high in sugar. They contain about one percent nitrogenous elements, no fats, about sixteen percent of sugar, and rank fairly high in organic salts - about twenty parts per thousand.
The value Of the grape cure, like that of the milk cure, lies largely in the fact that it is a mild and pleasant form of protein and starch starvation. The grape sugars burn up (oxidize), and the alkaline mineral elements neutralize and eliminate the acid by-products of starch and protein digestion.
Berries
Berries are still richer in the positive, alkaline mineral elements than the acid and subacid fruits. Therefore, they possess great medicinal values. The country people in Germany gather in their seasons, the different kinds of berries, and preserve and dry them for use in the winter.
Huckleberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, elderberries, currants and cranberries, besides being delicious raw foods, make excellent soups, drinks and desserts, and are to be classed among Nature's finest remedies. They run from forty to one hundred parts per thousand in the positive, alkaline mineral elements.
The widespread belief that the seeds of berries and fruits are responsible for many cases of appendicitis is another fairy tale. The best way to prevent appendicitis is to live largely on seed-containing fruits and berries, and on other kinds of raw food. The small seeds which are swallowed act as scourers of the intestinal tract. They stimulate the peristaltic movements of the bowels and are natural laxatives. Appendicitis, in ninety percent of all cases, is caused by a sluggish, atrophic condition of the intestines.
Huckleberries, blueberries and blackberries are excellent medicines, not only for diarrhea but for all other ailments of the digestive tract. In severe diarrhea, dysentery, bloody flux and cholera morbus, no food whatsoever should be taken - only water mixed with acid fruit or berry juices. Blackberries and raspberries make delicious drinks and are fine tonics for weak stomachs.
Nuts
Nuts are by far the richest foods in nature. They contain only about five percent of water - all the rest of their substance is solid nourishment. On an average, they contain from ten to twenty percent of proteins, fifty to sixty five percent of fats, five to ten percent of carbohydrates, and from ten to twenty parts per thousand of the positive mineral elements.
The most costly beefsteak contains only from twenty to thirty percent of nourishing substance, and seventy percent of impure water.
Nuts, on the other hand, are three times richer than meat in fats and proteins, and their delicious flavors an enjoyed best when eaten raw. They are, therefore, the finest substitutes for meat in the diet of the vegetarian and fruitarian. The only danger lies in eating too many of them. They should be taken in moderate quantities only, and always in combination with foods of the mineral group.
No wonder many people say "nuts do not agree with me," when they eat them by the handful after a heavy meal of meat, potatoes and vegetables. The vegetarian uses nuts, not with meat, but in place of meat.
Many nut recipes will be found among salads, croquettes, roasts, and sandwich fillings.
Vegetables
The leafy, juicy vegetables which grow in and near the ground rank lower in proteins and starches and still higher in the positive mineral salts, than the fruits and berries. They are, therefore, best suited to balance in the diet the acid producing starches, sugars, fats and proteins. The mineral salts, contained in the juicy vegetables in larger amounts than in any other class of foods, are the real blood, bone and nerve builders, the most valuable antiseptics, blood purifiers and generators of the positive, electromagnetic energies in the body.
None of the vegetables belonging to group five, which are relished raw, are improved by cooking. The cooking more or less destroys the vitamins and dissipates to some extent the vital energies latent in the vegetable protoplasm.
Uncooked Cereals
Seeds are highly charged with the sex principle, which in physical matter is the highest expression of life force. All seeds, such as cereals, nuts and legumes, which can be used as foods are, therefore, especially rich in the life elements - in vital magnetism or vitamins - and these vital energies remain unimpaired and most effective in the uncooked foods.
While the digestive apparatus, in the case of most people, through the constant use of cooked and highly spiced foods, has lost its ability to thoroughly digest and assimilate the raw starches of cereals, it is good practice to partake of some raw cereal at one or more meals every day. They should be freshly ground or cracked in the hand mill, or soaked, dried and flaked in a grain and nut flaker.
Flaked and rolled grains can be bought in every well-equipped grocery store, but these seldom consist of the whole grains, usually having been robbed of the mineral elements. The surest way is to buy the grains and prepare them at home. A mixture of rolled oats, wheat and rye in about equal proportions, with additions of pine nuts and raisins, makes an excellent and palatable substitute for baked bread. The flaked grains may be mixed according to individual taste and fancy, with various kinds of nuts, raisins, figs, dates or other uncooked fruits and berries. A great variety of palatable and tempting uncooked strength food dishes can be prepared in this way.
Raw Sugars
Always the natural sugars should be used. Honey is the very best of all and should be given preference when available. Maple and pure cane syrup come next in order; then the brown, unrefined cane or beet sugar. The highly refined, inorganic sugars - granulated, pulverized and loaf should not be used.
Foods and Thirst
Those who adopt a vegetarian diet soon find that they are not as thirsty and do not require nearly as large an amount of fluids as they did under the meat diet. The following explains why this is so.
The juicy fruits and vegetables contain on an average about ninety percent of water. These fruit and vegetable juices, prepared in Nature's own laboratory, supply in the best possible form the demand for fluids in the animal and human body. They are cooling, refreshing, and saturated with the most valuable medicinal elements found in nature.
These vegetarian foods, therefore, are non-heating and non-irritating, and contain in themselves large amounts of pure and wholesome fluids. Flesh foods, as we have learned, are saturated with uric acid, poisonous alkaloids and ptomaines, which have a stimulating, heating and irritating effect upon the system. This is further increased by the spices and condiments necessary to cover the unpleasant odor and taste of the flesh. Largo amounts of fluids are required to counteract the heating and corroding effects of these Systemic poisons, and to "wash" them out of the system.
Herein lies the reason why a meat diet creates abnormal thirst and is most conducive to the forming of the drink habit, while the adoption of a fruit and vegetable diet in the beat remedy for the abnormal craving for drugs, tobacco, and spirituous liquors.
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