Raw Thoughts
Nora Lenz
You may have thought that discovering raw food was the answer to all your questions about how to become truly healthy. However, if you've done any reading at all on the subject, you will no doubt have noticed that the raw world is filled with confusing and conflicting information. When there are so many different opinions, philosophies and approaches, it can be difficult to choose a path to follow.
The extent of confusion in the general field of human health originates from the idea that no set of consistent health truths is determinable. Is this true? Can it be that the fundamental principles of life are simple and straightforward for all the other "less intelligent" species on earth but hopelessly unknowable for humans? No. The truth is knowable and accessible to all. It may not be emblazoned on our TV screens and newspapers like the falseness we've mistaken it for, but it can be found.
As we embark on a transition to a healthier lifestyle, we needn't proceed on the basis of opinion or belief. Instead, we can be guided by information that has been established with the highest standard of scientific certainty.
This information is not mysterious or complicated, it's just not forthcoming from those to whom we have traditionally looked for such guidance. For a couple centuries now, our thinking about health and disease has been influenced by industries which stood to make enormous fortunes by promoting the idea that health can be bought and sold.
With each succeeding generation those industries have become more prosperous and their ideas more accepted. Today large numbers of people are finally beginning to give up on the unfulfilled promise of conventional medicine but are mistakenly seeking answers from "natural" medicine, which has built itself upon the same flawed premise; namely, that health can be acquired with pills and procedures. Medicine, in all its varied incarnations, does not recognize that health can only be produced by healthy living practices.
Re-education must be part of any genuine quest for health. It is very important for new raw fooders to have some basic and plainly truthful principles to guide them through the transition and beyond. Becoming healthy in a culture that supports and encourages all the wrong practices requires a significant shift in the way we think about health in general, and food in particular. To become truly healthy, we must go far beyond just replacing our drug of choice (cooked food) with a raw alternative.
Because opinion, theory, and marketing gimmickry make up the bulk of what is represented as truth in matters of human health, it has become almost impossible to obtain truly reliable information. Making outlandish health theories seem valid is a new art form created by "experts" who urge us to ignore self-evident facts and indulge in practices that are known to cause sickness. Most of what we hear about health is not intended to inform us, but rather to manipulate or influence us into buying something.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the cause of disease is elusive and indeterminable. Many people would even say that disease has no cause, and that it chooses its victims randomly. This is not the case. The field of human health is no different from any other area of scientific inquiry, in that there are immutable, fundamental truths that can be known and relied upon. One of those is that disease is subject to the same laws that govern all life, including the Law of Cause and Effect which dictates that where there is effect there must be cause, and vice versa.
The causes of disease ARE known, they just aren't known by doctors. People have mistakenly come to expect guidance about how to be healthy from doctors. If doctors were experts on health, one would expect them as a group to be very healthy. Instead, they suffer from disease even more than the rest of us, and die younger on average. The truth is, doctors only study health from the very limited perspective of learning how to suppress symptoms. Expecting them to know about healing is like asking a car wash attendant to fix your transmission.
Although symptom suppression is often confused with healing, the two are NOT the same, and are, in fact, opposites. Acute symptoms, like those associated with "colds" and "flu", are the outward expression of body-initiated restorative processes. In other words, symptoms are healing. Acute symptoms are the body's self-limiting emergency system for eliminating accumulated waste. When we stop symptoms, we thwart the body's efforts to restore optimal function. Drugs, herbs and supplements appear to "cure" disease, but in reality there are no "cures". The body, and only the body, can heal itself. What we're really doing when we ingest these substances is forcing the body to discontinue its healing efforts in order to defend against the new threat: the remedy.
Stopping acute symptoms with remedies allows the further accumulation of waste that would otherwise be eliminated, which leads to degenerative disease like arthritis, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and cancer. Unlike acute symptoms, the symptoms of degenerative disease are not constructive but are the result of actual physical, long-term and slowly accumulated damage that has been done to tissues and organs because the self-cleansing mechanisms of the body have not been allowed to perform their life-preserving functions, or have not been able to keep up with the cumulative burden.
That the very harmful practice of symptom suppression is so commonly employed illustrates the level of misconception that exists in our culture concerning disease. The reality about disease is so far from what we are taught, in fact, that it seems alien and unbelievable when we first hear it. The Germ Theory, for example, which forms the foundation of modern medicine, has never been proven, nor could it ever be. In bacteria and viruses, doctors have found the perfect scapegoat for disease, an unseen enemy who is never defeated and can be relied upon to promptly show up whenever and wherever disease is present. In truth, however, there are gaping lapses of logic in the contagion theory of disease. Most of us never hear of them because in the health care profession the idea that disease can be transmitted from one person to another enjoys unquestioned acceptance. This fact alone serves to perpetuate the theory, since admittedly it is difficult to reconcile how so many people could be so wrong. Yet, wrong they are. Unanimity doesn't change that. Even the theory's exalted progenitor, Louis Pasteur, admitted he was wrong during the latter years of his career.
For the most part, acute, constructive diseases are the ones that are said to be "infectious." Chronic or degenerative disease is thought to be inherited. All diseases fall into one of these two categories but the truth is that disease is never contagious, and it is never inherited.
Like contagion, the connection of disease to heredity is similarly taken for granted as truth, but the closest it can come is that we inherit certain physiological weaknesses that may determine where in our bodies disease will form if we indulge in disease-causing lifetyle habits. Whether we will become ill is not in the province of heredity except in the sense that it is from our families that most of us learn the harmful diet and lifestyle practices which cause disease. We are the creators of our own health, and we are the creators of our own disease, through our very own choices.
Medicine promises healing but delivers only lifelong management. And it not only does NOT cure disease, it always adds to the harm done by the original causative agents. This includes so-called "natural" or naturopathic medicine, which operates on the same false premise that equates symptom suppression with healing. For those who have come to understand that symptoms are just the effects of unhealthy lifestyle choices, medicine has little to offer. What we need is practical instruction on how to remove the cause of disease and build health in its place. It has become very clear that the health care industry is not the place to look for that information. If we want to get well and stay well, we need to look elsewhere.
As you will discover, what one needs to know in order to live healthfully is not complicated or difficult to understand. The principles of health can seem overwhelming at first because in many ways they are opposite of what we are taught. One of the biggest challenges in getting healthy is UN-learning all the ideas we have about health that are based on belief rather than correct knowledge. The truth always leads to simplicity where health is concerned, unlike medicine, which only gets more contrived and complex as one looks deeper into it." -- Nora Lenz, Founder, http://www.rawschool.com
