"Living Foods" The Next Evolutionary Step
June 2002

The essence of understanding living foods is ... if it is not broken, don't fix it. Living foods or raw foods are those, which have not been cooked, processed, "pesticided" or "herbicided", micro waved, irradiated, or genetically engineered. They represent an unbroken wholeness that is the original creation and nutritional gift of the Divine. The understanding that the food we eat is an energetic whole greater than the sum of the parts reflects a quantum mechanics view of nutrition.

Research by Dr. Brekhman of the former Soviet Union illustrates a foundational truth - when he gave whole, live foods to animals, their endurance was 2-3 times greater than if he gave them the same foods after they had been cooked. From a traditional nutritional perspective there should not be a difference since cooked and raw foods have the same amount of calories and therefore the same amount of energy. Brekhman's results can be explained, however, if we understand the effect of cooking on the whole food. Thorough cooking destroys the ecological balance of the food. It makes 50% of the protein unavailable, destroys 60-70% of the vitamins, up to 96% of the B12, and 100% of many of the lesser factors like gibberellins, anthrocyans, nobelitin, and tangeretin which boost the immune system and other body functions. Cooking foods also disrupts the bioelectrical structure, the bioelectricity transfer power, and the bioluminescence. All of these factors are important for building and maintaining our life force energy and health.

The famous European physician, Dr. Bircher-Brenner, who started the first modern live food clinic in 1897, felt that eating raw foods was a way of restoring the diseased body and the mind's ability to heal itself. Many healers have gotten fantastic results using living foods with their clients. One of the most famous was Dr. Gerson who healed Dr. Albert Schweitzer of diabetes and Schweitzer's wife of TB. Dr. Gerson healed hundreds of documented cancer cases with live foods and published a book about it in 1958 called A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases. Dr. Szekeley saw over 133,000 clients at his live food clinic in Mexico over a 30 year period from 1940-1970. With the use of live foods he healed 90% of his patients, of which 17% were considered incurables. Later came Ann Wigmore and her clinics, and then the next generation including the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center (http://www.treeoflife.nu/) which has made the next step by using live foods not only for healing of physical disease, but as a way to actively enhance spiritual life.

Cooking destroys enzymes in live foods. Enzyme reserve seems to be connected to life force, health, and longevity. Ann Wigmore, the "mother" of the raw foods movement, feels that "enzyme preservation is the secret to health”. Enzymes are living biochemical factors that activate and carry out all the biological processes in the body such as digestion, nerve impulses, detoxification processes, functioning of RNA/DNA, repair and healing of the body, and even the functioning of the mind. There are natural enzymes in raw food, which minimize the enzymes that need to be secreted by the body for digestion. The body's enzymes can then be converted and be used for the process of detoxification, repair, and overall healing. The preservation of our enzymes by eating live foods seems to play an important role in slowing the aging process. With age there seems to be a significant drop in enzyme reserve.

Cooking our food may also change the molecular structure of its components and consequently impair our health. For example, researchers found that Eskimos eating about two pounds of raw blubber a day had no heart disease or atherosclerosis. When this same community of Eskimos began eating the same amount of cooked blubber, they developed high rates of heart disease and atherosclerosis. Other researchers have since found that cooking fats changes their molecular structure in a way that disrupts cell structure and impairs cellular function.

There has been some interesting research to validate Dr. Bircher-Brenner's insights. Dr. Hans Eppinger of the First Medical Clinic at the University of Vienna found that with a disease process, the micro-electrical potential of the cells would decrease and the ability of chronically diseased people to absorb nutrients and excrete toxins would be diminished. He found that live foods were the only type of food that could restore the micro-electrical potential of the cells. The electrical potential of our tissues and cells is a direct result of the aliveness of our cells. Live foods enhance the electrical potential in cells, between cells, at the interface of the cells, and with the microcapillary electrical charge. When cells have the proper micro electrical potential, they have the increased power they require to rid themselves of toxins, and maintain their selective capacity to absorb appropriate nutrients and oxygen supply.

Eppinger's work correlates with that of Dr. Kollath's from Sweden. Dr. Kollath found that when he fed animals the typical cooked food of a Western affluent diet; they developed what he called, "meso-health". This is a condition in which the animals looked to be as healthy as the animals living on their raw food diet, but that they had less resistance and developed chronic, degenerative diseases at an earlier age than the live food animals. He found that the ingestion of raw food was able to restore their health and slow the rapid aging process, whereas giving them specific vitamin and mineral doses could not effect a significant change in the process of reversing them from meso-health to vibrant health.

Harry Oldfield and Roger Coghill, in their book, The Dark Side of the Brain, discovered (with Kirlian photography research), that live foods were surrounded by a considerably stronger bioluminescent field than cooked foods. This field is associated with greater cell bioelectricity and life force. Nobel laureate Szent-Gyorgyi described the essential life process as a little electric current sent to us by the sunshine. Live food is filled with these live electrons from the sun because the living food has not had its electron patterns (energized by the forces of nature) disrupted by cooking or processing in any way. I agree with Dr. Johanna Budwig, who holds degrees in medicine, physics, pharmacy, and biochemistry, that electron rich live foods act as high powered electron donors and as solar resonant fields in the body to attract, store, and conduct the sun's energy in our bodies. She feels, as I do, that the photons of sunlight are attracted by like electrons resonating in our own system, especially in the double bonded electron clouds found in our lipid systems, such as in flax oil.

People who eat refined, cooked, highly processed foods diminish the amount of solar electrons energizing their bioelectric system. In fact, according to Dr. Budwig, processed foods may even act as insulators to the healthy flow of electricity in our bodies. The more we absorb solar electrons through live foods, the better we are able to resonate, attract, and absorb electrons in direct resonance from the sun and other star systems.

People have been eating live foods for thousands of years. Cultures who have eaten primarily live foods such as the Pelegasians (ancient Greeks, reported by Herodotus to live an average of 200 years) and the Essenes seem to have an extended life span, higher quality of health, vitality, and joy. Live foods have the highest amount of bioactive food nutrients, phytonutrients, bioelectrical energy, biologically active water, electrons, and most energized and organized SOEF's (subtle organizing energy fields).

Live foods have the potential to turn us into superconductors of electrical energy and cosmic energy. This is where one of the most important evolutionary secrets of live foods emerges. Live foods combined with a full live food spiritual life style of meditation, hatha yoga, pranayama (breathing exercises), prayer, service, charity, wisdom, and devotion creates an energetic (sattvic) field. This field is a powerful ally, which helps open up the door for us to have direct experience of the Divine. Further, a highly energized sattvic field awakens the kundalini energy (the spiritualizing energy stored within the body that takes us to the next evolutionary step in our life on the planet as human beings). This is the ultimate gift that a live food lifestyle can give us.

Satya Sai Baba, one of the few Indian spiritual teachers who have transcended his culture's food tradition, makes the essential point why people may be slow to make their diets high in live foods. He says: "Out of all the species... Man alone tries to cook and change his food. A seed when planted will sprout to life... but when cooked, the life is destroyed... man does not like to partake of food as God created it. He is the victim of his tongue, which he wants to be satisfied in terms of taste, and so his own likes and dislikes come in the way of what he should eat. Because he is exterminating the life-giving forces in the food available to him, he is increasingly subjecting himself to disease."

The simplest way I can explain raw foods is...If it is not broken, don't fix it.

Live foods are God's gift to us to support us in taking the next evolutionary step on this planet into our destiny as peaceful, free, and joyous spiritual human beings.

Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), Dip. Ayurveda

http://www.treeoflife.nu/ewlivingfoods.html