I received an unexpected second shipment of organic unpasteurized almonds and am looking to move some of my 2011 inventory (the most recent crop) of both almonds and organic walnuts.  $8/lb for walnuts, $9/lb for almonds.  Both are from farms so small that the farmers have day jobs!  The walnuts are the Chandler variety, prized for their tenderness and sweetness, and not available commercially because of their fragilility.  Almonds are Butte-Padres, smaller and rounder than the more common Non-Pareil, but sweeter and more flavorful.  NOT pasteurized.  FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OF 10 POUNDS OR MORE.   Email me for more info:  nmlenz@speakeasy.net.

Recently during a coaching session I was asked to name the one thing that helped me the most toward my recovery from food addiction. First, let me say that I’m not there yet.  However, unlike most raw foodists, I have a pretty good idea where I was when I started, how far I’ve come, and how far I still need to go.  Also unlike most raw fooders, I’m okay with not having crossed the finish line already. More about that later.

The way I answered the question was to say that my “crises” are what really forced me to take my eating choices seriously. For example, 3 years ago an extremely painful inflamed tooth (actually the gum surrounding it) forced me to give up nuts. I had been eating them a few times per week (an ounce or two each time) for years and when I stopped, the tooth pain stopped too. After the pain went away, I started back up eating nuts, and my tooth pain came back. I never ate nuts again, and my tooth pain never came back. Fast forward 3 years and I had more or less replaced nuts with the occasional frozen durian. Except that, “occasional” became more and more frequent, until I had a week this last May when I ate 4 durians over a 5-day period. The accumulated consequence of that particular bad habit was 3 weeks of “flu”-like symptoms, including extreme weakness, chest and head congestion and very high fever. Of course after it was all over, the need for durian was gone and as of this writing I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life, on a fairly predictable and even basis.

The point of explaining the above is to illustrate that my habits were so reinforced by the time I went raw (age 44) that changing them voluntarily just wasn’t in the cards. For me it worked best to improve my diet just enough to allow slow healing, which resulted in gradually increasing sensitivity/vitality, from which the ‘healing events’ (like the tooth inflammation 3 years ago, and the ‘flu’ this past June) eventually and periodically emerged to motivate even greater refinements. In other words, things just piled up until my body was forced to institute extraordinary symptoms to rid itself of the excess.

Even though it’s true that this is the mechanism that forced me off my periodic dietary plateaus, however, I would have answered the question differently if I’d thought about it more first.

Without doubt the one intellectual idea I’ve LEARNED that helped me the most is that food addiction is an extremely powerful force. When people want to escape other addictions in our culture, they can get help. There exists a social safety net for people who recognize the harm of continuing to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, take drugs, gamble, shop or even have sex compulsively. But there’s no help for food addiction recovery. There might be some lip service given to the problem as it relates to hard core, heavy weight (literally) compulsives, but if you really understand what garden variety food addiction is and go looking for help, you soon realize that nobody’s REALLY tackling it, and I mean NOBODY. Even so called food-addiction experts are food addicts in irretrievable denial.

Added to that is the fact that addiction to food is every bit as physiologically-centered and physically damaging as any other addiction. It might take 30-50 years to kill a person, typically, but it does kill. It needs to be taken seriously, and its power needs to be respected. The consequences of not doing so are what causes so many raw fooders to fail. People think it’s just a matter of ‘will power’, and that it can be approached like any other problem – in the head first, then followed through in practice. However, it’s the extremely rare person who can recognize all his/her dietary issues at once and then get rid of them overnight. In fact, it’s impossible. Virtually everyone who tries it not only meets with failure, but a great deal of demoralization and self-recrimination as well.

When overnight change is attempted, people not only typically fail, but in practical terms, they become confused and lose their sense of direction. They feel that they can’t move forward, but they can’t go all the way back to their previous eating habits either.  Feeling stuck and trapped, they sometimes end up wishing they’d never even learned about raw food or the power of the body to heal itself.  From this vantage point, it’s easy to feel envious of “normal” people who obliviously abuse themselves and get lots of support and sympathy for the consequences that follow. 

Slow transitional changes, on the other hand, give people something to fall back on at each stage, if/when they realize a little compromise is needed. This allows gradual, gentle and graceful forward progress.

The challenge of slow improvement, however, is that you have to learn how to deal with the conflict that arises from not instituting ALL the changes at once that you know are necessary to enjoy peak health. In other words, self-forgiveness.

Self forgiveness is the biggest challenge by far for the type of people that the low fat high fruit lifestyle seems to attract (Type “A”s, perfectionists), and it’s the one that most people don’t manage to pull off. Instead they go too fast, then they backslide, then they make that same mistake over and over. It happens much more in the high fruit camp than among the high fat crowd, because people in the latter group tend to go much slower. I don’t think they realize it necessarily, but they have the tools to take their addictions seriously – namely, foods that allow a certain amount of healing (by virtue of the improvement they represent) and also keep them emotionally satisfied. Unfortunately people using that approach tend to stay in transitionland forever, not realizing it’s not the finish line.

For some reason, high fruit eaters tend to be very competitive. They regard the high fat, complicated-recipe approach to dietary transition to be indulgent and less self-disciplined. But in reality, both approaches can lead a person to a kind of health purgatory, where forward movement is either restrained or nonexistent, and the need for compromise is either overindulged or completely denied.  In high fat raw fooders, it means eating the same miscombined and questionable transition foods forever. In high fruit eaters, it means bouncing back and forth between “optimal” and the old way of eating, regardless of what that was.

There’s a way to transition that offers the best of both worlds, and at its foundation is an UNDERSTANDING of the incredible power of the foe we’re all up against: food addiction. No military strategist ever won a battle by underestimating the enemy, and the same goes for transitioning raw fooders.

To your health,

Nora

Hello fellow raw fooders and aspiring health seekers! As a special “thank you” to all of you who’ve signed up to be notified when the RawSchool blog is updated (and a lesson to those who haven’t that you might be missing out on something good:)), I’ll be offering FREE coaching this Sunday, September 25. Here’s how it works: If you have previously entered your email address to receive blog updates — you know who you are (and so do I) — you are eligible for a free ½ hour phone consultation between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. (Pacific Time) this Sunday. Bear in mind this ½ hour won’t be as comprehensive as a normal coaching session, because I won’t be taking any written background information on you. It’s meant to be just a personal Q&A session, wherein you can get questions answered that you may have been struggling with or are just curious about. Possible topics for discussion include general natural hygiene principles, raw food eating, or raw feeding for dogs and cats. NOTE:  As of today, Sept. 21, all the free mini sessions have been spoken for.  However, watch this space … I will offer free coaching again in the future!

All you have to do to sign up is email me directly at the contact link at the very bottom of this page.

Until Sunday!

Recently at the Woodstock Fruit Festival, I attended a class entitled “Do Raw Fooders Need to Eat Greens?”, hoping that the instructor, (who I knew to be hygiene-friendly) would answer the question using factual evidence and common sense rather than the normal speculation and fear-mongering.  I was disappointed.  Although the speaker acknowledged that the taste buds are the sentinels of the body and need to be respected, he nevertheless propagated the standard advice to blend foods that taste bad (greens being the food in question) with fruit in order to sneak them in.  It seems that nobody in the raw food world (or elsewhere) is approaching this issue in a way that respects the laws of nature.  So I’m re-posting the following comments I wrote a couple years ago for the RawSchool Yahoo Group, on the topic of whether greens are “essential”.

Best wishes, Nora

Hi All,

In the Q&A section of newest edition of Living Nutrition magazine, a reader asks if she absolutely must eat greens, admitting that she doesn’t like them and wondering if she can disguise them in a banana smoothie to fulfill her “daily salad requirement”. In case you don’t get the magazine, here are the answers:

Doug Graham: “Yes.  You do have to eat your greens — feel free to drink them.  I have found that people who include insufficient greens in their diet invariably suffer health decline.”   He goes on to explain the nutrient advantages that greens offer, saying that it is not “essential” to eat greens everyday but that 2-4% of total overall calories should come from them.  He also says it is “healthful” to blend greens but a good salad is a “real joy”, adding that likes and dislikes often change in time.

David Klein:   ”Dr. Herbert Shelton reported that in nature all frugivores eat some greens, and he recommended greens as beneficial to the digestion of high protein foods.   As a predominant fruit eater for 23 years, my daily diet regularly includes two heads of lettuce and two bunches of kale, substituting on occasion bok choy, salad mix and tender inner ribs of celery” .. He further says “a balanced sense of wellness is experienced when they are combined with sweet fruits, except melon which is best eaten alone”.

Apparently even fruit fans are not immune from the unfortunate fruit phobia that has swept through the raw food world of late.   The remarks above only differ by degree (a large degree, granted) from the full-scale war on fruit waged by the likes of Paul Nison, whose rationale for doing so was recently critiqued by Doug Graham.   Nison says we should avoid fruit almost entirely, and Graham says we should avoid eating it exclusively.   Neither of them offers any real evidence to support their beliefs, and indeed nature-trusting truth seekers have good reasons to disregard both.

Personally, I have never met a failing raw fooder whose symptoms couldn’t be blamed on obvious mistakes of EXCESS in his/her past or current diet and lifestyle. It would be extremely difficult to produce evidence that could isolate the lack of greens, or even nutritional deficiencies in general, as the cause for his/her ill health, considering that almost everyone comes to raw food after having eaten some version of the disease-producing conventional western diet for decades.   Although deficiency is a concern among cooked food eaters, or at least it should be, the biggest problem with the conventional way of eating is EXCESS, and this is what leads to the pathological conditions which impede the body’s ability to use nutrients. 

Even after a person goes raw, it takes a very long time to leave  bad habits behind and heal from the physical damage they did. If we took a close look at people experiencing “health decline”, in all cases we would find either the misinterpretation of acute symptoms or the dietary excesses and poor lifestyle habits, past and present, that really caused the problems.　Blaming the health failures of high fruit eating raw fooders on the greens issue is as specious as blaming sickness on germs, and as unscientific.

Even in the raw food community we can’t escape from the illogical notion that disease is caused by deficiency rather than excess. A person can be committing 50 acts of blatant dietary excess every single day and everyone seems to want to put a drop of his blood under a microscope to see what the problem might be. The deficiency way of thinking is an outgrowth of the medical myth that ADDING things to the body is the key to good health. The popularity of this mindset grew mainly because when you can ADD something to a problem, there’s a product to SELL.

Even though it makes nobody any money, most often in our modern world, it’s taking something away that holds the key to health, and the greens debate represents no exception. The key benefit of eating greens is not the avoidance of deficiency, but avoidance of excess.

Raw fooders typically indulge many habits of excess but the most common is over eating in general — regardless of whether they’re in the low or high fat camp. Overeating as a temporary strategy to stay off cooked foods is perfectly acceptable; in fact, most find that it is absolutely essential and some even realize that it’s not sustainable to do that.  There comes a time when the body reaches a level of efficiency that it demands less food and the constant eating must end or health issues will be the cost. It can take up to 10 years for a person to overcome the tendency to eat for reasons other than hunger, although this can vary according to age and other factors. In raw fooders who have not yet reached this mark and/or have not deliberately sought to decrease their overall consumption to a level that is normal for human beings (much less than is supposed by raw food gurus), it is a mistake to suspect deficiencies when they encounter health issues. If problems happen more often in high fruit eaters than high greens eaters, that doesn’t mean the former are failing because they’re not eating “enough” greens. It likely just means that among people who eat constantly (like low fat raw vegans tend to do), those who favor more low or negative fuel-value foods like greens will be able to get away with it longer. Eating greens, like exercise, simply allows people to eat for reasons other than hunger without suffering the negative effects. And neither eating greens nor exercise offers a viable permanent solution to overeating or food addiction. There is no replacement for learning to properly interpret the bodily sensations that drive people to eat when they shouldn’t.

Those who tell us to eat greens even if we don’t like them are often quick to imply that a dislike for green foods is probably pathological and will correct itself over time as the body heals. If this is true, there is nothing to fear in telling people who are making improvements to their diets to avoid greens until they taste good. Regardless of the reasons that the taste buds send their signal of rejection, the signal should not be ignored. If the dislike of greens is not related to condition, then it can only mean that some people just naturally don’t like greens. This is not likely, because we know that members of a species generally share the same dietary affinities, and greens in some form do generally appeal to most of us. But if it’s possible that some people just naturally don’t like greens, there is still nothing to fear.

I sometimes meet transitioning raw fooders who say they’re not fond of fruit and prefer other foods instead. What I usually suggest is that they try many fruits, eat only the ones that appeal and keep going back to the ones previously rejected to see if they taste better. Even though I know with all certainty that fruit is the best food for humans, I also know that eating should be an entirely pleasurable experience. Nobody needs to eat foods they don’t like. In addition to eating the fruits they like, I also tell them to build a transitional diet around other raw foods because this will still allow healing to proceed, as long as the new diet represents an improvement over what was eaten before. And as health improves, the ability to appreciate fruit will return as well. To deny this is to deny all the evidence that human beings are biological frugivores.

If we can do this with our #1 food – fruit – there’s no reason the same advice can’t be offered to people who don’t like greens. How long is a person who dislikes greens likely to go without them by following this advice? What is the estimated period that a person can go without greens before experiencing the grave consequences we’re warned about? And, most importantly, what evidence is this estimate based on? If we’re being asked to chuck a fundamental law of nature (all species eat only those foods which appeal to them), we need to have the answers to these questions.

The truth is, the people who are advising us to choke greens down could never produce sufficient evidence to trump a natural law, and those who are taking the advice aren’t demanding evidence, either. Both seem to take on face value any idea that validates the popular, civilization-based suspicion that nature isn’t 100% trustworthy. The greens issue is reminiscent of the fearful unknown consequence that made our parents force us to eat vegetables when we were kids. If any of them had examined the issue objectively, they’d have discovered there was nothing to be afraid of and all those mealtime struggles could have been avoided. Nobody needs to be coerced or threatened into eating something they don’t like in order to be healthy. If this wasn’t true, our species would not be here.

Natural hygienists generally recognize that processing never improves food. However, it seems when it comes to the “necessity” of eating greens, no otherwise sensible rule is an obstacle. Blended foods cannot be characterized as healthful except relative to whatever cooked or inappropriate fare that might be eaten instead. As we all know, some indigestible constituents in certain foods may be made more digestible or palatable by processing, but others are destroyed or are made more vulnerable to destruction. Very often in transition, the trade off is worthwhile and certainly this is the case with blending when it allows a person to avoid eating worse things. However, it is entirely indefensible as a means to sneak distasteful foods past the body’s wise sentinels to fulfill some arbitrary or presumed nutritional requirement.

Observations of non-human primates have given us a great deal of truthful information about our own dietary needs but unfortunately they have also provided support for every flawed diet theory out there. The primal diet people love to point out that chimps hunt and kill other animals. The greens advocates talk about the quantity of greens that gorillas eat. The supplement hucksters say that we can’t get the B12 we need because we don’t eat insects or dirty leaves like our primate relatives.

All we really know for certain from anatomical comparisons and field observations is that humans belong in the same category as all other primates: frugivora. Anything beyond that seems to be more speculation than fact. The similarities between humans and our closest relatives are preponderant, granted.  However, you don’t have to be a primatologist to see that there are differences too. Nutritional requirements obviously vary among divergent primate species. Although we can’t say exactly how our needs differ from other primates, using physiological and anatomical differences as a way to account for the discrepancies between human and non-human preferences seems more sensible than other explanations which require us to flout natural laws.

Humans are gentle, naturally empathetic and nonviolent, perhaps more so than any other species, including, it could be argued, many or most of our primate relatives. It is common to hear long term raw fooders discuss the changes they experience in temperament and disposition after getting to a higher level of health. Many refer to it in metaphysical or spiritual terms but regardless of how it is framed, a desire for harmonious and loving co-existence with each other and the rest of nature is very prevalent among healthy members of our species. Our peace-loving nature dovetails beautifully with the entirely symbiotic act of eating fruit, and perhaps even supports the idea that our species is better suited than any other — not only physiologically but psychologically — to a diet of fruit only. That may be speculative but then so are the ideas that claim to support the need to eat greens at any cost.

In any event, it makes more sense to trust nature while we gather the finer details of what we’re supposed to be eating, rather than issuing arbitrary mandates or inducing fear where none is warranted. It’s impossible to reconcile something like a “daily salad requirement” with the fact that our ancestors managed successfully eating whatever was available that appealed to them on any given day, week, month or year. No other species besides modern humans consults its intellect in selecting foods. No other creature needs to observe other similar animals before knowing what to eat, or put their foods under microscopes to see what nutrients they contain. They are all born with the knowledge of what to eat, and so are we, from the time we exit the womb. This knowledge is not mysterious and it doesn’t need to be “re-awakened”. It only needs to be heeded.

This idea is often met with the standard retort that no other species grows its own food, like this fact alone renders our food inadequate or unfit. The truth is, we can’t fool nature into giving us fruit, we have to genuinely replicate the conditions under which a tree or vine will see fit to reproduce itself. Only nature produces fruit, and even though modern fruit has been manipulated to some extent, it is not fake and it alone has the potential to fulfill our nutritional needs even in its imperfect state. Human-cultivated food is not artificial food any more than an artificially inseminated baby is an artificial human.  The body doesn’t require perfection, only adequacy.

Our acceptance of the idea that we must eat things we don’t like reveals our weaknesses, emotional dependence on outside “experts” and our lack of faith in nature. There aren’t even two nutrition gurus in the world who agree on everything, and this is a sign that none of them has the whole truth. If we think experts know more about what our bodies need than our bodies themselves, we are lost. Where do we allow our senses, logic and real evidence to rule, and where do we ignore these in favor of “expert” advice?  That’s the slippery slope we step on when we decide to toss out the laws of nature.

Even with all our modern advances, there is no replacement for the system of food selection that nature gave us. Allow your taste buds to do their magnificent work, and when they say “no, thanks”, listen. There is nothing to fear.

Kind wishes,

Nora

I was interviewed last week on a local (Seattle) radio show about dogs.  The information is focussed on dogs and dog nutrition, but there was a great deal of discussion around the principles of natural hygiene and the importance of removing the cause of disease rather than covering it up with herbs, supplements, drugs or homeopathics.    http://www.dogtalkshow.com/podcasts/  Enjoy!

Nora

Since I wrote my blog post about the fallacies of the calorie theory, I’ve encountered a few people who are frustrated because they fail to reach their weight loss goals on a low fat raw food diet.  The latest of these was a contributor on a raw vegan forum who posted that even though he worked out like crazy everyday and kept his fat consumption low, he wasn’t able to lose the last 20 pounds he felt he needed to. 

Clearly the calorie belief system is failing to account for these experiences, as it did mine and those of many others. I was once a chronic dieter at the same time I was teaching fitness classes everday. For years I ate under 1,000 calories per day, while expending much more. According to conventional calorie-based “wisdom”, I should have died of starvation. Yet, I never even reached my goal weight of 120 pounds.

As I mentioned before, in order for a system to be scientific, it must be reproduce-able and reliable, like the hard sciences that are used to build things. It can’t be said that it “sort of” works, or “sometimes” makes sense. A theory can only stand if it’s been tested and found to be useful in all applicable situations. Otherwise, it qualifies as a belief system.  Beliefs are not knowledge. To “believe” is to accept an idea without benefit of evidence.

When a person attempts to manage his weight, he’s really just managing his toxicity, because extra weight IS toxicity. Body weight can take years to stabilize and some people need to stay on a very clean diet for a long time in order to lose the last remaining amount of extra weight they carried as cooked food eaters.  It will happen, you just have to be patient and pay attention to your body. That’s where the truth is, and it will conflict with the information you get from people who use the calorie system. At some point you’ll need to decide which one you’re going to listen to. Many long term successful high fruit raw fooders (including myself) have had the experience of receiving unmistakeable signals from their bodies that less food is needed. This makes sense, because nature always strives for maximum efficiency. The difference between how much food is needed by a truly healthy person and one who eats a normal conventional diet is NOT small, it is significant.

It’s extremely important to overeat early in transition because backsliding is almost always the result in people who don’t. It may even be important for people who want to lose weight to overeat.  Even if this means quick weight loss must be sacrificed, staying on a path of continual forward progress is more important.  If a person eating less in an attempt to lose weight ends up eating too little to stay satisfied, s/he may lose weight temporarily but it will come back when the person inevitably backslides. 

Weight loss goals notwithstanding, there comes a time, typically 3-8 years into transition (depending on the age of the person and many other factors), when the body doesn’t need all that food and is burdened by the excess.  When symptoms of false hunger become manageable with less food or are not experienced at all, then real hunger will return as long as the person is not eating according to the calorie system, which will tell them to eat as much as they always have.  Eating according to the calorie system thus keeps people from reaching their full health potential, because it applies arbitrary standards of consumption without accounting for individual needs.  It can likewise keep people from reaching whatever weight loss goals they might have, because calorie tables typically overestimate the body’s true needs even for unhealthy people, and healthy people need even less food.  Not only that, but the healthier they get, the less food they will need.

Increased digestive efficiency is one of the great benefits of regaining our vitality.  It makes eating more incidental, shopping easier and cheaper, it gives us MORE return for LESS investment (this is what nature always strives for, after all) and it signals progress.  Digestive efficiency was an important survival mechanism that facilitated the long term success of our species, as well.  Human digestion and metabolism is much more than just calories in and calories out, as the simplistically useless calorie system holds.  As Herbert Shelton says in his article below, the human body is not a stove which must constantly be stoked.  The enormously beneficial phenomenon of increased efficiency is just one more area where the truth is at odds with conventional ideas about health, many of which are welcomed into the raw food world without being subjected to the critical scrutiny they’re due.  

Best wishes,
Nora

Flaws in the Calorie Theory
By Herbert Shelton

The human body is more than a mere furnace or fire box into which we must continue to shovel fuel. The fuel value of food is the least valuable thing about it.

A table giving the caloric values of different foods tells us merely how much heat can be produced in the laboratory by burning these foods. Such tables are fairly accurate indexes to the fuel values of the foods listed, but they are not an index to the nutritive values these foods have for you. You must digest them, absorb them, assimilate them and then metabolize them. If you fail to digest and absorb them, you certainly cannot assimilate and metabolize them. You can produce no heat by the oxidation of foods that pass out in the stools.

The amount of heat and energy required by various individuals varies so greatly with the conditions of sex, climate, occupation, age, size, temperament, etc. that food values based on the calorie standard are of no practical value. Aside from this, most of the heat produced in the body is used in maintaining normal body temperature and not for the production of energy. If health is destroyed, if the nutritive functions are impaired, to stoke up on fuel foods is not only valueless but is positively harmful. This is easily proven when we compare the results of such treatment with those obtained by the fast or by a low calorie diet which is rich in the organic mineral elements.

The burning of food in the body is a vital or physiological process and does not take place in a dead body. Food, to be burned in the body for the production of calories, is dependent upon the condition of the tissues that do the burning, a fact that is completely overlooked in feeding the sick. If the functions of the body are impaired this process is also impaired and foods that are high in fuel value cannot be properly cared for. The digestive and assimilative powers of the individual are ignored in fire-box dietetics. If energy is low, feed up the fires by shoveling in more coal.

To declare that man requires a given number of calories a day and to feed these, all the while ignoring the individual’s condition, is the height of folly. In a state of nature, demand reaches forth to supply and satisfies itself. The calorie feeders force the supply even when there is no demand or when there is lack of ability to properly care for the supply. Along with this, their standard of measuring food values wholly ignores the most important elements of the food and the further fact that not all the food elements of the food that are combustible are burned in the body. Those proteins that are used in building new tissue are not used for the production of heat and energy, even if we assume that man derives his energy from food.

It should be easily seen that a system of feeding based on the caloric or fuel value of foods must inevitably lead to mischief. And this is exactly what it has done for it invariably causes patients to be stuffed with fuel foods that are deficient in the other and more vital elements. These patients are forced to eat beyond their digestive capacity in the effort to feed them the standard amount of calories. A standardized treatment without a standardized patient is a farce and a standardized patient is an impossibility.

Dr. Claunch says, “the difference between true hunger and false craving may be determined as follows: when hungry and comfortable it is true hunger. When hungry and uncomfortable it is false craving. When a sick person misses a customary meal, he gets weak before he gets hungry. When a healthy person misses a customary meal, he gets hungry before he gets weak.”

If we follow the rule to eat only when truly hungry, those people who are “hungry” but weak and uncomfortable would fast until comfort and strength returned. Fasting would become one of the most common practices in our lives, at least, until we learn to live and eat to keep well and thus eliminate the need for fasting.

It is a testament to the dark age we live in that the calorie system is regarded as the best measuring system we have for figuring the fuel value of foods. If any other measuring device of use in modern civilization was as flawed, inaccurate and unreliable as the calorie system, we wouldn’t be able to quantify anything. Imagine stepping on your scale in the morning and reading “sorry, I don’t know your weight, but other people like you weigh 180 pounds”. That’s about how scientific the calorie theory is.

The calorie is particularly irrelevant and useless to people attempting to improve their health by increasing the quality of foods they eat.  The true fuel value of any natural unprocessed food is dependent on its type (appropriateness), quality, freshness and ripeness. Do we really get the same fuel value from the unripe, hot-house-grown, over-refrigerated tomatoes we eat in January as we get from the sweet, ripe, delicious tomatoes we grow in our backyards in summer and eat right off the vine?  The calorie system says “yes”. 

Most people do not realize that the way calories are quantified is by simple burning in a lab device called a calorie or “Parr” bomb.  It was designed to measure the amount of heat any given substance generates when it is lit on fire.  This is fine for calculating how much wood it would take to heat a room, but it has absolutely no relevance to the bodily process that converts food to fuel. Although we say our bodies “burn” fuel, in truth we don’t light a match to our food or anything remotely similar.  Before the food we eat can become fuel, it must be digested, absorbed, assimilated and metabolized.  Unless all 4 of these things happen efficiently, food will not produce heat or energy.  Food that goes out as waste generates nothing.  Regardless of how it is measured, food only represents POTENTIAL energy for the body.  Extracting that potential is the job of the body, and how it does that will depend on its overall condition. 

That’s why the calorie theory’s biggest, most glaring flaw is the variance which exists in efficiency between individuals. Long term raw fooders know better than anyone else how much efficiency is increased when the human body is clean and healthy. When all other factors are equal, 500 calories consumed by a healthy raw fooder will deliver vastly more energy than that same number eaten by the average cooked food eater. And likewise, a long-term, simple-eating raw fooder will more efficiently use fuel than a new raw fooder. Over years of transition and dietary improvement, fuel needs gradually and continually decrease, and, despite popular misconception, this is largely independent of the level of physical activity a person engages in.

Raw fooders counting calories as a way of determining how much to eat are allowing a fatally flawed system to override the much more reliable and truthful information they would otherwise be getting from their bodies.   A raw fooder eating more than he needs or necessarily wants to because a calorie chart (or book, website, raw food guru, etc.) told him to will never be able to heed the conflicting signals he gets from his body, including those particularly important ones that come later in transition that convey unmistakeably that LESS food is needed.  And if a person needing to eat a given amount of food in order to stay satisfied in transition but finds that he’s eating excessively according to some arbitrary calorie-based standard, he may begin to eat less out of guilt or fear, which may lead to backsliding because he will not be satisfied.  Staying satisfied is job #1 of transitioning raw fooders, because of the psychological, and to some extent physiological, damage than can result.

It is especially important for raw fooders who are attempting to lose weight to eschew the calorie system.  Carrying excess reserves is not about consuming too many calories, it’s about toxicosis.  It is not the amount of calories a food contains that determines how much waste and toxemia will  be produced in the body.  Rather, the food’s quality and appropriateness (or lack thereof), among other factors, determines that.  Instead of counting calories, people wanting to lose weight should focus on eating all that they want of appropriate, healthful foods — regardless of calorie content — and always with the goal of GRADUALLY decreasing those which are less optimal (more difficult to digest) in favor of easily digested foods (fruit, primarily).  Calorie counting may cause a person to stop eating avocadoes, for example, once s/he realizes how many calories they contain.  But a person can still lose weight eating avocadoes, and in fact may make much more progress keeping avos in the diet, because this may be what it takes for the person to stay off the extremely harmful foods s/he might otherwise consume.

New raw fooders often feel a sense of security from using the calorie system, and think that using it is the most cautious and conservative way to proceed.  In reality, however, calorie counting is a form of mental slavery that needs to be relegated to the cooked food world we’ve all left behind.  The calorie system, as it applied to human nutrition, is not the least bit grounded in science.  Science is what is used to build bridges and airplanes. It’s predictable and unchanging; that’s why we can still be driving over bridges that were built 50 years ago and we can know that they’ll still be safe to cross 50 years from now. Can you imagine building a bridge on anything resembling the calorie system? Even if the difference between reality and published values was only 5%, we’d still end up in the river. And the difference between reality (which takes relevant variables into account), and calorie charts (which do not), is a great deal more than 5%, I hazard to say. There’s no room for similarity or inaccuracy in real science. Either it’s accurate and reliable or it’s not science.

Below is a short compilation of comments I gathered from various unnamed sources which reveal some of the flaws in the fundamental premises of the calorie system.  The criticisms are valid, but even these don’t go far enough because they are written by conventional thinkers, who aren’t fully aware of the main problem with the calorie theory — the difference in efficiency between individuals.  Nevertheless just these issues alone justify tossing out this unscientific system once and for all.  Apologies for the lack of attribution; I gathered these comments a few years ago and haven’t had time to retrace my steps to find out where they came from.

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There are two basic flaws in using caloric values to determine the amounts of food we should eat:

1. The more obvious flaw in the argument is that our bodies do not burn foods in the same way that they are burned in a bomb calorimeter. If they did, we would glow in the dark. Our digestive process is quite inefficient. The chemical process whereby blood sugar is oxidized to provide energy produces carbon dioxide. About half is exhaled as carbon dioxide; the other half is excreted in sweat, urine and faeces as energy-containing molecules, the energy values of which must be deducted from the original food intake. All of these vary. For example, eating a lot of fat forms ketones, which can be found in urine. The value of a gram of ketones derived from fat is roughly four calories. So, in this case, nearly half the energy from the fat is lost.

2. The second and more important flaw in the argument is that the body does not use all its food to provide energy. The primary function of dietary proteins, for example, is body cell manufacture and repair: making skin, blood, hair and finger- and toe-nails, etc. The amount of protein needed for this purpose is generally accepted to be about one gram per kilogram of lean body weight. As meats contain approximately 23 grams of protein per 100 grams, a person weighing, say, 70 kg (11 stone) needs to eat about 300 g (11 oz) of meat, or its equivalent, every day just to supply his basic protein needs. Even eating this volume of lean chicken would provide some 465 calories. These calories are not used to supply energy; they contribute nothing to the body’s calorie needs and so must be deducted if you are counting calories.

Much of the fat we eat is also used to provide materials used by the body in processes other than the production of energy: the manufacture of bile acids and hormones, the essential fatty acids for the brain and nervous system, and so on. All these must be deducted as well. Thus trying to determine, from food intake and energy expenditure alone, how much excess energy your body will store as fat will give a completely wrong answer. However, these other factors cannot be measured. Therefore, calorie-counting, which is the foundation of practically every modern slimming diet, is a complete waste of time.

And there is one more flaw: We are told by the ‘experts’ that ‘a calorie is a calorie’. What they mean is that it is impossible for two diets containing exactly the same number of calories to lead to different weight losses. Yet, over the last century a spate of dietary studies has shown that, calorie for calorie, low-carbohydrate diets are much better at reducing weight than the traditional low-fat diets. ‘Experts’ have heavily criticized these studies saying that the data could not be right because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics. But they don’t. It is important to realize that there is more than one law of thermodynamics. The narrow view that ‘a calorie is a calorie’ might comply with the First Law, but it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The point is that there is no doubt that low-carb, high-fat diets do have a metabolic advantage when it comes to weight loss, whatever the ‘experts’ say.[2] And this metabolic advantage complies fully with the second Law of Thermodynamics — and, incidentally, the First Law as well.

The First Law, as mentioned above, is a conservation law. The Second Law is a dissipation law; it is this Second Law which governs the chemical reactions in our bodies.

Let me use an analogy. The energy in the petrol that fuels your car makes the car go along, but it also produces heat through friction and noise, which we really don’t need. The Second Law is all about efficiency — how much of the energy we put in does useful work and how much is wasted. Thus, although all of the energy in the petrol is accounted for and complies with the First Law, the actual moving of the car, if the waste products (heat and noise) are removed from the equation, does not. The Second Law was developed in this context. And it applies equally when we look at the efficiency of our bodies and how different foods affect our bodies. The Second Law says that no machine is completely efficient: Some of the available energy is lost as heat or in the internal rearrangement of chemical compounds and other changes. And as different foods use different metabolic pathways, with different levels of efficiency, variations in efficiency must be expected. For this reason, the dogma that a ‘calorie is a calorie’ violates the second law of thermodynamics as a matter of principle.

It is the differences in chemical changes within our bodies that make low-carb diets better than low-fat, calorie-controlled ones easier to lose weight on. What the diet dictocrats fail to take into consideration when considering the laws of thermodynamics are the energy losses incurred in the different chemical changes within our bodies. When these are taken into consideration, neither law of thermodynamics is violated.

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The calorie theory says that weight management in humans is a simple matter of calories-consumed vs calories-expended. It is suggested that this is a matter of the second Law of Thermodynamics which states essentially that energy is conserved in a closed system, in other words, all calories have to be accounted for, none is *created* and none is *lost*.

 The flaws in this theory:

1) The human body is not a closed system. Duh!

2) The theory assumes that *all* food that is consumed is broken down *completely* into energy, in its *entirety*, in *all* circumstances, at *all* times. This is an incredibly absurd assumption.

This theory ignores the fact that each of the three macro-nutrients, fats, proteins and carbohydrates, are metabolized differently and used to various degrees for tissue rebuilding and energy needs in different ways at different times depending of the state of the body.

Each nutrient breaks down differently and each nutrient affects various hormones and in turn may affect how the body uses the nutrients in various states of hunger or satiety. The amount and
quality of the food itself changes the metabolism on an on-going minute by minute basis.

The second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply to weight management in humans.

I challenge anyone to provide us with the name(s) of the researcher(s) or scientist(s) who showed beyond a doubt that the 2nd Law of Thermo applies to the human body and give us the names of the study or study that first proved it.

This is the very foundation of our nutritional beliefs. Something as fundamental and as crucial as this is to the nutritional sciences should be well documented and easy to find.

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First, a calorie is nothing more, or less, that a unit of energy, just as the BTU, erg, foot-pound, joule, horsepower-hour, watt-hour, electron-volt, or Newton-meter are. 　The term “calorie”, as uniformly misused in the bizarre pseudoscience of orthodox nutrition, is really the kilocalorie: the amount of heat required to raise a kilogram of water one degree Centigrade.　　The way the ‘calorie content’ of a substance is determined is to burn one gram of it to completion in high-pressure, pure oxygen in a

How does this relate to human nutrition? 　It really does not, because we do NOT “burn” our eaten food to completion, as always occurs in the Parr bomb. 　Here, “burning to completion” means that all the carbon is burned completely to carbon dioxide, and all the hydrogen is burned completely to water; clearly this does not happen in human digestion! 　In fact, since all proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are NOT used for energy, and are indeed used for other quite different purposes than producing energy, the abstract “calorie content” of “foods” and nutrients is absolutely irrelevant and meaningless. 　Worse, thinking that one calorie-equivalent of protein, one calorie-equivalent of fat, or one calorie-equivalent of carbohydrate are in any way similar or identical, as seen by our digestive biochemistry, is simply absurd. 　Would a ‘calorie’ of DDT, gasoline, wood, alcohol, diamond, feces, iron, or an old shoe, be somehow ‘equivalent’ to a calorie of protein, fat, or cho? 　Obviously not. 　Further, since a calorie is a unit of energy, it can NOT be “burned” as is foolishly claimed in the currently popular nutribabble about “burning calories”!. 　What would you get? 　Calorie oxide?

Calories are a useful concept in thermodynamics and physics, but they are totally irrelevant to human nutrition or diet.  It makes as much sense to try to classify and/or quantify “foods” by their density, color, refractive index, shape, electrical conductivity, pH, heat capacity, tensile strength, compressive modulus, sheer modulus, melting point, boiling point, thermal conductivity, dielectric constant, absorption spectra, dipole moment, optical rotation, solubility, surface tension, thermal expansion, vapor pressure, viscosity, reaction kinetics, or any other -totally irrelevant- physical property as their “calorie content”.　

Hello,

I was interviewed by someone from another raw food website a couple years ago, and since that particular website seems to no longer be in existence I thought I would post this here, in case it might be helpful to someone, and to serve as a temporary update to my raw transition story, which hasn’t been officially updated in quite a few years (it’s on the perpetual ‘to do’ list).

Happy reading,

Nora

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?  For example, where you grew up and what kind of up bringing you had?

I grew up in a small agricultural community in Eastern Washington with one brother and one sister, and two married parents who still live in the house I grew up in. I was athletic and studious in school. There was so much agriculture around that it was easy to find work picking fruit, which I did every summer for extra money. I ate some fruit but my diet was otherwise very unhealthy. I had no interest in health until about age 30. I had carried an extra 20-30 pounds or more my entire adult life and wanted very much to be slim. I had noticed that the people who looked the way I wanted to were very conscious of what they ate, so I resolved to learn as much about nutrition as I could. I also started working for a company that was involved peripherally with the meat industry, which inspired me to go vegan. About that same time I got into fitness and started teaching aerobics classes. Even though I was fit, it was a struggle to keep weight off and I never achieved the slim physique I wanted until I went raw.

What inspired you to get healthier?

At age 44 I made the momentous discovery that being vegan wasn’t enough to prevent disease. I had heard about eating raw food but I didn’t realize it wasn’t just another way of eating, it was THE way humans are supposed to eat. From the time I made that discovery, it became my goal to eat only raw food. A few years after that I learned that just eating raw food isn’t enough to assure the high level of health I aspired to, so I have continued to refine my diet.

You probably get asked this a lot, but where do you get your protein from?

Fruits, tender leafy greens, nuts and seeds. Protein is abundantly supplied by all these foods.

Don’t you need protein to grow strong?

Yes, of course we need protein, but all foods contain protein. The idea that only animal products provide protein is a falsehood that comes from meat and dairy industry marketing propaganda. Fruit has just the right amount of protein for humans, and in a simple unbound form that is easily assimilable. It is no coincidence that fruit has approximately the same percentage of protein as human mother’s milk.

What are your favourite exercises to use and do you go the gym to do them?

I no longer go to the gym for exercise. I only walk, hike and do yard work.

Can you share with us some of your health achievements or goals?

I have already reached a level of health that I didn’t realize was achievable. My goal is to recover completely from food addiction, which afflicts all civilized humans with only two exceptions that I know of.

Are you 100% raw and for how long?

Yes, almost 11 years.

What is your typical daily food plan?

“Typical” has changed over the years that I’ve been raw. Nowadays, the foods I eat really only change with the seasons. The bulk of my diet is fruit. The more I center my diet around fruit and limit my consumption of nuts and greens, the better I feel. Currently, and for the past month or so, I’ve eaten 4-5 grapefruit around 9 am, a melon at 11 or so, 2-3 apples around 1 pm and 3-4 persimmons between 2 and 3. Once or twice per week I have a salad in the mid-afternoon instead of my last fruit meal. This is usually composed of iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, celery and either a few ounces of nuts or an avocado or two. Salad is something I still enjoy; I do not eat it because of the nutritional ‘benefits’ or to satisfy a perceived need for greens. In fact, I plan to eventually move away from salad eating entirely as I consider it the last vestige of addiction. It has taken a very long time and lots of practice to feel comfortable and satisfied eating low fat and primarily fruit. In my experience a person has to allow the process to happen at its own pace, otherwise s/he will not be prepared to forego harmful habits like gourmandizing, mixing foods and meal planning. These are necessary in transition but are destructive of health overall and must eventually be left behind to achieve optimal health.

(Note:  The above was written in 2008, and I have made some changes since then.  Notably, I no longer eat nuts or salads of any kind.  I do eat celery or iceberg lettuce sometimes, but I eat them alone, with no accompaniment.   As of this writing, it is wild berry season here in Seattle so on many days I eat my fill of berries as my first meal of the day.  When I don’t, I eat 6-7 Valencia oranges.  A couple hours later I will usually have either a melon or a large meal of stone fruits (apricots or nectarines).  Often I will have another melon later or a pound or so of figs.  I am still eating frozen durian, only much less frequently.  I’ve had two in the last month.  Earlier in the year I was eating lots of pineapple (almost daily) and discovered the negative effects this can have on teeth!  So I begrudgingly gave it up and started eating oranges instead.)

Do you have to live in a warm climate to make Raw food work?

No, but you have to eat foods that were grown in a warm climate.

You currently live in Seattle … how is the product availability there?

It’s the only place I’ve ever lived as a raw fooder so I don’t have much to compare it to. Since it’s a large metropolitan city, there is abundant fruit available although it can get tricky in winter trying to find ripe fruit. I have found ways around this, like buying foods that store well, like apples & pears, or can be ripened at home, like cherimoyas and bananas. I also go to California in the fall and pick several hundred pounds of persimmons to eat over the winter months. Our growing season is relatively short but Seattle is within a couple hours driving distance of some of the best fruit growing land on earth, so I make lots of trips to the rural parts of the state in Summer and Fall.

Do you use any type of supplements and or recommend using them?

No, I have never taken supplements. Imo, they are not necessary and cannot be utilized by the body. Nutrients work in concert with each other and are only usable in the normal context of a whole food. Nutrient deficiency of dietary origin is practically impossible, especially for raw fooders.

What about B12 … aren’t you concerned about not getting enough B12?

No, I am not concerned. The B12 myth arose from meat industry propaganda and has no basis in truth.

Many people say fruits have too much sugar and are hybridized — what are your thoughts on this?

Humans are a frugivorous species. The only thing we need more of than sugar is water. All the vitamins we need for a whole year can fit in a thimble, and the same goes for minerals. We need minute quantities of these nutrients. We have been lied to by the industries which stand to gain from the idea that health depends on overconsuming things that our bodies were designed (by adaptation) to get in very small quantities. Nobody knows the true difference between the fruit that our ancestors ate and the fruit we eat today. I don’t doubt that the former was better, naturally, as there was nothing to get in the way of it being perfect. However, our bodies don’t require perfection. Our bodies only require adequacy. And modern fruit adequately provides everything we need. I didn’t get healthy eating food that was produced 100,000 years ago. I did it eating normal, supermarket fruit, most of it conventionally grown.

What type of water do you drink and how much do you drink on a average day?

I collect stream water from the Cascade Mountains, because I prefer the taste. I drink a couple cups per day, roughly, but I expect that will decrease over time.

Do you believe in fasting and can you share some of your thoughts on this?

Fasting is almost always beneficial, physiologically. Regarding the specifics, I will defer to the experts like Dr. Shelton and TC Fry. New raw fooders should approach fasting warily as it will not cure their bad habits and may make these even harder to manage afterwards because often there is a strong desire to overeat after a fast. Also, after a fast the body is more sensitive and vital so the consequences of mistakes or bad habits will be felt more readily.

Is the raw food diet for everyone?

There is no doubt that fresh, raw, biologically appropriate foods are best for overall health for all human beings. However, there are lots of psychological, social, financial, circumstantial and other reasons why people can’t eat all raw.

I understand you follow a Natural Hygiene lifestyle?

Yes.

What is Natural Hygiene and what drew you to this lifestyle?

Natural Hygiene is the science of health. It arose from observations of nature. It is simply the set of laws that we must follow in order to thrive. It is truthful and infinite, yet beautifully simple. It’s nature.

What types of challenges have you seen with people trying to live the raw lifestyle?

The challenges are myriad, and people often make it worse by putting too much pressure on themselves to keep up with others or unrealistic expectations. People come to natural healing with their medical belief systems intact so they expect healing to be like taking a remedy, where the symptom just goes away instantly. They have too little patience with the healing process and not enough understanding of what symptoms mean and how they should be handled. Overall there is too much dependence on gurus and too little willingness to trust nature and bodily senses.  The raw food lifestyle also seems to attract Type A personalities and perfectionists who aren’t able to forgive themselves for not doing things perfectly overnight. It can’t be done quickly, no matter how much grit a person has. Typically it can be much easier for young people because their bad habits are not so firmly in place, but for people who wait till their 40s and beyond to begin making changes, patience and self-forgiveness are key.  It is also a challenge financially because people find that they must eat a great deal of raw food in order to get the elusive feeling of satiety that just a small amount of cooked food provides.  Transitioning raw fooders also typically buy into the idea that they must eat only or even primarily organic foods. Organic growing practices are better, of course, but other criteria are more important, like ripeness, freshness, quality and biological appropriateness. Eating conventionally grown fruit is not as much of a compromise as people think. Most of the foods I eat are  conventional, since organic is too expensive and is often not fresh or ripe.

What are some of your current health and fitness goals?

Just to continue refining my diet and practicing the habit of eating incidentally, including no more meal planning, no combining of foods, no gourmandizing. I already do very little of this but I want food to be less important to me than it is currently. It is addiction that makes eating seem more important than it is.  I also want to learn to eat LESS, since the body becomes more efficient as it gets healthier. 

The raw food movement seems to be growing fast.  What are some of the things you have noticed about the raw food movement over the last number of years and where it is going?

Although it has come a long way in 11 years since I became aware of it, there is much to be disappointed about.  Unfortunately, raw food eating seems to have become more like a religion than a lifestyle based on logic and rational science. There is a belief, for example, that anything eaten raw is automatically healthy, and better than any food that has been cooked. This is not true. There are cooked foods which aren’t nearly as harmful as some raw foods. There is a lot that a SAD-eating person can do short of going raw to improve his/her health. And for those who are willing to eat only raw foods, there is much work to be done even after reaching that sought after 100% mark. There is even more work to do after learning how to eat a 100% high fruit, low fat vegan diet.   Although there is not much discussion about increased fuel efficiency in the raw food world, it’s an extremely important reality that long term raw fooders must deal with.  Healthy bodies are capable of producing more energy on less fuel, and eating more than the body needs can put a great drain on energy and impede health improvement.  Overeating is defined simply as eating in the absence of true hunger, or eating in response to symptoms like weakness or stomach ‘pangs’.   Because there’s so little discussion and understanding of the fuel efficiency issue in the raw food world, many long term high fruit eating raw fooders don’t understand why eating the same amount of food they always have tends to give them symptoms, and they are perplexed by their lack of progress.  I hope to bring these issues into the discussion, and that’s why I’ll be speaking about them at the upcoming Woodstock Fruit Festival.  The good news, of course, is that there is a growing contingent of raw fooders who are embracing the simple elegant truths of natural hygiene and centering their diets around fruit.  

What type of advice would you say to someone who is just getting started on a journey towards a healthier life?

 There is no blanket advice that can be given to everyone. What a person does will depend entirely on his or her unique history, situation and personal goals. Generally I would say that people need to do the things that are necessary to avoid the problems I mentioned in the previous question about the challenges of going raw. Getting correct information is very important, and there is a lot of nonsense out there, especially in the raw food movement. 

If anyone would like to get a hold of you for some more guidance how would you recommend that they do this?

I can be contacted through www.RawSchool.com or www.NoMoreVetBills.com.

  http://www.fredericpatenaude.com/blog/?p=210

The above blog entry was sent to me yesterday by a friend.  I thought I’d like to comment on it.    

First, I’d like to say that I admire Frederic for his amazing ability to market his ideas and products. He has reached a lot of people who otherwise might not be experiencing the joys of simpler eating. 

However, I think he belongs with the majority of people who don’t understand addiction and don’t recognize the extent to which it afflicts civilized humankind, including almost all raw fooders. Addiction is an extremely powerful phenomenon and people need to be able to forgive themselves for doing whatever it takes to get out of its clutches, even if it means eating foods that some raw foodists wouldn’t touch. People can’t get rid of all their addictions at once. You don’t see former alcoholics mingling at parties with an empty hand, you see them holding a soda (another addictive “food”), and everyone who’s ever quit smoking will attest to the help that gum and hard candies can offer.

Gradual replacement has long been used as an effective way to resolve addiction, and although hardly anyone even attempts to recover from food addiction in our culture, it offers an effective way to get to optimal eating, as well. Unhealthy foods in the diet just need to be replaced with healthier alternatives, even if the healthier foods are not optimally healthy. Those foods will eventually need to be replaced, too, with healthier versions, and this should continue until no more improvement is practical or possible. That strategy requires great patience, but it’s the gentlest & easiest way to transition to an optimal diet, if that’s the goal that is sought.

Frederic is right that health seekers need to be told that in order to reach their full potential they must completely phase out transitional foods, like complex or high-fat recipes, etc. There aren’t too many raw “experts” saying that, and the ones who are saying it are going too far in the other direction, treating the need for transitional foods as the sign of a weak character.  These foods should be abandoned gradually and mindfully, taking one’s individual weaknesses, habitual tendencies and potential triggers into full account.  In the meantime, nobody needs to feel ashamed or rushed.

It seems there is a great lack of middle ground in the raw food community.  The “experts” are either telling people that they can eat anything and everything as long as it’s raw, or advising them to skip transitional foods altogether and go right to optimal.  Of the two, the latter is probably the most dangerous because if transitioners don’t acknowledge the strength of their foe (addiction), they may be inclined to conclude erroneously that they’re just not the stuff that successful raw fooders are made of.  Staying in transition-land forever is hazardous to health, to be sure, but reverting to the typical cooked food diet is worse.

For those suffering debilitating diseases particularly, there is great merit in combining both approaches.  That is, eating simply and optimally for a temporary period of time (typically 30-90 days) and then, after the body has cleansed and healed sufficiently to allow the person to function more normally, going back to a more gradual transitional diet.

Best wishes,

Nora