I recently left some comments on a YouTube video made by a woman telling everyone why she is no longer a raw fooder and does not recommend it. I would categorize some of her reasons as lame excuses, myths or even outright falsehoods, while others were legitimate. In my comments I tried to separate the correct from the incorrect but apparently she didn’t like what I had to say because she deleted them. I think my comments might actually be helpful to someone, that’s why I took the time to write them in the first place, so I’m going to post them here even though doing so will necessitate sending more viewers to the video in question.
Here are my comments. Enjoy.
“I would submit that you don’t eat whatever you want whenever you want it, because you are obviously using a lot of discernment in your food selection if you are eating all vegan and low fat. I would also deduce from your healthy appearance that you’re not giving in to the vilest vegan junk choices out there. So you should not be trying to give the impression that you’ve thrown all caution to the wind. What you’ve done is found a comfortable, sustainable way to eat that serves your moral, physiological, psychological, financial and social criteria. That’s ok. It is what most people strive to do.
The raw food community is full of baseless dogma, but that doesn’t mean raw food or even being 100% raw is bad. Raw food is obviously what humans ate for the millions of years preceding the “discovery” of fire and migration into areas that don’t support human life. However, it is pure myth that people need to eat 3,500 calories a day, and you’re using this non-fact as a basis for many other objections to the raw food diet. It’s true that it is helpful to stay on track if you eat constantly in the beginning. But people need to gradually move away from that because as they heal their bodies will become MORE EFFICIENT. That means they will be able to produce MORE energy on LESS food. It is a universal law that nature always strives for more efficiency. Do you think we humans invented the idea that it’s good to go farther on less fuel? So anyone wanting to get to the very pinnacle of health needs to bear in mind that eating less and less as time goes by will not only get them there, it will free them from the burden of sourcing, lugging and paying for so much food. This also establishes as erroneous the idea that early humans would not have been able to fulfill their caloric needs eating only fruits and veggies. A modern, brainwashed, food-addicted, transitioning raw fooder might need 3,500 calories a day in order to stay raw, but this has no relevance to what our superlatively healthy, extremely-digestively-efficient human ancestors would have needed. And, by the way, these ancestors of ours would have no problem getting the fruit out of the trees.
Another idea that most raw fooders have in their heads is that their food needs to be 100% organic. For most people, it’s going to be impossible to sustain a fully raw diet that is all organic or even close. Conventional fruits and veggies are not poison, just as all cooked foods are not poison. Organic has been hyped by the same Wall Street-based conglomerates who produce conventional fruits and veggies and even junk food, for that matter. Why wouldn’t they hype it if they can sell it for 3-4 times what conventional produce sells for? It is possible to reach an extremely high level of health eating conventional produce purchased at mainstream North American grocery stores, and/or even living in small towns where the fancy raw vegan specialties aren’t available.
Having said all that, your other reasons for giving up 100% raw are mostly legitimate – the time investment, financial considerations, social/dating alienation, etc. The 100% raw diet is not for everyone, and in fact it’s the rare individual who can find a way to comfortably sustain it over a lifetime. But it’s not impossible, and the benefits are commensurate with the effort it takes. Everything gets easier with practice. Combined with increasing digestive efficiency, this means that being all raw is not only not impossible, it’s downright do-able for people who have the right mindset and circumstances.”