Vegan Nutrition

What if I came to you and said,

“I have the absolute best diet in the world. You will lose weight, you will have more energy, and you will prevent and even reverse any and all diseases. AND you get to eat 60% OR MORE of your calories from fat!”

You would probably a) laugh in my face, b) turn and run, or c) ask if I was a raw foodist.

That’s right, folks. The average raw foodist eats 60% of his or her calories from fat! That’s over HALF of one’s daily calories, all from fat!

Are you surprised? I know I sure was when I went raw. I could not believe that there were people actually promoting a high fat diet when all the evidence for a healthy diet pointed to the exact opposite!

So why are so many raw foodists eating so much fatty foods? What it boils down to is the “If It’s Raw, It’s Healthy” fallacy.

If It’s Raw, It’s Healthy

Many raw foodists will argue that raw fats are much healthier than cooked fats and do not result in such problems as heart disease and atherosclerosis. As long as it’s raw, you can eat as much avocado, nuts, and seeds as you want.

Yes, it’s true that raw fats are much better than cooked fats. Cooked fatty foods have had the majority of the water removed and many necessary micronutrients along with that water (not to mention all the nutrients that are destroyed by the heat alone).

Once fats are cooked, they quickly go rancid and produce harmful carcinogens. The more oxygen that these foods come into contact with, the more rancid they become and the more dangerous carcinogens they produce.

The Problem With Too Much Fat

However, eating an excess of either cooked or raw fats produces a host of problems for the consumer:

#1: Fat takes a long time to digest and it remains in the bloodstream for a long time. When too much fat is consumed, the excess fat in the bloodstream interferes with insulin production from the pancreas. Under normal circumstances, the insulin would attach itself to sugar molecules within the blood in order to carry them to the cells. With the fat in the way, the insulin does not reach the sugar. The pancreas becomes fatigued from producing extra insulin. The blood-sugar level becomes elevated because the sugar cannot be transported out of the blood by the insulin. As you can see, sugar metabolic disorders like type 2 diabetes and Candida are not caused by a lack of insulin or too much sugar. They can be directly linked to an excess of fat.

#2: An excess of fat in the body slows down digestion of other foods that are eaten. Fruit, which normally takes minutes to digest, now has time to ferment inside the body. This results in uncomfortable bloating and gas.

#3: Too much fat in the bloodstream also interferes with the red blood cells’ ability to transport oxygen. A low oxygenated body is a perfect environment for cancer cells to thrive.

#4: Excess fat consumption is linked to numerous physical and mental ailments, such as:

How Much Fat?

Dr. Graham, author of The 80/10/10 Diet and a leader within the raw food movement, advocates a diet of 10% fat or less. Personally, this is the guideline that I follow and recommend as well. Anymore fat than this and it is likely that you are not consuming enough simple carbohydrates in the form of fruit.

10% of calories from fat is surprising to many people. However, many reputable sources (including the world-renowned Pritikin Center) recommend that only 10-15% of calories come from fat.

Many people around the world eat diets low in fat. In The China Study, the longest nutritional study ever conducted, Dr. Campbell studies people living in rural China who eat as low as 6% of calories from fat!

It is not surprising that in these areas you find much lower rates of heart disease, atherosclerosis, breast cancer, etc. compared to more industrialized places like the US and Britain.

On most days, I do not eat any overt fats and on those days I average about 5% of my calories from fat. I’ve never experienced any adverse reactions from limiting my fat intake.

In fact, I have only experienced great benefits since limiting fat, such as weight loss, increased energy, deeper sleep, mental focus, and improved digestion.

Take Action!

You can take action right now by simply limiting your consumption of fatty foods to 15% or less. A good way to do this is to replace these foods with high-calorie, low-fat sweet fruits.

For instance, if you usually eat avocados with your greens, try peaches sliced up on top instead. You can even make completely fat-free dressings from fruits and veggies. Here is a personal favorite of mine:

*Tangy Tomato Dressing*

Blend all of the ingredients together.

The best way to track your fat consumption is to use www.nutridiary.com. There are many more sites that allow you to track your calories, but this is the site I recommend. It is easy to use and easy on the eyes.

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I have spent a good amount of my time on raw food forums over the past couple of years. It is a great way to learn about eating raw and to gather information from others who are thriving on the diet.

While visiting these forums, I have noticed a problem that is expressed over and over again by various members. Many people complain that they find it too difficult to stick to a raw food diet. They find themselves extremely hungry and experiencing cravings for cooked dishes on a regular basis.

And I’m not talking about brand new raw foodists. I’m talking about people who have been attempting a raw food diet for years and still can’t seem to stick with it!

So what’s the problem? Why is it that such a vast majority of raw foodists fail on a raw food diet?

Not enough calories, Too much fat

In general, the raw foodists I’m talking about are consuming lots of greens and vegetables, avocados, nuts, oils, dehydrated mixtures like flax seed crackers, some vinegars, and dried fruit.

Even though the raw foodists described above are eating large amounts of greens and other vegetables, these foods do not offer a substantial amount of calories.

Here’s an example…

*Typical Salad without Overt Fats*

A large salad of 1 pound of romaine lettuce, 1 medium red bell pepper, and one medium cucumber is only 153 calories. All of that food has less calories than just two bananas!

This is a problem because the average person needs between 2000-2500 calories a day. To eat that much food from romaine lettuce, you would need to eat 25 pounds (about 50 heads) of lettuce per day! This is completely impractical, not to mention rather unpleasant. My jaw aches just thinking about it!

We’ve now established that it’s nearly impossible to get enough calories from vegetables. While salads like this are high in volume, the satiation is short lived because the caloric needs are not being met.

So where do these raw foodists get their calories from?

Avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and cold-pressed olive oils. To be precise, fat. These fatty foods are used to make dehydrated dishes like “raw” crackers, breads, and “mock” pizzas. They are also eaten on their own or put atop salads.

Let’s return to the salad example…

*Typical Salad with Overt Fats*

1 head of romaine, 1 medium bell pepper, and one medium cucumber is 153 calories. Now, add just one medium avocado and one tablespoon of olive oil. That takes the calories up to 561 calories!

The avocado and oil alone provide 2/3 of the total calories in this dish. Not only that, but the addition of the avocado and oil took the fat content from 10% to a staggering 61% of fat!

As you can see, it only takes a small amount of these foods (fatty fruits, nuts and seeds, and oils) to exceed your needed calories and fat content for the day.

Again, this is just one meal. Many raw foodists have two salads during their day and often times these are even more fat laden than the example I have shown above. This does not even consider the popular complex, dehydrated recipes that are mostly comprised of high-fat nuts and seeds.

With this knowledge in mind, is it surprising that the average raw foodist consumes a whopping 60% of his or her calories from fat everyday? How many times have you come across people who claim to eat several avocados a day and handfuls of nuts in just one sitting? Maybe this isn’t surprising, but it’s certainly unhealthy.

What’s the Alternative?

While greens and vegetable fruits are very important in a healthy raw diet, they simply do not provide the necessary calories to fill you up and combat cooked cravings. However, you do not have to get your calories from low-volume fatty foods.

You are not destined for raw food failure.

There is another way…

*Sweet fruit*

By eating substantial amounts of whole, raw, simple, delicious fruits, you will feel completely satiated and will no longer suffer from cooked food cravings. You will also be getting the absolute best nutrition available and fueling your body right!

And it’s so easy to get started! If you still eat a cooked diet, simply replace your breakfast with as much fruit as you can eat and move on from there. If you already eat raw, just replace the majority of the raw veggies and fats you eat with sweet fruit.

If you are having a hard time getting enough calories via whole fruit, try blending them into tasty smoothies!

So put down the avocado, pick up an apple, and start succeeding on a raw diet today!

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My biggest problem when I first learned about raw back in 2007 stemmed from information overload. There was just so much advice out there about raw foods and so many different educators…all providing very different guidelines for living the raw lifestyle. And all I wanted to know was which raw diet was best and what I had to do to implement it!

Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon the healthiest diet of all rather quickly. Fortunately for you, I can explain what that diet is just as quickly, with 3 easy guidelines! So let’s get started…

#1: Eat More Sweet Fruit

I want you to think back to a time when you ate some delicious fruit. Maybe it was an exotic mango, a perfect peach, or a juicy orange. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was scrumptious, sweet, and satisfying. And the best part? No guilt! In fact, you probably felt pretty happy with yourself for choosing such a healthful snack over greasy chips or fatty cookies. Now imagine experiencing that satisfaction, both with yourself and your food, every single day… Pretty sweet, huh? How can you experience this? By simply eating a diet based on raw, sweet fruit.

Fruit is full of water-soluble fiber, packed with essential vitamins and nutrients (not too mention the oh-so-popular antioxidants and phyto-nutrients), calorically dense and water-rich, and provides easy to digest healthy sugar in its simplest form.

#2: Don’t Forget Your Veggies!

But it isn’t all about the sweet stuff. A well-rounded, healthy raw diet also incorporates moderate amounts of mineral-rich vegetables. These include tender leafy greens like romaine and non-sweet fruits like tomatoes and zucchini. Not only do these foods provide some extra variety (and maybe a nice break from all the sweetness) in your diet, they also provide higher levels of necessary minerals than their fruity friends.

#3: Hold It On the Fat

Although many raw foodists eat and promote a fatty diet that rivals any standard cooked diet, this is *not* optimal. While raw overt fats like avocados and nuts are healthier than their cooked versions, too much fat in a diet still results in many health issues, including but not limited to heart disease, arthritis, and even depression.

This is certainly not the makings of the best raw diet. The best raw diet does contain these healthy raw fats, but in a limited quantity. For optimal nutrition, the bulk of your calories should come from low fat sweet fruit, not fat.

Final Words

So there you have it! The best raw food diet, in a raw nutshell!

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Anyone who has ever eaten a meal of raw fruit knows how intensely pleasurable this can be.  Fruit requires little to no preparation (all you need to eat a banana is opposable thumbs).  It is easy to eat and digests quickly, usually in just 30 minutes.

Best of all, fruit tastes great and completely satisfies the sweet tooth in the most healthy way possible.

Just like avocado and nuts, fruit is calorically dense.  However, fruit is also high in volume, like vegetables.  This means that a meal of fruit both provides enough calories AND enough volume to leave you completely satiated until the next meal.

Just Fruit?!?

The idea of eating only fruit for a meal is very strange to people.  Much of this confusion stems from the fact that we grow up thinking of raw fruit as a snack or part of a dessert.  The idea of eating more than a couple pieces of fruit in one sitting is completely foreign to us.

As a result, people who are new to a low fat, high fruit raw food diet often under eat on calories at first.

To make the transition easier for you, here is a simple example of a sufficient fruit meal…

*Fruit Meal*

Let’s say you need 2000 calories a day and you like to eat 3 meals a day.  If each meal is divided equally, one meal would be between 600-700 calories.

One medium banana contains about 100 calories.  In order to consume 600-700 calories in one meal from bananas alone, you would have to consume 6 to 7 bananas.

And that’s it!  It really is that simple.

Of course, if eating a meal of only one type of fruit seems much too boring to you, there are many alternatives.  You can combine your favorite fruits into a nice fruit salad.  A popular choice for beginners is to blend fruits into a smoothie.  This is an easy way to get enough calories from fruit.

Here is a delicious smoothie you can make in just a few minutes…

*Two Pears in a Peel*

Blend ingredients together and enjoy!

There are many different combinations you can make.  You can also add greens, which will add some nice variety and counterbalance some of the sweetness.

Problems with Fruit

Many raw foodists believe that fruits should be severely limited, or even eliminated, because they contain simple sugars like fructose and glucose.  These simple sugars are believed to lead to such ailments as diabetes and Candida.

First, I want to clarify that the sugar in fruit does not cause sugar metabolic disorders.  It is an excess of fat in the body that coats the insulin, blocking it from reaching the sugar molecules.  The excess sugar in the blood leads to a high blood-sugar level.

Without the excess fat, the insulin will reach the sugar molecules and transport them out of the blood and into the cells.

Second, there is a huge difference between the simple sugars found in fruit and the simple sugars found in processed foods.  These refined sugars have been removed from whole foods (i.e. fruit, sugar cane) and further processed.  They no longer contain any nutritional value whatsoever.

On the contrary, the sugars in whole fruit have not been processed and are accompanied by necessary water, fiber, Vitamin C, Vitamin A, phytonutrients, etc.

How Much Fruit?

I recommend that the majority of your calories come from fruit.  The best way to determine how much is to simply eat sweet fruit until you are full.  As a general guideline, our closest relatives the bonobos consume 95% of their calories from sweet fruit.  The other great apes consume between 70-90% of their calories from fruit.

Dr. Douglas Graham, a well-known leader in the raw food movement, recommends in The 80/10/10 Diet that 80% of our calories come from simple carbohydrates in the form of fruit.  You can check out this excellent book and the rest of Dr. Graham’s top-quality catalog at FoodnSport.

On average, I consume between 85-90% of my calories from sweet fruit.

Take Action

You can get started today by simply eating all fruit for your next meal.  Many people prefer to wait until breakfast, as it is the easiest meal to transition.

You could also begin your next meal with as much fruit as you can eat, and then finish the meal with your regular fare.  Just be sure to wait at least 30 minutes between your two meals so that your body has time to fully digest the fruit.

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It is no secret that we as a species consume a lot of cereal grains.  It’s in our breakfast, our lunches, our side dishes and entrees.  It’s in our Mexican, Italian, and Chinese staples.

Grains even make up most of our favorite snacks and desserts.

And according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society, this is a good thing.  These institutions feel that “whole” grains, such as wheat and brown rice, should be the foundation of a healthy diet.

Do you wanna know what I think?  (Since you’re reading my blog, I’m going to assume that you do.)

The USDA, American Heart Association and American Cancer Society are completely WRONG.  You do NOT need grains to be healthy.  In fact, it will serve you well to completely eliminate them from your raw food diet.

Would You Eat Them Raw?

Seems like a silly question, but bear with me here for a moment.

If you were out in the wild foraging for food and you came across a field of wheat, would you be inclined to it some?

Would your mouth water at the sight of uncooked, unprocessed, unseasoned wheat kernels?

For the 1% of you who answered yes, I have to wonder about the possible fowl genetics present in your lineage.

On a more serious note, eating raw grains is not just unappetizing to the human palate.  In Grain Damage: Rethinking the High-Starch Diet, Dr. Douglas Graham writes:

“At best, raw grains taste unpleasant and bitter, even when they are sprouted.  More often, they are inedible or poisonous if eaten in the field.  Even birds, the only natural grain eaters, feed their young on insects, as grains are deficient in protein and nutrients.”

On the other hand, ripe fruit is instantly appealing to our senses.  It’s beautiful to look at.  Its smell makes us salivate.  It gives nicely in our hands.

Last but not least, fruit tastes wonderful.  What sane person can honestly resist a perfectly ripe peach or a fragrant muskmelon?

What About Cooked Grains?

You may be thinking that cooking grains is a better option than eating them raw.

Think again.

When a complex carbohydrate food such as wheat or barley is heated, the molecules of the food are fused together into a glue-like substance.  Even though cooking has broken down the complex starches into simple glucose, the body must do extra work to process the now chemically fused molecules.

This presents a huge problem in terms of blood-sugar levels.  In Left In the Dark, authors Graham Glynn and Tony Wright write:

“Carbohydrates also appear to be problematic when eaten in large amounts.  A diet high in carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates (cakes biscuits, pasta, etc.) dumps large amounts of glucose rapidly into our bloodstream.  This can cause insulin resistance in which the absorption of glucose from the bloodstream is disrupted.  This in turn can lead to obesity, adult onset diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes.”

And a little further down the page:

“If we compare refined carbohydrates with fruit we can see that fruit has a much lower glycemic index, which means it is digested more slowly thus avoiding the problems of the ‘glucose rush.’”

But that’s not all!  Here are some more problems associated with eating cooked grains:

But Humans Have Been Eating Grains For Thousands of Years!

While 10-30,000 years may seem like a long time to we humans with a mere 100-year life span (at best), it is but a flash in the pan evolutionarily speaking.

Here is an excerpt from Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution on the increased consumption of grains since the Neolithic Period (when humans settled down and began farming extensively):

“Becoming dependent on grains reduced intake of fruits and vegetables, often to 20% or less of total energy intake.  Accordingly, access to micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals) previously supplied by fruits and vegetables was substantially decreased.

Of course, cereal grains also provide micronutrients, but not necessarily those to which human biology became accustomed throughout a multimillion-year evolutionary experience, during which fruits and vegetables were the overwhelmingly dominant plant foods.”

Quite simply, we have not been consuming a diet high in grains long enough for our anatomy and physiology to have adapted to them.

And anyway, grains do not fulfill our nutritional needs as fruits and vegetables do.  For instance, they are very low in vitamins A, B, and C and sodium and calcium.

This is why when you pick up a box of cereal or whole wheat pasta, you will often see  “Fortified with,” preceded by a host of vitamins and minerals that have been added to the product.

Not only that, but certain properties in grains affects absorption of vital nutrients within the body.  It is now known that grain consumption decreases Vitamin D absorption.

And while many proponents of a grain-based diet site fiber as a reason to indulge, there is a huge caveat here.  You see, the fibers in grains are not water-soluble like those present in fruits and vegetables; they are insoluble.

This means that they lack the ability to absorb water and move comfortably through the body.  Think of a harsh bristle brush slowly making its way down your digestive track.

Yikes!

Leave It To the Birds

In short, there is no reason for you to consume grains.  Raw or cooked, they are completely inferior to raw fruits and vegetables.

If you are having trouble consuming enough calories on a raw food diet, there is no need to turn to sprouting grains…or legumes for that matter.  Simply increasing your consumption of sweet fruit until you feel satisfied will do the trick.

Remember, fruit always comes first.

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