Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

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TopHatFox
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Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by TopHatFox »

Considering implementing more raw based foods in my diet. I'm still researching the benefits/cons, but initial research looks promising.

Thus far it's just more salads, fruit, smoothies, raw nuts, raw seeds, oils, and spices.

Have any of you all tried a raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

jacob
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by jacob »

I tried and failed. Biggest obstacle was in not knowing how to cook.

It was all salads. The most advanced meal was some kind of biscuit made out of dryed flax seed porridge. Not having heat eliminates a lot of options.

I think my mistake was also combining it with Warrior Diet. It's hard to eat 2000kcal worth of green in one meal. I suspect it requires continual "snacking" to work out.

Scott 2
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by Scott 2 »

Cooking changes the nutritional profile of foods. Some nutrients are more bio-available after cooking. Just because something is raw, that doesn't mean it is superior. A kidney bean that has not been boiled, is quite poisonous, for instance.

I've had a few high end raw meals. A full 3 courses at a specialized raw only restaurant, raw lasagna at a couple places, including Emrils. Event the best of the food has only been ok. The specialized place gave me pretty bad digestive upset. Insufficient calories was a problem too.

My wife and I attended the first half of a 2 hour raw cooking class, run by a lady who claimed it heals everything. It was a groupon... We walked out when she started blending bags of nuts in a food processor and calling that cooking.

The little I was exposed, it bugged me that they leaned heavily on pureed cashews. Yet cashews are heated to the "bad" temperatures as part of the harvesting process. They could at least be internally consistent in their orthorexia.

slowtraveler
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by slowtraveler »

I tried it. I do not think it is healthy. Gut hurts more, food doesn't move through the body in a stable feeling way.

My diet was high in avocados, smoothies, and salads.

A cooked vegetable soup has always felt better in my body than a raw vegetable smoothie. Much easier to digest.

A massive salad is nice once in a while but would be a pain daily. Like a 2nd job. Alright, eat this massive salad for the next hour.

We are meant to eat cooked foods. Fire has been part of human technology for far longer than agriculture. I believe Sapiens are not the only human group to have used it.

But we are scientists here experimenting with our bodies. So try it if you feel inclined, and please, share your results.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by ThisDinosaur »

For all the reasons above, its probably perfect for losing weight. Beyond that, I agree with Felipe. Humans have been cooking food for a million years or more, so we're pretty well dependent on it.

Also consider that most herbivores have to spend their whole day eating. Carnivores generally spend most of their hours resting.

ducknalddon
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by ducknalddon »

Don't most people on a raw food diet put the majority of their ingredients through a blender, hard to digest otherwise.

Campitor
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by Campitor »

@TopHatFox

I've done the raw food plant based diet. There are benefits and drawbacks depending on your goal. Losing weight is easy on a raw food diet if you're consuming your food in it's "whole" state - no blending or pre-mashing. The chewing and starch/fiber composition of your food will signal satiety before you start tipping the calorie consumption towards weight gain. The risk with the "no pre-processing" approach is the lack of consuming sufficient calories, the lack of dense protein to fuel muscle growth (you can't eat beans/legumes raw), and the poor nutrient diversity IF you don't eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. You can't eat only apples and pears 7 days a week and think you're going to have a full spectrum of all the required vitamins and minerals. I'm 5'9" and reached 140 pounds eating raw - I was slipping into the 130 range when I started juicing/blending which brings me to the next stage of raw food eating.

Blending is superior to juicing unless you plan on eating the leftover mash produced in the juicing process. The nutrition in the fruits/roots is tightly bound to the fiber and you forego it by only drinking the juice and throwing away the mash. Blending is the superior method of extracting the calories and nutrition of raw foods. Blending allows you to bypass the lengthy chewing phase and compacts the food being consumed; you can eat more calories in a shorter time. The drawback is that you can gain a lot of weight blending very sweet fruits, i.e., dates, or fruits filled with fat, i.e, avocados and coconuts. I went as high as 193lbs when I was blending my meals.

The best approach is a diet that incorporates both raw and cooked vegetables if you're looking to maintain weight and be physically active; muscle hypertrophy requires regular consumption of protein dense foods like legumes. In my opinion, you need to consume a balance of fruits and vegetables with vegetables being your main staple in your blending/juicing/cooking and fruits being your main choice for raw and unprocessed eating.

Legal disclaimer - the advice I'm giving is my own personal experience and you should seek professional guidance before embarking on any activity that can greatly impact your health and nutrition. :D

BRUTE
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by BRUTE »

why not raw-food, animal based diet? only raw meat, eggs, and dairy. yum.

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C40
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by C40 »

Dairy? Might as well get it straight from the teat.

Bring your goat or cow around with you. Next level dietary hipster stuff.

TopHatFox
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by TopHatFox »

A friend of mine chugs raw eggs as a morning power shake, so there's that. lol

Today I prepared a tofu, arugula, cherry tomato, mushroom salad with a soy sauce, olive oil, garlic, and lemon marinade. Tossed it in a bowl, shaked it around, refrigerated for 30 min, and ate with some red wine. Yum :3

I doubt raw would cause me much trouble. I've been eating a plant-based, whole-food diet for years now. I don't plan on doing 100% raw, more like 50/50.

Beans and grains are too calorie and protein dense to pass up. They're also cheap as hell. Maybe I can get better at sprouting and eating more grains/legumes in that way. I was reading that nuts, grains, and legumes are best digested if soaked. Will need to do more research. I have no idea how to eat tubers with no heat. Nor how to make bread in that way. It is a fun puzzle! I'll be all set if the power every goes out haha (I may have to invest in a manual blender).

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conwy
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by conwy »

Agree with the "whole-food" and "plant-based" parts, but I don't get the "raw" thing. Virtually no plant food I know of loses significant amount of nutrients when cooked, assuming it's cooked properly (i.e. steaming, quick sauteing or even grilling). I'd much rather eat anything cooked rather than raw; maybe carrots and nuts are an exception.

At the moment my diet looks like:

30% vegetables
30% fish/seafood
20% grains/beans/nuts/seeds
10% fruit
10% sweets/dairy

I probably should reduce the fish/seafood and grains and increase the veggies, especially green leafy vegetables, which contain so much good fibre!

It was a bit of a digestive shift when I increased plant intake, but my system got used to it after a while and now I actually feel healthier eating veggies and less healthy when I'm forced to eat unhealthy processed foods (which is only ever in occasional social contexts).

The main principle I'm striving to follow in my diet is *whole foods*. Trying to eat foods that have been minimally processed. In the case of fish, trying to eat kinds of fish that are lower on the food-chain (sardines, mackerel, salmon, etc) so as to absorb more of the healthy plant-derived nutrients.

Michael_00005
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by Michael_00005 »

Scott 2 wrote:
Sat Oct 14, 2017 8:22 pm
Cooking changes the nutritional profile of foods. Some nutrients are more bio-available after cooking. Just because something is raw, that doesn't mean it is superior. A kidney bean that has not been boiled, is quite poisonous, for instance.


Well said Scott; potatoes, legumes (beans), rice, etc., are meant to be cooked... with these foods nutrient absorption is improved after cooking them. Where if you cook dark leafy greens or fruit you destroy nutrients. If you eat a raw black bean, it probably comes out, just like it goes in.

Personally I think some have a tendency to over do a good thing, and go to extremes when it's really not needed. Where 25-50% raw, gives a person all the antioxidants and phytonutrients to easily maintain perfect health. With that said, I do have a friend who has been following this diet for several years and it works for him. A good question to ask is why 100%, what do you hope to achieve(?), maybe start off by doing a 10 -30 day trial.

People in the know - the inner (natural) health circles will convert to a raw diet as the major ingredient to kill-off (cure) cancer. These are the self-educated types who understand chemo and radiation is nothing but a money making scam at the expense of the ignorant. Chris has lots of interviews on this practice, it's something everyone into natural health should be aware of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tRhkYQ9q-g
That and they look to detox the body. Going raw will start the detox process all by itself, but there are other methods that help speed up the process.

Read "The change" by Milan Ross, and watch "Super Juice Me!", Amazon prime or Netflix maybe?? A detox will often make a person sick in the beginning (if they currently follow the SAD), so person should understand that it's a normal, temporary cleansing process. In the book "Finding Ultra" by Rich Roll, I believe he did something like raw for a week and it altered his life in a major way for life... he went plant based after that.

Good luck, and keep us updated!

BRUTE
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by BRUTE »

detox :lol:

TopHatFox
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by TopHatFox »

Yeah, I don't know. Anything with the word detox gets me running the other way. Plant-based and whole foods with lots of water and sleep seems to be working OK.

Kriegsspiel
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by Kriegsspiel »

BRUTE wrote:
Fri Jan 05, 2018 10:48 pm
detox :lol:
Hey, don't knock it. The raw foods diet cured Steve Jobs' pancreas. He was actually poisoned by the Illuminati because he had discovered Elvis' hiding place.

BRUTE
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by BRUTE »

now that's just science.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States", James C. Scott suggests that the Anthropocene may have actually started with early human/hominid use of fire to clear climax forest and promote the growth of fruiting shrubs and grazing herbivore populations, thereby greatly reducing radius of average forage/browse for our species. The combination of using fire to promote edible growth and to cook many food species that would have been previously poisonous or indigestible, resulted in our brain being 3X larger and our guts being twice as short as those of closest related primates. Guts and brains are the most energy intensive organs. This means that humans are invasive pyrophytes; fire adapted species. IOW, we are structurally irreversibly dependent on fire for our survival. Unless a cheat such as using "fire in a wire" electricity to run a blender to serve as bionic-gut-extender is implemented, a human will likely eventually starve eating only whole raw plant-based food.


Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was a broad-spectrum omnivore, pounding, grinding, mashing, fermenting, and pickling raw meat and plants, but with fire, the range of foods she could digest expanded exponentially. As testimony to that range, an archaeological site in the Rift Valley dated twenty-three thousand years ago gives evidence of a diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grassland, and arid) encompassing at least 20 large and and small animals, 16 families of birds, and 140 kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds and pulses

Peanut
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by Peanut »

The Ayurvedic ( ancient Indian? ) diet is an interesting breakdown of what you should be eating according to body type. I looked at it once and found it fascinating bc it said I shouldn't eat any vegetables raw, and I hate raw vegetables so it was great confirmation. Was always so disappointed to see those raw veg party plates from the supermarket at events! The theory intuited my love of tomatoes and acidic foods also. Anyway so maybe there's something to it. The other two body types are better suited to raw perhaps.

slowtraveler
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by slowtraveler »

@7w, I love reading stuff like that.

Invasive pyrophyte? Learn something new everyday. Didn't realize the gut was particularly energy intensive either. I thought the liver was the other most energy intensive organ after the brain.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Raw, whole-food, plant-based diet?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

More chaos as another species of invasive pyrophyte exploits niche likely created by global climate change:

https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-inte ... wk-raptors

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