If you’d like to eat a raw food diet, you should be eating a minimum of 75% raw foods. These living foods, like fruits, sprouts and vegetables, are considered to have much higher levels of the essential vitamins and enzymes when compared to cooked foods. Why? It’s believed that the enzymes in food is destroyed by cooking at temperatures above 116F.
There are various ways that food can be prepared on a raw food diet including: juicing fruits and vegetables; sprouting beans, seeds and grains; and soaking dried fruits or nuts. While food is not cooked, it is sometimes put in a dehydrator. Dehydrators can be used to heat or dry foods, but the temperature does not reach more than 116F.
Is it necessary to follow the raw food regimen all the time? No, you don’t have to eat 100% raw foods to start seeing benefits, but it’s certainly worth the effort to get as much raw, living food in your meals as possible. Snacking at work is a great place to start – instead of heading for chips or a candy bar, try keeping a bag of raisins and some carrot sticks at your desk. Packaged, pre-sliced fruits and vegetables have become a much more common find in grocery stores, so take advantage of that convenience.
Because it’s so easy to pick up something from the snack machine at work, people have been resistant to making the change to healthier eating. True, it does take more effort and time to slice up fruits and vegetables to take to work. But with more supermarkets seeing the raw fruit trend and taking it seriously, there’s no reason not to stock up on the items they provide – packaged carrot or celery sticks, sliced apples, and dried fruits are all available at most grocery stores now.
Of course these aren’t necessarily organic foods, and organic is the better way to go. But we think anything raw is much better than cooked, processed food. If you have the time, do buy organic and slice them yourself. But if you’re in a hurry, and nowhere near a natural food store, then don’t beat yourself up or sabotage your efforts because you can’t do this 100% all the time. That’s not realistic. Anything from the fruit and vegetable aisle is going to be better for you than a potato chip, or worse yet, a french fry!
Learn more about raw food diet menus. Stop by Kelly Cannon’s site where you can find out all about raw food diet foods and how you can make a change in your health now.
