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raw questions

I am currently on the MC and I plan to dive into raw eating after I am done. Excuse me if I sound ignorant but I am very new to the raw life. I was wondering what’s wrong with cooking food that can’t be eaten raw such as white potatos and rice…? I just want to understand a raw foodist mentality. Didn’t God create these foods for us to eat? My husband also thinks that fish was created for human consumption because the bible makes reference to eating fish. Can someone please explain the reason for avoiding cooking some foods? Also, why aren’t there any recipes for dehydrated white potatos? I woild think they would make a nice thin crisp chip. Are they still toxic if dehydrated? I am reading The complete book of raw food and hopefully that will enlighten me on the hundreds of questions I have. Thanks

Comments

  • Actually I have always liked raw potatos and haven’t noticed any bad effects from them. Not to be offensive, but does your husband believe everything the bible says?

  • Cooked foods have their goodness destroyed by heat. Some foods can’t be eaten raw for toxin reasons. The toxin in potatoes is only destroyed at high temperature so I dont think dehydrating would work. Keep asking questions, it’s a good thing! Good luck.

  • Cooking not only destroys the nutrients, but also our body reacts to cooked food like poison.
    Here is an article that may help:
    http://www.rawguru.com/rawvscook.html

  • yeh cooked food is poison alright , may you let your husband read this verse GENESIS 1:29, also the bible records that methuselah lived upto 969 years old , he was araw foodistand there is no record of him ever getting sick,the bible also teches us to take care of our bodies, God did create the food for us to eat but not to destroy ourselves with but to nourish our bodies , and if we know that we are killing ourselves softly by eating cooked food i dont think thats a good thing,its best to eat them as God gave them, raw , all the best on your journey , ,

  • jeshuabrownjeshuabrown Raw Newbie

    The bible says in Genesis God said I give you every vegetation to eat, all trees but one…etc. So we can get everything our body needs from non meat sources. It was only after the flood God allowed humans to eat meat. Hope this helps!

  • thanks ,jeshuabrown i never thot of it that way….

  • germin8germin8 Raw Master

    I agree with jeshuabrown.

    It wasn’t until after the flood that God allowed man to eat meat… but only clean meats. Man lived several hundred years before the flood… (except Enoch who was translated, but even he lived 300+ years). Then, some few generations after the flood, people lived 120 years… then by about David’s time people lived ~70 years.

  • When I first discovered the Raw diet I immediately dived into it and failed miserably. Because A: My diet was already pretty unhealthy being SAD. B: I was uneducated on rawism. So I went back to the SAD diet for several months. I am slowly going back to raw now. More prepared, and more educated. Also my diet being SAD is much healthier thanks to rawism. I would like to go completely raw but that probably will not happen for a while.

  • at least you are more raw than before and thats good!

  • Thanks guys for giving me clarity on some of these issues. So do you guys think that some raw foods are not meant for human consumption? Foods such as rice and peanuts? I am trying to understand if they can’t be eaten raw, what is their purpose if they shouldn’t be cooked?

    Germin8-Your biblical explanation was beautiful, THANKS.

  • Can someone give me insight on this?

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    there is a great book on food called “in defense of food.” in it the author writes of how cunning man was to discover that certain inedible foods could be make “edible” by cooking. this is a great book btw, but i would argue that rice and potatoes are LAST RESORT “foods.” knowing how to manipulate foods by cooking, is great if that’s all you have and are hungry. cooking rice and potatoes does make them easier to break-down. but they are not NECESSARY and they are not nutritious. good quality rices (brown, wild) are useful for transitioning not because they give you necessary nutrients but because they slow the detox process down and are easily eliminated through the colon.

    i think fishing, again, great LAST RESORT if you’re hungry and in the wild. but fish are the sponges of the ocean (esp. mollusks) and our ocean’s are INCREDIBLY dirty. our understanding of nutrition is very fractionalized. we think of foods in a “nutritionist” sort of way, whereby every food carries a list of nutrients and vitamins that react with our body in such and such a way. but we don’t really KNOW what it is about an orange or a leaf that makes it good or bad for us (i mean not holistically…). that is why there is so much conflicting theory around food. if we observed and listened closely to how our bodies respond to certain foods, rather than to that article that says i need more omega-3s, than we would have a much healthier society.

    oh i could go on, but you really should check out that book. it has fabulous insights and makes you feel really good about eating!

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    p.s. germin8- really enjoyed reading that

  • Sgmom2 you know what happens if you boil veggies (ie almost all the nurtients get boiled out into the water which is dumped and the now-not-so-nutritious-veggies are eaten) well the reason why there are some foods that cannot be eaten raw is because the possess a level of natural toxins (to protect from animals eating the whole plant) OR they have a very high level of something (maybe nitrates) that would prove to be harmful to humans if eaten (THINK WILD MUSHROOMS) which is why cooking them (some of them at least) makes them safe to eat.. because the toxin or whatever is boiled out and subsequently dumped down the drain. Sometimes the purpose of these foods is to provide food to certian animals, not humans, or you are trying to eat the wrong part of the plant… like rubarb, you can’t eat the leaves but the stem is just fine.. this is true with alot of plants.. some parts are toxic/poisonious while another part of the same plant is highly nutritious and safe to eat. Such is the way of raw fooding.

    This is just MHO but I think there are some plants we only think are meant to be foods while infact they aren’t… which is why they are toxic to us and thus we can’t eat them raw.

    If you get to know which plants/veggies/fruits/herbs/nuts/seeds are good for you and have lots of nutrition then you (and perhaps your husband) will really see that you can be HEALTHIER eating only raw than you can be if you have fish or other cooked foods.

    Also a thought.. we cook foods to kill bad germs and because we’ve adapted to thinking that raw meats and most veggies are yucky.. but we forget to think about what else we’re killing when the food gets hot: good germs and enzymes. If you are what you eat do you want to be a walking graveyard?

  • I was reading a Scientific American article that said prehistoric humans (homo erectus, etc.) developed bigger brains and stronger bodies by eating cooked food. The last sentence of the article said:
    “Now let’s be glad that be can enjoy a nice piece of juicy roasted steak.”

    That enraged me so much. I wish I could go up to the guy who wrote that and say (get real dude)
    He has no proof that that is true. People are being destroyed by cooked food. So sad.

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    rawclaire- my brother came home and told me we developed bigger brains from from eating meat. on the discovery channel. wow. the meat industry is VERY influential in this research i think. just like all the “bone research” being done by the dairy industry.

    but there are degrees (no pun intended) of “cooked food.” i would argue that people eating cooked veggies are at least eating FOOD, whereas a snickers bar is something that only “closely resembles food”. it’s the things that are masquerading as food that do the most damage in my opinion. americans have sparked a food trend where these “food-facsimiles” are exported all over the world, to the detriment of everyone’s health. the japanese have been thriving on their diet for years, as have the french, the italians, etc. junk food, as well as factory farming practices, and the increased consumption of meat (no longer just for special occasions, but for EVERY meal!) are more to blame than the mere COOKING of food.

    that said, OR COURSE raw produce is superior to cooked. no question.

  • Now these are the answers i was looking for. Thanks SOOO much guys. I still have a lot of learning to do about this lifestyle, but really need to understand WHY I am making new choices. Thanks So much!!

  • What is the purpose of anything?! Many meat-eaters seem to think that the “purpose” of animals such as cows and pigs is simply to provide food for humans. I’ll bet the animals in question wouldn’t agree! And I don’t, either. Is it too much for bible-believers to think that some things simply are there just for the sake of their own “being”? It’s easy to take those biblical verses in such a way as to encourage abuse of these divine gifts. Which, it is NOT too much to say, is precisely what happened (then and now)!! Not that I disagree with the verses in any way, mind you – I’ve used them myself to illustrate the same points.

    Anyway, going with the idea that these things have another “useful” purpose other than to propagate themselves into the future, pulses’ main value to humans is as nitrogen-fixers in the soil. I wish i could remember more about it, but I once saw a very interesting program about soy: centuries ago, asian cultures USED soy, as is pictured in paintings and sculptures from the time, but they apparently did not eat it; it was used to replenish the earth between crop rotations. Natural fertilisers, in fact. The biggest family of nitrogen-fixing plants is legumes (peas, beans, pulses) and this with other factors (the “you-shouldn’t-eat-such-and-such-raw” factor, mainly, which seems to apply to lots of legumes in particular) leads me to feel a little wary of them all. I can’t find it now, but I’m sure I read somewhere that NOTHING eats soy as it appears in nature, not even birds. It simply isn’t fit for consumption, human or otherwise! Interesting…

    If you take this raw idea to its logical conclusion, probably nothing is really fit to be eaten that you couldn’t get for yourself if you were stuck alone, naked, and tool-less in the middle of nowhere (preferably somewhere tropical and bountiful near the equator!). Obviously you’d have other pressing problems, too, but broadly speaking food that’s suitable for a species is physically available to them (not necessarily EASILY obtainable, however!). By that I mean that it wouldn’t be beyond your lone body’s ability to come by it. That’s one reason why I can’t be bothered with “truly raw” cashews. In nature we simply couldn’t possibly eat them without poisoning ourselves, so logically speaking it’s not suitable food for us. Now I’m not saying they’re going to harm you (something about high levels of mycotoxins does keep cropping up here and there, however), but just that I like to think about where things come from and if I COULD eat it if I came across it in nature. It makes the concept far easier and simpler to accept as being correct – for me, anyway! But then I like to have things made as simple as possible…

  • This gets me to thinking who were the guinea pigs to test which foods are poisonous? I am guessing we learned by trial and error.

  • I don’t know. Animals seem to do mostly OK - nobody tells them what’s suitable and what isn’t. My guess (and that’s all it is) is that way back when we actually knew our bodies and listened to what they told us, we probably had quite an astute instinct for what we should and shouldn’t eat.

    Any ideas, people? Or do animals routinely die by accidentally poisoning themselves?! Maybe they do, I don’t know… I mean wild animals, of course.

  • Ah! And, have you read yet about the Boutenko family when they trekked all the way through North America? They did an awful lot of foraging – of plants completely unknown to them – and they tested things by getting the dad (who was biggest and strongest) to try small quantities of whatever it might be, wait a good while to see if any ill effects developed, try a bit more, and then dig in when they were satisfied they wouldn’t drop dead…

    So yes, trial and error – or just sensible caution!

  • Potatoes: The original heirloom potato was either red, yellow or blue (white did not exist). White was agrimanufactured (genetically altered) Yes there may be organic white potatoes but of course this is after the fact.
    Also the root of any vegetable is much less nutritional(same with corn,carrots, soy and so on) than what grows on top (the greens).
    For more info on that check out ‘Greens for Life’.
    Noah: Reread when Noah finally gets off the ark, God greets him asks him to cook up some of his clean animals and they eat, God just loves the smell (I never understand this, but God never actually EVER eats any animal). Then man/woman from that point on never lives beyond 120 yrs (and we seem to be deevolving ever since!)

  • germin8germin8 Raw Master

    ex-pat Katie, I bought some edible-weeds flash cards to learn how to identify them… and there’s is a ‘technique’ on how to try wild ‘foods’ to see if they are poisonous or not. It says something like, smell and inspect the plant and first rub on your gums and if that doens’t create a reaction, chew and spit it out…. and if that doesn’t create a reaction… have it a weak tea…. then if that doesn’t create a reaction, it should be okay… the flash cards say to wait 20 minutes between each. and recommends some other things too… so don’t try this! This is just part of the ‘rules of foraging’.

  • Hi germin8! Could you tell me where you bought the edible-weeds flash cards?

  • germin8germin8 Raw Master

    I posted about edible weeds here: http://goneraw.com/forums/2/topics/1378

    which is where Ambikalee mentioned the flash cards from http://www.learningherbs.com/

    That’s where I got mine… but do wish they had more cards. I had to buy the Wild Foods Pack (2 e-books) to get the free flash cards. I never looked at the e-books (at least not yet)... just wanted the cards! We still use them.

    They do have a board game for kids too…

  • germin8germin8 Raw Master

    Also, the cards display the characteristics of the plants… and what part is edible… and what part to grind and use as a flour.

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