What people ask me...

The most asked question when I tell people I am eating raw is, 'If you don't eat dairy, grains, meat, or processed foods, what DO you eat??'  The answer is that right now I eat:

• a wide variety of raw fruit and vegetables, as much as possible of which is organic, some of which I blend into smoothies and add high nutrient foods like kelp and barley grass
• a small amount (less than 10%) of other foods like soaked or boiled chic peas, wild rice, cooked vegetables like potatoes, organic brown rice wafers, free range eggs
• an even smaller amount of lightly cooked fish (ie once a week at most)
• a multivitamin/mineral supplement daily

This is usually very closely followed by a concerned 'but where do you get your protein?'  I could attempt to answer in my own words, but I'm really not the expert, so I've copied the following from www.rawfoods.com:

"Where do raw and living foodist get their protein?
The WHO (World Health Organization) says humans need about 5% of their daily calories to come from protein to be healthy. The USDA puts this figure at 6.5%. On average, fruits have about 5% of their calories from protein. Vegetables have from 20-50% of their calories from protein. Sprouted seeds, beans, and grains contain from 10-25% of their calories from protein. So if you are eating any variety of living plant foods, you are getting more than adequate protein.

Numerous scientific studies have shown the daily need for protein to be about 25-35 grams per day. So if you ate 2,000 calories per day, and ate raw plant foods that had an average of 10% of their calories from protein, you would get 200 calories worth of protein, or 50 grams. This is more than adequate to support optimal well-being. Other studies have shown that heat treating a protein (such as with cooking) makes about half of it unusable to the human body. So raw plant food protein is even a better source than cooked plant foods or animal foods.

There is still a huge, foolish, misguided idea that plant protein is not "complete". This is based on studies done on rats in the 1940's. This false conclusion was drawn before we discovered the bodies protein recycling mechanism and its ability to "complete" any amino acid mix from our bodies amino acid pool, no matter what the amino acid composition of a meal consumed. This false idea is still perpetuated by the meat and dairy industries, in an attempt to influence people to continue consuming their truly health destroying products".


I'm no scientist, nor a researcher, so all can base my opinion on is my own personal experience.  That experience is, that in the last 4 weeks of eating raw, as described above, I have never felt better in my life.  I have lost approx 6kg (probably more, but I don't have scales), I have more energy than I ever have even when I was much slimmer, I spring out of bed in the morning, my mind clarity is amazing, I no longer take anti-depressants, I need less sleep, my appetite is a fraction of what it used to be, and my passion for life is at an all time high.