Raw appeal: More people finding benefits in a largely plant-based diet

Stick your knife and fork in the dirt: It’s time to talk pure naked food. That’s naked as in natural — not preserved, processed, pasteurized, adulterated or irradiated. Not baked, boiled, braised, barbecued or browned in any way.

While vegetarians have gone green for generations, an increasing crop of health-conscious Americans is now going raw.

The raw food movement is not new, but it has grown significantly in the last decade. When most of today’s chefs were kids, you couldn’t find a raw food cookbook. Today some natural food stores and bookstores can have a dozen on display.

Louise Meyers, owner of Pryde’s Old Westport, a kitchen and home appliance store in Kansas City, Mo., is seeing so much interest in raw food, she has stocked up on blenders, food processors, dehydrators and other devices used in raw food preparation.

Going halfway

While there are numerous variations on the raw food diet — most don’t include meat, cheese or eggs, but some do — the bulk of raw foodists follow a largely plant-based diet that features vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, sprouts and nothing heated above 118 degrees.

While not all raw foodists (or “conscious eaters,” as some prefer) are 100 percent raw, they all share a common belief: the more raw, the better.

“When you cook, it (changes) your proteins and causes you to over-consume,” said Heidi Van Pelt, a vegan chef and former personal chef for actor Woody Harrelson. “You need to eat more because you’ve cooked out the vitamins and nutrients your body requires.”

Anthropologists Richard Wrangham and Nancy Lou Conklin-Brittain of Harvard University, however, say humans were meant to consume cooked foods. Heating foods, they say, renders them more digestible, allowing better absorption. In fact, the practice of cooking foods — humans have done it for more than 250,000 years — has produced biological adaptations including smaller teeth, longer small intestines and smaller colons.

Translation: we’re not built to eat an all-raw diet.

Furthermore, Susan Bowerman, director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, sounded this warning for extreme raw foodists in the Los Angeles Times.

“A raw vegan food plan … is likely to be deficient in vitamin B-12. A compound found naturally only in animal foods, vitamin B-12 protects nerve fibers and genetic material. In a recent study of 201 raw-foodists in the Netherlands, published in the Journal of Nutrition, 38 percent were vitamin B-12 deficient, and more than half had elevated blood levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that requires vitamin B-12 for processing and that, when elevated, increases heart disease risk.”

Maureen Veto-Slater, who organized Kansas City’s raw-food Bliss Fest, said lots of people are vitamin-deficient.

“To be fair, if they tested people on a standard American diet they’d find a lot of processed foods, which are devoid of many nutrients, including B-12 and many more,” she said. “That controversy has been going on for years with B-12. So take a supplement and get over it. It’s not a big deal.”

Building a movement

As far as humans not being made for an all-raw-food diet?

Nobody said you have to go all raw, she said. Just take it slow, listen to your body and use common sense.

“If you just eliminate the processed foods you’ve come a long way toward health,” she said.

It’s not clear that raw is always best, notes Andrea Giancoli, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. In some cases, she said, cooking foods makes important nutrients more bio-available for the body. This is true with the beta carotene in carrots and spinach and the lycopene in tomatoes.

Say what you want, raw foodists counter, you can’t argue with the way they feel.

Like many living the raw-food lifestyle, Veto-Slater says eating raw helped her regain her health after a serious illness. She still remembers the desperation she felt a few years ago.

Facing the stress of raising four children as a single mom and working 12-hour days as an advertising and promotions director, she began to fall apart. She couldn’t sleep, was anxious and depressed and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Doctors gave her a pill for every ill, 15 prescriptions in all. She just kept getting worse.

Finally, bed-ridden and more than 200 pounds, she landed in the hospital. She was convinced the drugs that were supposed to help her were making her worse.

That’s when she found raw foods. She threw away her pills and began to eat a healthy diet of fresh, real food — greens, cucumbers, carrots, nuts, seeds, fruit and soups. Her weight melted off, her energy returned and the depression and anxiety vanished. Ecstatic, she started a raw group at meetup.com and began to hold a monthly potluck.

“I thought if I could just meet five other (raw food) people,” she said.

Today her group has 637 members. And she’s not surprised.

“Heart disease is rising. Obesity is rising. Diabetes is rising,” she said. “It’s like something is wrong here. What is it? Look at your plate. Unless you’re shopping in the produce section or around the edges, everything else is not real food. It’s chemical. It’s from a lab. Your body doesn’t recognize it.”

But isn’t eating just raw food a tad extreme?

“It’s not a religion,” she said. “You don’t have to eat 100 percent raw food. But even if you eat 50 percent of whole plant foods, then you can build your immune system up and handle that other stuff. I’m 52 years old and I feel healthier.”

By James A. Fussell

Kansas City Star