Top 5 Reasons to Eat a Raw Food Diet
Why Raw? The raw food diet, while often billed as a recent diet fad, has actually been around for centuries. Eating raw is truly as easy as it sounds. The diet consists of eating only uncooked food. Raw and living foods are simply uncooked fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and sprouted grains. There are also other foods that fall within this category such as seaweeds, raw carob powder, cold pressed olive oil and certain spices and seasonings. By combining the various food groups, you can create an endless variety of salads, appetizers, entrees and desserts that will satisfy even the biggest critic. Reasons to Eat Raw: 1) Raw food is more nutritious. Cooking food, whether you steam or fry it, removes much of the water from the food. Just look at the difference before and after a pound of spinach is cooked! This water is necessary for both hydration of the body and assimilation of many important nutrients. The more nutrients you absorb the more energy you will have for your daily activities and workouts. Also, the more nutrient absorption you have, the better you body will recover from daily physical and emotional stress. 2) Raw food is not altered. Cooking food completely changes the chemical makeup of the food. For example, heating proteins fuses the basic amino acid chains together in a process called denaturing. The human body cannot The Raw Trainer dissolve these unnatural Marisa DiCenso-Pelser bonds and so the food becomes useless to the body, not to mention toxic. Also, cooking carbohydrates results in carmelization of the sugars and heated fats quickly become rancid. 3) Raw food contains fewer calories per bite. A pound of bananas contains only 400 calories with 3% fat. Compare that to the same amount of broiled steak and you get a whopping 1251 calories, 65% of which is fat! And that’s with the excess fat trimmed off. 4) Raw food is much more satisfying. Because raw foods retain their water and fiber, they are higher in volume. On a healthy raw vegan diet, you can eat a very large amount of food and you will still lose weight! Okay, so raw foods are inarguably better for us. But what about the effects of eating this way? What benefits can you expect from a raw food diet? 5) Many benefits of raw food. Here are just some of the awesome results you can experience on a healthy raw vegan diet: improved digestion, permanent weight loss, improved muscle tone, improved athletic performance, increased energy, better sleep, shiny hair, smooth soft skin, healthy teeth and gums, mental clarity and so much more!
Marisa DiCenso-Pelser is a Raw Foods Chef, Personal Trainer and Figure Competitor. Along with her husband, Pieter, she is spreading the word of Raw Food & Fitness throughout Northeast Ohio and the world. They are graduates of Cleveland State University with a B.A. in Exercise Science as well as Certified Living on Live Foods Chef/Instructors. To learn more about their weekly raw food delivery, education classes and personal training, please visit: www.rawtrainer.com or email [email protected]
Sept/Oct 2013 Issue—Page 6