Raw, Organic Basics

I've been posting about raw food and how I like it and how i lost weight and blah blah blah blah yummy recipe blah. But have i really even talked about what the heck it does for you? Its uncooked natural food...yeah...we get it...its super nutritious and whatever...so...one slice of pizza and a salad and i'm balanced right?

Forget that! Raw organic food is one of the best things you can do for your body period, end of story, the end. You may not care now, but about 10-30 years down the road you are going to be feeling like complete crap while i'm sitting here with a salad and looking like i'm half my age.

Alright. Enough exaggeration. Lets get on with this.....

A bit on enzymes

In its pure, raw form, unprocessed form, your food is completely covered both inside and out with tiny little thingies called enzymes. To keep it simple without going all sciencey, enzymes are basically tiny proteins that cause each and every chemical reaction in your body. These reactions are needed to do everything from telling your stomach to break down food, telling your thyroid glands to kick out hormones for your metabolism, telling your brain to send out serotonin to calm down stress, to even the millions upon millions you use to think.

With that said, cooking or processing food destroys a very large dose of the enzymes that were naturally there to begin with. So how is your body going to process that deficient food? It has to use some of the enzymes already in your body. So not only do you gain a much smaller amount of the nutrients that was in food originally, but you also loose some of the enzymes your body already has in it! Your body can be healthy on an all raw food diet, but not on an all cooked food diet.

Why Organic?

A lot of you guys thing the word "organic" is some hippie word for food that makes me healthy and spiritual and whatever, but actually it just means I'm not eating weird chemical crap on my food. Commercial foods are often grown in mineral-deficient soil where they barely grow.

In order to make them look somewhat good enough to eat to all of you guys in the grocery store, they cover them in chemical-steroid stuff that makes them grow bigger and look better. But this covers the food in those poisons both inside and out, which ends up both making our food deficient and our soil deficient in the minerals both we and our bodies need. Now you may not care about the planet now, but in a few years your

going to care when the soil no longer grows anything and all life begins to die.

All living things (including food) contains electrical currents in it that tell it where to go. The nerves in your body sending electric pulses to your brain are pretty much the same thing. And the more electricity in it, the better the message is received. Kirlian photographs are able to capture these electric currents in a picture so here are a few to show a bit of what i'm saying.

The last picture is my favorite. That one image is a tiny drop of raw organic coconut oil. Imagine the benefits of that one drop with such radiance in its glow.

More than just a Salad

This food doesn't have to be boring at all. Though i do eat a salad just about every day, only green vegetables gets boring after a while. Just because you eat only raw food, doesn't mean it has to be horrible. I will admit that at first, you may not like it and it may all taste bland.

After a while, the receptors in your taste-buds rebuild from the damage cooked food does to them. Once this happens, almost every piece of organic fruit taste fully alive. Even salad starts to taste good. Not to mention, i can make some amazing raw desserts in which i plan to post in the very near future.

Less Time Consuming & Less Expensive

I've heard a lot of rumors about how organic is so expensive and takes so much effort to make, but actually that's not quite true. For me, it was a bit more at first as I was trying to find out what I was doing. I bought every raw product could find and experimented with so many recipes that I was always in the kitchen and always spending money. But truth is, I enjoyed that part of it.

If you are creative and want to whip up something fancy for every meal, then by all means go for a bit of extra time in the kitchen. But if not, raw food is pretty easy.

Options?

Think you're limited? Guess again. Raw food can pretty much be any unprocessed fruit, vegetable, nut, seed, seaweed, root, or herb you can think of. It doesnt sound like much to the average frozen pizza-eater but once you take a step into a farmer's market or a health food store (like wholefoods), you'll see an endless array of foods of every shape, size, and color.

Dekalb Farmer's Market, GA

What can raw do for you?

Raw food pretty much heals your entire body from the inside out. Your blood flows cleaner, acne clears, skin becomes vibrant, hair and nails look amazing, and not to mention you have loads more energy. You get better sleep, scar tissue and muscle tissue repairs and heals faster (awesome for athletes), your body gets to its ideal weight, and not to mention that some foods can give you enough energy to get through the day with just a handful of something.

Raw food is food at its most basic. Its food that has not had human interference, been processed over and over, and then cooked to a point to where there's barely any life left in it. This is food at its simplest. Food in its raw form and food that can heal you and keep you healthy.

If you want to start raw, find what works for you. Don't think of it as taking things away and never having them again. Just incorporate new, fresher foods into your diet more and more at your own pace. Once you start to see the changes, you'll want to get off processed, cooked foods for good! Welcome to the RAWvolution....

Whats your favorite food?

(leave me a comment below)

-Andrew D. Morrison-