Eating Raw Foods

Susan Schenck is passionate about eating raw foods. Although she holds a Master of Traditional Oriental Medicine (MTOM) degree from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, she now spends her time exclusively on writing and teaching others about the benefits of adding raw foods to your diet. Susan's book, The Live Food Factor, won the Independent Publisher Award in 2007 for Most Progressive Health Book. Considered the most comprehensive guide to the raw food diet available, the book explains through detailed information, scientific research, and dozens of personal testimonials why raw foods improve health, memory and wellness for many. LovetoKnow spoke with Susan Schenck about her book and about her thoughts on eating a raw food diet.

The Live Food Factor

Susan Schenck

Many raw food diet proponents define raw foods a bit differently, and have different things in mind when they speak of a raw food diet, so the first thing Susan did is share her thoughts on what it means to eat a raw food diet.

A raw food diet means that the enzymes are intact. Most foods heated above 118 lose 100% of their enzymes. When the enzymes are destroyed, the pancreas has to work really hard to crank out digestive enzymes. This causes fatigue. People going raw notice how much energy they have. I have heard even people in their sixties report having more energy than they did in their twenties. Eating three cooked meals a day requires as much energy as eight hours of physical labor.

Vitamins and minerals are destroyed by cooking; 84% of the vitamins are destroyed and the minerals and protein become less bioavailable in cooked food. If that is not enough, toxic byproducts are also formed. My book has an entire chapter devoted to telling what is destroyed with cooking the food, and another which tells about toxic byproducts formed with cooking. The higher the temperature and the longer the time, the more toxins formed! We are truly playing with fire when cooking food.

It is the diet we are all genetically meant to eat. What animals in the wild cook their food? Yet they live, on average, seven times their maturation rate. If we use this for a guide, human beings should live seven times their maturation rate, of 7 x 20. That's 140 years! We live an average of half of that time span and count ourselves as living to a ripe old age.

Next, Susan shared her tips for eating raw foods.

Here is an easy way to go raw:

• Start with breakfast. Have a smoothie. An example recipe is half cup of freshly squeezed orange juice, 1 cup water, half a bunch kale and/or 3 tablespoons of hemp seed protein powder, 1 tablespoon coconut oil. If you care for some melon, eat it 20 to 30 minutes before anything else as it doesn’t combine with other foods. Pack an apple for a snack. You are now eating about 25% raw.
• When you are ready, pack a salad of organic vegetables for lunch with some homemade dressing of raw apple cider vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, and a bit of raw agave or unheated honey. There are plenty of raw dressing recipes; this happens to be one of the easiest. Add some raw nuts or seeds that have been soaked overnight to get rid of the enzyme inhibitors. Be sure to rinse them. Also make grow your own sprouts to add to the salads. You are now eating about 60% raw.
• For a snack have the apple and some raw trail mix: organic goji berries with raw nuts and seeds, any sun dried fruit, and shredded coconut. Be creative. Now you are eating about 70% raw.
• When you are ready, switch dinner to raw. There are many free recipes on the internet. Simple ones include raw soups, kelp noodles to make pad thai, and Chinese stir “fry” with various raw sauces. Dinner is when most people are tempted to eat cooked food. If you are, have some lightly steamed vegetables sprinkled with walnuts ground up in your coffee grinder or Vitamix.

You won’t feel deprived. When you eat 80-100% of your calories in raw foods, you will feel so much more alive! When we eat a cooked food diet, we use about 85% of our energy digesting the food.

The raw food diet is gaining ground, but is it grounded? Is there really any scientific support to back it up?

When I first discovered the raw diet, my enthusiasm was met with cold skepticism from all the medical doctors in my life, including my father. This inspired me to collect all the scientific studies proving the superiority of a raw food diet. In my book The Live Food Factor, I compiled 66 such studies (most which were published in scientific journals). Here are my favorite studies:

• One of my favorite studies was by Dr. Abramowski, an Australian physician who divided over 100 of his patients into two groups. The first took standard hospital food and drug therapy. The second was taken off all meds and put on fresh fruit. After several weeks, the experiment was discontinued due to the head nurse. She objected to the inhumanity of the experiment, since it was clear that the raw fooders were getting better, while the group taking hospital foods and drugs got sicker!

• The most famous study was published in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery. Dr. Pottenger divided (over a 10-year period) 900 cats into cooked fooders and raw fooders. While those who ate raw foods remained healthy into old age, the cooked fooders came down with all the “diseases of civilization,” and got worse with each generation!

• The British Medical Journal published a study (1960) in which calves were given their mother’s milk, only pasteurized. Nine out of ten died before reaching maturity.

• Max Gerson, MD, spent 30 years reversing cancer (even advanced stages) with patients on raw foods. This research was summarized in Physiological Chemistry and Physics (1978).

• Dr. John Douglass found that alcohol and nicotine addiction lessened on a raw diet. Sunflower seeds were especially helpful in reducing cravings for addictions (Journal of the International Academy of Preventative Medicine, 1982). His patients on a raw diet also lost weight, healing from obesity and hypertension (Southern Medical Journal, 1985).

• Researchers at the University of Kuopio have published multiple studies proving raw power. They found improvement in fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, an increase in antioxidant status, as well as a decrease in pain and joint stiffness. They were able to find improvement on a raw diet in as little as a week.

The proof is out there. There are so many studies and so much research proving the toxicity of cooked food and the benefits of raw that can’t be put in a small article. For more information, read chapter 8 and appendix D of The Live Food Factor.

I eat vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, a few sprouted grains and lentils, and eggs. I find eggs to be the perfect animal food. You can eat raw eggs only if they come from a healthy cage-free, flax-fed chicken. I was a vegan for four years, but after all those years I got deficient in B-12, DHA and vitamin D. Eggs have everything and no one dies when you eat an unfertilized egg. According to research by Dr. Sam Bass, not everyone can be a vegan. And many vegans take years for deficiencies to show up. Even gorillas are not vegans; they eat insects!

Take time to experiment with gourmet raw recipes, even if just guacamole or simple things, especially the first 6 months while you transition. If you eat tasty food, you will realize this is not a diet of deprivation. Read, read, read about raw to keep inspired! People who read are more likely to succeed. Go to raw potlucks or start your own. Get support with online chat groups.

For some people, that “one bite” can send them sliding into cooked food addiction. For others, being 95% raw allows them the occasional bite. That has been my path for years, but I can do that because I have internalized it so much having read hundreds of books on the topic and written one myself. Victoria Boutenko found that those that stick with it are the ones that do not allow that one bite. I would add that this is especially in the first year or so when you are getting grounded in the diet.

For parties, I always eat beforehand and my rule is BYOF (bring your own food). In other words, I bring some raw trail mix or flax crackers just in case I get hungry. If it’s a potluck I also bring a great raw dish that everyone will love and I get tons of requests for the recipe.

Everyone wants to be beautiful, healthy, and live a long time. People who eat a raw food diet look younger than their years, enjoy great health, and live to be strong and fit into what we now consider very old age. That's three great reasons for including raw foods in your diet!

To purchase The Live Food Factor, visit Susan Schenck's website. She also offers a free newsletter about raw foods, and the first chapter of The Live Food Factor is available free for preview.

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