Wednesday September 4, 2019
What is a raw food diet?
When 70-100% of your diet consists of raw/uncooked, unprocessed organic foods, one is considered to be on a raw food diet. To be considered raw, food can’t reach above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, individuals consuming a raw food diet eat a lot of fresh, dehydrated, and fermented foods.
Benefits of Eating Raw Food
According to Dr. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, cooking alters food in three important ways:
- Cooking breaks down starch molecules into more digestible fragments.
- Cooking alters protein molecules, causing their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily.
- Cooking physically softens food making it easier to digest causing fewer calories to burn in the digestion process.
Did you know? Humans are the only creatures that cook food.
Water-Soluble Vitamins Are Lost in the Cooking Process
Some nutrients are easily destroyed or leach out of foods during the cooking process. Water-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin A, B, and C are particularly vulnerable to being lost during cooking.
Did you know? The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, stated much as 55% of the vitamin C can be lost during the cooking process.
A study where rats were fed soft pellets (simulating cooked food) weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than rats fed the same weight of standard pellets (simulating raw food). This is because the rats who were fed the softer pellets expended less energy during the digestion process. This means that in the stomach and small intestine, (where food and nutrients can be absorbed) cooking increases the share of food digested from 50% to 95%.
There's another issue consuming cooked food: Stress on the digestive system, particularly the pancreas. The pancreas has to produce additional enzymes in order to digest cooked food. The less digestion that takes place before food reaches the small intestine, the greater the stress placed on the endocrine system to over compensate. Eating a predominantly raw food diet can reduce stress on the body by providing the enzymes required for digestion that are already naturally in the raw food!
Raw Food and Enzymes
Did you know? Enzymes are the energetic stimuli that converts food nutrients into fuel that our bodies use.
Enzymes necessary for the foods you eat to be digested:
- Amylase, glucoamylase, and phytase (break down carbohydrates)
- Alpha galactosidase, hemicellulase, and invertase (break down sugars)
- Bromelain, papain, protease, and peptidase (break down proteins)
- Lipase (break down fats)
Enzymes are heat sensitive and deactivate easily when exposed to high temperatures over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. When a food's enzymes are altered with heat, more enzymes are required from the body for digestion.
Raw foods are rich with enzymes that are able to predigest in the stomach (autolytic digestion). Cooked foods are not able to do this. Without autolytic digestion, the body compensates by over producing stomach acid in the pancreas in an attempt to break down the cooked food.
Raw Food Noni
We at Hawaiian Organic Noni produce raw whole food Noni Fruit Leather. The low-heat drying system used to process our organic noni fruit is below 115 degrees Fahrenheit for over 60 hours. This slow low heat drying process uses hot water as an indirect heat source and preserves the maximum beneficial medicinal qualities of Noni without additives or preservatives. The raw food Noni Fruit Leather has a 2 year shelf-life and doesn’t require refrigeration. Compared to alternative processing methods, you can't beat raw food Noni Fruit Leather for potency!