Most people live on an omnivorous diet, that is, anything that is possible to chew up and swallow and live long enough to tell about, they will eat.
Raw foodists maintain that only uncooked foods are fit to be eaten, that cooked food is the cause of virtually all disease and is always harmful to some extent. A cooked-food eater will, if he or she adopts a raw food diet, come to feel lighter, more energetic, and just happier about being alive.
The greatest value of the raw food diet is its ability to transform you into a new and better person, with new goals and desires, with better health and more energy. You become more of your essence, your true and natural self.
"This delightful book is packed full of useful information for the living food advocate, and the easy natural manner in which it is written makes it most worthwhile reading." J. Vanderborg
Publisher's Preface
Introduction by Terri Su, M.D.
1. Introduction to Raw Foodism
2. History of Raw Foodism
3. Some Notable Raw Foodists and Their Teachings
4. Ice Cold, Hard, Rational and Objective Scientific Evidence of the Harms of Cooking
5. Unscientific, Subjective and Anecdotal Evidence for Raw Food Diet
6. My Own Story
7. How to Become a Raw Foodist
8. The Tibetan Rejuvenation Rites
9. Freeing Frozen Emotional Energy
Appendix A: "The Influence of Heat Labile Factors on Nutrition in Oral Development and Health" by F.M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D. and D.G. Simonsen, Ph.D.
Appendix B: "Cosmic Crusade" by Michael Tobin
Bibliography
Excerpt
The greatest value of the raw food diet is its transformative value. To a great extent, when you take up the raw food diet, you become a new and different and better person. You don't just stay the old person, only a little healthier. You become, to a great extent, a new being with new interests, a new philosophy and outlook on life, new goals and desires. You become more of your essence, your true and natural self. You become a person who is more a part of the one great life of Nature and less of the confused human world. You become less "of the world" and more "of the Earth."
Such transformations of course are impossible to imagine before you have experienced them. So the raw food diet doesn't so much "improve you" as "replace you" with somebody better! One of the most common statements of people who take up raw food diet in middle age or later, is that they now feel younger than they did even as teenagers. And yet at the same time they feel possessors of an ancient and ageless and eternal wisdom. The spirit is old and wise, and fresh and young at the same time.
Raw foodists get new insight into how much better (than we commonly imagine) life can and should be, how Nature intended it to be. The common little miseries of life, such as frequent colds and flu, indigestions, chapping of the hands and lips in cold weather, bad breath, sluggishness and depression, disappear, and become seen as not natural and normal parts of life at all, but indications of an unbalanced and unhealthy, chronically poisoned condition.
Unfortunately most of us who take up the raw food diet in our adult years have already been badly damaged by our preceding years and generations of unnatural living. Most of us already have decayed teeth and other deformities. But we do the best we can, and hope that by writing books and spreading this knowledge we can influence a widespread return to more natural living so that future generations do not have to suffer as we have. And of course there is the matter of reincarnation: we want to propagate knowledge that can help make this world a better place to be reborn into! That is one reason why I am trying to spread the knowledge and practice of a raw food diet. If reincarnation is true and I am to be reborn into this world, I want this knowledge widely available so I can rediscover it again!...
You can make a comparison between a meal of raw vegetables, and a meal of the same types of vegetables cooked. The raw vegetables leave you feeling light, fresh and alert, whereas the same vegetables cooked will make you feel lethargic and sluggish. It is common experience, how one feels lazy, dull and sluggish for hours after a big meal, such as Thanksgiving dinner. But meals of raw food don't produce such lethargy and dullness. Vegetarians don't believe in killing for food, but too often they kill their food by cooking it!
Raw food diet is a sort of rational and healthy austerity. It is the sort of discipline that makes you more free. For example, a skilled draftsman and painter is free to make pictures that look like anything he or she desires to create. The unskilled person is free only to fool around and make childish-looking pictures. A raw food diet is a healthy discipline that frees you to be more creative, work harder and think more clearly. It also makes you more free to enjoy the beauties and wonders of the natural world.
Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1990