Chewing Guide to Raw Food Success

How do some manage to stick with the raw lifestyle for the long-term? And why do others revert, even after initial considerable success? Just eating raw, I believe, is not quite enough to achieve optimal health. How you eat is equally important.

The Chewing Idea Comes to America

Horace Fletcher (1849—1919), known by the nickname—“the Great Masticator” taught and religiously practiced chewing food until it “became liquid and swallowed itself.” According to Fletcher, following this practice would not only increase “the amount of strength a person could have,” but also considerably “decrease the amount of food that he consumed.”

At age 58, Horace Fletcher participated in strength and endurance tests against Yale University athletes. He outperformed the young athletes in all exercises, which tremendously helped to promote “Fletcherism,” as the practice of thorough chewing came to be called. Fletcher also advocated eating only when truly hungry, when in a good mood, and only a moderate amount at each meal.

Consider Saliva and How it Works

Saliva supplies amylase, an enzyme needed for proper carbohydrate digestion, which also fights any pathogenic bacteria that arrived with the food. Moreover, saliva imparts to the eater’s system information about the food that’s being eaten. Lingual lipase is released along with saliva to start breaking down fat while you are chewing. Chewing allows your brain to prepare the right enzymes and digestive juices to match the arriving food.

Weight Loss and Weight Gain Solution

Chewing can affect the processes of weight loss and weight gain. Fletcher is credited with conducting an experiment that involved overweight army officers and underweight rank and file soldiers. Given the same food, both groups were instructed to thoroughly chew each bite before swallowing. At the end of the experiment, participants in both groups arrived at their optimal weight.

The more you chew, the less you eat. The more you chew, the more legitimate nutritional value you gain from your food. By paying attention to the eating process, and chewing thoroughly, you allow time for your hormones to signal satiation. Bathed in saliva and broken down into smaller parts by teeth, the bolus—chewed up bits of food—begins undergoing efficient digestion before even reaching the stomach, giving welcome help to your hard-working digestive system. Available energy can now be diverted to cleansing and repairing.

More Benefits of Chewing

Thorough chewing:

• improves blood circulation in the brain, resulting in a clearer mind
• promotes healthy gums and sinuses
• prevents cavities thanks to saliva’s anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties
• builds stronger bones, and
• gives you more energy.

Unbeatable Raw Food Success Formula

It’s my strong conviction that to experience the real miracle of raw foods, one more ingredient is needed. And you need to practice it faithfully…I call it the 30/10 chewing rule—at least 30 times for solid food, at least 10 swishes for liquids, which allows your saliva to start working.

Scientists are finding some evidence that, given good digestion and high quality food, the beneficial bacteria in the human gut can synthesize significant amounts of the vitamin B12.

Chewing just might be the final key to raw food success. There’s nothing simpler. Or harder. It will require a strong will and real effort to develop this practice. But as with everything else, once it becomes a habit, you will do it automatically.

The rewards of thorough chewing will pay off almost immediately in the form of better digestion, reduced food intake, improved health and stamina. The best part: Eating raw foods with total attention and extensive chewing is your formula for long-term success on the raw food diet.

How to Practice Chewing…

Find some time and a place where you won’t be disturbed. Public venues and rushed lunches won’t help. Choose any type of raw food you like. Bring your awareness to the present moment. Focus on the food before you. Bless it. Evoke your senses of smell and touch before you start putting the food into your mouth. Stay in touch with the feelings and sensations in your body you experience in the process. When you are ready, take a small bite, about a teaspoon, and place it in your mouth. Chew slowly. Notice the flavors that get released as you continue to chew until you feel no more flavor, the original texture has been lost, and the food has turned liquid, and then effortlessly send it down your throat.

What to eat? Raw foods are the best for your health and beauty.

How to eat? Apply the 30/10 chewing rule.

When is the best time to eat?  Eating only during the first part of the day will give you the most impressive anti-aging benefits. Read my book Quantum Eating and decide for yourself.

These days in the raw food community the theory has been touted that staying on the “whole food diet”—for example, 80% raw—will let them achieve the same results as a 100% raw food diet, though over a much longer period of time.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell:

1. Since detox is slower on a “whole food diet” than on 100% raw, you’ll be cleansing your body longer, therefore you’ll be getting younger over a longer period of time, say 10 years.

2. 100% raw eaters detox faster and deeper, they will become “ridiculously young,” perhaps in 3 years, but then they’ll still begin to age.

3. Therefore, the 80%, the whole foods regime would be equal in results to the raw food diet at some point, since the “whole food” people who are still getting younger will catch up to 100% raw individuals. (Remember those started to age again after just 3 years.)

But the premises and the conclusion in the scenario above are seriously flawed on many levels. Let us consider them more carefully.

No Full Detox

First, we know that raw foods purify and restore cells much more thoroughly than whole foods ever can. Whole-foodists never achieve the deep detox effects raw-foodists do.

If you stay 80% raw, the body will adjust to the new regime pretty quickly. You’ll get younger for sure, but within a year or two you’ll stop “getting younger,” the plateau will be reached soon. In my case it happened after three months. Another diet upgrade will be needed to detox the body more deeply. But if that doesn’t happen, the body will still be subject to aging – slower than if the person were eating the Standard American Diet – but still faster than if she or he were 100% raw.

The idea that the body will continue cleansing itself on 80% raw for many years to come is simply wishful thinking. If you’re only 80% raw, you’re still taking in 20% of the toxins you used to. So long as your body’s digestive and waste systems are still dealing with that load of impurities, you’ll simply never become fully detoxed.

80 Doesn’t Equal 100

The argument at its core is that partial restoration of health will result in the same effects as total restoration, but will take longer. But can this idea really withstand logical analysis? Taking raw foods as the basis point for our assessment, we’ll call its cell restoration 100% (“full raw results”). As a “whole foods” diet partially purifies the cells, its resultant peak would be proportional to the degree of cellular restoration. Let’s be generous and call that 80%.

Another major flaw in the whole foods argument is that the peak “youthening” point achieved in 10 years (80%) would be equal to the extent of repair (100%) that’s achieved in 3 years on raw foods. Sorry…80% just never equals 100%.

I believe the chart below is more representative of the anti-aging effects of both dietary plans.

Every person who honestly lived 100% raw for a period of time knows this feeling once expressed by David Wolfe: My experience has been that by eating 95% raw food, I received 95% of the amazing results. After comfortably eating 100% raw food for several years, it seemed that I was receiving 1,000% of the results.

Everyone goes through detox. I agree on 100% raw, the detox is more pronounced. But with the right attitude, it can be very satisfying, and you will be reaping all the “youthening” benefits in the process. And when most of the major detox is complete, aging will proceed at a much slower pace than by just going with the 80% whole foods plan.

Anytime we upgrade our diet, regardless of our starting point, we can’t but feel better, have more energy, and get farther along the path of delaying the aging process. Switching from a standard American diet to a whole foods diet will surely bring its rewards. Look: I’m not loyal to 100% raw foods for the sake of raw food. And you bet I’d like it if only 80% of the effort could take me all the way. But it hasn’t. And it can’t.

Am I against your trying the 80% whole foods diet? Certainly not. I just don’t want you to have the wrong idea—that you’ll get the same health and anti-aging benefits as with a fully raw lifestyle.

The Addiction Factor

But there is more. What worries me is the key negative aspect of the Whole Foods plan-cooked food is the most addictive thing there is! Many people cannot stick to the 80% raw plan. They may start, but then that percentage will start to dwindle and dwindle. It is a situation similar to an alcoholic who believes he can kick the habit by only having two beers a night. But the fact is, he is an addict, and that’s why he can’t stick to only two beers. And with cooked food, we are hardcore addicts. We have been raised since infancy, possibly since birth if you were fed infant formula, to consume mostly cooked foods. This is why I believe abstinence from cooked food is the way to go.

Regardless of what we eat, we’ll all be experiencing some degree of aging. But in my almost sixteen year experience, over the long haul, a 100% raw food diet coupled with fastidious skin care, is the best anti-aging formula there is. See my book Quantum Eating for advanced anti-aging practices that make 100% raw more enjoyable and easy to follow.

What is dry fasting?

It’s as simple as the wet-dry distinction. Wet fasting: Drink water, but take no food. Dry fasting: a total abstinence from both food and water for a defined time.

There is one more level of dry fasting called Absolute Dry Fasting. Some suggest to reach the deepest level and realize the full benefits of dry fasting, it’s better not to let any water come in contact with the body through the skin or mucous membranes. You heard that right: no showers, no swimming, no brushing teeth while dry fasting.

Animals commonly use dry fasting for healing. When wounded or very sick, they retreat for rest and refuse to take in food or water until they get better. Humans used to have the same instinct, until the advances of civilization replaced it with readily available food and medicine, and culture took over to dictate when and what we eat.

You may have acquired somewhere the common belief that humans can only survive three days or so without water. If so, you might be surprised to learn that therapeutic dry fasts as long as five, seven, nine, even eleven days are not unheard of. The Guinness Book of Records mentions 18 days as a record for a person surviving without any food or water. With the right intention and some comprehensive information about fasting as a mode of healing, you can go with relative comfort through the experience of a 24-36 hour dry fast and reap the benefits.

The Mechanisms behind dry fasting

The cessation of both external food and water creates a special kind of stress in the body, prompting it urgently to come up with both nutrients and water, initiating the process of making both internally. During a dry fast, the body survives on so-called endogenous or metabolic water, produced internally as a result of metabolizing fat tissue. Unlike any exogenous water, this metabolic water is of superb quality, produced by the hard work of our own cells. It literally erases any negative information imprint which the body had before the fast, allowing cells to experience a kind of a rebirth, as a result.

Under dry fasting conditions, even the skin changes its function, from being an organ of elimination to serving as an organ of absorption, taking in any available water from the air and supplying it to healthy cells. Besides water, the body during a dry fast absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen to manufacture its own amino acids. Since there is no water to flush out the endogenous toxins, these are eliminated by means of a unique mechanism, dormant during less rigorous modes of fasting: Each cell, in effect, becomes the furnace that burns up its own waste.

Results seen in dry fasting

Inflammation cannot exist without water. Microorganisms need water to survive. These facts taken together make dry fasting a highly effective tool to address acute health issues and degenerative conditions. Such a fast stimulates the immune system, activates the body’s anti-inflammatory mechanisms, purifies the blood and clears the blood vessels, as well as cleanses the GI tract and renews its mucosal lining.

Dry fasting also eliminates parasites and promotes regeneration of healthy tissues. And this isn’t even a complete list of benefits. Every cell of the body literally cleans house. Only the strongest and healthiest of cells survive in such extreme conditions, while cysts and benign tumors dissolve as a result of autolysis, a process by which the body sacrifices its sickest cells for its own survival.

Sounds like a perfect solution for weight loss….or is it?

While it is true that during dry fast the fat tissues become the fuel for metabolizing the water needed for bodily processes, dry fasting is not a magical, one-time solution for weight loss.  You must adjust your diet after the water or dry fast by reducing the amount of food you eat and increasing its quality. Permanently. If you don’t, you’ll likely quickly gain back all the weight you’ve lost, and then some.

Can you use dry fasting for weight loss?

Sure. A better way: short dry fasts such as once a week. A still better way—perhaps the best way: Fast every day for 14 to 16 hours. That is what I call Quantum Eating. Embracing Quantum Eating, you’ll consistently teach your body to eat less, while performing regular short dry fasts. These, working in tandem, will be the key to your permanent weight loss. A special bonus: You simultaneously will reap unprecedented anti-aging benefits via this lifestyle. Read more in Quantum Eating.

Can dry fasting help you gain weight?

If your issue is the less common one of being underweight, Quantum Eating is also here to help you gain weight and stabilize at a desirable “normal” weight. Learn more in my book Raw Food and Hot Yoga.

Dry fasting retreats. Prolonged dry fasting to address a persisting health issue is a serious undertaking. It is important to find a knowledgeable, experienced practitioner who will supervise your fast. While dry fasting retreats are still hard to find in the USA, such centers do exist abroad. Sergey Filonov of Altai, Russia, is an experienced and competent health professional and author, who runs a retreat called Sinegorye, specializing in dry fasting http://filonov.net. Anna Yakuba, also an author on the topic, offers a similar retreat in the Ukraine http://syhoegolodanie.com/.

Dry fasting holds the potential of changing us on a much deeper level—physically, mentally, emotionally—than any other type of fast. And it’s my favorite way to fast. It’s easier than a water or juice fast and the results are three times more pronounced. But to do not attempt it until you thoroughly research the topic and until you are already very comfortable with water fasting.

Read more on water fasting in Your Right to be Beautiful.

I have been vegetarian since 1995 and 100 percent raw since 1997. I have tried many practices in my health journey, enjoyed many successes along the way, tripped over a few failures, and achieved some remarkable results. But if you ask me what has been the single most beneficial constant throughout my health journey, there’d be exactly one answer: juicing.

Why Juice?

The practice of juicing is health promoting, will give you the best complexion you’ve ever seen in the mirror, and is the best single anti-aging practice going. Whether you want to lose weight, detox, correct certain nutritional deficiencies, to feel light and energy-charged in your physical workout, or to simply experience more focus and clarity in your mind, look no further than juicing vegetables.

I don’t buy juices. Certainly not the kind you’ll find in a can, bottle, jar, or cardboard container at the supermarket. I don’t care whether the label says pure fruit goodness…100% Florida grapefruit…natural…organic or anything else. I make it myself.

Read to Get Motivated to Juice

The benefits of freshly juiced vegetables and fruits are many… There’s a lot of information out there on juicing—on websites, in books and health magazines, Blogs, and online testimonies about “juice cures” from former sufferers of all sorts of ills. Do read as much as you can. Reading is important for self-motivation and as an intellectual base for your juicing practice. But ultimately, it will be your consistent personal acquaintance with the process of juice extraction and “eating” juice that will make you a convert to the power of fresh juicing to change your health for the better.

Some argue that juicing is not natural since it removes fiber. Consider…the human body is itself the very prototype of a juicer. We are the ultimate juicing machines. Just as chewing food causes the release of the plant’s cell content to be digested and assimilated while letting fiber pass through, in a similar manner the juicer extracts the precious liquid part of plants, separating it from the pulp. Freshly squeezed juices deliver easily absorbable and highly concentrated nutrients, and at the same time provide significant digestive relief. But what about fiber?—that precious stuff that cleanses us so well as it passes through our bodies. On the raw food diet, you will get plenty of it. Lack of fiber will never be an issue.

How to Make Juicing Even More Beneficial

Want to maximize your juicing’s effectiveness? Simple…Don’t gulp it down. Just because there’s hardly anything there for our teeth to sink into, don’t shoot your juice down the pipe right after you sip.

Crushing food is one function of your mouth, but there is another, equally important, and that is saturating each bite of food with saliva. Juice is a concentrated food, and, like any food, needs to meet with saliva in a very intimate way at the start of its digestive journey. Saliva contains the enzyme ptyalin (aka salivary amylase), which initiates the digestion of carbohydrates right in the mouth. Saturating each bite or sip with saliva is like imprinting the vital information that the body will be responding to for the rest of the digestive process.

Benefits of Chewing Your Juice

While you are chewing, your body is figuring out how many enzymes and what kind it will need to produce in order to digest this bite. It is also allowing the temperature of food to match its own, as well as absorbing the sugars from the carbohydrate digestion directly into the bloodstream before you even swallow. So it only makes sense to drink a fresh juice slowly, mindfully, holding each sip in the mouth for a short while before swallowing. Remember—it’s ultimately all about how much of the good stuff the body will be able to absorb and make its own. This practice will ensure the best assimilation of the juice you took effort and time to extract.

Targeted Juicing

Where the range of store-bought juices is limited, your range as a juicing enthusiast is wide open. You can target your juicing recipes to your particular health needs—an invaluable tool if you are trying to avoid using pharmaceuticals and supplements.

Juicing is a big piece of the anti-aging puzzle, with the potential to slow and even reverse the effects of aging by flooding your body with antioxidants, resetting your biological clock over and over again towards a younger feeling and looking you.

The alert, bright, positive feeling that only concentrated plant nutrition can invoke, as well as a glowing reflection in the mirror, will keep bringing you back to the juicer and a glass of the precious liquid gift given to us by plants.

Read to Start Juicing?

My article, Vegetable Juice, is a great place to start learning the basics of good juicing practice. For more information on juicing, as well as my personal experience of recovery check out my books Your Right to Be Beautiful and Quantum Eating, now in its 2^nd Edition.

Juicing is the way to go. In time—even a relatively short time—your own improved health and looks will prove it!

It’s widely believed that raw food doesn’t give enough energy. So how much energy do raw foods provide? Food energy is usually expressed in food calories. So, how many calories are in “unprocessed raw foods” such as bananas, carrots, soaked almonds, pistachios, and the like?

While attending a CR conference in 2011, I approached several presenting scientists with the questions: How is the caloric value of food measured? How much has that method changed in the last hundred years?  Interestingly, without exception, each of them directed me to the “Atwater Method” and its variations.

How was the energy value of food measured a century ago? Answer: By burning it, and measuring the heat given off. How has that changed since? Answer: Not much at all.

Beginning circa 1895, a Department of Agriculture scientist Wilbur O. Atwater devised both the conceptual foundation and the method for measuring calories. The bare idea of this notion was essentially:

ME = G – (E_f + E_u + E_s + E_g)

Gosh, I love formulas! The mathematician in me gets excited every time I see one. In plain English, this one means that the metabolizable energy of a food—the “available” energy, as Atwater called it—would be the gross (or total) energy it produces, adjusted for loss of energy in feces, urine, secretions, and gases.

Refinements to this method were made by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), but the method we use today remains roughly the same: Burn dried food…measure heat, subtract the combustion energy of whatever the body expels.

Scientists know the method is imperfect. They know, for example, that there are all kinds of discrepancies in measurement. Many acknowledge, too—the FAO itself among them—that the unit we use most customarily for measuring food energy (the calorie or, more properly, kilocalorie or kcal) is far less than ideal.

But more is happening here than mere imprecision. As some scientists grasp, there’s wrong thinking in this entire method. More significantly so when it comes to raw foods. Arguably, the modified Atwater techniques might not be far off, if we’re talking exclusively about all cooked food. The combustion, after all, does roughly mimic cooking, doesn’t it? Yet what about that raw carrot you’re munching on?

If you look at the charts of caloric values of different foods, you’ll notice there are no raw foods present. Even if there is an occasional “raw carrot” that got into it, it’s an absurdity. Caloric value of a raw plant simply cannot be measured with the existing method.

We keep using the same old system because it’s all we’ve got. It just won’t do any longer. There’s something fundamentally wrong in the way we’ve been measuring, even thinking about how we measure energy and nutritional value in food.

But I can still prove to you that raw foods are special and they are the only nutrition your body recognizes. The raw food diet/lifestyle will make you healthy, youthful, beautiful and considerably improve your brain power. And the best part of it: You don’t need to count calories! Read more in Quantum Eating.

Insulin-Like Growth Factor and Aging

Many bodybuilding websites advise you to combine two hormones—IGF-1 and HGH—in supplement formulas. It’s the kind of advice a fair number of bodybuilders seem to go for—anything to give them the extra edge.

But is that a good idea? Let’s look at what these hormones are. Throughout life, HGH (human growth hormone) comes from the pituitary gland, whence it’s whisked throughout the entire body. The amount of HGH released declines with age. IGF-1 (Insulin-Like Growth Factor) is produced in the liver and works with HGH in an important way. In effect, HGH stimulates the need for growth, stimulating anabolic activity throughout the body, and IGF-1 carries out the growth—especially muscle growth. Indeed, both HGH and IGF-1 prove essential to muscle growth—the bodybuilder’s goal.

But there’s a catch. Lots of scientific data indicate that high levels of HGH and IGF-1 will decidedly age you.

Lower levels of IGF-1 protect against aging and certain types of cancer. When IGF-1 levels are low, new cell production slows allowing the body to concentrate on repairing existing cells. When IGF-1 levels are high, this signals the body to enter a ‘go, go, go’ mode, causing cells to grow and age too fast to be repaired. The result: accelerated aging.

How to Lower IGF-1 Levels and Slow Down Aging

Eating less food in general certainly helps lower IGF-1 levels. A low-protein diet helps even more. And fasting is the quickest, most effective way of all to lower IGF-1 levels in order to assist the body in slowing the aging process. Research done at Baltimore’s National Institute on Aging evidences that fasting one or two days a week could protect the brain against some effects of Parkinson’s Disease and even Alzheimer’s.

One drawback to infrequent, extended fasting is that, once a person goes back to normal eating habits, IGF-1 levels shoot right back up to pre-fast levels. Recent research has discovered some effective ways to help IGF-1 levels remain low consistently. One of those ways is what’s called “intermittent fasting.”

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Sounds a bit daunting, that expression. Somewhat clinical and rather “hair shirt,” as well. But it needn’t be intimidating at all.

My readers all know that fasting is one of the oldest healing methods known to humankind. Historically, many fasts were days in duration, even much longer. In contrast to extended fasting—say, three days and up—intermittent fasting means simply short bouts of fasting (water only, usually) interspersed with periods of eating, practiced on a more or less regular schedule. Indeed, in intermittent fasting, the period of fasting isn’t the exception, but rather is part of a planned pattern of eating.

There is a wealth of evidence that such a pattern offers enormous health and anti-aging benefits, including an increased capacity to resist stress, disease, and aging. Ori Hofmekler, creator of The Warrior Diet was the first to offer a diet plan based on intermittent fasting. Skip breakfast and lunch and aim to eat one big meal per day, at night. For the most part, on his plan, you fast during the day. You’re allowed to eat whey protein, green vegetables, and berries during the day, but for maximum effect you fast until dinner whenever possible.

There are plenty of ways you can perform your intermittent fasting, several of which are being researched. One method is “alternate day fasting,” where research participants eat whatever they want on “feast day,” then semi-fast the next day on a certain very limited number of calories—example: a small, calorie-restricted breakfast, then no food until the next day.

Other versions of intermittent fasting programs include the one-meal-a-day regimen, fasting one or two days a week, and fasting once every other week. And of course, there’s me, with my Quantum Eating.

Intermittent Fasting—so many methods, variations. What’s the best way? The best IF program for you: The one you’ll start and stick with, faithfully, comfortably, every day. It will depend on your daily routine, your kind of work or profession, your current level of health, your exercise schedule, your family life, and so on. The truth is, they’re all good, because each is a step in the right direction. Virtually every variation on intermittent fasting has been shown to reduce IGF-1 levels significantly, even by as much as 50%. All deliver benefits.

To determine which variant of fasting is objectively better would require some extensive (and expensive) research testing one version against another. What’s more, even that unlikely research may just confirm what we know now—that all the major methods work, and each individual needs to find what works best for him or her.

Bottom line: You decide.

Quantum Eating…An Advanced Version of Intermittent Fasting

I’ve found Quantum Eating to be the optimal form of intermittent fasting for me. I have been practicing it since 2005, with amazing results.

Quantum Eating—unlike some other plans—recognizes how special raw foods lifestyles are. Once your body adjusts to the quantum eating program you feel no sense of deprivation. Quite the contrary, any overindulgence becomes torturous, compared to the light, energized feeling of eating in moderation.

With Quantum Eating, especially when you go raw, you never stress your digestive system on ‘feast days’ by eating too much or by eating the wrong foods, leaving you reaching for Alka-Seltzer. Since you do not eat at night in the Quantum Eating lifestyle, there’s no danger of overeating and going to bed on a full stomach.

When you eat only raw foods, and only in the first half of the day, leaving the second half of the day and overnight for fasting, you’ve developed an advanced form of intermittent fasting. When you become accustomed to a daily pattern of eating and non-eating cycles, such brief periods of hunger as you’ll experience really won’t feel like hunger at all, and in consequence you won’t “beast out” when it’s time to eat. Quantum Eating keeps you at an even keel every day. No swinging “binge-purge” pendulum!

Quantum Eating is simple and uncomplicated—physically, emotionally and spiritually. It has worked wonders for me, and if you approach it sensibly, it can do the same for you. If you have any doubts, read the book, now in it’s Second Edition. It will address all your questions.

One reader unsubscribed from my newsletter and provided the following comment:

Raw food is very bad for people with a ‘damp’ condition in Chinese medicine and I don’t think it should be promoted across the board as if it is good for everyone. My stomach likes warm food, I have learned, so I have been eating the worst food possible—that is, raw!—for my condition.  

Five Types?
Traditional Chinese Medicine (“TCM”) states that everyone falls into one of five body types: the Yang / Hot…the Damp/Phlegm…the Yin / Cold…the Dry…and the Neutral. Using the term “type” suggests a situation that is inherent, unchanging and unchangeable. I happen to agree with the term my reader uses, “condition”, which suggests that it can change with lifestyle choices.

TCM’s Prescription for the Damp Condition

Chinese medicine, in one formulation, recommends a certain eating regimen for those enduring the “Damp/Phlegm” condition: “Raw food tends to be cold and damp. Unless you have a Hot Phlegm condition with cooked down green phlegm, avoid raw salads and uncooked food. Steam or stir-fry your veggies instead.”

Only one of TCM’s five essential conditions has a name that implies health. It’s the so-called “neutral” condition.

These Conditions are Not Permanent

When I look myself up in charts that describe the various conditions in TCM, I come up with two answers. When I find a description in terms of how I used to feel, look, behave, I come out—just as my reader does for herself—as exhibiting a “Damp and Phlegm” condition. When I find the description of how I look, feel, and behave today, now that I’ve been raw for fifteen years, I come out—you guessed it—“neutral.” That is to say: healthy.

We Can All Be “Neutral”

Fact: I’ve changed. Fact: You can change, you can move toward and into the “neutral” or truly healthy condition. More about the intersection of Eastern medicine and raw foods in this article: Eastern Medicine and Raw Foods.

Steaming and stir-frying vegetables even reminds us of what we North Americans think of as Chinese food, doesn’t it? And these are indeed the major ways of preparing food in China, where the diet for most consists of steamed rice, stir-fried vegetables and a small amount of meat. You’ll not see many Chinese folk in China who are overweight. That certainly is the observation of my son, who’s been living in the People’s Republic for the last four years. But you do, he noted, see many sick people, just as in the USA.

TCM is all the rage these days, but just because it is a practice with a long history does not mean we need to blindly follow it either. Is eating dog meat in the winter really going to improve circulation? Will eating tiger penis really make a man more virile? Will eating bird’s nest soup made from the saliva of a swiftlet improve the immune system and alleviate asthma?

What about Digestion?

TCM prescribes small frequent cooked meals for improving digestion, but from my experience the result was quite the opposite. But having only two raw meals with intermediate fasting (such as by following a Quantum Eating regimen) helps to heal the digestive tract faster. For the Damp/Phlegm condition specifically, TCM assigns eating cooked whole grains. I’ve found that the raw food diet with no grains at all gives much better results.

Experiment and Be Willing to Change

Seeking health means change. It means being teachable, being willing to learn. It means experimenting, trying out new things for yourself, and refusing to be slave to preconceived notions of what you have to endure, have to do.

I’m reminded of a popular slogan attributed to Henry Ford: Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you‘re right. The clear implication: Don’t blindly accept the paradigm presented to you.

So…investigate. Read. Read my books. Read more widely too—Chinese medicine included. But even more importantly: Experiment. On whom? On you, of course. Find out what moving toward raw foods, eventually right into the raw lifestyle, will do for you, for your body and mind.

Quite a list! Yet every item is backed up with sound scientific research. Lets look at some of the benefits in more detail:

Calorie restriction has been linked with both prevention of Alzheimer’s and the general improvement of cognition. Two researchers, Gillette-Guyonnet and Vellas, specifically attribute to calorie-restriction diets both improved resistance to inflammation in the brain and reduction of stress.¹

Martin, Matson and Maudsley, in a very useful and informative review article, comment at length on research crediting both CR and intermittent fasting with improving energy, cellular stress mechanisms, and resistance to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.²

The conference on calorie-restriction which I attended in Las Vegas brought me face to face with a leading researcher I’ve long admired—Luigi Fontana of Washington University. During conference sessions, Dr. Fontana presented work—some as yet unpublished, which revealed facts some might find surprising. Vegans, he showed, do as well on their diets, health-wise, as do followers of calorie-restricted (CR) diets on theirs. Alternate-day fasting works as well for laboratory animals as do CR programs, and that has now been proven across a range of species.

My anti-aging program, Quantum Eating, combines the benefits of CR and fasting in a system that may be more workable for many. The clear indication after this conference: Quantum Eating works, and it has a sound foundation in science. One great benefit for me, beyond scientific vindication: Since it’s now clear you don’t need to reduce calories sharply to get anti-aging benefits, I can now suggest Quantum Eating for athletes.

I encourage you to conduct some online research of your own to learn more about recent scientific findings of the exciting benefits of CR diets.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is a pattern of eating that alternates between periods of fasting (usually meaning consumption of water only) and non-fasting. Traditionally, practitioners of IF follow a “one day on/one day off” fasting routine.

My anti-aging system, called Quantum Eating includes a more practical version of IF. Instead of alternate-day fasting, it incorporates daily evening fasting, which many people find to be easier to practice yet still just as beneficial.

Those of us actually putting into practice such dietary programs already know their value. The benefits present themselves to most of us in terms perhaps “unscientific” but nonetheless powerful: We feel more alert…’sharper’…‘more alive’…recognize ourselves as not only feeling better but thinking better. Now, we can add the confirmation of recent scientific findings to the practical knowledge we’ve already obtained from following sound eating practices.

This blossoming of knowledge and health will demand but one thing: an open mind.

1.    Caloric Restriction and Brain Function.

Gillette-Guyonnet S, Vellas B.

       Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care. 2008 Nov;11(6):686-92.

2.    Caloric restriction and intermittent fasting: two potential diets for successful brain aging.

Martin B, Mattson MP, Maudsley S.

       Ageing Research Reviews. 2006 Aug;5(3):332-53.

Recovery By Increment

There are two great things about incremental change. One is that you don’t have to fix everything at once. The second is that incremental recovery from nighttime eating is a tool you can apply wherever you are in your health journey. Perhaps you’re already raw vegan and this is a late step for you. Maybe you’re going vegetarian, or even just seeking weight loss. Wherever you are, Recovery by Increment can help.

Be Honest to Yourself

But you do have to be honest. Make a few notes about what you’ve been doing in recent weeks. You ate well all day but “lost it” between the ten o’clock news and Letterman? Write down what you ate and when. Just a few wee chocolates at eight or nine? Write. You’ve gone vegetarian but added an extra bowl of soup at seven-thirty? Write, and note the time you ate that last evening meal.

Your aim is to find a pattern. Look for two things…what you’ve been eating late…and when. Perhaps you’re good during the week but bad on weekends. Or you eat Monday nights because it’s always a rough day at the office. Find your latest eating time, and start there.

For example, maybe when the clock hits nine o’clock pm it usually means a trip to the fridge for food you feel you’ve earned—doesn’t matter much whether it’s sandwich, a salad, or an apple.

Deny the Time, Not the Food

Key principle: Start by denying yourself the time—not the food. If nine o’clock’s your trigger-time, your new rule this week is: not later than 8:45. You can still have it—the “it” you crave. But not after 8:45. The week after: 8:30. Then 8:15, 8:00, 7:45. If you can get it in before your new cut-off time, you can have it. If not…Oh, well!

In three months, a week and fifteen minutes at a time, you’ll be down to eating nothing after six—and in better shape in your eating discipline, than most people. You’d no longer be eating after conventional “dinnertime”—a breakthrough by itself.

As you move backward on the clock, you will eat less altogether. And more healthily.

Support+Rules+Personal Responsibility=Success

Tuck in a little support, and develop some new rules for yourself. If you’re going to the Wilsons’ dinner party, maybe you make a deliberate exception—in which case, let it be okay, this one day only. Or limit what you eat—have just the salad. Ask your husband, wife or companion to help. A tip: Don’t say It’s your job to see I don’t eat. It isn’t. It’s your own. Rather, try saying, simply, My goal is not to eat tonight, and I wanted to declare that to you. Take responsibility.

Books get written one page at a time. Your own success can be written in fifteen-minute increments. Try it!

Want to learn more about the “whys” of not eating at night? Check out the just-released Second Edition of my book, Quantum Eating.

A 2005 study conducted by Dr. Luigi Fontana and his colleagues is a typical, relatively recent yet still quite rare example of research performed specifically on the raw foodist population.

Fontana and colleagues studied 18 experienced raw foodists, average age of 54, two-thirds of them women. The researchers compared the test subjects to a group drawn from the general population, matching for age and gender, of “normal” eaters. Among several related factors that they looked at: bone density, vitamin D, and potential for osteoporosis. Bone density and bone mineral content surprisingly proved lower among the raw foodist group. Generally, low density and mineral content in critical areas such as the spine suggests a higher risk for osteoporosis. However, the study revealed that while raw foodists’ bones were of lower density, those bones weren’t weaker. Nor did the raw foodists suffer from any vitamin D deficiency. Message: It’s not just bone mass that matters, but bone quality. And there, the raw foodists shone.¹

A 2007 study by Fontana and colleagues looked at populations of raw foodists, non-raw endurance runners, and “normal” eaters, all carefully matched for many factors the researchers wanted to keep out of the equation. Most interestingly, the two groups other than the runners were both sedentary—yes, there are raw foodist couch potatoes too!—so that any effect of vigorous, diligent exercise could be taken off the table, so far as raw versus non-raw diets were concerned.

Bottom line: As compared with the “normal diet” group, the raw foodists fared vastly better, meaning lower levels, in such factors as blood pressure…blood concentrations of lipids, lipoproteins (fatty proteins), glucose…and arterial plaque. Indeed, the raw foodists—sedentary—performed in these categories comparably with the distance runners. What’s more, the raw foodists, astonishingly, had lower blood pressure than the runners—likely, the researchers said, thanks to lower salt consumption. Who’d have thought that just diet alone could produce health comparable to that of the distance runner?²

Again studying three similar parallel populations, the Fontana team looked at specific risk factors for cancer. Their findings in a nutshell: The distance runners, and those eating a low-protein, low-calorie diet, both showed significantly lower risk factors than did those consuming “normal” diets. Moreover, results for those who had only adjusted their diets, without adding endurance exercise, were remarkably similar. Once again: not only lower risk for heart disease, but lower risk for cancer!³

My fellow raw foodists and vegans will understand when I say: Thank you, Luigi! thank you, science! At last—you’ve provided scientific evidence for what the raw food community has known for a century or more! Thank you to that small but growing group of scientists who see merit in what we do, see in it ground for fertile research and a better opportunity to understand what genuine health really is.

1. Low Bone Mass in Subjects on a Long-term Raw Vegetarian Diet. Luigi Fontana, Jennifer L. Shew, John O. Holloszy, Dennis T. Villareal. Archives of Internal Medicine 2005;165:684-689.
2. Long-Term Low-Calorie Low-Protein Vegan Diet and Endurance Exercise are Associated with Low Cardiometabolic Risk. Luigi Fontana, Timothy E. Meyer, Samuel Klein, and John O. Holloszy Rejuvenation Research, Volume 10, Number 2, 2007.
3. Long-term low-protein, low-calorie diet and endurance exercise modulate metabolic factors associated with cancer risk Luigi Fontana, Samuel Klein, and John O Holloszy. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2006;84:1456–62.