Raw Food Diet: An Overall Cleanse
Eating a raw food diet is another way to help cleanse and detoxify. Raw foods are mainly alkaline and include fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, sea vegetables, and sprouted grains. While some people may introduce raw food items to their diets in order to cleanse, others may eat all raw food to eventually release all the toxins in their bodies. David Wolfe advocates raw food for many reasons, and included in these is its ability to help people become connected with nature and feel rejuvenated and young again. The saying “you are what you eat” poses the question for people of, “what do you want to be?” Wolfe chooses to eat all healing foods, which he believes to be those that are raw, or uncooked. Raw foods are as nature created them, without any modifications by humankind. The Essene Gospel Of Peace (1981) quotes Jesus as saying, “With that fire of death you cook your foods in your homes and in your fields. I tell you truly, it is the same fire which destroys your foods and your bodies, even as the fires of malice, which ravages your thoughts, ravages your spirits. For your body is that which you eat, and your spirit is that which you think.” (40)
A main difference between raw food and cooked food, according to Richard Anderson, is that raw food contains life force and enzymes. Richard Anderson says that life force is a key ingredient to health. In Cleanse & Purify Thyself (1998), he states that life force is “the source of energy and nerve power. It gives life to our cells and to the enzymes in our body.” (192) The life force of each of our bodies decreases when we eat cooked food, take drugs, or experience negative thought patterns. Cooking food kills its enzymes because enzymes die at a temperature above 119 degrees Fahrenheit. Enzymes are essential to the body for health since they are necessary for keeping the body clean, utilizing proteins, vitamins, and minerals, digesting food properly, and for all metabolic processes to take place.
Anderson refers to research done by Dr. Edward Howell, an expert on enzymes, which shows that we all have a limited supply of enzymes. If we eat cooked food, which contains no live enzymes, our bodies have to take enzymes from their reserves in order to digest the food. Eating cooked food depletes the body’s limited amount of enzymes, and when this enzyme reserve is depleted completely, none of the body’s metabolic processes will be able to occur. Anderson states, “With a decrease of enzymes, a process of internal decay rapidly develops, creating mounting problems in the body, which can even be transmitted, through DNA, to one’s future children.” (194)
According to Anderson, raw foods also help the body by keeping it free of congestion. He uses the metaphor of a car. People know not to put sugar into the car’s gas tank because this will clog the engine. Anderson claims that eating cooked foods has the same affect on our bodies as sugar does in a car. We become congested. The Essene Gospel Of Peace (1981) quotes Jesus as saying, “So eat always from the table of God: the fruits of the trees, the grain and grasses of the field, the milk of beasts, and the honey of bees. For everything beyond these is of Satan, and leads by the way of sins and of diseases unto death. But the foods, which you eat from the abundant table of God, give strength and youth to your body, and you will never see dis-ease.” (41)