First of all, I hope this doesn't go too much off topic as my first post in this category. And the second, remember that English is my second language, so some words are guaranteed spelled wrong and used wrong. I'm very interested in food and health, and what's the food does to our body. After I got ill myself of eating the wrong food, I started to read more and more about it.
A Swedish author called Mats-Eric Nilsson have written a book called «The Secret Chef» (Original «Den hemlige kocken», I'm not sure if it's translated to English or not). It's about all the cheating in the food industry. It's from the Swedish marked, and the Norwegian translation are adapted to our marked. One of the most interesting parts is about the food additives. There are more or less no test about what happens when you make a cocktail of them in the food as most people eat every day.
One of the things I guess everyone have noticed, is that the advices around food is very different. After my opinion, on of the reasons are that there are big companies that are behind some of the tests, and not all of them will be 100% objective.
Here in Norway we are advices to drink a lot of milk (I guess it's an advice in most western countries...). It's good for our bones as you all know. Some articles claims that the Norwegian women is the ones that drink most milk during a year in the world, and also the ones with the highest ratio of osteoporosis in the world. There is probably other reasons why, like genetics, or that it's not unusual for Norwegians to lack vitamin D, or other things. But who is the milk good for? Our body or the farmers' income?
None of the big food brands are interested in our health. They want to make money. And as you know, they put all this crap in the semi products and finished products they make. And people eat it. All the time. Diet related problems are increasing, and we probably doesn't know all the illnesses and problems that are connected between a wrong diet and health. Most of the food related illnesses we know about, is connected to overweight or underweight (eating disorders). When people get ill, luckily some are changing their diet. When you take all the crap out of your diet, a lot of peoples gets more healthier and better shape. And they are convinced that it's this fantastic diet's reason why they became healthy. And you get all these nice articles and YouTube videos about how fantastic their new diet is. One of the things a lot of the diets have in common, is that it's clean food, and food made from scratch. The reason isn't always that you found this amazing diet that made you healthy, but that you removed all the crap that made you ill.
The raw food diet has some benefits as I think. All vegetables and fruit are clean food. No mixture of food additive than can cause health problems we do not know about yet. There are no sugar, wheat, fish, meat, eggs and dairy products. I haven't read the whole China Study yet, but as we know, they are claiming that a vegan diet can avoid and reduce the risk of several diseases. But on that part, there is no big differences between a good vegan diet, and a raw food diet after my opinion. But a normal vegan have more and more opportunities for semi and finished products, and I guess several of those products contains some of the things that necessary aren't good for our health, like sugar and food additives. It's possible to eat very unhealthy as a vegetarian, and I'm quite sure it's possible to do it as a vegan too.
Then we come to the individual differences. People are different. We have different genetics and health issues, where we live, our lifestyle etc. And here I think sometimes one diet can be a much better choice for one person over an other. And don't forget the placebo effect. If a person is really convinced that they are finding the perfect diet, well perhaps the placebo effect is so strong that this diet is the perfect one.
I try to live at least “50% raw” myself. I started it out this summer, as I have some health issues. So it was just a project more or less for fun, to see if I got some benefits (I was really inspired by the documentary “Food Matters”). I was really good at it earlier this summer, and felt really really fine. No pains, no stomach problems and a lot of energy. But it's too easy going back to old habits. I haven't been good at eating enough raw food lately, and I'm more or less back to scratch as I was this summer. But is it only the lack of raw food that causes it? I really don't think so. I eat less fruit these days, as I think fruit taste better when it's hot outside. I have been really lazy making my breakfast smoothies only from blueberries. I've treated me with things that contains sugar, even though I know sugar isn't specially good me. And I've eaten things with gluten in, as I've been lazy and taken some shortcuts at work. And I'm not eating as often as I did this summer. So then I'm back at the start. It isn't always the very special diet that causes the positive progress in the health changes, but a lot of times what we take out from our diet. The variety of the fresh fruits and veggies are gone, and in with some of the crap again.
So the conclusion for me is that I really don't believe that a 100% raw food diet is a healthier choice over a good vegan diet. But in most cases, it will be a much healthier choice over several other diets, since it doesn't contains a lot of food categories that are know to cause health problems, or still yet to discover that can cause a lot of problems.
