Here are a list of questions I get asked all of the time by my clients who are new to cleansing in regards to raw and cooked foods…
Are cooked foods poisonous?
Can cooked food still be cleansing?
Can cooked foods and raw foods coninside in a diet happily together?
Do you have to be all raw to cleanse?
Can eating cooked foods still cleanse the body?
Is there a way to cleanse and improve health without detox symptoms by incorporating cooked foods?
Which cooked foods are best?
Which raw foods are best?
Which foods should be minimized or avoided?
What foods are poisonous?
What foods are low grade poisons that still have a place in the modern healthy diet?
Is it even appropriate to catagorize foods and put labels on foods as good and bad yes and no?
The answer is no all things are relative.
No cooked foods are not poisonous. Cooking food has helped increase its digestibility and has helped the human species thrive since fire was first discovered. Food becomes physically easier to break down by the small intestine when the fibers and cellulose in the food have been softened through applied heat. The difference is that the food doesn’t have live enzymes to help in its digestion. A good way to aid in this is to take digestive enzymes with cooked meals or them with raw food before.
Can cooked food still be cleansing?
Yes! Cooked food is still cleansing. A food’s ability to cleanse the body and to be quickly and effectively digested is dependent on its density and water content. The more dense the food is the harder it is for the body to break down. Think about a steak. A steak is much harder to chew and swallow than a piece of cooked fish. The reason for this is that fish live in water and their muscle tissue is softer and contains more water. It can be cut easily with the back of a spoon and practically dissolves in your mouth versus the steak which needs to be cut with a special knife and chewed vigorously. If you have to work that hard just to swallow it imagine how much harder your gut will have to work to break it down. Further more, the higher the water content of a food the more quickly it will digest. Our bodies are mostly made of water. Water acts as the great transporter of the body. Through water the body is able to move substances from one place to another. The more water a food has the more quickly the body can break it down and move it through the intestinal track. Therefore cooked foods with more water will always be more digestible and health supportive than a raw food with less water.
For this example lets look at steamed broccoli vs. a raw nut. The raw nut (before soaking) is very dense and dry. It requires a lot of chewing and doesn’t move easily through the body. This is indicated by the fact that you simply don’t get full when eating nuts. That is why it is so easy for you to eat an entire bag of sunflower seeds before you realize that you have a stomachache. You can only eat so much steamed broccoli before getting full. It is also much more easily and quickly broken down by the stomach and digested than the raw nut. The cooked broccoli will spend about one hour getting digested while the raw nut can take up to four hours. Therefore it is clearly more beneficial to eat the cooked broccoli or cooked fish than the raw nut and the cooked steak.
Can cooked foods and Raw foods Coinside together happily in a health regenerating diet?
I’m not saying that there is no place for those foods in the diet. When paired with easily digested foods more dense foods can be simultaneously “carried” through the digestive system with the aid of the more easily digest foods that pave the way for the more dense foods. Therefore dense foods should never be eaten alone. That is why when I choose to eat a piece of fish I would always eat a large green salad first. The green salad helps clear the path and make way for the dense food. Kind of similarly to how a tug boat helps bring a huge cruise ship out of the harbor. Let me elaborate
The most versitle and helpful raw food group that can be paird with hcooked foods to decrease their trasintit time and increase digestability are raw non-starchy vegetables. These include cucumbers, cellary, greens leafies, tomatos, peppers, etc. These foods take one hour to be broken down in the small intestine. They also need enzyes to break them down that are compatible wit hthe enzymes our bodies use to digest protiens and starches. Therefore you will not slow down digestion when you eat vegetables with mashed potatos and halibut. When you eat a large raw salad before any cooked meal the salad acts as a broom and sweeps the walls of the allementry canal while simoultaniously stretching the intestine to make more room for the denser foods. Therefore no matter what cooked food you are eating it shoul always be preceeded by a raw vegetable.
