How and Why to Adopt a Fruitarian Diet

Eating raw foods is a way to give your body some of the nutrition it desperately needs. Many of us are at least slightly overweight, and even the morbidly obese are starving for essential proteins and amino acids.

All the processed, cooked foods we eat give us only a small percentage of what we need. Consequently, we eat and eat and yet we're still not nourished. Psychologists try to tell us we're eating to make up for an emptiness in our souls. Wrong! Our bodies our empty and trying to tell us so.

Eating raw foods is good for us on so many levels. It's satisfying to eat them. They take more time to chew and swallow, so we don't eat as fast. And we're getting so much more in the way of nutrition by consuming fruits, vegetables, nuts and sprouts.

It can take time to prepare raw foods, however. Which is why a juicer is an important addition to your kitchen once your start to be serious about raw foods.

A good juicer can process an entire apple - seeds, stems, peel, pulp and all - and turn all that into a healthy, nutritious juice.

Buying apple juice is NOT the same thing!!! Don't even look at apple juices or even ciders in the grocery store. Put that $2 or $3 aside and save up for a juicer. Buy bags of apples, orange, bananas, carrots and make your own juices to get everything from the fruit that you'd get by eating it raw.

Now you're getting juice that's as fresh as the fruit or vegetable you made it from. No preservatives, no processing that strips most of the energy from the fruit. And think of all the delicious combinations you can make with the many tropical fruits that are available now in most grocery stores.

You can customize your fruits and add non-typical ingredients like pumpkin to an orange juice.

Now that's a powerhouse of a juice!

Many people have heard of juice fasts as a means of detoxifying the body.

Followers of a raw foods regimen also include juices as part of their nutrition. Nearly anything can be juiced - fruits and vegetables, primarily. It's a form of concentrated nutrition. Some raw foodists drink only fresh fruit juices.

In addition, fruit and vegetable juices are good sources of the traditional nutrients. Citrus fruits (grapefruit, oranges, etc.) provide a healthy portion of vitamin C. Carrot juice contains large quantities of vitamin A, in the form of beta carotene.

A number of green juices are a good source of vitamin E. Fruit juices are a good source of essential minerals like iron, copper, potassium, sodium, iodine, and magnesium, which are bound by the plant in a form that is most easily assimilated during digestion.

While fruit and vegetable juices are the most common form of juice, wheatgrass juice has been getting a lot of attention lately because of the denseness of nutrients it contains.

The primary advantage of truly fresh wheatgrass juice - juice made from raw, live, soil-grown wheat grass, is the apparent high level of life force energy that it contains. It is one of the few truly fresh foods available (sprouts are another).

The grass is alive and growing right up to the time it is juiced, and hopefully you are drinking it within a few minutes or so of juicing. Most of us get our green veggies from markets, and they were picked days ago and refrigerated - losing vitality the whole time. (It is an even worse situation for fruit, which may be picked weeks before you eat it, and in some cases, held in cold storage for months - losing vitality the whole time.) In contrast, one can grow wheatgrass indoors, and enjoy it when it is truly fresh.

In conclusion, drinking plenty of fresh fruit juices daily will cleanse your system, make you feel completely energized and last but not least, you will look beautiful. People will wonder what you are doing differently!

We saw an interesting article about starvation in which the comment was made that there are really two types of starvation. One, of course, is caused by too little or no food at all.

But there is another type of starvation caused by serious malnutrition, and even though the U.S. is the fattest nation on the planet, our bodies are starved for important nutrients and enzymes.

It's partly why we're so fat, because we keep eating and eating, but we're eating highly processed, cooked foods that have the essential components burned out of them. Cooking removes up to 80% of food's important amino acids, fibers and vitamins.

It's one reason why switching to a raw foods diet makes such compelling sense. When you start eating raw foods, you're suddenly getting all the nutrition from food that nature intended you to get. It's the way our bodies were meant to eat, in balance with the planet.

We suddenly become the vibrant, healthy animals we're supposed to be.

But we still live in the modern world, with all its pressures and time constraints. It's one reason why getting your whole foods from juicing is a good idea. You can still get all the fiber you need without taking the time to cut, peel or slice the food.

Raw foods do take a little more time to chew and swallow and that's a good thing. But if you don't have the time for that, then you should consider using juices for at least a portion of your raw foods intake.

You do need to invest in a good juicer though, and that's different from a blender. A blender can't process the fruit peels that contain most a fruit or vegetables vitamins and enzymes. A juicer is a more high-powered appliance that will process everything - seeds and stems, peels and pulp.

It's designed to do it quickly and efficiently. They can be expensive, but there are many more options today than there used to be as this concept has gained in popularity.

A diet is considered a raw food diet if it consists of at least 75% raw, uncooked fruits, vegetables, sprouts, etc.

Raw and living foods are believed to contain essential food enzymes (living foods contain a higher enzyme content than cooked foods). The cooking process (i.e., heating foods above 116°F) is thought to destroy food enzymes.

People who follow the raw diet use particular techniques to prepare foods. These include sprouting seeds, grains and beans; soaking nuts and dried fruits; and juicing fruits and vegetables. The only cooking that is allowed is via a dehydrator. This piece of equipment blows hot air through the food but never reaches a temperature higher than 116°F.

Do you have to follow the regimen that strictly? Of course not. But it's certainly worth it to incorporate some of these techniques and ideas into your diet. If you tend to snack at work, try taking in carrots or apple slices.

Many of the bigger grocery stores now offer packaged vegetables or fruits that make it easier to pack them and take them to work. We're a nation of convenience, and much of the resistance to healthier eating is that it does generally take a little more effort and time to buy and slice fruits and vegetables.

Food retailers have been catching on, slowly, and it's much easier now to get bags of sliced carrots, celery, apples, nuts and raisins.

Of course these aren't necessarily organic foods, and organic is the better way to go, but we think anything raw is infinitely better than cooked, processed food. If you have the time, do buy organic and slice them yourself.

But if you're in a hurry, and nowhere near a natural food store, then don't beat yourself up or sabotage your efforts because you can't do this 100% all the time. That's not realistic. Anything from the fruit and vegetable aisle is going to be better for you than a potato chip, or worse yet, a french fry!