Saturday, June 13, 2015

Why Raw Till 4 is a Bad Idea

RT4
About a year ago a new diet (not really a new one but the same old one with a new name) came onto the scene. It was coined by Durianrider and Freelee of Australia. They started a site called 30Bananasaday in the mid 2000's to promote veganism and raw food. The site was run by a group of overzealous young people who listened to everything that the two creators told them. They would ban anyone who posted anything about cooked foods or animal products. Anything that went against their set rules would be removed from the site. If there was a post that criticized any of their made up fairytale diet and health world or them it was soon removed and the poster was banned from the site.

This is the way these two think is the right way to work in the online community. If you don't like something just make it go away. Remove it. Delete it and soon you can go back to the brainwashing and bullying.

In 2011 the Woodstock Fruit Festival was created. It is an event that a runner named Michael Arnstein created to bring people together who either were a part of the raw fruit and vegetable diet community or at least were interested in knowing more about it. There were many people who were invited to this week long festival to be what they referred to as pioneers. Many of these pioneers had very little real world experience and even less real credentials as health practitioners. Some were only trying the diet once in a while and were really not consuming anything close to the diet most of the time but still were invited to be leaders and speakers at the festival. Some of these pioneers were as young as 23 years old and had only started on a raw fruit and vegetable diet maybe 1 year earlier.

In 2013 after Durianrider went to the Woodstock Fruit Festival as a pioneer and then started to promote the use of processed sugars, cooked highly processed junk foods like pizza, white rice and Thai food as a healthy part of a vegan diet the management of the Woodstock Fruit Festival decided to kick Durianrider and Freelee out as pioneers from the Woodstock Fruit Festival.

The couple took this very hard and soon started to bully and lash out at the managers of the Woodstock Fruit Festival who they thought were responsible for their ill fate. They started to create videos on Youtube that showed dirt on people like FullyrawKristina, Doug Graham, and Dan McDonald. They also started to create a lot of new posts on their 30Bananasaday site to make these people look bad.

Not long after all of this they decided to start their own festival in Chiang Mai Thailand called the Raw Till 4 Thai fruit festival. This would be an event that was totally free and would take place over a 2 week period in July 2014. Most of the people at the festival were overweight and several were simply obese. In fact even after over 1 year the same people who were at the first year of the festival were more fat and obese than they were in the first year (year 2 was held in June 2015).

Either these people do not follow the recommended Raw Till 4 diet or there is something very wrong with the diet. Most people who eat a healthy diet (I am just using most to be conservative, it is really all) will see tremendous results in a few weeks and in a few months at most. People who are eating a healthy diet for over a year would certainly show a lot of improvement and start to look much thinner if they were overweight. None of this can be said of the participants of the Raw Till 4 diet, they all are just getting fatter if they started out fat and thinner if they started out too thin.

What is wrong with the Raw Till 4 diet? Here are some of the problems: First of all eating tons of fruit all day and then following that with cooked vegan food is a very bad idea. Fruits if eaten ripe and raw and in their natural state digest well only when they are eaten on an empty stomach. If a person eats a bunch of junk foods like rice, pizza, pasta and stir fried foods in the evening and then they wake up and have a meal of fruit there will likely still be some of the junk food in the digestive tract and the fruit will not get digested correctly. The fruit will ferment in the body as opposed to getting assimilated.

The creators of the diet suggest that men must eat at least 3000 calories of food every day and women eat at least 2500. They do not believe that the number of calories that someone eats in a day are related to the size of the person and the amount of activity that they do that day. This is a clear fallacy, every health and diet instructor I have ever heard of says that the number of calories someone needs in a day is related to the amount of activity the person does and their size. It makes no sense for a 75 to 80 pound sedentary woman to consume the same amount of calories as a 170 pound woman who spends the day in the hot sun lifting heavy boxes and working hard. This is a recipe for disaster. Obviously there will be overweight people on the diet.

The diet requires drinking a liter of water upon waking up. It requires 3 to 5 liters of water to be drank in a day. This also is across the board and not depending on the lifestyle of the person. A healthy human shouldn't need to drink more than a little bit of water a day unless they live in a very hot dry climate or they eat some very poor foods which lack water content. It also depends on the amount of physical exercise that someone does in a day. If a person is sedentary and lives in a cold environment and they eat lots of juicy fruit then probably very little water if any at all is required. In fact drinking the amount of water that is suggested will cause damage to the kidneys and other elimination organs with time as they are not designed to eliminate so much water. Also many electrolytes will be flushed out of the body with this immense amount of fluid, leaving the body weak and unable to function correctly.

The biggest problem with the diet is the way many young people grasp onto it without verifying that it is even the right thing to do. Many of these people simply want to be different and just blindly do everything that the diet prescribes. They will eventually find that their health will suffer and some might even get chronic or even life threatening illnesses such as cancer and heart attacks due to the stresses that the diet can create on the organs of the body.

Another issue is that the diet requires people to use vitamin b12 shots. They actually encourage people to buy their own syringes and administer the b12 themselves. This is totally irresponsible as only a qualified medical technician should administer anything to people who have no idea what they are doing. There are risks of infection and spreading of various diseases. The main problem however is that the human body has evolved over millennium to have many systems to protect it from harm such as the coating of skin and to just ignore those systems and force foreign substances directly into the bloodstream is potentially harmful. In fact there is no such thing as 100% vitamin b12, the b12 that is sold always contain additives which, along with the b12 itself doesn't belong in the blood of a human.

Using anything as a prophylactic is never a good idea. Every nutrient in the human body has a certain range that it needs to be in as well it has to be consumed in a certain form and in combination with other nutrients. To just blindly take shots of vitamin b12 without knowing how much vitamin b12 is needed, if any is a dangerous behavior. Teaching people to do this is irresponsible and can lead to dangerous situations. Many people consume a vegan diet who never use any b12 supplements and do not need to, adding this form of b12 to a body that doesn't need any will simply make the elimination organs work to remove the excess.

Durianrider and Freelee have no integrity. In the days when they created the 30Bananasaday site they would ban anyone who even mentioned cooked foods, today they encourage the consumption of not only cooked food but completely processed junk cooked food. In my opinion they never were truly eating 100% raw foods, anyone who was would never fluctuate back to a cooked diet because they would feel so much worse. Nobody would accept that poor feeling every day and continue feeling bad when they know how good it would feel to be 100% raw on just fruits and vegetables. They never got to feeling that way, which means they never were really eating that way for a long enough period of time.

The Raw Till 4 diet is not raw at all. By the very nature of the diet, eating raw all day and then starting to eat cooked food at 4 p.m. is like being sober until 4, or being sexually abstinent until 4. Is it really raw? Most people are addicted to cooked food and therefore they would skip all of the raw food or eat a small amount during the day, saving their stomach room for the 4 p.m. cooked meal when they will stuff themselves with tons of cooked junk foods. This is a totally cooked diet and not raw at all.

I believe that Durianrider and Freelee just plagiarized a book by Mark Bittman called VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 , which came out in May of 2013, just around the time they were kicked out the the Woodstock Fruit Festival. They did not use exactly the same name but it is quite obvious they did not think of this one on their own.

The diet doesn't differentiate between whole foods like beans, lentils and quinoa and processed foods like white rice or processed sugars. There is a lot of scientific data on the way processed food versus whole foods react with the human body. All show that processed foods are always the worst choice and whole unprocessed food is always the best choice. Avoid the processed foods like white rice, processed sugars, salt (which is not even a food at all) and junk foods like pizza and all the other crap that they are seen scarfing down on their Youtube videos.

Cooked foods are always poorer in quality, they always contain less or none of the nutrients that the uncooked food contained before it was cooked. Even the lycopene example where the mainstream seems to prefer cooked foods because the lycopene is more bio-available doesn't mean that it is needed in that form, or in the quantities it is provided in the cooked form. There is sufficient bio-available lycopene in an uncooked version of the food to keep people healthy, adding more is not a good thing and it has to be at the risk or loss of something else.

I do not support the cooking of food as this is a natural hygiene blog but I leave it up to the reader to check into a much better cooked food diet called the Forks Over Knives diet, which incorporates 100% whole foods and low fat foods which would make a much better transitional diet towards a totally 100% raw whole foods and low fat diet.