Raw Food Restaurants Serve Healthy Food?

For those of you who have followed my old blog, you probably already know my feelings on the raw food or raw gourmet food restaurants. I decided to post another entry on this because I have been on a business trip and wanted to sample a meal at one of these places.

I did a quick search online and there happened to be a raw food restaurant right in the very neighborhood where I am staying. I looked over the menu, which is posted online and saw a couple of things that might work for me with a bit of manipulation.

I entered the restaurant and there were 2 hippie like people working there. One man and one woman. Both were decked out in psychedelic clothes, the man was wearing a tie dye shirt.

The woman greeted me and asked me to take a seat at any table. I sat down and she brought me a carafe of water. I looked over the menu and then asked if there was something that did not contain garlic.

For some reason I think this ticked them off because the woman immediately replied to me that most everything on the menu was made with garlic. Then she said that if I didn't want garlic I shouldn't eat there. I found that quite rude but still persisted.

I finally asked if there was garlic in the salad and she replied that there was none but there were onions in it. I never asked about onions but I think she understood why I was asking. I ordered the salad.

I ate the salad but avoided eating as much of the onions as possible. They were cut in small pieces so avoiding them was not easy but I managed. She also told me that her garlic was organic and raw and was okay to eat.

I was laughing inside at this. Oh sure, organic and raw garlic is okay to eat but the regular stuff cooked is bad.

The truth is in fact the opposite as the toxins in garlic are very volatile and quickly evaporate with even a small amount of heat. Slightly heated garlic is less toxic than raw garlic but of course heated garlic has other issues such as newly created substances that even science doesn't know about which are probably just as toxic as the mustard oil that evaporated.

I won't be returning to that restaurant, I'd rather just get a ripe bunch of bananas.

Food Courts or Fool Courts?

I was driving around the area where I live the other day and I needed to use a toilet quite badly, which is a pretty common occurance for me. I noticed there was a food court nearby so I decided to stop and use the toilet of one of the restaurants.

Most of the restaurants had outdoor as well as indoor seating. I saw a few of the patrons sitting outside and eating. Obviously the majority of them were obese and overweight, which makes sense since there are 75 to 80% overweight people in the USA.

I also noticed that the food most were eating was traditional foods such as pasta, burgers, pizza, submarine sandwiches and the like. There were a couple of people eating salads which were obviously drenched in oils and fats.

I made my way to the Starbucks because usually there is nobody in the Starbucks toilet. I think people who drink Starbucks are having a hard time with their bowel movements. Of course they must need to urinate out the toxic junk they drank, but that is quick especially for the men.

Also I find that Starbucks toilets are usually clean and easy to get in and out of quickly. In fact this Starbucks' toilet was near the entrance and I could easily pop in and out without being seen by the employees. Most restaurants don't like when non-paying customers use their toilets.

Once in a while I will actually purchase a bottled water from a Starbucks or other coffee shop just to use their toilet. Since my consumption of water is so little I usually have a large stash of these bottles for when I need them, like when the weather gets too hot or I do some extraneous exercise.

Of the many restaurants I saw at this food court, I have to say that none were serving anything close to a human compatible food. Except for a few apples, oranges and a banana which was unripe that I saw at Starbucks.

Skip the food courts and get your nutrition from whole, ripe, fresh, raw and preferably organic fruit and vegetables. Go ahead and use the toilets at the food courts when in need, but save your money for some real food.

Saving Money with Natural Hygiene

An added benefit of living a natural hygienic lifestyle is saving money. In these poor economic times that could make the difference between surviving and not being able to pay the bills.

How can one save money by obeying the laws of nature? Many people who attempt to eat a natural diet complain that fruits and vegetables are expensive. They point to the small bag of groceries filled with organic fruits and vegetables that costs so much. Of course if you simply shop at the chain grocery stores which do not sell much volume of the organic fruits and vegetables the costs can be quite high.

The trick is to become a little creative in finding quality fruit and vegetables. Always keep and eye open for specials from the major food chains. When they put organic fruit or vegetables on sale, often the prices are below some of the other sources. When there is a sale then buy as much as you know you will use of the fruit or vegetable before it spoils. Don't just buy several cases of it and watch half of your investment go to waste.

There are also web sites such as neighborhoodfruit.com which allows people who have backyard fruit available to find someone who wants the fruit. As of the writing of this post there are only members offering fruit in California but this will certainly be expanded soon.

Foraging for fruit can also help with costs as many trees are in public places and even some backyard trees hang over public land. There are also many wilderness areas that have some truly wild fruits and berries that can be harvested.

Some of the less known stores in many cities stock lots of fruits and often when they do not sell as fast as planned they are marked down in price. I was able to find pints of organic yellow cherry tomatoes from Mexico for just 99 cents each. Some of the tomatoes had a few brown spots on them but were otherwise just perfect.

Go into some of the ethnic stores that are run by people from Asia, Africa, Europe, etc. They often carry tropical fruit and vegetables that are not found in the major grocery chains. Sometimes they will bargain with you if you desire a large amount of them. I saw some longans at a local store yesterday.

Besides all of this expenses for things like perfume, cologne, hairspray, makeup, aftershave, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, and many other grooming products are no longer necessary when living a natural hygienic lifestyle. Those of you who already live like this understand, those that don't will understand as soon as they start living in a natural way.

Don't forget that your medical expenses will vanish. You will no longer need to buy any over the counter or prescription medications. Your trips to the doctor should become a thing of the past. There is practically no need to get any diagnostic tests or any other preventative procedures.

Most natural hygienists do not waste their money on medical insurance, some choose to keep this but eventually most people realize that insurance is just redundant. Some choose to only have major catastrophic insurance instead of the usual full coverage.

Restaurants are often used as a form of entertainment, but often are overpriced and do not deliver much in return. Most hygienists prefer to avoid restaurants completely as they do not conform the the laws of nature.

Some natural hygienists move to tropical locations where there is an abundance of fresh ripe fruit available all year around. The prices of these fruits are often a small percentage of the prices in the northern climates where they must be imported.

Some people think that the only way to get exercise is by paying for a gym membership or paying for Tai Chi or some form of Yoga. This is absolutely unnecessary as there are many ways to get exercise without any equipment at all and all that is needed is a little space. Running or walking is a great way to enjoy the area you are in and get sunshine and exercise. There are many body weight exercises that can get the body in perfect shape. Check out the many available videos on Youtube.com to get an idea of the possibilities.

Sunshine is easy to get for free. Many cities don't get much sunshine in the year, but when there is sunshine make sure to bathe in it as much as possible. If you can afford to get away for a week or two in the off season then try to go to a very warm and sunny location and get as much sunshine as you can while there.

You'll find that your cost of living will drop as your health increases. Money should never be an impediment to health.

Is it Comfort Food or Discomfort Food?

Many people have heard of the term "Comfort Food". Usually the foods that come to mind are the traditional standard foods that many people consume often. These foods include things like casseroles, which are generally made with animal meats and potatoes or some kind of pasta, roast beef sandwiches, cornbread, all the way to simple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Most of the foods that are considered Comfort Foods are poorly combined and full of processed and extremely toxic substances. In general they contain the foods that are addictive like dairy, meat and grains. These are the foods that contain opioids which are opium-like substances that act on the brain and nervous system in the same way that opium does.

This is probably why these foods are considered comfort foods. They will leave most people who eat them in a very comfortable state. A very comfortably numb state is a better description of the situation.

Actually when these opioids act on the nervous system they cause a feeling of well bring and drown out the emotions, both positive and negative emotions. We are left in a complete state of unemotional numbness.

Most people do not consider themselves drug addicts but those who continue to allow their addiction to comfort foods to continue are just that, drug addicts. They use food as their drug.

For some people this addiction is so powerful that they need to go through therapy to be able to get off the addiction. Don't be too upset if you are attempting to stop eating these kinds of foods and always find yourself returning to them. It is a difficult habit to break.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that for every time that someone numbs them self with their food, there is a time when their body needs to recover from the numbing and they will suffer a higher than normal emotional experience. This can often lead to unexpected consequences such as being very happy or sad unexpectedly.

People who experience these periods have an erratic personality with emotional highs and lows instead of a more constant even personality having a better understanding of their emotions.

Try to refrain from the usual comfort foods and see how much better life is when you experience it real time. Handling life is just much easier when you do not need to get high or low on opioids. Have a bunch of bananas instead.

Natural Hygiene and Pets

I learned about natural hygiene about 5 years ago. At the time I realised that it was the way of nature and that following the laws of nature was the best thing a human can do. It is very powerful and freeing to understand that everything in nature is self-healing, that includes the ever fragile environment, biodiversity on the planet and of course our own health.

All of the benefits that come to nature in general will be enjoyed by everyone who gets as close to nature as they can. As long as we follow the laws of nature we will reap a benefit.

It wasn't until I heard about a dog that belonged to my brother who was put to death because it was suffering from cancer that I associated the treatment of pets with natural hygiene. I did not see the correlation between humans and pets until that day.

Most people who own a pet will usually follow the standard protocol and simply treat it the same way the majority of the people treat their pets. This usually includes the feeding of off the shelf pet foods available in supermarkets and pet food stores, or even at veterinarian's offices.

Even many people who follow the natural hygienic lifestyle continue to feed their pets these very toxic and health destroying foods. Most of the food sold for the consumption of pets are made with profit in mind. They use very low quality ingredients and are extremely processed. In fact most of these foods are made with waste products from other industries. It is a rather easy way to get rid of the waste products and earn money off of it at the same time.

These companies use marketing to get their products sold to people who purchase them without understanding the serious consequences that feeding such low quality food to their pets is doing to them.

A bowl of unknown brown color pellets doesn't resemble anything ever seen in nature, yet the package they are sold in highlights how healthy and nutritious the food is for our pets. People see their pet consume these foods and assume that their pet is enjoying the taste and they believe all of the market hype and assume their pet is getting the nutrients it needs.

Of course this is all incorrect. Nowhere in nature is there a pellet with all the necessary nutrients for an animal of any kind. In nature every single species of animals has it's most appropriate food and that food is never found in a bag or box of any other sort of container. Never are there vitamins or minerals added to any of these foods.

For example a cat would track down and eat rodents in nature. This is one of the natural foods for a cat. It would eat the entire rodent from head to toe. Nothing would go to waste. Even the contents of the rodent's digestive system would be consumed by the cat.

A dog on the other hand has a little more complex diet and would eat plant based foods as well as some small animals. Again they would eat the entire animal from head to toe with everything in between.

Every species in nature has it's specific diet and in order to thrive they need to consume their natural diet. If you have a pet, know someone who has one or are planning to get one please make sure that at the very least it is getting the foods that it would be consuming in nature.

Try doing some research on the BARF diet for dogs or the equivalent for whatever other pet you have.

Eating the Diet that Our Body was Specifically Designed for is Weird

There is an insurmountable amount of evidence that the diet a human body was designed for is just as some of the other blog entries here have discussed in detail. That is one that is nearly totally comprised of raw, ripe, organic, fresh, fruits and vegetables that are eaten one type at a time to satiate hunger and only when hungry. This is a simple way to put it, but it is also a simple diet that was available for us when we first arrived on this planet.

I won’t go into all of the evidence but I would like to mention some of it. For example we are closest in our genetics to the primates. In fact the chimpanzee or to be more specific, the bonobo chimpanzee has nearly 99% of the same genetics as humans.

When these animals are observed in the wild, when they have sufficient varieties of food and there are no external influences such as human activity, they will eat a diet that is practically all composed of fruits and vegetables and some insects. They rarely, but occasionally will hunt for animals but this behavior is not common and the percentage of calories that is from animal fare is close to negligible in their overall diet. Over 95% of their daily amount of calories comes from fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.

The human body can not handle a diet that is comprised of more than a single digit percentage of calories from fat. This is a scientific and anecdotal fact. In western cultures where the diet is high in fats the amount of heart disease is much higher than in populations with a diet that has a much lower percentage of fat calories. In fact heart disease wouldn’t exist if people had stuck to the original diet that they were designed for.

Many of the institutions of the study of health recommend a diet that is low in fat, most recommend a single digit percentage of calories from fat. The American Heart Association, The American Cancer Association, The American Diabetes Association all recommend a diet that derives little of it’s calories from fat. A diet such as one very low in fat is known to reverse these diseases, and prevent them if they did not already exist.

There are several well known doctors such as Dr. McDougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Fuhrman, and others that all recommend a low fat diet that gets less than or equal to ten percent of it’s calories from fat in order to reverse heart disease and stay healthy.

T. Colin Campbell, a highly renowned scientist in the field of nutrition recommends a low fat diet also. His studies have shown that a diet that is high in protein is carcinogenic. Generally when a food is high in protein, it is also high in fat, unless of course the food is highly processed. Natural foods which contain a lot of protein also contain a lot of fat.

These are just a small number of reasons why the human body is designed to thrive on a very low fat diet. There are many more reasons, but in a short blog post there is not enough space to go into a lot of detail.

Since the human body is designed to consume a low fat diet then it follows that the best foods for humans are those that have sufficient calories to maintain our weight and to accomplish our daily tasks but do not contain a lot of fat. The only foods that nature provided for us that fit these requirements are fresh fruits. Vegetables are very high quality foods and do not contain a lot of fat but they are lacking in calories.

Animal foods such as flesh, eggs, and dairy, all contain more than the recommended amount of fat and are overall a poor supply of vitamins compared to fruit. They also are void of fiber, which is a requirement for the human digestive system to function correctly.

There is one more type of food group which might be a good candidate for a human diet and that is starches. Starches are found in root vegetables such as potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, yams, etc. They are also found in grains such as rice, wheat, rye, barley, and all the others. Beans and legumes also contain a lot of starches but they also contain a lot of protein which when combined with starches cause dificulty in digestion, this is why bean eaters are known to pass gas.

Why are starches not a suitable part of the human diet? First of all they are nearly impossible to consume without heat. In fact potatoes are considered poisonous until they are heated. Grains also are difficult if not impossible to digest without heating them. Since humans arrived on the planet without heating utensils or even the ability to produce a fire that was under control it is highly unlikely that the human body was designed to exist on these foods. Were humans supposed to fast for as long as it took to develop the skills to heat food? I don’t think so, no humans were consuming the easy to digest and easy to find fruits and vegetables for millions of years before the invention of and control of fire occurred.

Besides this, the human body has little of the enzymes that are needed to digest starches. This is because there are only traces of starches in ripe fruits and that is all that is needed to digest this little amount.

Now that the evidence has shown that humans’ natural diet and the foods that the human body was designed for is fruits and vegetables with an occasional nut and seed, why do most humans ingest most of their diet from other foods?

The answer is not simple, there are many reasons but the main reason is that the human population left the fertile tropical regions of the planet and found limited amounts of fruits that were available for consumption. They soon began to experiment with what types of food existed in that part of the world. Eventually they found ways to adapt to the new kinds of foods and ways to prepare them. This however does not mean that the human body and digestive system adapted but that it tolerated the change in diet.

Certainly around that same time there were many changes going on. Agriculture is one thing that was developed. Humans were no longer foraging for food but were now specializing in creating foods for an entire city of humans. There was little high speed transportation available so the shipping of tropical fruits from the tropics to the colder climates was not an option. Humans were not seeking to thrive at that time but to survive. The new foods and the new preparation of foods allowed just that, the survival of humans.

This explains how the human population started to eat foods that were not totally appropriate to them but still managed to survive. Certainly there were obvious changes in the human population such as new diseases that appeared and many other issues but these were overlooked at the time because survival was more important than worrying about a few cases of heart attacks or cancer.

Going back to the original topic, why do humans look at people who consume the diet that their body was designed for as weird while their totally deviant diet that is simply a survival diet seen as not weird? Just because there are huge numbers of humans eating the survival diet does not make it weird of someone doing what the human body was designed to do.

What do you think?

Circumcision : Healthy and Hygienic or Mutilation?

After nearly 3 years I finally got around to the whole circumcision debate. It’s quite a hot topic to many people because this procedure is very common for certain religious affiliations. To the best of my knowledge, both Jews and Muslims require that all males have this procedure at a certain time in their life.

Jews actually have a celebration when a child is circumcised, called a brith (pronounced like briss). This ‘celebration’ is usually performed on the 8th day after a male child is born. Often the entire family attends the event and gifts are brought for the victim, I mean child.

Muslims also have a ceremony associated with circumcisions that usually takes place in the first few years of a male child’s life. Some Muslims wait until the child reaches puberty or around the age of 10 to 12 years old to have the procedure.

Many people who are not associated with these religions will still have their child undergo circumcision. The procedure is seen as a way to avoid health problems and as a hygienic necessity. In fact as many as 80% of males in the USA are known to be circumcised.

Is this really a necessity? Does it really promote health in any way? Sadly the answer to both of these questions is no. Similar to many of the other pieces of misinformation that are floating around in society, circumcisions are in no way beneficial to anyone, under any circumstances.

The procedure certainly promotes a solid financial benefit to the doctors and other practitioners (such as the Jewish mohel). It doesn’t have any benefit to the child or receiver of the surgery. In fact it is just a form of mutilation that causes severe pain to the victim as well as long term psychological damage.

An 8 day old child is certainly not prepared to go through the pain and agony of having it’s most intimate part of it’s body mutilated. Especially not in front of many unfamiliar people, by a complete stranger. A young child is expecting to be held and nurtured as much as 24 hours a day.

In fact there is no part of the human body that doesn’t have a purpose. Scientists and doctors seem to believe that we have many extraneous parts on the body that have no purpose. Nature is not going to create anything on the body that has no purpose. Everything is there for a reason. The exact reason is not always obvious, but there is always a purpose for every part of our body.

Studies have shown that men who have their foreskin intact enjoy sex better than those who have been circumcised. Also their partner’s have more pleasure and less pain. The female vagina has been designed to accomodate a penis that still has the foreskin attached and not one that has been mutilated.

In fact some women experience severe pain and actually have their vaginas damaged by having sex with a man who has been circumcised. Nature is not flawed, nature is perfect, there are no extra body parts in any natural being.

If you are a believer in one of the religions that has the ritual of circumcision or if you are planning to have a child or already have a male child that has not been circumcised, please consider not performing this barbaric mutilation on your child. He will thank you in the future for your consideration.