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I tend to be a loner, but two companions I’d love to live with for the rest of my life are the sweet Bird of Youth and the Spring of Joy.

Youth is fleeting. We can’t keep it, and there’s no pill for old age.

But happiness? Ah, joy we can experience until our last breath. Is there a source of happiness? Somewhere we can drink and never thirst again?

One thing I noticed as a teenage bibliophile is that everyone thinks they’ve found the source. Whatever book I was reading, the author sincerely believed THIS IS IT. My revelation came when reading Herman Wouk’s book on Judaism. I realized he was as passionate about his religion as Protestants and Muslims, Catholics and Hindus are of theirs.

Whatever I read in my youth, they told me they were The Secret, The Absolute Truth. Encounter groups (Here Comes Everybody by William Schutz), primal screaming (Arthur Janov) – you name it, it was the answer.

The raw food movement does the same. There are high priests who dedicate themselves full-time to the religion and preach the word that if you don’t go 100% raw, you’ll never be happy. Heaven is in raw foods.

At first I bought into it – just as I did the day I stepped through AA’s doors, I bought into their religion, that if I did not attend meetings for the rest of my life, I’d go out and drink again. It took me a year to realize it was a lie (for me).

Balanced Biochemistry, that’s what it’s all about – whether you’re recovering from alcohol addiction or junk food slavery.

If you love 100% raw, good for you! But don’t guilt-trip yourself into a *must.* ALL-raw is not the entire source of Healthy and Happy.

It does NOT take 100% raw foods to balance your biochemistry. Yes, it DOES take green juices. It DOES take blended greens, with a focus on LIVING greens. It DOES take forcing yourself to go on fasts where you eat vegan whole foods only, or all-raw, for a day, 3 days, 10 days, a month, 6 months. So your cells have a chance to cleanse and rebuild, to gain the strength to stand up to whatever oddities you eat.

The problem is PACKAGED food, machine-processed food – not home-cooked food. Machines mangle the molecules into shapes our enzymes can’t lock onto. So we can’t digest or assimilate them. They end up as toxins in our tissues.

Buy plenty of raw plant foods, eat in a salad, and blend, juice, or cook them on low heat – to convert the starch to glucose and extract the nutrients from the fiber (cellulose). This is called the WAVE diet – Wholefood And Vegan Eating.

There are SO MANY doctors healing with the WAVE diet, and have been for decades. Modern humans are 70,000 years old and have clearly thrived on WAVE up to the advent of machines in the 1700’s. All humans untouched by The Machine, still thrive on WAVE today – raw fruits + vegetables with cooked starches, and the occasional animal (but in our society, we treat birds and animals too cruelly to eat them).

To preach “all cooked food is poison” is to fly in the face of epidemiological evidence – the actual experience of happily living human beings.

WAVE is called the RAVE diet too, which is a negative way of saying the same thing – NO Refined foods, NO Animal products, NO Vegetable oils heated, NO Exceptions – R-A-V-E. The ravediet.com DVD is the best for lending out – doctors supporting a plant-centered diet.

Even leading rawfood preacher Doug Graham writes in his book, The 80/10/10 Diet that if you can’t eat the 80% sweet fruits he advises, then it’s better to eat cooked vegetables + grains, than to eat raw nuts + dried fruits. His actual words are:

 “If high-fat raw or low-fat cooked seem your only options, choose the low-fat option every time.”

Personally I don’t have time or cash to shop for so much fruit. And my teeth don’t enjoy it. Today it’s winter in South Africa. One lightly cooked butternut (or equal quantity pumpkin or squash) fills me up in the evening, together with a packet of raw greens – baby spinach is my favorite. To get the same satisfied feeling (glucose) from fruit that my butternut gives, I’d need to eat 5-6 fruits, say 2 papaya (SA’s winter fruit) and 3 bananas. That’s five times more shopping. As for cost, one papaya at a $1 costs 10 times more than one butternut at a dime.

I love to simmer sliced butternut for a few minutes, switch it off, add onion and sweet red pepper sliced, then leave it to soften together 5 or 10 minutes while I make the animals their food. Then I may enjoy it whole with vegetable salt, or blend it with raw hot red pepper for one fiery soup. It’s tasty and quicker to make than any rawfood meal!

I myself experience the most energy and balance when I eat 80% raw in winter, and 95% in summer. I evolved into that over ten years or so. I eat party food when I need to party. It can be as simple as taking my 89-year-old mom out for tea. She orders scone with jam + cream, I order apple strudel. Once you’re free of the addiction, sugar no longer controls you. You’re free to choose your actions.

All that’s needed is to reach a certain level of biochemical balance. You know you’ve reached balance when you have no binge reaction the day after. All you want is your fresh fruit + greens. That omnipotent demon (imbalanced biochemistry) that once picked you up by the scruff of your neck and made you buy junk food or liquor, is gone.

When I force myself to do 100% raw when I don’t want raw, then I get crochety and uptight. Because it is a religion. And it’s a religion that doesn’t fit into my social world. None of my friends or family are vegetarian even, let alone rawfooders! Personally I don’t enjoy the hours in a kitchen that all-raw takes. Food must serve me. I don’t want to be its slave.

I’m wary of religions. CONSCIOUSNESS is the purpose of human life. We measure our existence between two doors – the entry door and the departure door. Yet there is another door for humans – the door of self-discovery.

We create religions to give us eternal life. But that LIFE is discovered step-by-step one day at a time, when we walk the path of self-discovery.

The more we open up to releasing our true selves, at our pace in our unique way in multi-faceted ways, the happier we grow. Raw food is a sparkling part of that growth. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.

Life is an ocean of love and peace when you’re gentle with yourself. You float on waves of love.

More about the sources of happiness in my next blog…

Before you think of trying the low-fat high-fruit diet, currently known as:

• the 80/10/10 diet or 811, or
• the fruitarian diet

please read the stories of those whose hair and teeth fell out, trying the 80/10/10 diet, at rawfood author Rhio’s site, rawfoodinfo.com.

Click on “Hotline” then under January 2006 you’ll see it begins with “Fruitarian Diet and 80/10/10 Fruitarian Diet - Part 1″ and continues in each issue (05/06, 11/06, 01//07).

On a fruitarian diet, hair and teeth can fall out from fatty acid deficiency. Our brain is king. From its earliest days when still in the foetus, it begins to take control and stand first in line for nutrients. With the 80/10/10 diet, the brain is grabbing for itself the minimalist fats coming in, while hair and teeth get short-changed.

The 80/10/10 diet tries to turn the king into a pauper. It ignores the HUGE needs of our human brain for unsaturated plant fats. Read this page in the September 2000 issue of Nutrition Science News.

Our brain invests heavily in fats. It uses saturated fats for the insulating material round our nerve fibers (myelin sheath) and uses highly unsaturated fats for the signaling structures (neurons) and billions of neurotransmitter sites (dendrites) – “neither protein nor carbohydrate have this same wide physical versatility” (Michael Crawford and David Marsh in Nutrion and Evolution).

The 80/10/10 diet claims that glucose is the brain’s primary fuel. It fails to mention that the fuel is useless without the structures, and they are built with fats.

EATING RAW: DIETARY SOURCES FOR UNSATURATED FATS

Today you don’t need shell-fish and wild game for your polyUFAs (Unsaturated Fatty Acids). In fact a seed milk or yogurt four days a week, coupled with an avocado or raw olives or a handful of nuts daily, should meet all your needs. If you like cold-pressed oil, then a little olive or flax oil is fine.

When you don’t eat enough UFAs, you get irritable, feel stressed, and over-react to small things. Your brain is not getting the nutrients it needs to respond to the bombardment of external stimuli. Your finger-nails and hair may turn brittle, and your skin dry.

You know your hair grows thicker when you drink seed milks. In fact, since I gave up saturated fats (cheese) my hair is turning brown again. Meat, fish and bird I stopped in 1972, but cheese only this year in January (2007).

Plant fats help me to feel happy and balanced. I consciously make two seed yogurts every Monday, eat them by Thursday, then I may make more yogurt or I’ll drink 2 seed milks between Thursday and Monday.

THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF THE 80/10/10 DIET

It’s so seductive, eat sweet fruits! Who wouldn’t be tempted? It makes health sound so easy – eat fruit all day with some greens for supper. Keep fats from nuts, seeds, avocado and olives to an all-time low.

The fruitarian 80/10/10 diet has been around a long time – first popularized by Herbert Shelton in 1937 – and continues to this day in the Natural Hygiene movement. It’s so pervasive, even popping up in best-sellers like Marilyn & Harvey Diamonds Fit For Life.

It claims that: “man is naturally frugivorous” and “sweet fruits give the greatest amount of nourishment for the least amount of digestive strain” (Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Food and Nutrition, 1937).

More recently, Douglas Graham writes in The 80/10/10 Diet (2006):

“In nature, humans would be frugivores only. A frugivore is a creature that lives primarily on fruits, with the addition of tender greens … Fruits are replete with the nutrients our bodies require – in the proportions that we need them.”

80/10/10 DIET IGNORES OUR HUMAN BRAIN

The 80/10/10 diet is based on a totally unproven premise that we humans once swung happily from tree to shining tree like chimps. Therefore fruit and green leaves are our natural diet.

The proven truth-to-date is that when humans first appear in the archeological record 75,000 years ago, they are eating a diet of 50% or more fat, mainly from shell-fish and fish. I’m contacting the scientist leading this dig, to ask him the exact percentages.

It’s this polyunsaturated fat that built our brain! The one organ which separates us from all other species.

Because chimps and other apes eat fruit and green leaves, they are stuck poking sticks down a termite hole. While your brain just built a spaceship that’s on its way into the outer solar system, due to arrive on Pluto in 2015.

Yes I eat fruit and LIVING baby greens every single day, either blended in a Green Smoothie or in salad. But I also consciously ensure I get my polyUFAs.

The 80/10/10 Diet does not work because it’s extremist and unbalanced. We are not built to eat 80% of our calories as carbohydrates in the form of fruit, that’s about 60% by volume. Nearly 60% of your brain is unsaturated fat, not fruit sugar!

I’m writing an eBook on Fats – what fats we need, why we need them, how much (definitely a variable of daily activity) and where to get them. Also includes fats in the history of human diet. If you’d like a copy, please be sure to subscribe to this blog by feed or by email.