High Raw vs 100% Raw Food

Currently, I am of the belief that high-raw diet is a better diet than 100% raw. This is partly due to reading Frederic Patenaude's book: Raw Food Controversies. Patenaude explains that based on his experience of being a raw foodist for decades, it is easier to secure calories from cooked complex carbohydrates than it is from raw food only (e.g. by eating copious amounts of fruit).

Human body's main energy sources are the macronutrients: carbohydrates (sugar), fat, and protein. However, excess fat and protein intake has been deemed by many raw foodists as harmful. So the approach of eating some cooked complex and wholefood carbohydrates seems to make sense to satisfy our needs for calories. Especially because I live in a Northern climate, where the quality and availability of fruit (another form of carbohydrates) is quite limited in the winter.

Even if you are against eating grains - following the advice of someone like Dr. Peter Glidden - you can still eat cooked sweet potato and yam to get your non-raw carbohydrates.

I will try a gluten and wheat free diet for a while during my next raw food diet trial but will most likely include some non-gluten grains both in their sprouted and cooked form.

I do believe that for many reasons a raw food diet is fundamentally better for you than a cooked food diet. These reasons include cellular level biology, toxins created by cooking, and the benefits of enzymes and chi-energy lifeforce (scalar energy) present in fresh and live raw foods. And cooked foods, by contrast, are often denatured and harmful.

But at the same time it would seem to me that many of the benefits of raw foods can be achieved through a high-raw diet and including a little bit of cooked foods for comfort and convenience would not harm. Additionally, no 100% raw foodist is truly 100%, although some rare individuals may come close. In any case, I may change my mind about this in the future but for now, this is the ideology I base my next trial on.

Keep in mind, however, that generally raw foods are much superior to cooked foods for many reasons, such as their high-mineral content, high vitamin-content, high protein content (greens), enzymes, probiotics, lack f toxins and lack of denaturation.
This is what Jinjee Talifero writes about the topic on her blog, and I agree:

"True, plants have 'enzymes' which can also be called 'life force' [...]. But this 'life force' is more than just enzymes, though they may be the essential element. There is the water-content, vitamins, minerals, as well as electrolytes and other phytonutrients and nanonutrients that are only just beginning to be discovered with high-powered microscopes."

"Cooked food is denatured, which means that the nutrients in it have been compromised, or are no longer structured in their natural or original state. When you heat a food it generates numerous dangerous toxins within that food. The FDA states this very clearly on the toxicology section of their website.[...] Upon heating macronutrients, carbohydrates usually become carcinogens (which means 'cancer causing'), proteins can become free-radicals, and fats often become trans-fats. The list of toxins generated when heating any food is unbelievably long. Cooking generates literally hundreds of toxins. The body's response is to treat the food as it would a virus, and your immune system kicks in every time you eat cooked food, becoming entirely overworked."
- Jinjee Talifero

Best Raw Food Diet Books

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More raw food diet books, including summaries of the content, here.

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