Raw vegan diet 🍏🍄🍇🍍

Has anyone here ever tried the raw vegan diet? If so, how was it? Or is it? I'm curious.

[Betha]

I have not but I have a friend who did it and it really helped! I got the woman's name who is helping him and I need to reach out

[Hidden in reply to Betha]

Oh cool! Thats awesome, you should definitely give it a try ☺ I think I'm going to look into it and inform myself, maybe give it a go 👍

[BadHare]

I know several vegan people who rave about eating everything raw, Some use a very expensive >£400 blender & drink most of their food, some use dessicators. They insist they feel better, but then I hear they've binged on chips, crisps, cake, & vegan junk food that I wouldn't let past my lips. Only one friend does this type of diet properly, & says she feels better than when she ate a healthy vegetarian diet, but it's a lot of effort & very expensive.

[Hidden in reply to BadHare]

Well, I know I can't do expensive. Thank you for commenting ☺ It seems like a hard diet, that's for sure.

[benwl in reply to Hidden]

I don't think it needs to be that complicated or expensive.

I'm assuming if you are vegan already you're already eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and taking a b12 supplement.

Most fruit you probably already have raw. The non starchy vegetables (eg peppers, tomatoes, carrots, broccoli, spinach) you might normally cook with just need to go into salads instead.

The 'difficult' bit is going to be replacing the grains, pulses and starchy vegetables that probably form the bulk of your calorie intake. The options here are probably fruit (ie increasing your fruit consumption) and/or nuts and seeds with the ratio of them determined by how keen you are in keeping your fat intake low, so all fruits would be similar to a standard low fat plant based diet, and all nuts and seeds a sort of raw vegan paleo.

Having written that, i'm actually getting tempted to try it myself

[Hidden in reply to benwl]

Let's do it together! I'm up for it ☺ I think I'd like it. Plus, its always nice to have a buddy to diet with 😉

[benwl in reply to Hidden]

Yes that's a good idea, I'll start stocking up on fruit

[Hidden in reply to benwl]

Cool ☺👍 I'm going grocery shopping this weekend, so I'll get some fruits and veggies.

[deejames]

That precise a diet needs very careful planning and monitoring. I believe that eating a proportion of raw food is excellent but cannot see why all food should be in its raw state. It limits the food groups considerably. It is many thousands of years since humans discovered that cooking made food more digestible. We have the ability now to cook our raw ingredients. Why turn our back on that and replace it with an electric blender turning food into mush.

Dee

[BadHare in reply to deejames]

Some fruit & veg such as tomatoes & carrots, contain nutrients that are realeased during cooking, but also some that heat will destroy.

[benwl]

From a health perspective, a lot depends on your current diet. You should be able to get all or almost all the same benefits with any plant based or vegan diet without needing to go to the extreme of having everything raw.

But I don't see any harm in trying it for a bit if you are curious

[Hidden in reply to benwl]

I'm vegan now, I thought it might be fun to switch things up and do it raw. I might try it out, even if its for a couple weeks, ya know? ☺ good to try new things.

[BadHare in reply to Hidden]

No harm in giving it a go for a few days or weeks, whilst there's plenty of seasonal fruit & veg available. Your body will soon tell you if it feels wrong. Make sure you include lots of sprouting beans for protein, & that you're not missing out on B12.

All I want when the weather's as hot as this, is fruit, kefir, nuts & seeds, so I'm almost raw during summer. I like a smoothie, but drinking everything I eat could get a bit tedious. It's supposed to release more enzymes, but think that's hype from the manufacturers of vitamix.

[Hidden]

I have mixed feelings about this as on one level it appears healthy but eating only raw foods means you're also eating anti nutrients, which's basically a plants ways of protecting themselves from predators (being eaten) Phytic acid/phytates are the most common and our fore fathers/mothers knew how to neutralise them, here's a link about anti-nutrients

livingfullynourished.com/ne...

And here's a link about phytic acid/phytates:

authoritynutrition.com/phyt...

[benwl in reply to Hidden]

Interesting articles, although unless I was particularly sensitive I think the benefits of the nutrients outweighs the disadvantages of the anti-nutrients.

Although some plants have evolved protection against being eaten, many fruits for example specificaly evolved to be eaten, and as a species we've had lots of time to co-evolve adaptations to a plant based diet.

[Hidden in reply to benwl]

Hi benwl, I agree that someone who eats just raw food is unlikely to be over fed and under nourished and when you look at highly processed junk food with little nutritional value there's no contest, however if we the consumer are aware of anti nutrients then we can have the best of all worlds...

[benwl in reply to Hidden]

Good point - the anti nutrient concept is not something I've paid much attention to so far.

Just goes to show there are trade offs to be made even when eating "healthy" food, and the idea that natural food must be healthy by definition is too simplistic.

[suramo Star]

Hidden

I tried it very long back. Believe me I could not survive for a single day. By the evening I felt so weak and hungry and giddi that I had to rush to take some food. It's called naturopathic diet. I don't think diet is good enough .