Some people make it seem that it is "healthier" to add some cooked food to a raw food diet. But when investigating their evidence it shows them adding only about a ten percent addition of cooked food to the diet to get this "extra nutrition". They can't get enough calories to combat their "malnourishment" so they add some cooked food. Ten percent. If all they needed was ten percent, then it is not a major problem. If they needed forty or fifty percent or eighty percent then it would be a problem. They also say that eating a high sweet fruit diet provides too much sugar and will cause problems. They also said in one person's experience that after two years of eating a high fruit diet they had some problems. Well, I have been raw or ten years (vegan for 25) and it does take time to transition. I would not have been ready for a 100% raw primarily fruit diet right away, coming from a standard American diet, albeit vegan for 15 years before I went raw. I would no sooner make such a drastic diet change as I would add a hundred pounds to a weight training exercise suddenly!
In addition, you can easily cut and balance the sweet content of a fruit meal by adding celery or lettuce, or make sure that you are eating enough of these other foods at another meal. Eating ten percent more or even twenty percent more cooked greens or vegetables is not an option if genuine health is your goal.
Experience has taught me that transitioning to a good thing is key. Moving forward on a regular basis is what striving is all about, a respected quality in our society. To say that eating cooked food can somehow improve your health does not take into consideration those people who are actually improving their health, and moving our society slowly forward to better health in the generations to come. Why must we fall victim to mediocre? Good, honest and intelligent raw foodists are not in denial. Those who say that adding cooked food are. Of course, those who are fanatical about cooked or raw, in my opinion are defined as those who are not following the fundamentals of nutrition but instead bring "morality" or "culture" into the argument instead of the basic biological framework that creates the best diet for humans past or present. We should eat according to our original design principles, not based on opinion.
Chris Califano
