RawVgn

I definitely notice a difference when I combine well. When I became raw, my system became much more sensitive to food. I think of a very sensitive digestive system, and nose, as good things: they are natures warning systems guiding me to greater health, vitality, and longevity. Like any serious practitioner, I have become attuned to my art-and I have robust health, to the depth of my being, to show for it.

Why should food combiners carry the burden of proof? Before people say food shouldn't be combined, they should present evidence or links. We provided links to evidence; if you bother to study it,maybe you'll decide you agree with us. Even if you don't, many of us are persuaded by it, and will continue to express our opinions. We certainly understand some peoples opinions differ from ours, but don't expect us to remain silent. Your post does not provide one detailed criticism of Food Combining Theory; it is mere summary opinion. I'm certainly not persuaded by it. Considering the huge quantity of protein he's ingesting, it alone could easily cause discomfort: protein imolecules invariably contain acid forming elements like sulphur and iodine, and they require an acidic stomach to digest. Eating large amounts of protein is a dangerous practice that increases the likelihood of degenerative diseases like arthritis, osteoporosis, kidney stones, and so on. You are advocating a known dangerous activity and providing no evidence to prove it's safe.

Richard Go to rawfoodexplained.com and read the sections on food combining; they discuss the differing physiological processes required to digest different macronutrients which drives food combining strategies.

Food combining systems are well developed in Natural Hygiene; like "I'm Your Man" says, different macronutrients require different physiological processes for digestion-protein digestion requires an acidic stomach, carb digestion requires amylase which is neutralized by even small amounts of acid. Given the acidic environment needed to digest proteins, it is easy to see how ingestioning huge amounts of protein would cause upset stomach especially if it's being combined with carbs. In order to maintain Ph balance, all that acid also has to be neutralized which creates a lot of buffer waste which overworks the kidneys and eventually toxifies the body. The originator of this thread should test his urine Ph and see if his body is becoming acidified-an early indication of many degenerative diseases. Urine Ph should be at least 6.8 or higher-use high resolution paper to test it as swimming pool type Ph paper will not read accurately to tenths. I wish people would be more civil in here; you can state your position without denigrating others.

Sounds like a recipe for kidney failure, arthritis, and osteoporosis! The body uses very little protein-it's a building block, not an energy source. It has been confirmed many times in studies that the body uses very little protein-you just piss the excess down the drain after overloading your kidneys and leeching calcium off your bones to neutralize all the acidic minerals in the protein. I put on muscle easily just by uping my protein to about 15 g a day-and I'm 6-1 and 168 pounds. 2 or 3 ounces of raw nuts a day is all you need; I put on a pound a week with just that, and I'm also 47 yrs old. I often limit myself to an ounce a day of nuts and all the rest fruit and greens because I don't want to get much bigger. Remember, if muscle was primarily put on by food, bodybuilders would be in the kitchen instead of the gym. Lift as heavy as you can to failure, get lots of rest and recover fully, and don't consume more than 15% of total calories from protein or fat-it'll just undermine your health and waste your money.

Awesome, I converted to veganism at 44 and raw vegan at 47; I had no problem switching; one day omni, the next vegan and never looked back. When I switched to raw, my health just improved off the charts. Welcome aboard!

Tests done by Nautilus show that everyone who used the technique I described became stronger; whether it's the best method for everyone is a different matter, but it is universally effective because we are all fundamentally the same, at a certain level (and of course Arnold is genetically gifted). Every tree in an oak forest is unique and everyone is simultaneously the same, depending on what level of detail, etc your looking at. In some caes seeing the similarities lets you see the big picture, in some caes the details of individual trees are more important; it just depends on what goals you have to determine the most useful perspective.

Dogs are not carnivores; they are true omnivores just like their genetic twins bears ( and very unlike humans: different tooth structure, jaw structure, facial musclature, color blind, short and smooth digestive track, ability to eat cholesterol w/o arteriosclerosis, different stomach acidity, and so on). Unlike cats which are true carnivores, dogs can thrive on both vegetarian and animal diets. Obviously, humans are far different than true omnivores like dogs aand bears: for example, our jaws move side-to-side so we can thoroughly mix digestive saliva into our food with extensive chewing and completely masticate it. Omnivores like dogs sheer food off in chunks (jaws only go up and down)and swallow it piecemeal because their digestive tracks are relatively short( prevents meat putrification) and their stomach acid is far stronger than ours and quickly breaks down anything including meat. Dogs and bears see in black and white; we see in color because it allows us to judge if our food is ready (ripeness). And so on.

Muscles don't grow during workouts; they grow during recovery. You would probably get stronger faster if you allow full recovery between workouts; overr exercising is a major problem for many bodybuilders. Arthur Jones (the inventor of Nautilus) used to publish a standing challenge in bodybuilding magazines: he guaranteede to add 1/2 an inch to anybodys biceps in 3 days, or he'd pay all their expenses to his facility for the challenge. He knew that almost all serious bodybuilders overtrain, so they'd get to Nautilus and he'd have them sit on their butts by the pool for 2 days. Then they'd do one very brief high intensity workout, rest another day and then be measured. Jones never lost the challenge!

There is a mountain of scientific evidence that proves raw fruitarian diets are optimal. We can debate it if you think your up to it? If you can't backup your opinions with quality arguments though, please don't waste my time. The sophmoric "bullshit" doesn't do anything for me. Anyone who switches from a fruitarian diet to one loaded with starches like carrots and yams is going to notice the difference; starches, combined with cellulose, are far more difficult to digest than fruit and will definitely slow down your metabolism. In addition to a loss of energy as the sugars can't reach your cells as readily, you should start having a fair amount of gas since cellulose encapsulated starches like roots, particularly raw, are very difficult to digest. Since they sit in the stomach and intestines so long they ferment creating alcohol that kills off your intestinal flora and creating gas, also backing up the fruit sugars that also begin fermenting. In order to protect themselves from the sharp insoluble fibers in the starches, the intestines also line themselves with mucus which reduces nutrient uptake.

Eat raw tree fruit-apples, oranges, nuts, pears, peaches, and so on. The US, and much of the world, have lost about a third of their agricultural topsoil in the past 2 centuries. On average, it takes about 1000 years for nature to make an inch of topsoil so it is essentially nonrenewable and going fast. Trees, unlike relatively shallow rooted annuals like grains and legumes, hold soil in place with their deep extensive root systems and do not require annual tilling. An acre of orchard produces about 35 times as much food as an acre of livestock agriculture and twice as much food as an acre of grain; if we all ate mostly raw fruit, most of the land now used to make food could be returned to its natural state supporting clean air, filtering water, containing topsoil, and supporting wildlife. We can literally save the planet by what we put on the ends of our forks!

Seems to me, if you don't want to be 100% raw then you should accept that you are choosing a suboptimal diet and should expect some detrimental consequences. No animal on the planet eats cooked food except for some humans. From one perspective, cooking food is just a way to eat foods, like grains and legumes, that we are not biologically suited to eat-if you doubt this, try eating wheat berries or kidney beans without cooking them. If your going to knowingly put stuff in your body that doesn't belong there, what can you expect? You already know you feel and perform great eating just fruits and greens, so do yourself and the planet a favor and stay raw.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)is the UN consortium that analyzes global warming; it includes all the worlds leading scientists working in the climate change area. They publish many, many papers (free online)discussing all aspects of climate change. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) published a 430 page report recently analyzing the environmental impacts of livestock agriculture: "Livestock's Long Shadow" also available as a free online download. One of its key conclusions: livestock agriculture is the second or third most environmentally destructive industry in the world! By simply changing to a plant based diet (preferably trees and not annuals), we can be far more ecologically sustainable.

For years, I had chronic pain in my wrist and elbow that often prevented me from lifting; it is, as you may know, a very common problem which worsens typically as people get older. While experimenting with a diet for another health issue, I inadvertently healed the joint pain. This is after going to 3 orthopedic specialists who did xrays and MRIs and eventually told me they didn't know what was causing it even though they could see the inflammation. There was nothing they could do. There is a theory in natural hygiene that says most degenerative (versus injury) joint pain is caused by acidic diets. Because our culture eats primarily acidic foods like meat or dairy or grain or legumes, our bodies become acidified over time. Our blood has a very narrow permissable Ph range so the acidity must be neutralized for us to remain alive. It's neutralized by leeching calcium (an alkaline mineral) off our bones. The resultant buffer waste , because our bodies are not designed to efficiently remove it, lodges in our soft tissue ( like our joints) causing arthritis and often kidney problems. In Natural Hygiene, the key biostatistic is body Ph; by testing your urine or saliva, you can infer your blood Ph. The way to keep your body Ph balanced, without creating abundant buffer wastes, is to greatly reduce acidic foods by switching to a fruit and non-starchy veggie (like lettuces and cabbages) based diet. Chronicly ill people, regardless of the condition, almost always have an acidic body Ph. When I followed this simple advice, the chronic joint pain I had suffered from for years, and which the medical "experts" could do nothing, began clearing up within several days. The rest of my health skyrocketed as well. rawfoodexplained.com is a good place to begin learning about the link between body Ph and health.

Thanks everyone for debating so civilly; I love VEGANS!

B12 is made by bacteria in the soil; if you ate like the rest of the anthropoids, our primate family, directly from nature with soil residue still on your fruit and greens, you would get adequate B12. All animal sget B12 from the soil just like plants are the only original source of protein: animals don't make it. There is massive evidence that humans are herbivores; many of us believe it is overwhelmingly conclusive which is why we eat vegan. If I believed I was inately omnivorous, like a cat is inately carnivorous, then it would be ethically necessary for me to eat animal products: if I was a biological omnivore then that's the only way I could be healthy. Nature dictates the proper diet for each species, based on the ecological niche they evolved in. We evolved in tropical forests on fruit and nuts and shoots. We are more than 98% genetically identical to bonobos and definitely have a recent common ancestor; bonobos eat fruit and shoots, just like chimps, orangatains, gorillas and the other members of our primate family. That some of our primate relatives very rarely eat minute amounts of animal products, usually when under severe habitat and food stress, does not change this fundamental fact of our nature. Of course, there are many additional lines of evidence, which I previously alluded to, which support the human herbivore theory. Finally, even a health vegan like myself can be an ethical vegan: I don't hunt or fish for entertainment, I don't buy leather products, or any other products that contain animals, and so on. To me, it is simply a coincidence of nature that my natural diet does not include animals, and I am deeply grateful to occupy such a potentially benign niche.

Heart disease and cancer are not very effective adaptations-both closely linked to eating animals. Humans, like all the other anthropoid primates, are herbivores: our genes , anatomy, physiology, and empirical epidemiology all prove it. Try to kill and eat a deer without tools of any kind-no fire or heat, no guns or spears or knives, no anything, just your hands and mouth. And if by some bizarre means you do succeed for an hour or two, without getting deathly sick from the mess, try repeating it everyday year in and year out! We evolved eating raw fruit and green leafy veggies and some occasional nuts; try eating just these natural foods for a few weeks and watch how your health and vigor soar. Like most animals in nature, we occupy a pretty narrow evolutionary food nitch: lions eat meat, cows eat grass, and anthropoids, like humans, eat "fruit and shoots."

I personally would not discount a well documented theory so readily. We are the same species and our bodies all work in fundamentally the same fashion, so we are far more the same than different. But, that's just my opinion, though it's widely shared in scientific circles. I certainly agree with you about the lifting heavy part; keeping up full intensity is one of the keys to growth, and single sets to failure always keep this fact front and center!

There is a theory that says any set you do that is not to complete failure is a waste of time if your trying to get stronger: if you're doing a "light" routine, then your working at less than full capacity, lets say for argument sake 80%. By working at 80%, 100% of your muscles do not work at 80%. rather 80% of your muscle fibers work at 100% and 20% of them work barely at all. Why would your muscles be stimulated to grow from such a workout if they already have 20% capacity that's not being used? To build muscle, you must fully recruit the entire muscle so the body knows that more muscle must be built to meet demand. That means working to failure on every single set. There is another theory that says doing split routines is ineffective; working the whole body at each workout creates the chemical environment the body needs to build muscle. The Nautilus company tested these Theories years ago strength training collegiate football teams and found them to be very effective. Ellington Darden's book "The New High Intensity Traing" explains these ideas, and others, very well. It's a great read and I've found it's techniques to be simple, quick, and effective; after reading it, I cut my time in the gym from about 4 hours a week to 75 minutes and have been making consistent strenngth gains ever since! To some of us, lifting is not about frequency or duration; it's about INTENSITY. If your intense enough, you can't spend much time in the gym because you just can't do anymore that workout and you need to recover for a few days.

Alright, first time I've run into another vegan family! My 9 and 11 yr olds are thriving on a vegan/raw vegan diet. CYA

IMO (obviously) supplements are a waste of money; eat only the right things to begin with and you'll achieve better long term health. Health isn't so much about what you put in your body as what you don't pollute it with so it's inate excellence can shine through. Don't imagine for a moment that all our little chemical inventions can improve on nature's genious and millions of years of evolutionary design and building. Read Douglas Graham's book "The 80/10/10 Diet" and start getting a feel for just how far we have strayed from nature's plan for us, and how we can optimize our health all naturally without synthetic junk.

The Natural Hygienest school I belong too, would say that our bodies are brilliant biological creations that took millions of years to design and perfect. They are capable of ideal health when left to their own devices and not undermined by what we put in our bodies. If we feed our bodies only what they're designed for, raw fruit and greens, thereby avoiding toxemia, our natural systems will provide the proper biological response and recovery. In my own high-intensity practice, I am amazed at how very fast I recover-and I'm 47-without taking any supplements or additives of any kind.

Hope you get Dr Graham's book too; being raw is easy, but there are definately some things you want to know-adding greens to the diet for bulk and minerals, details you want to understand in the long run. Hope you have a lot of fun with it; ain't nothin to it once ya get the hang of it, and raw low-fat will give you really superior health. I can talk for hours about the benefits of raw, but anyone who's really interested should just read Graham's book and study material on rawfoodexplained.com. So did you eat fruit today? Pack it in so you start getting a feel for how much to eat; it's a lot different mind set than eating cooked, caloricly dense food that's usually had most of its water removed by heating/cooking. Most of us eat so much raw fruit and greens that we don't drink ANY fluids; it's all provided in our food, just like chimps in the wild. If you manage to keep the fats down, you should feel a big surge in energy and strength as the sugar energy begins moving very efficiently into your cells. And don't worry if you get some detox symptoms; most people who go straight from the SAD to raw low-fat do. Just be patient and they'll eventually subside. Any small nagging health problems you might have-poor skin, a bad joint, and so on-often begin to clear up within a few days of dropping cooked food too. Raw is an awesome journey! Ask if you have any questions; it don't take but a few minutes to churn out an answer.

Eat fruit! Alot of us raw vegans eat mountains of fruit; veggies have very low caloric density and don't cut it as a raw vegan (you'd have to eat 40 heads of lettuce to get a days worth of calories.) When your raw, you GOTTA think fruit: bananas, melons, apples, grapes, oranges, grapefruit...and you gotta eat them in bulk. My 4 person vegan household goes through more than 200 lbs of fruit a week! Fruit is mostly water, so you have to eat A LOT of it to make your calories for the day. I don't know how big you are, or active, so I can't tell you specifically how many calories you need to eat. However, as a general rule, a person must eat 10 times their weight in pounds for base metabolism ( if you weigh 175 that's 1750 calories) plus about another 50% for moderate daily activity. So figure about 2500 cals a day if your 175 and mostly fit. That's the equivalent of nearly 35 bananas a day, and you'll probably still loose a lot of weight as your body adapts to healthier raw food. I strongly suggest keeping the fats down, particularly since you want to get cut. Many of us limit fats to no more than 10% of calories a day. That's eating 1 tablespoon of nutbutter (not peanut butter, it's roasted) or 1 ounce of raw nuts a day; fruits average about 5% fat so you can only add another 5% of fats overtly to reach 10%. Finally, get Dr Douglas Graham's book "The 80/10/10 Diet." Going raw is a big step and to be successful it requires a good plan: your heart is in the right place, but you need to be more sophisticated in your head.

Diet has always been the key to weight loss and getting ripped for me. Eat nothing but raw fruit and greens for a few weeks; you'll loose the extra pounds without breaking a sweat while catching up on much needed rest or sleep; don't work hard, work smart. Most of the cops I see aren't in real good shape; I routinely see obese ones! They dominate mostly with superior communications, numbers, fire power, and public confidence (often misplaced.)