Intuition marries science in this little diet dispute
by Cassie J. Moore
I became a vegan about two years ago. I was visiting a friend in Boone, N.C., and we were sprawled out on her couch after tearing up some Ben & Jerry's. That weekend, hippies of varying degrees had surrounded me. There were good-looking hippies whose parents were rich. There were angry hippies who protested the SUV's that the former group drove. And there were vegan hippies. I contemplated their super-vegetarian lifestyle while my stomach negotiated lactose overload, then came home and tried it.
Other than some stolen bites of gelato in Boston, and an accidental piece of chicken at Stir Fry Cafe, I have more or less maintained the no-meat, no-cheese, no-milk thing. I thought I was pretty radical. I was wrong.
The raw-food diet has recently come up strong on my celebrity-media radar. I heard Demi Moore is a disciple. Alicia Silverstone does it. There's this skinny, tan guy named Juliano in California who allegedly gets paid $1,000 per day to not cook for celebrities. Raw enthusiasts eat fresh, organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and sprouts. And that's about it. It's extreme; but the Atkins diet seemed equally extreme when it gained popularity in the late nineties. And anyway, I am attracted to the extremity. It seems spare, holy, the kind of thing that will empty me out and simultaneously give me Buddha peace and dewy skin.
So I pick a week when my boyfriend and my stepdad, both excellent cooks, are out of town. I hit up the produce section of Kroger, alone and determined.
The first day was smooth sailing. I was in Birmingham, on a job interview, with fruit and cashews stashed in my car. For lunch I stopped at the Golden Temple Cafe, and had a delicious tofu salad. For dinner, more nuts, a grapefruit, and some grapes. No problem. Right?
Wrong again. I had a funny feeling about that tofu. I posted a query on the raw food Yahoo group I had just joined, and got a clipped response. "Peter" let me know, in no uncertain terms, that tofu is "fermented—not raw!"
Thus chastened, I searched out knowledgeable folk. I needed books. At Borders I found a book called Dining in the Raw, by Rita Romano. The book was published back in 1992, so I guess my new idea wasn't so new after all. The idea of eating raw has been around as long as humans have, gaining and then losing popularity as tastes or technologies change. No matter, it's back now, and I am riding the wave.
Romano says the point of eating raw foods is to take in enzymes, which assist in digestion and vitamin absorption, and which are destroyed in cooking. Romano also covers sprouting, or germination, which converts proteins and starches to a "higher quality protein source." And you can sprout lots of stuff—lentils, radishes, pumpkin seeds. As my stomach growls, I silently beg Romano, "Just tell me what I can eat!" I flip the pages hurriedly, an obsessed, big-eyed fad eater.
An oven-less rice pudding calls to me. So does a dehydrator-made falafel. Dehydrators have a place in the raw foodist's kitchen, as long as they don't heat over 115 degrees. I jot recipes quickly and head on to Nature's Pantry for seeds.
Days pass. I eat breakfasts of apples, salad lunches with cold-pressed olive oil. I turn off the air conditioning in my room to facilitate the sprouting of the slimy garbanzo beans and fenugreek seeds that are now spread around in colanders on my nightstand and dresser. I rinse, I repeat. I want a beer.
I try to make hummus with the sprouted garbanzos, and fail. I eat molasses and realize my mistake. It seems the only rooms I spend time in are the bathroom and the kitchen. I'm tired. Seeds of rebellion are germinating faster than my fenugreek when, on the fifth day of raw-ism, I meet with Dr. Michael B. Zemel, Professor of Nutrition and Medicine and Director of The Nutrition Institute at UT.
What are the possible advantages of a raw food diet? "On the face of it, none," he says, and I feel at once frustrated and vindicated. I don't have to do it anymore.
He concedes that raw food would aid weight loss.
"At one level, if you limit yourself to just raw foods, because of the volume per calorie, your likelihood of overeating is vastly diminished," he says. "You are cutting out many, many choices—some of which are good, healthy choices, and some of which are problematic. And so from that perspective, your risk of excessive weight gain and all of the diseases associates with it are probably diminished."
But Zemel insists that an overweight person could take a much less drastic approach with similar results. And with extensive obesity studies under his belt, I believe him.
Zemel's main concerns: that a 100 percent raw food diet limits variety, and lack of variety can lead, ironically, to nutrient deficiency. He is also concerned about raw parents.
"What I worry about most is some well-meaning set of parents who decide not only is this good for me, it is good for my growing child," he says.
I go home that night and uncork a bottle of pinot noir, down half of it with a slab of tofu, and make cookies the next day. I am back to the "monster" of "cooked-food addiction," as Yahoo group Doug calls it. And I have no regrets.
Until the day after that, when I meet petite, soft-spoken Crystal Brooks, who is 25 and teaches raw-food classes at Nature's Pantry. Brooks gives me an orange-banana smoothie and tells her story.
She hands over a picture of herself three years ago. She sat in a wheelchair, pushed by her husband. Her thighs were twigs, her face sunken. I wince.
"I was deathly ill and the doctors only expected me to live for another month. There wasn't much that they could do, so they told me to see what I could find out in the alternative realm to help myself," she says. "My whole body swelled, I lost massive amounts of weight. I couldn't open my mouth to chew food, I couldn't think, I slept 15 to 20 hours a day. So I did anything and everything I could come up with. I didn't have a choice."
Brooks never got a definite diagnosis on her mysterious illness. She tried raw food because she'd heard about its healing benefits at the Living Foods Institute in Atlanta. She entered the Institute last August on crutches; she was walking free in a month. A course at the Institute taught her how to prepare foods, along with the nutritional theory behind the diet.
"I have steadily improved," she says, and I smile at her and silently thank all the little bananas that made her healthy again. She has been 75 percent raw for a year and just recently switched to 100 percent raw.
"I play tennis every opportunity I get, and now my goal is not to get well, because I've already gotten well. My goal is to feel the best that I can feel and have the most energy and just be the best me," she says.
Brooks is also a mother. I gently ask about her 17-month-old girl, Skylar. Brooks breast-fed Skylar until she was one; now the baby eats a 100 percent raw food diet.
More photographs materialize, and the chubby, pink-faced, blue-eyed baby seems perfect to me.
"She is growing like a weed, and I've taken her to the doctor for her checkups, and they've consistently told me that she's one of the healthiest babies they've ever seen," says Brooks.
But this was one area where Zemel was uncompromising.
"A child, per pound of body weight, has a whole lot more demand on the nutritional environment, than you or I do. Almost inevitably this would result in a failure to thrive. This type of diet will not support the needs of a growing child," he says.
Since Skylar is taken regularly for a checkup, I hope her pediatrician will be vigilant of any health problems. And I really hope the baby continues to thrive.
Brooks takes me through recipes she likes, how her husband converted from a daily meat eater to raw, and benefits she didn't expect.
"My allergies have gone away...my energy has been raised, my thinking is so much clearer than it was before, my memory is a lot better. It's great," she says.
She says it takes more than a diet, however, to stay healthy.
"Raw food on top of positive thinking, on top of exercise, on top of fresh air and fresh sunlight and good quality water, all those things work together beautifully," she says.
She ends our interview by hugging me.
So. I am relieved that the raw situation is not all or nothing. I can marry intuition and science. While Zemel and Brooks would certainly have points of contention with each other, I don't find fault with either. Zemel is only worried that people will ignore nutrition in the face of a fad. Brooks believes raw food has helped saved her life, and I am not about to argue.
Personally, I am at peace with the raw food movement. I may try it a little longer, with allowances for vegan cookies and tofu. I lost maybe a pound, and didn't notice any remarkable physical changes, but paying so much attention to what goes into my mouth has made me profoundly thankful for each bite. I'll never look at a banana in quite the same way.
July 31, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 31
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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