Raw Foods — The Balancing Act
Today’s Dietitian
By Kate Jackson
Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 42

Raw foods can be great for healthful eating, but some nutrients may be more beneficial in cooked foods. Don’t go overboard. Balance is key.

Eat it raw” was once something of a curse, an odd expression about which only one thing was clear: Eating it raw wasn’t a thing to be desired. Today, it’s an invitation to a way of dining that’s believed by many to be supremely healthful. A vibrant movement has grown around a passion for eating food as nature delivers it—fresh and uncooked.

Understandably, you may be conjuring images of grassy, grainy, sprouting foods washed down by carrot or celery juice—less-than-tasty morsels not deserving of the label of cuisine. But the fare of the raw food movement is most definitely not your father’s health food. Renee Loux Underkoffler is a raw foods chef and author of Living Cuisine: The Art and Spirit of Raw Foods, a new cookbook that puts a gourmet spin on time-tested healthy ingredients and minimal preparation. Raw foods, she explains, “is based on whole, unprocessed, unpasteurized, uncooked foods—vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and grains that have been sprouted and that haven’t been treated with heat or processing.” The approach to eating is based on the premise that all nutrients, minerals, vitamins, and enzymes are heat-sensitive, she explains, and deleteriously affected by heat above approximately 110°.

The Good
The staples of raw foods, writes Underkoffler, are “fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh juices, nuts and seeds, sprouted beans and grains, fermented and cultured foods, and low-temperature dehydrated crackers, breads, and treats…” To some, the raw foods movement seems a bit marginal, but its main ingredients are fairly universally accepted as some of the most nutritious substances available. Thus, says Amy Lanou, PhD, nutrition director for the Physicians Community for Responsible Medicine and author of Healthy Eating for Life for Children, “Raw foods are a step in the right direction.”

“As dietitians, we constantly recommend that clients have five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, which is a challenging goal to achieve,” says Claudia Gonzales, RD, a dietitian in private practice in Miami and a national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. One of the positive things about a largely raw food diet, she says, is that it makes it quite easy for people to consume an adequate amount of this important food group. An emphasis on fruits and vegetables is low in calories, high in fiber, and rich in phytochemicals and antioxidants.

With all these benefits, what’s not to like?

A Raw Deal?
Do raw foods have a dark side? Not really, suggest dietitians. There are not too many negatives to tally when weighing the pros and cons of raw foods, unless devotion to them is taken to the extreme. When raw foods become a way of life and are consumed to the exclusion of other foods, experts argue, the benefits may diminish and some hazards may arise.

Says Lanou, “There’s evidence that some of the nutrients found in plant foods are actually better absorbed or better utilized if the food has been cooked.” By way of example, she points to tomatoes. “You get more lycopene from tomato sauce, ketchup, or pizza than you do from a similar amount of sliced fresh tomato.” This is also true of vegetables in the cabbage family. “They’re wonderful for you, not only full of phytonutrients but also very rich in calcium and cancer-
fighting properties,” she explains, adding that many people, however, can’t easily digest raw cabbage family vegetables and so would be likely to avoid them and miss out on those nutrients.

Another drawback to a diet made up exclusively of raw foods, says Lanou, is that for many people it might be composed largely of fruits and nuts, and therefore would be high in sugar and fat. Such a diet would tend, as well, to be low-calorie, which could be a mixed blessing. For individuals who eat only or virtually only raw foods, says Gonzales, a daily calorie intake might be as low as 800 to 1,000 calories, which isn’t enough for good health or energy maintenance. With such a limited intake, supplementation may be necessary, which, suggests Gonzales, is just another way of saying there’s a hole in your diet.

In the Balance
“It definitely makes sense to have some portion of your diet come in through raw food,” says Lanou, who says it makes less sense for all of your diet to be composed of raw foods. “You don’t have to go to extremes to have a healthy diet,” says Gonzales. By eating only raw foods, she suggests, people could lose a lot of nutrients. It isn’t necessary or advisable to cut out entire food groups or cooked food just in an effort to be healthy. While acknowledging the wholesomeness of raw foods, she suggests that they should best be part of an overall balanced diet. Not only does she discount the notion that human digestion is improved by the enzymes in live foods, insisting that the body’s own enzymes carry the weight of digestion, but she also dismisses the notion that cooking significantly destroys the nutrient value of food. “We’ve been cooking for hundreds of years” and clearly have been getting adequate nutritional value from it, she says, adding that so many foods are indigestible raw that it would be nearly impossible to truly eat well on a pure diet of raw foods.

If one is committed to a largely raw food but still eats a lot of grains and legumes, says Lanou, then it’s quite a healthy way to eat. It would be ideal, however, to have some portion of food in its cooked form to get the nutrients from those foods that are better delivered from heat-processed food. If people significantly increased their consumption of raw foods yet didn’t rely entirely on them and instead included adequate amounts of the five food groups, says Gonzales, their diets would improve.

Raw Is Beautiful
Strangely enough, Underkoffler, one of the leading advocates of raw foods, agrees in theory with Gonzales and Lanou that there can be too much of a good thing. A more or less self-taught chef, she has experimented with a wide variety of food systems, most recently moving toward integrating nutrition and culinary arts, “weaving in some of the principles of macrobiotic and Ayurvedic systems with the live and raw food practices for a more well-rounded, seasonal, universal approach that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the extremes of any one system.”

Raw food, she says, “is both the most ancient way of eating and the newest hot cuisine out there. It’s a developing system and there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation.” It needn’t be an all-or-nothing strategy, Underkoffler emphasizes. There’s much that people can benefit from eating raw foods, she observes, but they needn’t go whole-hog and toss out their pots and pans.

She, for example, doesn’t live by raw food alone. “Over the last 10 or 12 years, I have been experimenting with raw foods. At times, I’ve been very committed to eating an exclusively raw food diet, eating 100% raw foods and, for a long period of time, really thriving on it.” She came, however, to prefer a less-stringent approach that recognizes the body’s needs. “It’s essential to leave some room for flexibility in any system,” Underkoffler concludes.

Still a vegan, she eats primarily (but certainly not exclusively) raw and live foods. Everyone eats raw foods at some level, she says, even if it’s just a tomato on a sandwich. So it’s just opening up that perspective a little bit, finding the foods you like, concentrating on them, and not necessarily worrying about cutting things out of your diet, which can have grave consequences. “It’s more fun and healthier to concentrate on the good things that you’re eating rather than giving yourself a hard time about what you’re eating.”

Underkoffler became a vegetarian at a young age and soon after a vegan, she says, for moral and ethical reasons. “I realized pretty quickly that I would have to learn about nutrition if I wanted to be healthy because you can’t just go about cutting things out of the diet.” She started a lifelong program to educate herself about nutrition and culinary arts. The ideas of Dr. Ann Wigmore in the 1960s and 1970s sparked her interest in the growing raw food movement, but they seemed, she admits, “a little out there.” She began reading everything she could get her hands on about conventional nutrition and alternative medicine, including macrobiotics and Ayurvedic practices. She was captivated by the similarity in their underlying principles. “A lot of these systems are recognizing and speaking about the same things—just calling them by different names.”

A former co-owner of the Raw Experience restaurant in Maui, she consults with numerous restaurants, helping them rejuvenate their menus and incorporate more health foods—including raw foods—into their menus. She’s on the crest of a movement that’s not only recognized for its nutritional benefits but that’s increasingly gaining notoriety as a fine culinary art on its own. “There are elements of raw food techniques that can really gracefully complement just about any type of food,” says Underkoffler.

Living Cuisine introduces readers to raw foods for every palate. There are more than 300 highly appealing recipes to satisfy an array of regional and ethnic tastes. Underkoffler elevates health food to gourmet status, introducing appetizers, soups, salads, entrees, and, surprisingly, very tempting desserts all easy to prepare from raw foods. She blends tastes and textures with artistry, for example, when creating Ginger-Curried Pumpkin Soup, or the surprising pairing of raspberries with crumbled feta. And while there may be little cooking, there’s plenty of heat—ethnic dishes may be spiced with fiery blends. And there’s something for every taste—from a simple Shepherd’s Pie to Japanese Pumpkin to Shiitake Mushroom Walnut Torta. The generous section on cakes and pies will quickly make you and your clients forget that these desserts are healthy.

Although you may quibble with some of her conclusions or explanations of the theoretical underpinnings of the raw foods system, Underkoffler offers appetizing blueprints for healthful eating. She marries the best practices of a variety of systems to present strategies that few would argue with, such as eating seasonally, regionally, and organically whenever practical—in other words, emphasizing products that are “as fresh and vibrant as possible to ensure a colorful plate of food and a variety of tastes and textures.” Foods that are seasonal and regional are likely to be fresher, less processed, and more ripe, as well as more affordable because they are abundant, she insists.

“There’s no black and white with raw foods. There are a lot of gray areas and there’s an open debate on just about every perspective,” observes Underkoffler. For example, she points to miso, which she describes as “one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. It’s a savory paste made from a grain or a bean that’s been cooked and inoculated with a live culture and cultured or fermented for anywhere from six months to two years. It’s teeming with enzymes and healthy microorganisms, and it’s got a great salty flavor. It’s certainly live, but somewhere in its process it’s been cooked. So is that a raw food?” she asks. “It depends on who you ask.”

Underkoffler prefers not to get caught up in arguments about the incidentals. She finds it more agreeable to take a “unified stance and not get mired in the details.” Extremes, she suggests, aren’t healthy, and rather than as a way of life or a doctrine, she views raw foods as a complement to any kind of diet.

She sums up her stance simply: “I try to ask what nutrients the body needs and how we can get them, and it’s not an easy question. It has to do with where you live and your genetic predisposition. But for the most part, a well-balanced diet is a wide variety of foods, as organic as possible, as fresh as possible, with a nice balance of taste and texture. That’s a good place to start.”

— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Today’s Dietitian.

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