The benefits of a raw food diet

You were placed on this Earth with a healthy, self-healing body intended to consume a plant-based diet. God created you to have a healthy body and that is why you were meant to eat a biblical plant-based diet filled with natural, raw fruits and vegetables. Yet in today's society, far too many people fill their body with preservatives, processed foods and artificial additives. Not only do these toxins deplete your cells' strength, but may even lead to disease.

Author of "Healing with Raw Foods," Jenny Ross noted on the historic practices of stimulating good health simply by consuming the living foods of the land. In the times of Hippocrates and other ancient cultures, there was less focus on treating symptoms, as people instead emphasized consuming fresh, natural foods and herbs to sustain and fuel the body in the first place. To them, food was medicine. At its essence, a raw food diet is the No. 1 path to optimal heath. Today, though many may have disregarded this wise, ancient diet, its benefits are innumerable.

Fuels and nourishes

To properly fuel and nourish itself, your body requires enzymes to break down food into the nutrients that it needs. Even presumably whole, healthy foods that are not absorbed and assimilated properly will lose their nutritional value. According to Shape magazine, the more natural and whole a food is, the more nourishing it will be. Thus, raw plant-based foods that are consumed as is, in their purest form, will provide the body with the ultimate return on energy from the food.

In comparison, once foods have been processed or cooked, they lose those enzymes that are so essential for efficient digestion. When you consume processed foods, you put more stress and work on the body as it compensates to make up for the lack of enzymes. If you pick up a package and there is even just one item on the ingredient list that you can't pronounce, it's best to avoid that food, advised the source.

Self heals and restores balance

The core of good health begins at a cellular level. Unhealthy foods that are processed and refined weaken your cells and strip them of healthy essentials. On the other hand, with all of the fulfilling nutrients, enzymes, vitamins and minerals that raw foods provide, these natural living foods reverse and repair damage to your cells that may have occurred, attested Ross.

"As the first culinary option available to human beings, the raw-food path to healing is as old as life on the planet itself," she wrote.

Each and every one of your cells is constantly at work to bring your body back to its natural, balanced essence. By creating balance, living foods help to maintain proper function of vital organs and systems within your body.

Combats disease

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and obesity are some of the most common, yet most preventable diseases in our world today. Numbers as of 2012 showed that 117 million Americans were living with one or more of these chronic health problems. That staggering number was close to half of the adults in the country. Among a lack of exercise, poor lifestyle habits and behaviors, tobacco use and drinking too much alcohol, poor nutrition is one of the top risk factors for chronic illness. Yet by eliminating poor nutrition in the form of added sugars, refined grains, saturated fats and the like from your lifestyle, it may be possible to lower the risk of developing these diseases. Over the years, scientists and researchers alike have pointed to the notion that a plant-based diet promotes optimal, ideal health. All one must do is look toward cultures that consume mostly fruits, vegetables and whole grains to see a very low or almost no incidence of disease. Moreover, according to the article "Plant-Based Diets Can Prevent Over 60% of Chronic Disease Deaths," a diet of raw, plant-based foods can prevent 60 percent of the deaths that are the result of chronic disease. The source pointed to telling research on the link between nutrition and chronic disease, published in Food Technology magazine.

The research article titled, "The Chronic Disease Food Remedy," by Toni Tarver supported the notion that consuming living plant-based foods is linked to low rates of chronic illness with new findings in nutritional genomics. New research found that hundreds of bioactive compounds such as vitamins and antioxidants are found in plant foods. When you eat these foods, the compounds become the catalyst for a number of different changes within your body. "More specifically, the bioactive compounds in plant foods interact with cells, enzymes, hormones, and DNA, playing a role in controlling gene expression and cell changes that lead to chronic disease," reported Tarver. Thus, the food that you eat day in and day out plays a direct role in the makeup of your genes, which can then affect the risk of chronic disease.