It is unclear how much of a toxin, if any, would be set free if the fat molecule it is attached to is burned. The toxin is now free to attach to other fat molecules. If it does mobilize with other recently liberated toxins, in the case of extreme starvation, then the toxin could become toxic and overwhelm the liver.
In short, there are no foods or herbs that can magically bind and pull toxins from your blood or organs. The same would be true for cows or for any "vegan" animals that accumulate toxins in their fat; they don't cleanse themselves with their raw, plant-based diet.
At best, detoxification schemes (juicing, fasting) can help by virtue of not placing more toxins in our body for a day or two. And a healthful, plant-rich diet with plenty of water can, in general, help your liver and kidneys process and remove toxins more effectively, McDougall said.
Misconception #4: Raw veganism is healthful
Healthfulness when eating a raw, vegan diet is a challenge; it's not inherent. Many on the diet do lose weight by consuming fewer calories. But weight loss should not be the ultimate goal.
The most apparent problems are nutritional deficiencies, particularly for vitamins B12 and D, selenium, zinc, iron and two omega-3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA. Without taking supplements in pill form, it would be very difficult (and, for B12, impossible) to obtain a sufficient amount of these nutrients from raw, plant-based foods. [5 Key Nutrients Women Need as They Age]
Also, without access to a variety of foods year-round that can be eaten raw, one tends to rely on single-food sources.
"The problem with the raw food diet is where do you get your energy food?" asked Caldwell Esselstyn of the Cleveland Clinic, the doctor who convinced Bill Clinton to adopt a plant-based diet. "You get it from pouring down nuts," he said, and these are high in fat and not healthful when eaten in excess.
If it's not nuts, then it's bananas, which are healthful perhaps at a level of one or two per day, but not when providing the majority of your calories. Some people on a raw food diet rely so much on fruit that their teeth begin to erode: from acids in the fruits that wear down the tooth enamel, from sugar promoting decay, from dried fruit (another raw vegan staple) sticking to the teeth and further promoting decay, and from a general mineral deficiency.
The raw diet could be more healthful than the so-called S.A.D. ("standard American diet") of processed foods. But there is no evidence that, even given the resources to prepare a variety of raw foods daily, the raw vegan diet would be more healthful than the plant-based diets promoted by McDougall or Esselstyn, or than the diets that allow modest amounts of animal products.
Vegans would have to ask themselves what the added benefit would be from going raw if the raw diet offers no additional moral satisfaction, other than a reduced use of cooking fuel.
Misconception #5: Raw-only foods are natural
"No other animal cooks food," many a raw vegan has stated. One can just as well say that no other animal combines their kale and clover with tropical bananas in a high-speed blender to make the foods more palatable and digestible. Or, that no other animal plays chess.
Judging what is natural is a slippery slope. Humans around the world live to relatively similar ages on a multitude of different diets. Most of the reasonable diets that consist of grains, vegetables and meats will get you to at least age 70 if an accident orinfectious disease doesn't kill you first. A traditional, animal-based diet eaten by natives of Siberia is just as natural as a traditional diet eaten by unnamed tribes in the Amazon.
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Add CommentIn general most evidence for any of these diets are based on "clinical" studies and this makes all of them suspect. The bottom line is the human body is designed to digest meat and similar products and has a host of bacteria to digest plant products on behalf of the body. Considering evolution does not occur all that fast the best diet is likely to be a decent mix of everything in moderation with a slight bias to the diets of your ancestors. If you ancestors come from northern Europe where 6 months of the year only meat is available due to winter, then it is probably a bad idea to go on a diet similar to a place like India or even pre-columbian mexico because those places have plant products available year round.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese extremes of veggies only or even meat only are likely to do nothing for you except cause problems.
"vital life energy" really? I never heard that argument from a raw vegan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Yes, "cooking" can increase the amount of some nutrients we can absorb. The question is what is meant by "cooking", 40C sounds a little too low to me. I think the maximum temperature on the earth (~55C) is a reasonable upper limit for raw food. Its quite possible that "raw" (warm room temperature) is the perfect balance between increasing some nutrients without destroying the others. Easy experiment to conduct... (if you have the equipment to measure the nutrients.)
3. "detoxifying" is problematic in general.
4. Similar issues with non-raw vegans and even vegetarians. Seems to me veggies are high in these minerals, nuts and seeds are raw and contain fatty acids. We (vegans) all know where B12 comes from: bacteria. "nuts" are high in fat? its all relative. What is the comparison between the fat content of beef and nuts for the same mass? I expect nuts are lower in fat. Still, we're not necessarily talking about a low-calorie vegan raw diet, and we do need some fat!
5. What is "natural" is a key point of discussion and self-reflection for all vegans, in particular in the relation between wild, domesticated and "food" animals. *"impossible to survive on this diet without modern convenience"* This is a strong claim with no evidence.
Regarding the the "big brain explosion" argument: Was not #4 referring to their being *too many* calories in nuts?? What about coconuts and avocados?
Survival used to be about maximizing calories with the least risk and expense. In that framework, meat and cooking are obviously highly desirable. The point is that we are no longer fighting for survival, actually this engrained need for calories is actually decreasing our survival (obesity is just a manifestation of it). The arguments that big brains require more calories than a raw diet could provide don't hold any water for me. If big brains need more calories than raw-plant diets, then raw vegans should be wasting away. I don't buy that brain evolution takes more calories than brain maintenence. Evolution so slow and incremental, giving more than enough time for other aspects to adapt/develop. For example the greater ability to efficiently gather foods, evolution of digestive systems to be more effective, etc. Still what worked for early humans and apes have little to do with what works for us now.
The bottom line is that if you're a raw vegan, a vegan or a vegetarian you have to pay attention to the nutrients you are consuming. Same thing goes for *any* other diet.
"impossible to survive on this diet without modern convenience"* This is a strong claim with no evidence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcusde me, but the evidence is all around you. Right now, I'm sitting here in Ann Arbor, MI. It's January and it's well below freezing outside. No raw vegetation that I can eat has been growing anywhere within a hundred miles of me since sometime last fall. How am I supposed to obtain my raw-vegan food? It doesn't fall from the sky. It has to be transported here, and kept edible along the way, and kept edible in my home, under these conditions.
Yes, it does require "modern conveniences." Roads, trucks, refrigerators, packaging - these are all modern conveniences, and are absolutely necessary to life on this diet.
Native Americans lived on the land where my house stands. They lived here on their own diet, unsupported by anything that we would call a modern convenience. They lived on a well-mixed diet that they could obtain from this land, in this climate. They did just fine.
Any more evidence you want? Just open your eyes.
"Never heard it from a raw vegan?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Steve Factor, the Pure Energy Chef, will help you restore the vital life energy you were born with. Gourmet raw vegan food helps release pure energy in your body, mind, and spirit. In this ABOUT section read Steve's bio, his story of self-discovery. Enjoy an album of Steve's photos, as well as some mouth watering recipes for Steve's famous King Kong salads...with more to come." (from http://www.pureenergyfactor.com/about.)
There. Now you have. All I had to do was search "raw vegan vital life energy" and it came up first on the list.
Look in a mirror. Your eyes face the front, like lions, wolves, bears, or T-Rex, and unlike a deer or cow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are a carnivore or at least an omnivore.
Vegan diets are not natural, cooked or otherwise.
""nuts" are high in fat? its all relative. What is the comparison between the fat content of beef and nuts for the same mass? I expect nuts are lower in fat."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh, this was cute! It's not (nut?) really hard to check, even if you didn't know, and there's nothing relative about it at all. Nuts are generally more than 50% fat by weight. Macadamia nuts are more fatty than traditional butter!
"Regarding the the "big brain explosion" argument: Was not #4 referring to their being *too many* calories in nuts?? What about coconuts and avocados?"
If you can find any extended region of the world where nuts have been growing naturally in sufficient quantities to sustain even a small population of humans, I'd like to know where. Our far ancestors developed big brains *before* they could reap the benefits of agriculture, plantations and industrial harvesting.
Much the same with avocados and coconuts. Although there may have been small patches here and there, where a pre-tribal community could sustain themselves well on naturally occurring energy-rich vegetation, such patches are unlikely to have been big enough to support long-term evolution of big brains.
Indeed, there would have been little pressure to develop (very costly) big brains, if they did not use their brains for something more complicated than picking fruits. Any monkey can eat a raw avocado, unless it has allergies - if nutritious raw vegan food was so plentiful, what would they need a larger brain for? Was there some big evolutionary advantage in pontificating over Hegelian philosophy or something? For whatever reason(s) it happened, I'm pretty sure big brains didn't develop because there was a surplus and nature could find nothing better to do with it than produce zombie food.
It is true, just because our ancestors didn't eat like that, doesn't mean we shouldn't, but you just can't combine that argument with the frequent claims that these are natural diets.
It's curious, I've seen exactly the same chain of reasoning in support of "paleo" diets:
"We should eat like this, because that's how our far ancestors ate, and [some argument about how therefore that is best for us]!"
"But our ancestors didn't eat like that!"
"Well, just because our ancestors didn't eat like that, it doesn't mean we shouldn't eat like that!"
(Incidentally, "paleo" proselytes will also use the "I never heard that argument from any of us" argument, no matter how easy it is to find in a search.)
1. Yes, a raw vegan diet in some locations certainly requires lots of technical intervention. That does not mean that those diets require technical intervention in *all cases*. Living the way we all do in these cold climates also requires technical intervention. Living in cold climates requires everyone to use more resources than living in warm climates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. Yes, google will allow you to find someone who says just about anything. I don't see how that validates the "vital live energy" statement. The quote above does not even state that the food as vital energy, but that it "release pure energy in your body, mind, and spirit." As far as I am concerned that statement has no meaning nor validity.
I'm not going to argue that anything is "natural" for a human, as that term is highly problematic in the case of us "artificial apes".
3. Front-pointing eyes: this theory is in dispute. Animals have different degrees at which their eyes face mostly front, and have mixed diets including mostly vegetation, eg. Loris, megabat, Lemur. These are by no means carnivores.
4. Brain explosion: Again, I'm not arguing about some mythical "natural" human state (I don't believe such a thing exists at all). Yes, for enough calories to be foraged only a small population could evolve large brains. Just because the population it supports is "naturally" small does not make invalid.
Evolution is slow, and it is entirely possible that brains increased in size in parallel with increases of methods to gather more calories. This could include hunting, or it could also include better navigational ability, communication for social structure, etc.
Presumably great apes are the apex of non-human primates, thus their brains had to evolve to their large size (compared to "lesser" primates) by consuming more calories, and yet they are still largely herbivores. Of course you could argue that there is some hard threshold at which vegetative calories are no longer sufficient to evolve brains bigger than great apes. Again, I'm not arguing for "vegan == natural".
Why did large brains develop? I have no idea, but that is irrelevant regarding the validity of a modern human's choice to consume a raw vegan diet.
"Omnivore" simply means that an animal (human or nonhuman) is able to digest both plant and animal foods. Horses are technically omnivores. So are bears. Nearly all animals are omnivore and not all that many actually require animal foods. Cats, for example, are obligate carnivores, which means that have to have animal foods ... unless given taurine supplements. Incidentally, taurine is also completely destroyed by heat, so any cooked cat food must have taurine added to it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know some one that says being vegan is the best thing in the world. I will show her this.
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