Secret 17: Keep Aging Away with a Salad a Day

Are you a follower of rawism? Rawism is the practice of consuming uncooked, unprocessed food as a large percentage of your diet. If you are neither fruitarian, juicearian or sproutarian, you may consider juicing or regular consumption of raw vegetables to boost your health. Including raw vegetables in your diet gives you, according to Sally Beare, several advantages:

• raw vegetables are high in minerals and vitamins. These are affected by heat. 
• antioxidants protect your body from free radicals that accelerate degenerative diseases such as cardiovascular disease and strokes. Antioxidants include vitamins A, C, and E, minerals selenium and zinc, and anti-aging superoxide dismutase SOD.
• fiber provides a feeling of satiety, removes toxic substances from your gut, evens out blood sugar levels, and ensures that food does not putrefy in your intestines
• enzymes are essential initiators of biochemical reactions. Even though your body manufactures enzymes from the vitamins and minerals in your diet, your ability to make enzymes starts to decline with age

Other advantages of eating raw vegetables include:

• the presence of phytonutrients.  A 2003 study in Germany showed that large amounts of raw vegetables have a positive effect on reducing breast cancer. Phytonutrients are destroyed by heat.

A delicious mix of antioxidants, phytonutrients, enzymes and fiber

Reducing your consumption of meat or consuming meat that is raw or medium raw rather than well done reduces the amount of the following harmful chemicals in your diet:

• carcinogenic heterocyclic amines or HCAs
• carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs.  These are created during the cooking process and are also found in cigarettes
• toxic advanced glycation end products or AGEs.  These are also created when cooking meat

In fact, Sally Beare argues that becoming a rawist improves looks and makes skin cremes and hair coloring products unnecessary since "people changing to a raw food diet report grey hair starting to grow back dark". Even cellulite supposedly disappears as does unwanted fat!  However, a raw food diet is not without its nutritional deficiencies and should not be undertaken without careful consideration.

When preparing your salad, make it a colorful one: 

Watermelon, feta/blue cheese, spinach/arugula salad

The more color, the greater the variety of antioxidants.  Whenever possible, choose organic vegetables to avoid unnecessary exposure to pesticides and seasonal, locally grown vegetables to ensure high levels of nutrients.  You can obtain local produce by joining a CSA (community-supported agriculture).

Pear, shredded almonds, blue cheese atop a bed of arugula

Raw vegetables high in antioxidants include alfalfa sprouts, avocados, baby leaf spinach, beets and broccoli. Garlic is considered a superfood as it has antibacterial and antifungal properties, and also contains a dozen different antioxidants.  

For some intellectual, visual entertainment, you may consider watching the documentary Supercharge Me! 30 Days Raw.  The film producer ate only raw foods for thirty days and documented the results.  Supercharge Me! was inspired by the documentary Super Size Me. 

Take home lesson: include raw vegetable matter in your diet either as salads or home-made, freshly-squeezed fruit/vegetable juices (you may consider investing in a juicer) or better yet - both!