Tag: Raw Food Diet

Example Raw Food Diet Menu

Post author By admin
Post date April 3, 2011
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Figuring out a raw food diet menu can be challenging. You have access to hundreds if not thousands of raw recipes on the internet and in cookbooks, but how do you plan an actual menu from all of that? In this article we will look at what you might serve for a special meal, such as a dinner party.

Raw Food Diet Menu For A Special Meal

Prepare to have fun when you are planning a menu for a special raw meal. There are just so many dishes to choose from! It may take a little time but you are sure to come up with something that will please your guests and probably astonish them too, if they don’t have experience of how varied and delicious a raw food diet menu can be.

One of the great things about eating raw is that you can have some stunning colors on the table. Cooked foods lose the vibrancy of their colors along with so much else. When you are serving raw food, it’s easy to prepare a menu plan that will cover the table with color and make people long to taste everything.

Many Colorful Raw Food Diet Dishes

For that reason, you may want to prepare a range of dishes and serve them all together, buffet style, even if people are sitting down at the table. Provided the tastes will not clash, this is easy to do. Instead of offering one large bowl of mixed salad, you can serve a green salad with just a splash of color, and slices or sticks of crunchy salad vegetables separately, with a range of dips. Put enough dishes on the table and you have a combined first course and main.

You can also provide cabbage leaves for people to stuff to make their own raw spring rolls. This makes a great first course.

If you are serving the main course separately, you may want to offer something more traditional like zucchini noodles with a tomato based sauce, raw pizza, or a raw stir-fry without the frying. Raw vegetable noodles require a simple piece of kitchen equipment known as a spiral slicer, or you can slice them into ribbons very thinly with a knife.

Raw Food Diet Desserts

The choice of desserts for your raw food diet menu is huge. You probably already have your own favorites. If not, go experiment! The choices include cheesecake substitutes, chocolate puddings, raw brownies, fruit tarts and pies with a nut-based crust, or simply freeze your favorite smoothie recipe (with less added water) to make ice cream. Some of these are even better than the real thing!

Gourmet raw food recipes can be very filling, so it’s worth offering guests an alternative of plain fruit salad at the dessert stage. Some will want your classic nut-based ‘cheesecake’ but others will already have eaten their fill during the earlier courses of your raw food diet menu.

Of course, as with any dinner party, it is important to test all your dishes before the big day. You need to make sure they all work, both in appearance and in taste. If you can, have other people try the dishes in your raw food diet menu too.

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Raw Food Children: Is It Safe?

Post author By admin
Post date April 2, 2011
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If you are a parent who wants to switch to raw food children are going to be a question for you. Do you want your children to follow a raw food diet? How will you get them to eat it? How will you deal with opposition from others? And most importantly, is a raw food diet safe for kids?

If you believe that raw is the healthiest possible diet out there, then you probably would like your children to join you in it. You want what is best for them and a high raw diet is certainly healthy. But 100% raw can be another matter.

Kids have different dietary needs than adults. They require more calcium, in particular, in order to grow strong bones. It is hard for raw food children to get enough calcium on a raw vegan diet. Therefore, if you want your kids to be 100% raw, you should consider including raw (i.e. unpasteurized) milk, cheese and yogurt in their diet.

Raw milk products have their own risks, including the possibility of carrying salmonella and other food poisons. Remember there is a reason why pasteurization is carried out. You may also find that it is not possible to buy unpasteurized dairy products in your area, because it is illegal to sell them in some jurisdictions. You may still be able to buy direct from the farm.

If you cannot buy raw milk products or if you decide against them for safety, you will need to consider giving your kids some non-raw items whether those are pasteurized milk products or calcium supplements. The result of inadequate calcium in childhood can be very serious, including stunted growth and rickets.

With children under 5, you will also need to consider the size of their stomachs. Small kids cannot eat as much fiber as adults, which is probably one of the reasons that kids often refuse a lot of vegetables. They need higher calorie foods including a certain amount of fat. Fruit alone would likely not contain enough minerals and other nutrients. Again dairy products can help out, as can nut milks and nut butters.

Kids don’t like sudden changes and your best option will be to have them transition slowly from a cooked diet. You can begin with offering more of the raw foods that they like, such as bananas, and adding slices of finger foods like cucumber, celery and peppers to their plates. They may enjoy helping you prepare the food, creating interesting shapes when cutting.

Smoothies are popular with kids and can be the basis of many meals and snacks. You can add green vegetables to a fruit smoothie and they will probably still like the taste but you may have to serve in a cup with a lid so they don’t see the color.

You will almost certainly find that most people will think you are crazy or cruel for trying to raise raw food children, unless your kids are seriously overweight, when people may be more sympathetic because they will assume you are doing it for the weight loss aspect. But most people think of raw food as a stupid fad. This will probably include the children’s grandparents, other family members and possibly their other parent. So be prepared for some opposition, and be sure to have plenty of facts and figures to use in your defense.

We are not medically qualified and every individual has different nutritional needs. Before encouraging your kids to go raw, you should speak with their doctor and check that it is safe for them to become raw food children.

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Is A Raw Food Bar Really Raw?

Post author By admin
Post date April 1, 2011
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There are plenty of companies offering some type of raw food bar that you can buy. You can either order on the internet or find them at your local health food store.

However, you might wonder whether they are really raw. How could raw foods last so long and be a commercial proposition?

How Raw is Your Raw Food Bar?

In many cases, if you look at the fine print on a raw food bar or on the company websites, you will see that in fact very few, if any, of these vegan snack bars are truly raw. Most of them use some of the following ingredients:

Californian almonds which are pasteurized by law

Cocoa (chocolate powder) from roasted cacao beans, not raw

Pasteurized lemon juice or other pasteurized fruit juices

Cashew nuts which are heated to high temperatures to extract from the shell

It is possible to find cashew nuts that have been shelled in other ways, without using heat, but it is a more expensive process. Many manufacturers therefore choose regular cashews even when they are making what they consider to be a raw food bar.

Pasteurized is not Raw Food

Pasteurization is a process that heats food to high temperatures, close to boiling point, to kill bacteria and preserve the food. Food that has been pasteurized is not raw.

Some even contain roasted peanuts or regular peanut butter made from roasted ingredients. In fact, if you read the label, you will often find that a raw food bar only contains 50% to 60% raw ingredients. That is not what most people following a raw food diet would want to eat.

However, you can quite easily make a nut-based raw food bar yourself. Take 4 cups of raw nuts* and 8 fresh medjool dates, plus one teaspoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice. Chop or grind 1 cup of the nuts in a food processor, add half the pitted dates and process again, then another 1 cup nuts, then the rest of the dates. Keep processing after every time you add something. Add another 1 cup of nuts, then lemon juice, and finally the last cup of nuts.

When the mixture is done, you can add dehydrated fruits whole if you want. To have a chocolate flavor, mix in raw cacao powder plus a little agave nectar or other raw sweetener. Then form into bar shapes and refrigerate.

Raw nuts include: most filberts/hazelnuts, cashews from specialist raw food suppliers, most walnuts, brazil nuts in shells, most almonds from outside the USA

Raw is In The Eye Of The Consumer

In most countries, there is no law that says that a product marked ‘raw’ must be 100% raw, live food, never treated at temperatures above 118 degrees F. The word ‘raw’ is often used to mean something that still needs some cooking, like a bread mix, or nuts that have not been roasted for taste, etc. The ingredients of a bread mix would not really be raw.

Therefore, unfortunately virtually anything could be labeled a ‘raw food bar’. It probably has some raw ingredients and does not contain raw sugar, so it may be healthier than a sugary snack. There may also be some that are truly 100% raw – check labels. In most cases, if you want a truly raw food bar you will need to make your own.