Raw Living Foods
Eat natural foods in their natural state. Eat foods in their whole form, with skins on when organic, such as apples and pears. Living Foods are uncooked, free from animal products, organic, easy to digest, rich in enzymes, and highly nutritious. They include vegetables, fruits, nuts, home-grown sprouted grains and beans, fermented preparations, dehydrated snacks and delicious desserts such as fruit, nut pies and fruit ice cream. You may have heard of this term in the health food industry or even in Time magazine. Eating raw is nature’s first law; every species on the planet does except man and his domesticated animals. Raw is an inadequate word to describe uncooked foods. It refers to something unfinished or needing something done to it. To get away from the negative connotation people have come up with terms such as living foods, sun fired foods or raw energy foods.
Ayurveda and Raw Living Foods
Ayurveda generally does not recommend raw food diets for long term health maintenance but only for short term detoxification. This is because raw food is harder to digest. This Ayurvedic view that cooked food is better, however, has caused some people to think that raw food is bad from an Ayurvedic perspective. However, if we look at traditional yogic texts we do find an emphasis on raw food.
Raw foods increase the air and ether elements in the body and mind, the vata components. Cooked foods are better for increasing earth and water elements, the kapha component and also for increasing fire, the pitta factor.
Raw foods are rich in prana, which the yogi is seeking to develop as the highest energy of the mind. Raw food brings the pranic force not only into the body but into the mind as well. Raw food is part of a traditional yogic diet for cleansing of the nadis (channels), which occurs through increasing prana. Great yogis were said to live on the air and prana alone.
Raw food diets should not serve to suppress our digestive fire, leaving us without a healthy appetite to sustain us. Along with the raw food diet, try to follow a regimen to increase the digestive fire with the use of spices like ginger, cayenne, cinnamon, basil or the Ayurvedic formula trikatu. One should only take raw food to the extent that one’s digestive fire has the capacity. Nevertheless the importance of raw food for purification should not be overlooked. As one advances in spiritual practices one can handle more raw food and require less and less food. Advanced yogis naturally gravitate toward raw foods as well as grains and dairy products. They prefer living on pranic foods to anything processed or overcooked. Seeing nature as their mother, they dislike commercially prepared or grown food. Yogis in retreat in nature live on wild food as part of their spiritual regimen and as a means of connecting with the forces of nature. Spiritual progress reflects a growing sensitivity to food and requires food that contains both prana and LOVE as the main ingredients.