If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you don’t want to leave a comment about, feel free to email me privately: deniseminger@gmail.com.
Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet
Navigating the sea towards better health.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you don’t want to leave a comment about, feel free to email me privately: deniseminger@gmail.com.
HI I am just educating myself about this lifestyle change and want to know what to do about the tooth decay problem and would you suggest this raw food intake for a developing toddler-thanks Linda
Hi Linda,
My advice for dealing with tooth decay on a raw diet is to avoid acidic foods (especially unripe fruit, vinegar, and lemon juice) and eat only limited quantities of dried fruits, which seem to be the worst thing out there for causing cavities. Eat plenty of leafy greens for minerals, as well, and try to eat actual meals instead of grazing all day.
Toddlers can do well on a diet high in raw foods, but the biggest concern is meeting their calorie needs. Relative to body size, toddlers need a LOT of food each day compared to adults — and so many raw foods are high bulk but low calorie. I would feed a toddler calorie-dense raw foods like bananas, mango, avocado, figs, papaya, etc., and if the child was not being breastfed, I would also include raw milk until he/she got a bit older.
The biggest problem I’ve seen with young children on raw diets is that they are not getting enough concentrated nutrition, and they simply look malnourished. You can avoid this by providing plenty of calorie-dense raw foods and giving your child a wide variety of foods to choose from, in case they’re picky.
I love this info…..Thanx Denise…lv Bette
Thanks for reading, Bette
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I stumbled upon your blog today and would like to keep up with it. Is there an RSS/Atom feed?
Love your blog! I’m trying to go raw, will combine Weston Price with Hallelujah Acres. (or Alissa Cohen or Green Smoothie Girl with WAPF) Thanks for all the info.
Denise
Nice blog, great research.
Hope you have carefully included current research on vitamin D needs.
If not please visit http://www.grassrootshealth.net/ which hosts the best researchers in the US and Canada. UC SanDiego)
There is a good chance that people living at your latitude are seriously sub optimal in 25(OH)D3. Repletion should take care of the teeth opacity, bone density, and other longer term problems.
Apologies if I missed this topic in your archive, and its importance has already been addressed.
Hi, Denise!
This is such an impressive blog. Your writing is so refreshing and informative! You and Stephan Guyenet at Whole Health Source have made a fan out of me.
I don’t know anything about raw dieting. Although I’m a rabid consumer of everything that’s written on health, my diet hasn’t really calibrated to all the knowledge I’ve soaked in—I do indulge in a bunch of garbage on an almost-daily basis. (Hello, Tim’s jalapeno and Hawaiian-style sweet onion potato chips! Egad!)
Having said that, I’m curious to begin experiment with this raw-food thing. I am wondering if you can share a typical day’s worth of meals with us in one of your posts. I know it’ll be custom to _your_ version of eating raw, but nevertheless it’ll give me an idea about variety and quantity.
Thanks in advance!
Your deconstruction of The China Study was nothing short of brilliant – I can honestly say I’ve never seen a more detailed and insightful analysis performed by an “amateur.” I hope you’re seriously considering a career in science or medicine. My understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet has been evolving, and by the time I got around to reading TCS, I already had some doubts about the neutrality of the results. You’ve confirmed some of my suspicions.
I’d like to recommend two other books that you might find interesting, if you haven’t already read them. Good Calories, Bad Calories (author: Taubes) is a very detailed look into the human diet, metabolism and related endocrinology, and the history of the scientific research into diet and obesity. To an interested reader, it reads almost like a detective novel, as the officially recommended low-fat diet somehow results in a massive wave of obesity and related diseases in Western Culture. You’ll never look at your pancreas quite the same way again…
The other book is Catching Fire – How Cooking Made Us Human (author: Wrangham). The author is a professor of biological anthropology, and his book looks at the archeological record of human cooking, and its impact on man’s physiology and culture. He makes a compelling case that cooking food is genuinely integral to homo sapiens. Both books are written in a scientific manner, meaning they’re well-researched and footnoted (GC,BC has over 100 pages of footnotes), and neither tries to be sensational. I found that both books provided important insights into the question of what science has to tell us about the most appropriate diet for humans.
Keep up the great work – if you don’t end up as a scientist, you should be a science writer.
Greg
Denise,you totally rock woman.As one who has been through the wringer eating raw vegan 100% for almost 7 years,the pitfalls can be many.I am very glad i have changed now,as thankfully the body CAN heal from being so severely depleted!
Keep speaking loud and proud woman XX
Hi Denise,
You write that you eat 2-4 pounds of greens daily. Please give examples…I consume about a pound of spinach daily usually blended with water, thinking of upping that, wondering what other greens I might add. Very much enjoy your writing style.
River Rance
Naples,FL
Isn’t there a problem with oxalic acid in raw spinach and other dark leafy greens? If they’re going to be eaten raw, shouldn’t they be lacto-fermented first to neutralize the anti-nutrients?
Annie Dru
good shit lil miss Minger!
My sister e-mailed me about an hour ago that I must read this book that she just read called “The China Study” She was very excited about it.
I just happened to be wandering wordpress–not looking for anything, really, and stumbled upon your blog.
I will take much interest in reading the “flip side” of the book, which I intend to read.
As a health professional, I know how “studies” can be misleading.
Thanks for all your hard work!
Hi Denise. I like your blog. Raw foodism is one of my current interests. I am an ex-vegan (now cooked omnivore) but I was never raw, I ate a cooked vegan version of the SAD diet. I enjoy lots of raw plant foods though.
What I’d like to see you write about is the safety concerns of raw animal products such as raw meat, raw eggs and raw milk. What do you think of the pathogens and parasites that these products can harbor. What do you think of pasteurization and cooking of animal foods, not as a taste-based practice, but a health practice?
What do you think of freezing sashimi (using modern technology) so that the parasites are killed?
Where do you buy your raw fish from? conventional fish from a grocery store or from more organic sources?
Great stuff Denise. Keep up the good work. I wonder what your views are on the 801010 diet.
Thank you. How can we get your kind of brain to debunk the rest of the BS that clouds our thinking — like politics, business and the climate change? So I’m still at a loss as to diet and what is apparent is that there is a dearth of hard science attacking this incredibly urgent and important matter. We return to tradition and our emotional biases. For me, eating flesh of a once living sentient being still remains unpleasant.