Raw food movement takes hold in South Sound

Posted on June 8, 2012 by bilrob

Raw food movement takes hold in South Sound

Imagine a diet that takes away most of the food you currently eat – and replaces it with better health, more energy and weight loss. That’s the claim made by many advocates of the raw food diet, which is gaining enough interest in the South Sound to spur on classes and even a raw food restaurant.

Yet as with any diet, you need to balance it with what your own body needs. The key, say proponents, is nutritional knowledge.

“I went raw six years ago,” said Shuanna Holt, a chef and co-owner at Tacoma’s Caffe Dei who also teaches raw food classes. “I’d been vegan for about 11 years and was looking for something even healthier.”

After several months of changing her entire diet to uncooked food, Holt found her health improving dramatically. “I got rid of eczema and asthma. I used to be inhaler-dependent; now I never use it. I’m completely medication-free.”

Tacoman Darrin London also found huge differences after going raw: no allergy issues, no sickness, increased energy and a 40-pound weight loss. In fact, he and his wife, Tina, felt so much better on the diet they decided to open a raw food restaurant – AmeRAWcan Bistro in downtown Tacoma.

The basic science of a raw food diet corroborates to some degree what those who follow it swear by. Food is never heated beyond 118 degrees in order to keep alive natural enzymes and vitamins that help digestion, fight free radicals and maintain overall health.

So what exactly does a raw food diet look like? Well, plenty of fruit and vegetables, obviously, but there are other components that add nutrition, flavor and texture. Zucchini is spiralized with a mandoline to look like pasta, which can be served with a cashew-based sauce that resembles alfredo. Walnuts can be soaked and ground to the texture of meat, then spices added to make a taco filling. Sprouts can be worked into something approaching bread; nuts can be ground to make milk and cheese substitutes. Dehydrators can heat food slightly to add crunch or warmth.

In other words, it’s not just salads. One look at AmeRAWcan Bistro’s menu is enough to convince anyone that raw doesn’t mean boring: vegan burgers, sesame falafel, kelp noodles, kale chips and cheesecake are just some of the possibilities.

But there’s no doubt that going raw requires a major change in food focus. Many stand-by favorites you might have just aren’t possible, including meat, pasteurized dairy, regular bread, crackers, tea, coffee or anything processed. Alternative sources of protein, including nuts and nutritional yeast, and superfoods such as acai berry and maca root start looking important. Carbs come from fruit rather than starches.

One myth about raw food, though, is that it takes heavy equipment and way too much time.

“Most of my recipes use about five ingredients and take five minutes to make,” said Holt. “I’m a mom, a businessperson – I need foods that is quick.”

One example of that is Holt’s taco salad. Swiftly demonstrating it at a raw food class at her cafe last month, the chef did indeed put it together in less time than you’d take to assemble the cooked version. Soaked walnuts got mashed up with Mexican spices. Tomatoes, onions, lime and cilantro got chopped into a pico de gallo. And lemon juice, garlic, tahini (a sesame paste), red bell and jalapeño peppers, onion, nutritional yeast and cashews got blended up with water to make a deliciously creamy nacho cheese sauce.

“It helps to learn to stock your kitchen properly,” says Holt. “And never underestimate the power of a good knife.”

While nothing Holt makes in her classes need anything other than a good-quality blender, it does help to have other equipment. A dehydrator not only warms food (helpful in winter, says Holt) but dries out sprouts batter to make tortillas and burger patties, as well as making other food more portable, such as fruit. A mandoline will help you create interesting and easier-to-chew versions of vegetables, like London’s zucchini pasta.

“It does take planning,” says London. “That can put people off. But as you get things going, it’s easier.”

So surely it must be hard to travel on a raw diet?

“Yes,” says London. “That’s why we opened this restaurant, because we love to go out and usually all you can eat is a salad.”

Holt herself travels up and down the West Coast giving cooking classes, and in fact takes her $300 blender with her. She also preps tortillas in the dehydrator beforehand.

On the positive side, Holt said, you do get to be creative.

“Raw food is visually appealing,” she said. “You get to really use your imagination.”

Not everyone who’s gone raw, though, has found it a good thing long-term. Olympia school librarian Donna Dannenmiller went 100 percent raw for three years, and at first found all the benefits Holt and London did: increased energy, better digestion. She only needed five hours of sleep a night.

“All the problems I had just dropped away,” Dannenmiller said, who took classes and educated herself thoroughly on the nutritional details of the diet. She also saw huge improvements in friends who took it with her: curing of diabetes, arthritis, even cancer.

“Basically it’s a detox diet, and the body heals itself,” she says.

But after three years Dannenmiller noticed the health benefits dropping, and her nails didn’t look so good. She consulted a naturopath, who advised her that she should be eating meat. Now she has a balance of both, including plenty of green raw smoothies.

“If you are ill it’s a healthy diet, no question,” says Dannenmiller. “But for long-term, 100 percent is not necessary. … Everyone’s body is different – you have to continue to read your body.”

Holt and London would agree. After a recent accident Holt went down to about 60 percent raw, and is working her way back. London makes a conscious choice to eat meat every now and again, having seen his sister develop health problems after eight years of totally raw food.

“People have to know how to do it, to take responsibility for their health,” advises Holt. “It’s the same no matter what diet you’re on.”

So is raw food the next big eating trend in the South Sound?

“We’ve stayed in business nine months now,” London points out. “It’s been trending up. People want to eat healthy food. They’re sometimes a little skeptical, but we haven’t had anybody say, no way (to eating our food). People are surprised.”

[email protected]

253-597-8568

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Wyoming group contests raw food rules change

Posted on May 28, 2012 by bilrob

Wyoming group contests raw food rules change

CHEYENNE — The debate over proposed Wyoming food safety rules centers on opinions about what constitutes food safety.

“People in Wyoming are concerned with food safety,” state Rep. Sue Wallis, R-Recluse said. “Many want to buy locally.”

The problem is, according to Wyoming Department of Agriculture spokesman Derek Grant, unregulated processing of locally produced products, such as chopped lettuce or cantaloupe, increases the chances of contamination.

One proposed rule allows farmers to sell leafy greens at a farmers market, for example, as long as they are not in a bag. If the greens are cut and placed in a bag, they are considered cut leafy greens and producers must meet sanitation requirements and obtain a license to sell them.

Wallis said farmers in Jackson Hole have been selling bagged greens to local restaurants at the restaurants’ request.

If the rule change is adopted, farmers will have to invest in a certified kitchen, with equipment to meet department requirements for cleaning the greens.

Grant said the proposal is intended to clarify rules already on the books.

He said the wording on the cut leafy greens rule comes from the federal Food and Drug Administration’s food code.

“What we’re trying to do is make it easier to sell products in the state of Wyoming,” Grant said. “I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about what’s being changed in the rules.”

Wallis claims the proposed rules represent major change.

She said about 700 people have signed a petition urging the department to hold a public hearing on the rule changes.

A major sore point involves raw milk.

What’s getting people upset, Grant said, is the word “solely” in the new rule to clarify that only the sole owner of a cow can serve raw milk to people in the household, employees and guests.

Grant said the practice of cow sharing, or multiple people paying to get raw milk from a single cow, has been illegal in Wyoming for decades.

“The sale of raw milk is still not legal in the state of Wyoming,” Grant said.

Wallis said there is no law or regulation that even mentions cow shares.

The department, she said, is trying to perpetuate a rule that would allow only the sole owner of a cow to use the raw milk.

Wallis said she is a cow share owner because she wants fresh milk and she can’t have a cow in her town.

If the state adopts the sole owner rule, it will be taking away her property right, Wallis said.

Wallis also took issue with a proposed rule banning the sale of local, ungraded eggs.

Grant said the rule is designed to open opportunities for people who raise chickens so they can obtain licenses to sell their eggs to restaurants.

Wallis said someone who owns a flock of 50 chickens couldn’t afford to invest money in the equipment needed to clean, candle and grade eggs for sale.

Grant said people can still sign and date eggs and sell them at a farmers market if the rule change is adopted.

Wallis said so-called food freedom supporters are independent-minded and don’t want the government “to decide what we can eat or who we can buy it from.”

Kari Gray is Gov. Matt Mead’s chief of staff. Gray said she told Wallis she is interested in the Department of Agriculture having a public hearing on the proposed rules. Contact capital bureau reporter Joan Barron at 307-632-1244 or [email protected]

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New Leaf and Whole Foods Stock Local Raw Cookies

Posted on March 26, 2012 by bilrob

New Leaf and Whole Foods Stock Local Raw Cookies

In an ever-increasing fashion, area grocery stores are keeping their shelves stocked with local products. Of the latest to hit the walls at New Leaf Community Markets and Whole Foods is Wonderfully Raw Gourmet cookies, which come from just down the road in Watsonville.

To hear Sequoia Cheney tell it, CEO of a food company wasn’t something she saw herself being.

“I never thought I’d be doing this at this time in my life, but here I am.”

But she wouldn’t have created the product without a type 2 diabetes diagnosis about five years ago. Her condition led to discovering raw foods, training at the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, and then taking her knowledge and skills to teaching cooking classes in Watsonville. After classes, her students could not get enough of her treats, yet she still did not it turn into a business.

“People were buying my food for sale after my classes and just loving it. They said you’ve got to get some of this stuff in the market, and I’m thinking, ‘yeah right,’ ” said Cheney.

But from her Watsonville kitchen, Cheney did bring a product to market. Her Coco-Roons cookies are now sold in over 120 stores. More than just being carried locally, 28 Whole Foods throughout Northern California, plus stores in Florida, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest now have the product. And that looks to just be the beginning as Wonderfully Raw Gourmet has signed with a national food broker to take Coco-Roons to even more stores throughout the country.

While Coco-Roons are about to go national, it began locally with New Leaf placing the first store order—something Cheney was not really ready for.

“I had no bag. I had no label. I had nothing. In 30 days we created everything and got it out to market,” said Cheney.

The only thing ready was the cookie—a raw coconut macaroon-style cookie that, according to Cheney, is healthful while not tasting like it.

“The product really sells itself because it tastes so good. What I really wanted to was create a healthy food that tastes as if it’s not good for you,” said Cheney.

Raw food and cookies might not seem like a great combination. But according to Cheney, that mainly comes from misconceptions about what raw food really is.

“It’s not raw cookie dough,” said Cheney. “The macaroons are dehydrated at 115 degrees and so they’re baked but they don’t lose their enzymes or nutrients. That’s what raw means.”

While her business rapidly expanded, it brought her family closer together. Her son Eric Hara moved from New York, along with his wife and 5-year-old son, to Watsonville to become the company president—something he also never saw happening.

“If you would’ve asked me seven months ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be doing this,” Hara.

A chef with restaurants in New York City, Hara was consulting with his mom on Coco-Roons while still grinding out long hours in the kitchen.

“I’ve been a chef for 16 years and I was missing everything,” said Hara. “It just got tiring and was time to make a move.”

That move looks to be working for Hara, Cheney and Wonderfully Raw Gourmet. But even as the sales increase, Cheney hasn’t lost the simple joy of seeing something she created on store shelves.

“I still get excited when I see them on the shelf,” said Cheney.

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Former VNSNY nurse creates raw food company that sells healthy snack bars

Posted on March 6, 2012 by bilrob

raw

Former VNSNY nurse creates raw food company that sells healthy snack bars

Quote on food bar packages: “As a registered nurse and natural foods chef, I’ve developed a passion for raw foods. Imagine an alternative to high-sugar, processed snacks that tastes simply amazing, a fusion of live, raw and organic ingredients. Imagine a clean snack with a higher nutrient content that brings us closer to healing ourselves and the global ecology. Stop imagining and join the Raw Revolution. You owe it to yourself.”
— Alice Benedetto, RN, founder of Raw Indulgence

Benedetto credits nursing with giving her valuable experience and leadership skills. “I learned about working with people,” she said. “When you are a nurse, you are always on a team.”

As she began to work with food on a larger scale, such as operating and sanitizing big machines and testing ingredients for bacteria or contaminants — with strict adherence to FDA, Kosher and Certified Organic standards — Benedetto drew upon her nursing practice.

“I knew how to work hard as a nurse and to problem solve. We always had to learn about new equipment,” she said. “I knew from med/surg about physical work, how to lift carefully, and about long hours on my feet, [and] to get good shoes.”

When technical and safety challenges arose, such as finding a better moisture-and-light-barrier material for packaging to preserve freshness, Benedetto did some research, learned about new technologies and made adjustments. “As a visiting nurse, I learned to be flexible. There were always new situations in nursing,” Benedetto said.

Benedetto’s company now employs 20 people and leases an 8,000-square-foot processing building to make 10 flavors of snack bars. The bars are sold nationwide in stores such as Wegmans, Safeway, Giant and Whole Foods and are distributed internationally. Most of the bars support gluten-free, Kosher, dairy-free and vegan diets.

Benedetto said she is enthusiastic that the company sponsors several athletes, Celiac disease events and other community activities. “I knew we had an innovative product,” she said. “We really took it step by step. I kept ‘trusting my gut’ for what was next. You need to have a vision of where you want to go.”

Now, as a busy mother of two, Benedetto is involved actively in company decisions and new product recipes, while also spending more time with her family.

Always a nurse, Benedetto still gets health question calls from family and friends and said she would like to work with nurses in patient care again at some point. Fortunately, she will have good supplies of wholesome snacks to sustain her between those quick breaks.

For information on the snack bars, visit www.RawRev.com.
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Learn the magic of raw food

Posted on February 26, 2012 by bilrob

ONE of the leading pioneers in raw food is to visit the island this weekend.

Everyone is invited to learn about the bene?ts of raw superfoods with two Raw Magic workshops in Douglas this month.

Kate Magic, of Brighton, is the author of four raw lifestyle books and creative director of the Raw Living website.

She will be in the island to teach classes at Noble’s Park Pavilion between 7pm and 9pm tonight (Friday), and between noon and 6pm tomorrow.

The ?rst talk will be an introduction to raw food and its bene?ts, while the second will go deeper into the whys and hows of such a diet.

The mother of three who tours internationally and has featured on various TV and radio programmes, has also created more than 20 raw products.

In tonight’s two-hour class, Kate will be packing in as much as she can of the Raw Magic philosophy.

What are the best raw foods to include and which are the best to avoid. How to transition easily and achieve your goals effortlessly, without stress and yo-yo-ing. Some of the common bad habits people slip into and ways to avoid them. How to avoid deficiencies on a raw diet.

And then, what happens when we start getting it right. The natural highs that come from eating the best foods on the planet. The transformations that start to occur in our lives. And why these personal changes are so important to the wider culture and our global environment.

Meanwhile, tomorrow (Saturday), Kate will hold a day-long class in which she will explore the subject more fully.

She will talk about building a solid foundation of inner health, and how best to do that. She will discuss the most important elements of a healthy diet, and where best to obtain them on a raw vegan diet. As much as time will allow, she will go into detail on the different superfoods and their energetic properties.

During the day, Kate will also share some of her personal experiences of being on the raw path for two decades. She will share some of the insights she gleaned on the way to help participants on their journey of raw transformation. She will offer advice on just how to get the magic flowing and the miracles manifesting.

Kate’s food classes are popular because she doesn’t just demonstrate a few recipes, she shares formulas that can easily be replicated in your kitchen with whichever ingredients you have to hand. Students won’t just come away with some set recipes, they’ll come away with a whole new repertoire – how to make dips, dinners, cakes, and chocolates. There will be plenty of opportunities to taste different ingredients and dishes.

The information covered in each class is different so attending both classes is recommended.

Personal consultations with Kate are also available. These are usually £60 for an hour, but if you are attending either class, it is £45.

The sessions will include some time for questions. Participants are advised to take a pen and paper.

Cake, chocolate bars, Kate’s books and some other Raw Living products will be available to buy (cash only).

• Tickets for the evening talk cost £12 in advance or £15 on the door.

Two tickets will be £20 in advance or £25 on the door. Tickets for the day course, which includes lunch, cost £90. To attend both is £100.

To book a place or a consultation email [email protected] or call 461461.

www.rawliving.eu/event/iom.html

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Toronto's newest raw food boutique, Belmonte Raw

Posted on February 23, 2012 by bilrob

By Rachel Heinrichs | Photography by Jess Baumung | Food styling by Linsey Bell/judy inc.

Belmonte Raw’s collard burrito with dehydrated ground-kernel corn chips

Belmonte Raw’s collard burrito with dehydrated ground-kernel corn chips

Toronto’s newest raw food boutique, Belmonte Raw

Outside Belmonte Raw, Leslieville’s new organic, vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free raw food restaurant, a trio of wiry-lean women with dignifiedly graying hair and yoga mats tucked under their arms examined the menu posted in the window: hulled hemp and kale salads, lucuma and camu camu smoothies, something called a sun burger made with pumpkin and clover sprouts. In their patchouli wake, I entered the restaurant while attempting (unsuccessfully) to conceal my huge leather purse under my trench coat.

The space is small—just 16 seats—and cute, with wood slab tables and motivational directives scrawled on the walls: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagine,” it says on the mirror across from me. While sipping my $9 Happiness juice out of a Mason jar, I overheard the owner, Carol Belmonte, chatting elatedly with another diner about juice detoxes. She offers a menu of home-delivered organic juice feasts (instead of fasts, because raw foodists prefer to emphasize abundance over abstinence) that start at $90 for one day and max out at $1,960 for a month.

The raw food diet has traditionally attracted vegans, dietary iconoclasts and the sanctimoniously puritanical. In books and on blogs, raw proponents eschew the word “diet” for “lifestyle,” “revolution” or “philosophy” because raw foodism encompasses ethical, environmental and spiritual convictions. Only organic, unprocessed fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are allowed—none of them heated above 47° C, the temperature at which, raw foodists believe, plants start to lose nutrients and digestive enzymes. The strict regime, the theory goes, is better for the body, the animals and the planet.

The many constraints of the diet force a creative, painstaking and expensive style of food preparation (two salads and two smoothies at Belmonte added up to $48 before tax and tip). Raw food chefs can’t fall back on deep-frying for crispy texture or on cheese or foie gras for richness. They blend, marinate, sprout, dehydrate, grind and ferment their organic ingredients.

Belmonte Raw is the latest and most ambitious among a handful of places serving exclusively raw food in the city. In 2002, Live Organic Food Bar in the Annex (Woody Harrelson’s favourite) was Toronto’s only proper raw restaurant (appetizers, biodynamic wine, table service). It was soon followed by Rawlicious (which now has four locations), Raw Aura in Mississauga and Cruda in the St. Lawrence Market. In 2009, Nature’s Emporium, a 50,000-square-foot health food store in Newmarket, hired a raw chef and partnered with a sports nutritionist to help Maple Leafs like Luke Schenn and Mike Komisarek integrate raw food into their diets.

These places often riff on cooked dishes. Their menus are laced with trompe l’oeils: spaghetti bolognese made with heavy, nut-based “neat balls” and zucchini noodles that leave a pool of water in the bottom of the bowl; flax quiche Lorraine without a single flavour or texture approximating the eggs, butter, pastry or joy that define quiche Lorraine; seed-crust pizzas bludgeoned with raw garlic pesto. When a plate of zucchini lasagna arrives looking just like real lasagna, your brain is hard-wired to expect hot, cheesy goodness. No matter how tasty, that first stone-cold bite is always a shock, like taking a sip of what you thought was water and realizing it’s vodka in the glass.

Instead of counting calories or carbs, proponents of the raw food philosophy consider the so-called life force energy of food. The more living enzymes in a thing, the more vitality it provides the body. It’s a perspective that questions the foods 99 per cent of us blithely consume, and that can easily transform those foods into sources of anxiety: Is my water dead or alive? (The water you get from fruit and veggies is, apparently, alive; the kind you get from the tap is dead.) Is chocolate a drug? Is cheese a carcinogen? Some subgroups even abstain from fruit because of its high sugar content. Others swear by an all-fruit diet. On the Meetup message board for Raw Food Toronto, a 786-member online group that gathers monthly for raw potlucks, one host banned fruit at her dinner, sparking a maelstrom of comments from appalled fruitarians.

Next: Was Jesus the original raw foodist? »

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Eat Raw Food To Lose Weight, Cooked Food Contains More Calories

Posted on December 31, 2011 by bilrob

Eat Raw Food To Lose Weight, Cooked Food Contains More Calories

We’re often encouraged to get into the kitchen and prepare more home-cooked meals. In fact, nutrition experts suggest that this strategy could go some way toward a healthier, thinner nation. But, if the results of a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is anything to go by, we should be encouraging people to cook less, or rather, to eat more raw foods – especially if they have a few extra pounds they need to shift. The reason? Harvard scientists responsible for the research, found that cooking food increases the amount of energy or calories that it provides to your body.

This disparity between cooked and raw fodder is due to the fact that the body uses more energy in digesting raw food than it does cooked food; that more of the energy available from raw food is lost to bacteria in our gut than is the case with cooked food, and that the body expends energy fighting off pathogens that are more prolific in raw food than in cooked.

The unique study which lasted 40 days, relied on 2 groups of mice that were fed a series of diets that consisted of either cooked or raw meat or cooked or raw sweet potatoes. Over the course of the study, the researchers tracked changes in the body mass of the mice, controlling for how much they ate and ran on an exercise wheel.

The results clearly demonstrated that both the cooked protein and cooked starch-rich tuber delivered more energy to the mice than raw variants of both.

“The starting energetic value of a food is based on the composition of that specific food, and that’s not going to change by cooking,” says Rachel Carmbody, the lead researcher on the study. “What cooking alters is the proportion of the energy that our bodies absorbs versus what is lost to gut bacteria, and what is excreted by our bodies. Specifically we believe that cooking reduces the energy that we use up in digestion, while increasing the amount that we absorb.”

“Because cooked food has been processed before it entered the body, some of the work in terms of breaking down that food has already been down so it saves our digestive system from working as hard. Basically cooking externalizes part of the digestive process.”

When it comes to the cooked meat, the heating process gelatinizes the collagen in the muscle and causes the muscle fibers to loosen and separate. This not only makes it easily to chew the meat, but it also increases the surface area exposed to digestive enzymes and gastric acids. As for the cooked sweet potato, here heat gelatinizes the starches and transforms semi crystalline structures into loose, amorphous compounds that are readily broken down or hydrolyzed into sugars and dextrins.

Part of the the gastrointestinal tract also includes a whole host of bacteria, and those bacteria metabolize some of our food for their own energy needs. The small intestine is where most chemical digestion take places. It’s in this 7 meter long tube, that energy for the “human” is absorbed. What remains, passes into the large intestine, and here huge volumes of gut bacteria draw energy from it. “The cooking process allows food to be almost completely metabolized by the time it reaches the end of the small intestine. This means that the body has extracted nearly all of the available energy, leaving little for the bacteria” explains Carmbody. In the case of cooked meat, heating denatures the proteins which unwind from their tightly bound structures and take on a random coil configuration that makes them more susceptible to the enzymes in the small intestine. This ultimately serves to increase the proportion of the protein digested by the body compared to what is digested by gut bacteria in the large intestine.

With raw food, on the other hand, this isn’t the case, and there’s more energy available for the gut bacteria which uses it to carry out a number of functions. For example, energy is used and lost through the production of combustible gases. Also, undigested polysaccharides (fiber) are metabolized by the bacteria through fermentation to produce short-chain fatty acids which are in turn consumed as fuel by the bacteria. “The more energy that’s leftover for the bacteria, the fewer the calories absorbed by the human being,” continues Carmbody.

So what does this all mean, then? Quite simply: If you want to absorb less calories, you should cut down on the cooked portion of your diet, and consume more raw foods. While there is currently no formula to calculate the actual difference in energy absorbed by the body from cooked and raw food, what this study has made clear, is that the existing system of calorie measurement isn’t accurate.

This system, known as the Atwater system, has been used for over 100 years. It measures the calories absorbed by the body by taking the gross calorie measurement of a food and subtracting an estimation of the calories that the body passes out as waste. “It’s basically calories in minus calories out,” explains Carmbody. “But this ignores the differences in how our bodies metabolize cooked and raw foods, and doesn’t account for the energy used in digestion, by gut bacteria, and by the immune system to fight off pathogens.”

Despite the catch-all figure on nutritional labels, you would gain more calories from cooked carrots, spinach or broccoli, for example, than you would if you ate them completely raw as a salad. Of course, if you slather them in Ranch Dressing, well that’s a different story altogether.

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Raw food movement takes hold in South Sound