Re: Scared to become raw b/c of too much misinformation - any advice?

Thank you for that very interesting and informative article.

I do believe that the problem with the vitamin deficiencies may stem from the fact that there is not a great variety of plants - (fruits and veggies) in most places for humans to get the proper balance. Most of those you will find in the grocery store are genetically modified in some way to cater to human taste buds.

That "weed" they refer to in the article purslane, is/was common in the northwest US. I grew up in Philadelphia. We had it growing in our yard. My family is from Italy, and apparantly my parents thought of that weed as a special treat. Whenever we found it, we would gobble it up. I remember looking for it in at my parent's new house a few years ago and I only saw a few little plants. I am going to call them today and tell them to try to save some of it and plant it at my sister's farm.

I can tell you that here in Japan, every grocery store/market has a much wider variety of fruits and veggies than any american store I have seen. There are many different kinds of greens and many of them taste very bitter. There are also a wider variety of fruits here.

I don't know the validity of the author's statements about raw vegans dying of starvation. If you are worried about this, but are considering raw food, then you should try the 80% raw, taking the author's suggestion of yogurt and eggs. Personally, I am not vegan - I eat eggs and salmon and lately I have been eating organic yogurt. In any case, I think to get the most raw nutrition, you can eat your fruis and juice your veggies.

Here is an article that relates the diet of the chimpanzee. Also remember that the chimpanzee is not vegan (they eat meat).
http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/nconklin/conklin.html

This is a table from that article that talks about the wild fruits, compared with fruits humans generally eat (sorry, the formatting didn't copy over, but you can read it in the article.)

Table 2. Domestic ripe fruit and vegetables compared to wild ripe fruit: %water %lipid %protein %sugar %fiber
wild fruit 81.0 4.9 9.5 13.9 33.6
domestic fruit 84.8 2.5 5.5 34.0 10.0
domestic vegetables 90.3 1.9 18.8 24.0 10.0


Tina.

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