Raw Beauty

If you are like me at all, you love food, and this menu from Pure Food and Wine in New York City looks like it could satisfy even my appetite. With lots of exotic sounding ingredients and names, you just assume that someone spent a huge chunk of their day slaving over a hot stove so you could enjoy a delicious meal. But there's just one catch, there is no stove at Pure Food and Wine, originally the restaurant love-child of Sarma Melngailis and ex-partner Matthew Kenney. The food at Pure Food and Wine is raw.

Now, you might wonder why anybody would pay someone to not cook their food. But, you might be surprised to know that alot of people would and do. The popularity of raw restaurants is increasing as more people become aware of the countless benefits of eating live foods. The following article from healingdaily.com give us a few reasons why so many believe that eating raw food is a much healthier choice than consuming cooked foods.

-Raw foods are rich in enzymes. Enzymes are needed for the digestive system to work. They are necessary to break down food particles so they can be utilized for energy. The human body makes approximately 22 different digestive enzymes which are capable of digesting carbohydrates, protein and fats. Raw vegetables and raw fruit are rich sources of enzymes.The enzymes in raw foods are destroyed by heat.-

-Most raw food, like our bodies, is very perishable. When raw foods are exposed to temperatures above 118 degrees, they start to rapidly break down, just as our bodies would if we had a fever that high. One of the constituents of foods which can break down are enzymes. Enzymes help us digest our food. Enzymes are proteins though, and they have a very specific 3-dimensional structure in space. Once they are heated much above 118 degrees, this structure can change.

Once enzymes are exposed to heat, they are no longer able to provide the function for which they were designed. Cooked foods contribute to chronic illness, because their enzyme content is damaged and thus requires us to make our own enzymes to process the food. The digestion of cooked food uses valuable metabolic enzymes in order to help digest your food. Digestion of cooked food demands much more energy than the digestion of raw food. In general, raw food is so much more easily digested that it passes through the digestive tract in 1/2 to 1/3 of the time it takes for cooked food. -

So , what exactly does this article have to do with the pursuit of beauty. Obviously, a healthy body is a goal we all want to attain and eating live, raw food gets us one step closer to that reality. But there is something else, that special radiance that comes with being vibrant and in tune. Some call it the raw "glow." What is the glow? For me, the glow is clear skin, bright eyes and an energetic radiance.

One look at the before and afters of raw foodies and you will know what that glow looks like. For a gallery of before and afters visit welikeitraw.com.

The good thing about the glow is that you don't have to be one hundred percent raw to start getting it. Making tweaks your diet here and there will yield tremendous results. Adding a couple of large salads every day and eating fresh fruit instead of canned is a great start. There are countless number of delicious raw recipes available. Recipes can be found on this and other internet sites. There are also many beautiful raw "cook" books such as Raw the Un-cookbook by Juliano, Raw Food/ Real World 100 Recipes to Get the Glow by Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis and Eating in the Raw by Carol Alt.

-Nasirah