By Vicki Chelf

Can eating completely raw, vegetable-based foods for 30 days transform your life? For Jenna Norwood, it did. Jenna is a vivacious Sarasota native with a sparkly personality and a mission to share her enthusiasm for raw foods. At Jenna’s monthly pot-luck, there was great live acoustic music, a relaxed atmosphere, and a table laden with fresh and delicious raw foods. Among the offerings were salads of local organic greens and seasoned purees of beets and mushrooms. A carrot dish with savory curry spices was an unexpected treat, as was a delicious nut pate. For dessert, I spied a plate of Medjool dates, dehydrated, rather than baked, cookies, and some sort of purple berry mousse. I didn’t taste the desserts, but they must have been good judging from how quickly they disappeared.

During the meal, Jenna mingled with the guests, making everyone feel at ease, and took time to dance with a curly-headed toddler. There was a lecture by an entertaining young man who shared with wit and enthusiasm tales of his “brownie addiction” and how he conquered Candida, a fungal overgrowth that often manifests in the guts of those who love sugary treats.

It’s funny, what inspires us to change our lives. For me, the early-‘80s movie Flash Dance aroused an incontrollable desire to give away a thriving health food store, sell my dream house, and move to Sarasota to enroll in the Ringling School of Art. For Jenna, it was the desire to fit into a Las-Vegas showgirl costume by Halloween. You see; when Jenna turned 40, she was less than thrilled with the way she looked, having ballooned to 157 pounds, which is a far cry from obese but certainly not the optimal weight to sport show-girl duds.
The typical approach of eating right and exercising would not have been fast enough to make the Halloween goal, so Jenna, passionate soul that she obviously is, chose a 21-day stay at the Optimal Health Institute inCalifornia. There, she was placed on a strict regime of juice fasting, exercise, colonics, and health lectures followed by an exclusively raw foods diet. Yes, that’s right; colonics are an important part of the cleansing program at the Optimal Health Institute. I won’t go into the details, but if you are interested, you can learn more by watching the movie I’m going to tell you about.

A couple of years prior, Morgan Spurlock made an award-winning film called Super Size Me, in which he documented himself eating three meals a day at McDonalds for 30 days. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you can imagine what happened. Jenna, in her desire to change her life for the better, decided to do Super Size Me in reverse, documenting her experience eating a raw vegan diet for 30 days. She called it Super Charge Me. Vegan, by the way, means a diet devoid of animal products. I’m sure you can imagine the results here, too. The film ends with Jenna radiantly kicking like a pro in her glitzy costume.

The best thing about Jenna’s film was the easy, intimate way she spoke and the fact that she was not afraid of looking less than glamorous at the opening. It was like sitting across from a girlfriend as she shared the trials, tribulations, and successes of the difficult, and somewhat wacky, adventure she had embarked upon.

After watching Jenna’s film and attending her pot-luck, I began talking to other raw food devotees in the area. The common thread that ties together most “raw foodists,” as they call themselves, is a desire to attain optimal health by ridding their bodies of the toxic sludge and pollutants that are byproducts of our quotidian lifestyle. The concept of eating a diet of raw foods is not new. Most religious traditions speak of month-long food restriction as a health practice, so the concept of healing with raw foods has been around, just not with the force it presently has. For the past several years, a raw foods, also called living foods, movement has been sweeping the country.

The grand dame of this movement was Ann Wigmore. Ann healed herself by adopting her grandmother’s teaching and embracing the healing plants that helped her to survive a sickly and impoverished childhood. Ann later founded the Hippocrates Health Institute, where she taught thousands of people about the virtues of wheat grass, sprouts, and raw foods. Ann’s early partner at Hippocrates was Viktoras Kulvinskas, whose 1971 book Survival into the 21st Century was an inspiration to many of today’s raw foods superstars. Viktoras is now 71 years old and running a raw foods retreat in Costa Rica, but Ann died in a fire in 1994 at age 83.

Today’s raw movers and shakers do not promote “health through asceticism.” They see a raw diet as a fun, delicious, creative, and even sexy way to attain better health. As artists know, a good way to jump-start creativity is to subject it to restrictions, and raw foodists have used their dietary restrictions to a great advantage by creating a mind-boggling array of raw foods that look, and sometimes taste, sort of like cooked foods. Even when raw dishes don’t taste like their cooked counterparts, they are often quite delicious in their own right.
Why are raw foods so popular? I believe it is because eating raw truly makes people feel and look better. Why do raw foods make people feel and look better? Raw foodists will give many reasons, some documented by science, some not, but the traditional healing modalities of Chinese medicine and Ayurveda explain it in a way that makes the most sense to me. They classify foods as cleansing or building, heating or cooling, and moistening or drying. Depending on one’s individual needs, different types of foods are prescribed. Generally, raw foods are considered more cleansing than cooked, and fruits are considered more cleansing than vegetables.

We live in a world of excess. Most of today’s diseases are brought on by excesses of food, drink, and inactivity. Top that with a bombardment of chemicals stemming from the products of our industrial world, and who doesn’t need a physiological house cleaning? Most people will see their health improve in a relatively short time on a raw foods diet. In fact, someone very close to me believes that he would not be alive today if it were not for a visit to the Hippocrates Health Institute, followed by several months on a raw diet. The popularity of raw vegan diets is perhaps a natural reaction to a society of people who are slowly killing themselves with excesses.

In Sarasota, there are several people who are educating the public about the benefits of raw food and bringing healthy raw foods to our local stores and restaurants. Dana and Scott Nuss are among those who come to mind. They make a yummy raw hummus that you can buy at Richard’s Whole Foods and at Morton’s Market. Scott is a certified raw chef as well as the chef at Simon’s Café, which always offers some wonderful raw items on their menu. Ionie’s, A Body and Mind Retreat, provides organic raw cuisine, fresh juices, smoothies, produce, and other raw products to go. Michelle Buice from Mi Pueblo does an amazing job of bringing raw foods to a local restaurant. Mi Pueblo, with its charming Mexican décor, has its own separate kitchen for creating raw vegan dishes, and in case you are wondering, yes, you can feel full and satisfied after a good raw meal.

I applaud and respect everyone who is bringing nutritional healing to the forefront; however, as someone who has taught and written about healthy gourmet vegetarian and vegan cuisine for over 30 years, I would like to make one last observation. Too much rich, cooked food can make us ill, and a cleansing raw diet can heal, but after a certain point, a cleansing diet is no longer what the body wants. Then, building foods like cooked beans grains and vegetables is helpful. Cooked food is not necessarily less healthful than raw food. Over the years, many people have healed with macrobiotic and Ayurvedic diets, which are almost exclusively cooked. What these diets have in common with the live foods diet is that they use freshly prepared, organic, local foods and omit almost all animal products as well as processed foods.

When it comes to nutrition, one size does not fit all. To sustain health over the long term, balance is essential. Almost everyone can benefit from eating more raw food. Raw foods are delicious and healthy, but so are consciously prepared cooked foods, and they go delightfully well together. The key to health is learning what particular foods most benefit your physiology at any given moment and to eat them with joy and gratitude. Can going raw for 30 days transform your life? You may want to find out for yourself.

To read more about Jenna Norwood visit http://www.JennaNorwood.com 

RECIPES

Italian Artichoke Toss

Fresh Herb & Kale Tabbouleh

Blueberry-Lemon Mousse Tartlets