The Most Important Raw Food Forms

The raw food diet is much more than just a diet. It is a lifestyle in its own right and – if implemented correctly – extremely healthy. Many people report almost unbelievable success in healing a wide variety of illnesses. Raw food is also by no means monotonous, because everything is now available in raw food quality – from bread to cakes and tarts to pasta and chocolate. So anyone who thinks that raw food means doing without is not up to date.

Raw Food Diet: History

The Swiss doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867 – 1939) is considered the founder of raw food and raw food nutrition. Bircher-Benner learned about and appreciated the healing power of raw fruits and vegetables through experiments while suffering from jaundice.

The doctor observed Swiss shepherds and herdsmen in the mountains and their simple diet while maintaining excellent health. He eventually came up with the theory that plant-based food stores solar energy and releases it again in the human body. He called plant-based food “sunlight accumulators.”

Definition of raw food

Basically, there is only one rule that applies to the raw food diet:

Everything can be eaten as long as it has not been heated above 40 to 42 degrees . This temperature represents the so-called fever limit. 

Protein that is heated above 42 degrees denatures – at least in the human body when it has a fever. In this case, the person dies and it is therefore assumed that this is also the case with plants, fruits and vegetables.

Raw foodists, however, want to eat “living” food, food that is in full possession of its vitality. Because only then can this vitality be transferred to the person who eats the food – so it is said. In contrast to raw food, cooked food is dead, robbed of its vitality. So it cannot provide vitality and therefore health. A convincing example is often given of the legendary apple, from which – if you were to bury it – an apple tree would sprout. Apple sauce, on the other hand, will probably never grow into a tree (even if there were still seeds in the sauce).

Which foods are considered raw food?

Raw food can therefore include all foods that can be eaten raw or heated to a maximum of 42 degrees. These include:

  1. Fruit
  2. Vegetables
  3. Salads
  4. Nuts
  5. Oilseeds
  6. Grain
  7. Pseudocereals
  8. Wild plants
  9. Some legumes in sprout form, e.g. mung bean sprouts or chickpea sprouts

Non-vegans also incorporate animal products into their raw food diet – although meat, fish and seafood are definitely no longer “alive”, whether you stick to the fever limit or not.

Are you already craving raw food? Then you are very welcome to visit our recipes section. Our chefs have developed a variety of delicious raw food recipes.

Since there are many different views on how the raw food diet should be practiced, here is an overview of some common raw food forms:

The forms of raw food nutrition

Almost all diets can be implemented using raw food.

  1. The raw food diet can be vegan. In this case, the raw food is composed of purely plant-based foods.
  2. However, the raw food diet can also be vegetarian and contain raw milk products (raw butter, raw milk, raw milk cheese, etc.) and raw eggs.
  3. The raw food diet can also include raw meat and raw fish, and in some cases insects.

Stone Age raw food or culinary raw food

Even the three forms of raw food diet mentioned can be further subdivided. They can all be primal/stone age or practiced in a culinary way. Primal/stone age means that the raw food is consumed as unprocessed as possible, whereas culinary means the following:

Culinary Raw Food

Spaghetti, lasagna, rice dishes, soup with dumplings, pate with sauce, sandwiches, onion baguettes, spring rolls, cakes and tarts – all of this is raw food – culinary raw food!

“Culinary” means “related to the kitchen/cooking art”. This form of raw food diet is therefore ideal for people who enjoy cooking. Of course, there is no cooking involved anymore. But you work with a lot of kitchen equipment and can use it to prepare many fascinating, super-healthy dishes.

Kitchen Appliances in Culinary Raw Food

In culinary raw food, these devices are particularly frequently used:

  1. high-performance blender
  2. dehydrator (e.g. from Sedona)
  3. juicer (slow juicer)
  4. spiral cutter

Kitchen appliances that you no longer need

Instead, you can now store the following kitchen appliances in the attic or basement:

  1. stove
  2. oven
  3. microwave
  4. steamer
  5. pressure cooker
  6. bread maker
  7. pans
  8. egg cooker
  9. deep fryer etc.

Spaghetti, Rice and Pizza in Culinary Raw Food

In the raw food kitchen, for example, spaghetti is made from zucchini or other vegetables using a spiral cutter. Lasagna sheets can be cut from kohlrabi, rice is made from cauliflower, and bread and rolls are still available, namely from the dehydrator.

If you like dumpling soup – which is of course only slightly warmed – the dumplings consist of a mix of avocados and pine nuts or cashew nuts.

Of course, all of these recipes taste different to the ones we are used to. But who says that pizza has to taste the way we know it? And why should dumplings always have to be made of meat or flour? Why do pasta have to stick? Yes, it is often the case that once you get used to raw food, you can no longer bring yourself to eat normal bread, pasta or even pizza.

The raw food tastes so fresh and authentic. You can feel its power, its vitality. You don’t want to go back. And if you do, you often end up with a headache or a kind of dull feeling, as if you were in a fog. Of course, such an experience is purely subjective – but it’s best to try it out for yourself! Perhaps you feel the same way and experience unexpected strength through the raw food.

Culinary raw food nutrition has only become popular in recent years. Before that, raw foodists practiced more early forms of raw food nutrition, such as the primal diet according to Franz Konz:

Stone Age raw food: the primal diet

The primal diet is the raw food diet according to Franz Konz, who was actually very successful with writing tax guides, but then fell ill with stomach cancer in the 1960s. In a subsequent operation, half of his stomach was removed. He did not believe that conventional medicine could completely cure him and so he developed his primal medicine. This consists not only of the raw food known as the primal diet, but also of lots of exercise in the fresh air, hardening and sunlight. The primal medicine – according to Konz – is said to have kept him healthy into old age despite his severely ailing stomach, before he died in 2013 at the age of almost 87.

The primal diet is a wonderful way of eating and living for people who feel really close to nature and want to eat and live as our ancestors did in ancient times. The main component of the primal diet is therefore wild plants that are collected by the people themselves. These contain many times more minerals, trace elements, vitamins and secondary plant substances than any cultivated salad. Wild plants have a very intense flavor. They taste wonderfully spicy, so that no salt is needed for wild plant salads.

Another large part of the primal diet is made up of fruits, preferably regional varieties. However, tropical fruits can also be part of the primal diet, as it is assumed that our first ancestors lived in tropical regions, so that the fruits native to these regions were part of our primal diet. In addition, these fruits – apart from bananas, mangos and papayas – are usually not nearly as over-cultivated as apples, pears, cherries, strawberries, etc.

Extremely exquisite delights include durian, breadfruit, jackfruit, rambutan, tamarinds, lychees, mangosteen, drinking coconuts and the exceptional Kopyor coconuts, whose insides taste like cottage cheese.

Some peculiar fruits are also much more nutritious than some local fruits, such as the African fatty fruit Safu, which has 22 percent fat and 4 percent protein. If you let it ripen, it provides a hearty, creamy taste reminiscent of sausage.

And before you complain about the environmental damage or the carbon footprint of tropical fruits, eating imported fruits can also have advantages, as many families in the often poor producing countries can make a living from growing and selling the fruits.

Of course, nuts and oilseeds are also incorporated into the original diet in the right season. Basically, insects are also allowed if you want them, at least those that you inadvertently eat with the freshly picked wild plants. But Franz Konz also recommended including ants in the menu.

Instinctive raw food: the Instincto diet

Another variation of the raw food diet is the Instincto diet. It goes back to its inventor Guy-Claude Burger (*1964) and assumes that people have an instinct that tells them what they need and what they have to eat at that moment. However, according to Burger, the instinct only works if you have unprocessed food available.

For example, you can smell cauliflower, papaya, chard, almonds and a piece of raw meat. If one of these foods smells particularly good, then this is a sign that the body needs exactly these nutrients and vital substances from this food at the moment.

You then eat the selected food raw and completely unprocessed, i.e. uncut, unseasoned and without dressings, sauces or other “adulterations”. The so-called block shows when the body has had enough of this food. Then you can eat another food. According to Burger, you can therefore feel exactly how much of which food is needed at any given time.

Raw food from fruits: the sun diet

Helmut Wandmaker (1916 – 2007) is also one of the great raw food pioneers. He is said to have been inspired by the two Americans Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, who celebrated great success in the 1980s with their “Fit for Life” concept and published two books that marked the start of a healthy and active life for many people.

Wandmaker called his form of raw food “sun food” because it mainly consists of sun-ripened fruit. In his opinion, humans are fruit eaters. Therefore, he recommends eating different fruits throughout the day and only about 20 percent raw vegetables and 5 percent nuts. He did not believe in wild plants and therefore often had verbal battles with Franz Konz during his lifetime.

Raw food in the USA: The Sunfood Diet

In the USA, “The Sunfood Diet” by David Wolfe (*1970) was created in the 1990s. At the age of 18, Wolfe discovered that he was lactose intolerant. From that point on, he became interested in healthy eating, soon became a raw foodist and founded his raw food company at the age of 25. At first he sold raw food products from the trunk of his car, but today his company is one of the largest on the raw food market.

Wolfe’s sun diet is vegan. It consists of fruits, which should always be combined with green leafy vegetables. Healthy fats are the third pillar of his form of raw food. For Wolfe, not only health is the focus, but also the spiritual aspect and environmental protection. Because a diet based on animal products will sooner or later lead to the collapse of our planet.

Paleo or Stone Age raw food

Paleo or Stone Age raw food are terms for raw food diets that – like Franz Konz’s primal diet – are based on the diet of our ancestors in prehistoric times, but in contrast to the primal diet, also contain plenty of meat and fish. Here, only foods that existed in ancient times are consumed, i.e. no grains or pulses, no isolated fats and oils – and certainly no dairy products.

There are also no processed raw food dishes, because the Flintstones only ate what they found in the wild. Blenders and juicers were just as rare as any knowledge of fermented dishes. So there is no sauerkraut, juices or smoothies here. Instead, there is often meat, fish and eggs – raw, of course.

Is a 100 percent raw food diet healthy?

The large differences between the individual raw food diets alone show that it is difficult to make a blanket statement about the health benefits of raw food. However, since almost every raw food diet automatically includes a large proportion of fruit and vegetables, this diet also provides significantly more vitamins, secondary plant substances and antioxidants than cooked diets – especially since the latter also involves nutrient losses through cooking.

How to better tolerate raw food

The prerequisite for the health benefits of a raw food diet is, of course, that you tolerate the raw food well. Those who have rarely eaten raw food before will have more problems changing than people who have always enjoyed eating salads and fruit.

Often, however, it is not the fault of the raw food itself that it is not tolerated at first. It is usually eaten too quickly and hardly chewed. Then it sits heavily in the stomach and causes discomfort. Unfavorable combinations (e.g. fruit with nuts) or eating late in the evening can also lead to intolerance to raw food.

Combine raw food with plenty of exercise

As with any form of nutrition, raw food nutrition also depends on how exactly it is implemented, how balanced and varied it is, and what the rest of your lifestyle looks like. For example, if you still spend the whole day sitting down, you will not experience a decisive health breakthrough with a raw food diet. Therefore, combine raw food nutrition with plenty of exercise and good stress management.

There are now numerous reports that show that a raw food diet can be a very good support for a holistic approach to illness. Whether it is cancer, arthritis or fibromyalgia, many illnesses can be influenced extremely positively with the help of raw food.

Raw Food Diet from a Scientific Perspective

From a scientific point of view, the results on raw food nutrition are not consistent. Two universities in particular have so far looked into the topic in more detail:

  1. The University of Giessen, which has identified the negative consequences and
  2. the Finnish University of Kuopio, which claims to have found predominantly positive, but also negative effects.

The possible positive effects

According to the studies available to date, the positive effects of a raw food diet may include the following. (Of course, there are many more from individual experience reports):

  1. Low cholesterol levels
  2. Increased vitamin A and carotenoid levels in the blood
  3. Higher antioxidant levels
  4. Relief from Fibromyalgia Symptoms and Rheumatoid Arthritis

The possible negative effects

The possible negative effects of a raw food diet can include the following (we will write behind each one what might have caused the respective undesirable effect to develop in the first place):

  1. Low Omega-3 levels – too few oilseeds such as ground linseed and hempseed, too few green leafy vegetables (a dietary supplement with omega-3 -rich algae oil capsules is recommended)
  2. Body weight loss – when too little is eaten overall
  3. Menstrual disorders or absence of periods – if too little is eaten, i.e. not enough to meet needs
  4. Tooth erosion – when too much fruit/dried fruit is eaten and at the same time too little mineral-rich vegetables
  5. Low bone density – the same applies here as with tooth erosions, and it must also be checked in general whether magnesium, calcium, zinc and silicon as well as vitamin D3 and K2 should be supplemented, but this also applies to other forms of nutrition
  6. Vitamin B12 deficiency – Vitamin B12 should always be checked regularly, not just in raw food diets, but in all types of diets, especially if you are taking medication or have chronic illnesses. You can read what you should pay attention to when meeting your vitamin B12 needs, which values ​​are important when checking your vitamin B12 level and much more about vitamin B12 in the link below.

Raw food: healthy or risky?

However, many studies on raw food diets did not analyze pure raw foodists, but rather people who, for example, lived on at least 70 percent raw food. The scientific results cannot therefore necessarily be transferred to a 100 percent raw food diet.

The above list of negative effects does not mean that every test subject suffered from them. For example, a study by the German Institute of Nutrition Research in 2005 showed that 38 percent of 201 people (who lived on 70 to 100 percent raw food) had a vitamin B12 deficiency and 12 percent had signs of anemia (1). However, whether this can be seen as a typical disadvantage of a raw food diet is questionable in view of the figures from the normal-eating population.

For example, a Swiss study found that up to 23 percent of women of childbearing age who eat normally suffer from iron deficiency, which can lead to anemia.

A vitamin B12 deficiency is also frequently observed in the normal-eating population, as we have already explained here: Correcting vitamin B12 deficiency and can also be easily corrected with a dietary supplement or prevented from occurring in the first place if appropriate preventive measures are taken. The same applies to an omega-3 deficiency and all other potential deficiencies, because a raw food diet – like any other diet – must of course be well planned and organized and supplemented with the individually required nutritional supplements.

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