Nature Always Right, Cooks Never

Excerpted from the book "Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You" by Tonya Zavasta. The book is available at: http://www.beautifulonraw.com It seems pathetic we aspire to create a new product as "natural" as possible but destroy the very natural ingredients in the process. New packaged products appear on the market every day. Each time you try one of these new products, you are foregoing the old-fashioned fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. As a result, you will not get enough nutrients from your meal. Researchers are excited whenever they discover new benefits in produce of particular colors. The bright vibrant colors of fresh produce, such as the deep green of leafy vegetables, the lilac of blueberries, or the red of strawberries are a sign that this produce is packed with antioxidants, called polyphenols. The brighter the color of the fruit or vegetable, the more nutrient combatants it has to prevent degenerative diseases. Now picture what happens to the original rainbow of colors after cooking. The colors fade like old laundry. How can it not be more obvious to us: by tampering with natural products, we are losing something essential for our health and beauty. There is a scarcity of nourishment, but not of meals. In this country, we face unprecedented temptations. America is preoccupied with eating like no other country in the world. By giving in to the skillful seductions of the advertisers to try "new food," our bodies are starving while we constantly chew and swallow. Ironically, the variety and affordability of foodstuffs leads us to become overfed and at the same time undernourished. The best way to resist these temptations is to develop an attitude towards cooked food in general and adopt the raw food lifestyle. Mark Twain wrote: "To eat is human, to digest divine." We need enzymes to digest food. Our living body also needs enzymes for every other operation and chemical reaction to take place. Enzymes constitute the difference between life and death. Only living organisms can produce enzymes, but their capacity to make enzymes is limited and exhaustible. Our body hosts two types of enzymes: metabolic enzymes, which run our bodies, and digestive enzymes, which participate in digesting our food. Only raw foods follow nature's design and come with their own food enzymes to aid digestion. They are responsible for the release of nutrients out of the foods we eat. Dr. Edward Howell writes in his remarkable book Enzyme Nutrition that heat over 118