But The New York Times reported recently on a new study showing that coffee actually prolongs the lives of people aged 50 to 71 who drink between two and six cups a day.  Or, to be more precise, it extends the lives of people that age when we control for the fact that heavy coffee drinkers also tend to smoke, eat more red meat, eat fewer fruits and vegetables, exercise less, and drink more alcohol, all factors that tend to shorten one’s life.

Delicious. And dangerous?

So, in other words, if you do all those harmful things to your body, then you’re better off drinking coffee on top of it all, than avoiding coffee.  This is good news for coffee drinkers.

But there’s a dark side to this news too.  It means that people who drink two to six cups of coffee live less long than people who don’t, when we don’t control for their other behaviors.  In other words, if you drink two to six cups of coffee a day, odds are, you’re a lot less healthy than those of us who don’t.  Should we care whether the cause of the correlation between high consumption of coffee and a shorter life is the cigarettes, the red meat, the lack of fruits vegetables or exercise, or the increased consumption of alcohol?

Maybe we should.  After all, it does seem that if you do those harmful things, drinking a lot of coffee can somewhat dampen their very harmful effect.  So there’s a chance that, if you drink two to six cups of coffee a day but don’t engage in those other harmful activities, then this coffee will make you healthier too.

But there’s a chance that it won’t.  (The study didn’t test for that.)  And it’s also possible that there’s a reason that high consumption of coffee goes hand in hand with these other dreadful health habits.  I concluded that my own weight gain resulting from coffee consumption may have come at least in part from the fact that coffee acidifies our bodies, causing our bodies to pull minerals like calcium and magnesium from our bones and tissues and potentially causing our body to then demand these minerals’ replacement, making us hungrier than we otherwise should be.

It’s possible that this drives people to reach more for red meat, which is heartier and more immediately satisfying than a fruit or vegetable; to reach more for alcohol for the alleviation of general feelings of dissatisfaction; to avoid exercise because the body is already short on minerals and doesn’t need to expend more energy engaging in unnecessary activities . . . you get the point.

So, maybe we shouldn’t control for heavy coffee drinkers’ habits regarding diet, exercise and alcohol, but instead should attribute those behaviors to the fact that they drink so much coffee to begin with.

I can’t say for certain that this is what happens.  It’s just a guess, and one that’s supported by little other than conjectural evidence.  But it’s tough to be certain that that’s not what happens.  After all, there must be some reason I gain weight when I drink coffee, and lose weight when I don’t.

So I wouldn’t take this study as a confirmation that we should drink as much coffee as possible.  The coffee may itself be the problem.

But I’ve discovered their products recently in Whole Foods, largely out of necessity.  I was struggling to live on a self-imposed diet of exclusively raw fruits and vegetables (not because I don’t enjoy them but because there’s only so much variety in that arena), and so I started searching the packaged-food aisles for a reprieve.  Boy, did I find one.

Aside from the price, there’s much to love.

In my first post about Go Raw products, I expressed some skepticism about how healthy they’d be.  Though they’re certified raw, vegan, and organic, they do include seeds, which I hadn’t tried since going raw, coconut, which I hadn’t tried since going raw, and dried fruits (e.g., dates), which I hadn’t tried since going raw.  I wasn’t sure how my body would handle these, particularly since the extreme guidelines for what actually counts as raw had scared me away from seeds or anything dried.  (Typical store-bought raisins are dried  under high heat, and therefore NOT raw.  Typical store-bought “raw” cashews are heated in order to remove their shells, and thus apparently also NOT raw.  You start to wonder after a while if you can ever leave the produce aisle.)

But, true to their claims, Go Raw’s products appear to be working for my body.  Not only have they helped me to stay almost 100% raw for the past 10 days (something I’d struggled with, due to the lack of variety, earlier on), but they’ve allowed me to continue steadily losing weight on this diet.  In fact, even though I’m already 10 pounds lighter than I was when I started the diet, the weight loss hasn’t slowed; it keeps ploughing along at the same steady pace that it has since the start.

This makes me think that Go Raw products are the real deal, and that they’re just as good for you as apples, bananas and pears.

Of course, weight loss isn’t the only factor in health, and any other factor is tougher to monitor, particularly without high-tech blood testing equipment.  At some point I’ll get to a doctor and have this all checked out.  But even then, I won’t know exactly what to look for.  In the meantime, weight may be a helpful proxy.  I wasn’t terribly heavy when I started the diet, but I was unhappy with my weight; I was heavier than just a couple years before, and though I was lifting more, at least some of that weight appeared to have accumulated around my midsection, and even in my face.  I still have some pounds to lose, if my midriff and the scale are any indication, but the diet has made an enormous difference.  If things keep going at this pace, I may even hit my college weight.  And it’s taking no sort of willpower: I’m never hungry on this diet.

But let’s get back to the topic of this post: the Banana Bread Flax Bar.  One of my favorite childhood foods was my mom’s banana bread.  Since I stopped eating sugar and refined carbohydrates a few years back, this old-time favorite has gone the way of Dewey & LeBoeuf, my wife’s old (newly defunct) law firm.  But these flax bars bring back the memories.  While they’ll never do justice to my mom’s venerable recipe, they’re delicious.

The texture is nice and soft; no hard crackling like in Go Raw’s other bars, the Spirulina Energy Bar and the Granola Bar (both of which are also tasty in their own right).  And somehow, they’ve made it taste like banana bread.  Yet all that’s in it is flax seeds, banana, coconut and date.  I’m pretty sure only one of those ingredients made it into Mom’s banana bread.

How they get it to taste like this, and how they get it to stick together like this, without heat, sugar, honey or any chemical fasteners is beyond me.  But it seems that they do it.  I won’t complain.

One final note: To those of us who eat refined sugar on a somewhat regular basis, it’s possible that these bars won’t taste like banana bread.  It’s possible that my palate is somewhat warped by depriving myself of such things for so many years.  But I’ve gotta tell you, it’s downright sweet, and downright tasty.

The only drawback: the price.  The bars were on sale today at Whole Foods, so that you get nearly 100 calories per dollar.  (This is a sort of unofficial benchmark for me in deciding which foods are too preposterously marked up to consume; if you live outside of super-pricey Manhattan, a different figure may be a more appropriate benchmark.)  But at regular price they exceed this threshold.  In that case I’d rather stick with their cookies and granola.  And, oh yeah, my favorite: raw, whole bananas, apples, pears, bell peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, spinach, cabbage, greens, oranges and peaches.

At least, in theory.  It’s cooked.  I don’t know the exact temperature we heat the water to when we make a pot of coffee, but it certainly feels like it’s more than 105 degrees.  And I don’t know whether coffee beans are treated in some way before they’re ground or sold whole to customers.  They may be heated even before we brew a pot.  But in theory, it’s a raw foods no-no.

So tempting. But so cooked.

In practice, however, what can the harm really be?  Other cooked foods have calories, and so it’s easy to see how they could make us fat, or contribute to heart disease or diabetes.  But coffee?  At about 9 calories per an 8 oz cup of black coffee, what can be the harm?

Well, the harm can be similar to the harm in diet soda, which has even fewer calories than coffee (if any).  Both tend to acidify the body.  (Some foods acidify your body; some alkalinize it.)  Raw foods (even lemons and limes which, though acidic on their own, tend to alkalinize your body) tend to be alkalinizing.  But many cooked foods acidify it, and coffee and soda (even diet soda) are leading offenders.

When your body gets acidic, it wants to fight that tendency and neutralize your pH (i.e., make it less acidic).  It does that by drawing minerals from your bones and tissue (among them, calcium and magnesium).  When your body loses these minerals in the pH balancing process, it needs you to add them back.  Hunger may be one way in which it does this.  So we eat more, to get those minerals, when we really shouldn’t otherwise have to eat any more.  Hence, weight gain and its associated illnesses, all because we drank that coffee.

How big an impact does this have in the real world?  It’s always tough to tell, because scientific research doesn’t currently have clear answers.  But I can tell you that since I’ve gone raw, and started monitoring my weight every day, along with what exactly I’m eating, I can tell you that my weight loss has seen interruptions, and even reversals, on the days when I drink coffee, even when I otherwise eat raw.

When I eat purely raw, so far I invariably lose weight from one day to the next.  When I mix in non-raw foods, sometimes I gain some back.  And when I mix in any meaningful amount of coffee, whether I add in other non-raw foods or not, I gain or fail to lose weight.  So far this has been remarkably consistent.  Enough so that I’ve stopped drinking coffee.

Now, the science on this isn’t perfect.  My description above may not be the reason that coffee seems to make me gain weight.  And my weight gain statistics to date aren’t exactly the most scientifically robust; I’ve been doing it for a short period of time, and any number of factors can make our weight gyrate from one day to the next.  But the pattern so far has been strikingly clear, and it’s not pretty for coffee.

So, yes, maybe there is a reason other than intellectual purity for keeping coffee out of your otherwise raw food diet.

The diet is very restrictive: Meat, eggs and dairy are essentially out (unless you can find raw milk or raw cheese nearby, or eat a lot of sashimi sushi).  Beans and grains are essentially out (unless you’re willing to soak, dry and sprout them; you certainly can’t cook them if you’re on this diet).  And even many nuts are out (apparently, even “raw” cashews are typically removed from their shells with the use of high heat, and most almonds are pasteurized).  Most table olives are cooked.  So is soy milk.  So you’re basically left cruising the produce sections and picking out the fruits and vegetables you don’t have to cook.  (Bye-bye potatoes.)

Just how super are they?

Now, there may be some nuts you can eat.  Brazil nuts seem to be shelled without the use of high heat, and offered truly raw.  Hazelnuts may be fine too (though they happen to irritate my throat).  And you can buy sprouted, and certified-raw, sunflower and sesame seeds in natural food stores.  So it is possible for you to venture now and then from the produce aisle.

But on the balance, there are very few options.  And sometimes, I just don’t feel like living off of bananas, apples, strawberries, grape tomatoes and avocados.  Sometimes I want a treat, a change of pace, a “sixth man” to come relieve my weary starting lineup.

And so I’ve been cruising some of the grocery store’s other aisles.  And this week I found something new: A product line called “Go Raw/Real Live Food” puts out a variety of treats geared to raw food dieters: their products are certified organic, certified raw, gluten free, nut free.  What more could a raw foodist want?

Still, I was skeptical: Go Raw products are shaped like, and often branded as, cookies.  They’re little crispy patties of some sorts of food products somehow stuck together.  This doesn’t look like my whole foods from the produce section; it looks like processed foods from the aisles where I normally won’t let my body venture.

So I scrutinized the ingredients.  The first Go Raw product I sampled, Chocolate Super Cookies, has only four: organic coconut (sounds good!), sprouted organic sesame seeds (tough to complain about that!), organic dates (tell me more!) and organic cacao (something I’d been eating a little of recently myself).  No added sugar.  No agave nectar.  No honey.  No heating.  How they got these things to stick together, I may never know.  But so far as I can tell, it’s just whole, raw foods mixed together.

So I decided to test them on my own body.  Adding them to my normal raw-produce diet, along with some other Go Raw products (their chocolate and regular granola; their original and ginger Super Cookies), I subjected them to my weight-loss test for three days.  During these days, I ate exclusively raw, shunning even coffee, so that if I gained weight I’d have a pretty good idea it came from the Go Raw products.

The result?  In three days of including Go Raw products in my raw-produce diet, I’ve lost one pound.  This is a good sign.  I was already lighter three days ago than I’ve been since I started monitoring my weight daily back in January, and so further weight loss from this point is more challenging than it would have been when I first started my raw diet three weeks ago.  (Over these three weeks, I’ve lost 7.6 pounds in total.)  It means that these Go Raw products are likely the real deal.  Any time I’ve breached the raw diet in the past by including non-raw foods, I’ve tended to gain weight, flatline, or lose very little weight.  This time I lost weight fairly nicely.

But there are a couple things that keep me from giving this product my 100% endorsement at this early stage.  No, taste isn’t one of them: these products are delicious.  (Add coconuts and dates to cacao and you do have something decently resembling chocolate.)  I enjoy these snacks.  But the weight loss wasn’t dramatic.

Losing one pound in three days may seem about par for the course, given that I’ve lost 7.6 pounds in 21 days on the raw diet.  In fact, even though I’m lighter now, and so further weight loss should be harder to achieve, I’ve lost weight about as quickly eating Go Raw products as I did eating produce alone for the first 18 days.

But those first 18 days weren’t as clean and raw as they may sound.  On many days, I had some coffee.  (On some days, I had a lot of it.)  On several days, I had Hungarian sausage.  On one I had cheese and pates.  On another, I had beer, French fries, bread and artichoke dip (and gained 2 pounds).  So those first 18 days included many unambiguous breaches of the raw food diet; and these past three days didn’t.

So the weight loss is encouraging for Go Raw products, but not definitive.  It’s also been only three days, so other factors may have prevailed during this short period in bringing forth this weight loss.

But the other thing that concerns me is its effect on the bowels.  Please skip this paragraph if you’re squeamish, but eating solely produce has turned my system into something of a dream machine.  It’s still quite good with the Go Raw products thrown in, don’t get me wrong.  But it’s not entirely the same.  And the small difference I’ve seen is a negative one.   Add to that the newfound presence of gas that may trouble the olfactory nerves (an issue I was not experiencing on my all produce diet) and some new questions enter my mind: what is it about Go Raw products that’s changing my system in this way?  And can it possibly be a good change?

I really don’t know.  Maybe it’s the seeds, which I hadn’t been eating.  Maybe it’s the buckwheat groats and other seeds in the granola.   Maybe these aren’t as good for us as fruits and vegetables.

But maybe, even if they aren’t as good, they’re still good enough.  And if they help me to add variety to my diet, where I was previously resorting to clearly non-raw foods like sausages and cheese, and to keep vegan, then even if they’re not fully as good as fruits and vegetables, they can still be a great “sixth man,” subbing in when they’re needed, without sabotaging the whole project.

Time will tell.  In the meantime, if you’re raw, and you’re open to experimentation, give these products a try.  If you’re not raw, you can try them anyway: you just might like them, and they’re probably a lot better for you than other cookie or granola alternatives.

I initially looked into the possible benefits, but now I really want to see the negatives, too.  The things people say about the diet that could possibly do harm; the skeptics’ critiques and criticisms.

Minerals leaching, before our eyes?

One lengthy critique is posted at beyondveg.com.  I like this critique because, though it raises some questions about the raw food diet, and ultimately advises that we include some cooked food in our lives as well, it’s fairly even handed and somewhat scientific.  (They did do a lot of research, to write this critique.)

I won’t address all of the concerns it raises, but I do want to critique a main one: that cooking food simply doesn’t destroy all that many vitamins and minerals.  The decrease in vitamins from cooking is, according to the report, only between 10 and 25%, depending on the food cooked; and the decrease in minerals is “negligible,” except to the extent that water is used in cooking, in which case meaningful amounts of minerals do leach from the food.

From these facts, the report conclude, eating more raw food may be a dietary plus, but not an enormous one.  And there’s no reason we can’t eat a good amount of cooked food.

Fair enough.  But are these facts about vitamin and minerals really so minor?  Take a 10 to 25% decline in the vitamins in your food.  If what our body needs from food is vitamins, and the idea behind raw foodism is that, if you eat foods high in vitamins, then your body won’t keep asking you to eat more and more, then isn’t a 10 to 25% reduction enormous?  Could you imagine eating 10 to 25% less food, because you’re getting the same vitamin content in the smaller amount of raw food than you’re getting in a given amount of cooked food?  Reducing 10 to 25% of your body fat as a result of eating 10 to 25% less food?  These are big numbers.  They alone are enough to make me want to follow this diet.  Equal satiation (i.e., no more hunger); but 10 to 25% fewer calories, and 10 to 25% less body fat as a result?  Sign me up!

Of course, it hasn’t been proven that the need to eat more in order to obtain the same amount of vitamins is the reason we tend to be heavier on a cooked food diet; but given that it could be a major reason behind it, I’m surprised that this report plays down a 10 to 25% difference in vitamin content.

And as for minerals?  Well, a lot of our cooking is done in water; and a lot of the foods we eat when we allow ourselves cooked food are otherwise packaged or consumed in liquids.  Canned beans, for instance.  Cereal with milk (at least some of which we pour down the drain).  Jarred tomatoes, brined olives, tofu.  If minerals leach into these fluids, then we simply are losing that mineral content, whether or not it’s caused by the cooking process itself.  And because raw foodists don’t eat those sorts of food (they eat almost exclusively fresh produce that sits on a shelf-not in a bath of fluids), they don’t suffer the mineral leaching.

It could be just me, but I’m more inclined to eat primarily, if not exclusively, raw foods than I was prior to reading this report.

But the report does make some other interesting points, and I’ll talk about some of them here in the future.

But there’s surprising unity on one aspect of the raw diet: eating organic.  Now, not every raw foodist eats 100% organic.  (I’d imagine that, in practice, few do.)  And no remotely 100% will insist that it’s the only way to go.  But in terms of ideals, organic food is fundamental to the raw food diet.

A raw foodist at work.

This seems funny; whether something is organic has nothing to do with whether it’s raw, and using pesticides (which organic growing prohibits) seems like a very different “evil” than heating food (which is the raw foodists’ other fundamental no-no).

So why do raw foodists care?  Is it just a general concern for the environment, for their bodies, or for the purity and honesty of the fruits and vegetables that make up the vast bulk of their diets?

In short, no.  What drives raw foodists to organics is that one of raw food’s purported benefits is “detoxification.”  According to the theory, cooking food denatures it in some way and causes you to bring into your bodies toxins created by high (over between 105 and 118 degrees Fahrenheit) heat.  Your body stores these toxins in fat cells, so that once introduced into your body, they don’t go away.

What raw food does is to purge your body of these toxins.  The toxic fat melts away, and is replaced by clean fat.  (If at all; raw foodists are known to lose significant weight once transitioning to the diet, and to keep it off for as long as they maintain the diet.)  Toxic muscle cells may also be eliminated and replaced with clean ones.

(This is all according to raw food doctrine, in any event.  I have yet to do enough research to know whether I believe these claims, and I don’t know whether anyone’s proven them to be true.  But this is a major theory behind the diet.)

So, if a fundamental premise of the raw food diet is to cleanse the body of toxins, then we don’t want to go reintroducing them.  And while leaving food raw prevents the toxins cooking would create from entering our bodies, it can still allow pesticides to find their way in.  If we’re eating conventional produce.  But if we replace that with organic produce, then we’re not ingesting those pesticides, and we’re keeping our new fat and muscle cells clean from any such toxins.

Of course, toxins these days are everywhere.  They’re in our drinking water (raw foodists advise filtering, though that’s one step I’ve yet to take).  They’re all over fragranced shampoos, soaps and household cleaning supplies.  They’re in our laundry detergents, in our plastic and aluminum containers, grocery store receipts, you name it.  It’s extremely hard to avoid them altogether.

But eating organic is one way to reduce them as much as we can.  (Studies of children eating conventional produce show remarkably high concentrations of pesticides in their bodies; once they go organic these pesticide residues drop to undetectable levels.)  And so, even though we are all better off eating organic, it may make particular sense for raw foodists to make that change because they’re otherwise cleaning away toxins with the one hand while putting them back in their bodies with the other.

In the meantime, I love to see one more group pressing the importance of going organic.  While going organic is better for our individual bodies, making the change also promotes the greater good by cleaning up our environment.  And we each have less personal incentive to do that (why should we make the change to help the environment when everyone else just goes and destroys it anyway?).  So it’s nice to have another group (raw foodists) in the organic corner.  Maybe raw foodism will expand and help to expand organics as well.

What I’ve loved about this diet, to start, is that it’s helped me to lose weight quickly (6.2 pounds in nine days, with a couple dietary breaches nonetheless), without feeling remotely hungry, and while eating foods (fruits and vegetables) almost universally recognized as “healthy.”

Delicious. But how many can you eat in a day?

But yesterday and today I’ve started feeling hungry for the first time.  I can think of one reason why.  At the beginning, I had a feeling I was eating very few calories on this diet.  (This could help to explain the fairly rapid weight loss.)  It’s very possible that my body was supplementing the calories I was consuming each day with stored fat calories from my own body.  And now that I’ve burned many of those off (but very far from all of them), it’s possible that my body is telling me, “Stop relying do much on your fat reserves, and start eating food.”

Not that I’m remotely out of stored fat calories left to burn; but maybe my body’s telling me I’ve gone far enough, fast enough, and that it’s time to start bringing my daily caloric intake closer to the total amount that my body burns each day.

So far my weight loss trajectory may line up well with this idea: I lost only 0.4 pounds yesterday, after eating what I expect was more calories than usual, whereas I’d been averaging about 1.0 pounds per day in weight loss during days when I substantially upheld the raw food diet.  This could signal that, though I relied on stored body fat to provide a number of my calories yesterday (theoretically, 0.4 pounds of weight loss equates to 1400 calories of body fat consumed), I relied on fewer of them, allowing calories actually consumed that day to make up a bigger proportion of my total calories burned.

But this is an extremely unscientific way of evaluating my newfound hunger, and it’s imperfect on the facts: one pound of weight loss requires that we burn 3500 more calories than we take in, and it’s unlikely that I did that each day for the six days I’ve been carefully observing this diet.  The additional weight may be coming off from some other source, e.g. water weight or maybe previously undigested or unpurged food previously remaining somewhere in my system.

Who knows.

But the hunger is potentially an issue, and if my theory is correct–that I’m going to have to start taking in more calories in order to continue on this diet–then I have a potential problem.  I resorted yesterday to supplementing my raw food diet with some Hungarian sausage (a gift from my mother in law that had been sitting in the fridge for a couple weeks).  Today I’ve already done the same.  This is not a long term solution, if I want to go 100% raw (though I’ll likely end up compromising at some figure south of that).  But I’m struggling somewhat to find truly raw foods that I can stomach in large enough quantities to satiate the hunger I’ve been feeling the past two days.

Maybe the hunger will subside, and this won’t turn out to have been the problem I currently fear.  My theory that I need to eat more calories all of a sudden could be wrong. But if any of you out there have gone raw, and found good ways to get enough calories into your body to stop relying on body fat stores (which we necessarily have a finite reserve of) without resorting to a breach of the raw diet (a la Hungarian sausage), please let me know.  I still have a few pounds I’d like to lose, and so I can imagine I can rely primarily on body fat to help me out for at least a few days to come.  But I’m not crazy about the idea of eating more bananas, tomatoes, apples and oranges than I’m already consuming.  And I certainly don’t want to eat more sausage.

But it’s less clear that I’ve seen another benefit of raw foods that I often hear about: less sleep.  One study (there aren’t many studies out there yet on this diet) showed a reduction in the number of subjects who sleep at least 8 hours a night from 59% before going raw to just 19% after going raw for two years.  This kicked up the percentage who needed 6 to 8 hours sleep a night from 36% to 64% and those needing under 6 hours each night from 6% up to 16%.  The number experiencing any amount of insomnia dropped from 59% to 40%.

It may be time for a new chapter.

It’s tougher for me to gauge changes in sleep than in weight because I haven’t been tracking my sleep for as long a period before starting the raw food diet.  Based on the six days immediately prior to starting the diet, and the six days I’ve spent thus far on the diet, my sleep requirements have fallen from 8.03 hours per night to 7.65 hours per night.

This is not enough data to demonstrate anything conclusively, and is hardly worth mentioning; over the course of just 6 days any number of things could change my sleep habits.  But I can say that for all 12 days in my “study,” I slept as much as I felt I needed, and woke up only when my body told me it’s truly time to get up.  For all 12 days I counted any day-time naps, so that if I did short-change myself at night, any catch-up napping was accounted for in my data.  And I haven’t had any unusual demands that have kept me up late at night or gotten me up early, or that have added or removed stress from my life (except maybe the dietary transition as well).   Also, I think the 8.03 hours per night figure from my pre-raw days sounds about accurate based on my general recollection of how much I typically sleep (we all should have a decent idea of this just from daily experience).

Even if we do give credit to my data, the change is not enormous.  (It comes out to 22 1/2 minutes per day).  But it’s existent, and potentially meaningful.  (And it may be accelerating; I slept 6 2/3 hours last night, and simply could not sleep any more.)  I’d certainly welcome an additional 22 1/2 minutes in each day of my life.  And technically, my experience does fit the study; I too went from requiring over 8 hours of sleep to requiring only 6 to 8.  But I was just barely over 8 hours to start; and because I slept so little last night, it’s possible I’ll need over 8 hours again tonight, and that my average sleep will move back toward 8 hours per night as well.

I’ll update my little personal study as I spend more time on the raw food diet.  That will make my data more reliable, and will give any beneficial effects of the diet some more time to kick in.  After all, the study subjects spent two full years on the diet; I’ve spend six days.

Why the reduction in sleep?  I’m really not sure.  Some raw foodists say that digestion takes up a large amount of our body’s daily work, and by reducing those demands (both by eating foods that are easier to digest and by eating less food in total) we’re letting our body focus its energy on its restorative tasks at night (whatever restorative tasks our body may typically carry out during sleep) rather than on continuing the day’s work of digestion.

Or maybe we simply need less sleep when we’re in better shape, or have less belly fat, or get more vitamins and minerals.  The raw food diet seems to help people accomplish all of these tasks.

In any event, the promise of less sleep was one of the many factors that drew me to the raw food diet, and if early signs of improvement are to be trusted, I’m optimistic that this will make some difference in my life.  But I’m also hoping to see more of a difference in the future.  The study’s numbers are encouraging.  Let’s hope I see them in my own life as well.

And I’d considered before the possibility that eating more nutrient-dense foods could potentially be healthier and help you lose weight.

But early experiments adding raw foods to my diet never seemed to bring about weight loss, or any evidence of improved health.  On the contrary, an Atkins diet of primarily cooked meat and pasteurized cheeses had proven the most effective weight loss diet for me, and had left me feeling generally good.  Though the media says meat is unhealthy, it certainly seemed an improvement over other diets that left me heavier and feeling less good.

I'm not sure what there is to raw foods that requires a book, but if you're looking for resources they're certainly out there.

What’s more, when I switched to veganism after learning more about the way animals are raised today, I presumably increased my diet’s nutrient-density, but I didn’t lose weight.  I ate more fruits, whole grains and even vegetables.  And many of these (particularly bananas, apples, blueberries and spinach) I ate raw.  Yet not only did I not lose weight; I didn’t feel healthier.  (In fact, while I was eating large amounts of whole grains, I’d get profoundly tired by mid-afternoon.)

So my old theory about nutrient-density, health and weight loss fell by the wayside.

But after I was recently asked if  a product I’ve helped to launch, a new organic olive oil called Frank (because we’re open and honest about our growing and production processses) is raw, I started doing some research on raw food.  Initially looking only for an answer to the question (I believe the answer is “yes,” if you’re curious), I found much more: I found a new diet to try.

There’s a lot about the raw diet that appeals to me.  First, it aligns with the Paleo diet.  Traditionally, humans didn’t eat processed food like white bread, Twinkies, crackers or protein bars.  They didn’t farm, so they didn’t eat a lot of grains.  And they didn’t cook.  They ate raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and meat.  And because we evolved eating this diet for far far longer than we’ve had a chance to adapt biologically to our current diets, this may well be the diet our bodies are currently designed to thrive off of.

Second, the diet is essentially vegan.  Sure, you can eat sashimi, probably carpaccio, and maybe even cured meats like prosciutto.  (I’m not sure yet whether the curing process is tantamount to “cooking.”)  Raw (un-homogenized, unpasteurized) milk and raw cheese are OK too.  But let’s face it, there’s not a lot of raw dairy around these days, and you can only work so much sashimi and carpaccio into your daily diet.  So, if you’re going to do the raw diet, it’s not a big leap to do it vegan.

Finally, the diet seems a surefire way to lose weight.  This is always a plus (so long as the weight loss is safe but healthy).  Until recently, the Atkins Diet has proved for me to be a surefire way to trim some fat; but given my concerns about meats and cheeses the way we produce the vast majority of them today, I don’t like eating any meat or cheese, let alone a diet consisting almost exclusively of them.  So the raw diet could be a way for me to keep slim and eat only those foods I’m comfortable eating.

So I decided to give it a shot.  I’ll be writing more about the raw diet shortly: there are many nuances to it, controversies about it, differences in opinion among the raw food community as to what’s healthy and what’s not, and debates over how healthy it may be.  But since I’m only 5 days into it I’ll give a very quick description of why to follow this diet, and what it’s meant so far for my body.

The key theory behind the diet is that cooking kills nutrients.  The less you cook food (preferably not at all), the more your body will get out of it.  And the more your body gets out of it, the less need it has for you to eat more food, and so the less it tells you to be hungry.  So you end up eating less, being slimmer, trimming belly fat and potentially improving your bloodwork, heart condition and diabetes risk.

Whether this is true is still in question; few studies have been conducted on the diet.  But, as with the Atkins diet, there are some studies about the effectiveness of the raw diet as a weight loss, and weight maintenance, tool.  The most remarkable of these (to me) showed that among a couple dozen men who followed a strict raw diet for four years, their average BMI was 20.7, and their average body fat percentage was 13.9%.

I’ve always fallen on the skinnier side of the spectrum, but if I could get my numbers to those levels it would radically reshape even my body.  These figures, as pure numbers, may not sound impressive.  But jump on a scale that shows body fat percentage, or punch your height and weight into one of the many BMI calculators you can find through Google, and you’ll can figure out how much fat you’d need to trim to get near either of these figures.  (Note that a 20.7 BMI means something different for the typical adult of Caucasian or African backgrounds than it does for someone with an Asian background, but it should give you a decent sense of what the diet meant for these men.)  As a 6 foot, 2 1/2 inch male, I’d need to weight 163 pounds in order to match that BMI.  Few Americans are that slender.  I certainly am not.

As for myself: I’ve been on the diet for five days now, and I’ve lost 4.8 pounds and 2.1 percent body fat.  I wasn’t at my thinnest before starting the diet, but I wasn’t at my heaviest.  (I’ve never been “overweight” as determined by BMI, or even terribly close, but I’m also nowhere near a 20.7 BMI these days).  This is a lot of weight loss (for me) in a little time.  It’s also a lot of trimmed fat.  But it’s still early in the process, and my long term weight loss (or gain) will be more telling.

I’m not going to keep a purely strict raw diet.  I’m going to see the Yankees uptown tonight, and I’ll drink beer (preferably “lite” beer) at the game.  But I plan to maintain a more or less raw diet for the coming weeks, and see where it takes me.  The initial weight loss (and fat loss) are very encouraging.  I also feel great.  People say the raw diet may improve your eyesight, and, at the risk of making myself sound ridiculous, and though it’s tough to measure on one’s own, I actually feel as though it may have.  (I unwittingly found myself holding a book a full arm’s length this morning.)  I also think my face looks thinner.

Let’s see how this experiment pans out.  Much more to come, if I stay on it.

I’d like to mention one more product I came across during my time there: The Well Dressed Nut.

The nuts aren’t among the very few foods I will eat (mostly, whole and very minimally processed foods) because each variety does contain some added sugar.  But I enjoyed participating in the marketplace with the company’s founders, and think they offer a delicious, all-natural (though you know as I do that this term means only so much) snack that’s delicious and beautifully packaged.  They’re also made by the founders in small batches with very evident care and love.

Well-dressed in savory spices.

The nuts, which you can check out (and order) at www.welldressednut.com, are pecans or almonds, seasoned subtly but aptly.  With names like “Spiced-up Pecans,” “Maple-Glazed Pecans with Cranberries,” “Cinnamon-Vanilla Pecans” and “Rosemary-Tossed Pecans,” you get a sense of what they’re like.  The new Rosemary-Tossed Pecans, which I sampled, are something I could eat all day.  (I suppose that’s a plus and minus.)

Though ingredients aren’t listed on the website, my understanding is that they contain a very small amount of sugar to nicely balance off the natural woody flavor and texture of rosemary, and some butter to make the spices stick to the nut.  On the balance the snack they most remind me of are Kind bars, which similarly contain whole nuts plus enough honey to make them a little sweet and to hold everything together.  And, like Kind bars, they’re about as close as you’ll get to a whole-food snack without eliminating sugar completely.

The nuts aren’t organic, but they do eschew preservatives and artificial colors.  You can find them at Whole Foods in Paramus, NJ, and at Nieman Marcus stores.  In their striking packaging, with their distinctive flavors, they make a great gift or occasional treat, even if they’re outside of your typical budget.  Order some online, and learn a little about the company’s founders and their love for their product.