Free Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself by Alejandro Junger Page B

organize gatherings, lectures, and conventions as well as sell products and services. Movements can affect the country’s economy as much as fads. Some of these movements are worth learning about.
    The raw-food movement explains that it is not healthy to cook your food. Cooking destroys the enzymes in raw foods that are necessary for their digestion. A famous experiment I heard about made me fully respect the theories behind it. In the early 1900s, Dr. Francis Pottage conducted an experiment in California. He kept two groups of cats separated, living in identical environmental conditions, except for one difference. One group was fed raw meat and milk. The second group was fed the same amount of the same quality meat and milk, only cooked. After some time, the cats on raw food were healthy and thriving. The cats on cooked foods developed various diseases, such as cancer, arthritis, diabetes, and others—all diseases we see often in humans.
    In my personal experience, eating only raw foods for a period of time is a great way to detox less intensely than juicing or water fasting. But after some time I myself could not sustain it. I was strongly drawn to eat cooked foods again, which invariably made me feel better. I do recommend that all my patients increase the percentage of raw foods in their daily diet. Small increases in percentage of foods eaten raw have proven to have significant benefits in lowering blood pressure and cholesterol naturally. The tenets of the raw-food movement are presented as the solution for a healthy body as well as a healthy planet. Shifting our habits to eating only raw foods would imply a total redesign of life as we know it, adherents explain, and will solve global warming, global toxicity, global hunger, and many other problems of modern life.
    The live-food movement takes the ideas of the raw-food movement to another level. Simply being raw is not enough—food has to carry the energy of life. It cannot be eaten too long after picking or the energy of life will no longer be present. Seeds and nuts must be soaked to initiate the process of germination, before which the seed is inert, without any life energy.
    Vegetarianism is the rare case of a dietary movement that people join for a whole host of reasons that have little to do with food, including religious and political ones. Still, whatever their motivation, they all reinforce each other, and the number of vegetarians is growing. Vegetarians eat both raw and cooked plants. Many vegetarians have to quit after some time, or they begin to look really unhealthy. Dr. Gabriel Cousens explains in his book Conscious Eating that becoming a healthy vegetarian is not as simple as having a salad for lunch and one for dinner. Certain nutrients are harder to get from plants, such as the B vitamins. There are ways around it such as including fermented foods, so that all the needed nutrients can be obtained from a vegetarian diet. He explains that many people making the change to vegetarianism need to do so gradually. Dr. Dean Ornish was the first cardiologist to prove that blockages in the coronary arteries disappeared after switching to a vegetarian diet and meditating. He opened the door for modern medicine to begin to give food choices the importance they really deserve.
    When it comes to diet, America is stuck in the wild, wild West. There are a thousand other theories that don’t qualify as fads or movements, but add to the popular confusion when it comes to something as basic as choosing what to eat. There is a lot of talk about the standard American diet (SAD), but the reality is that there is no standard. More than anything, diets in America are substandard, lacking essential nutrients due to soil depletion, unnatural growing conditions, and global toxicity. Instead, Americans are eating too many processed foods loaded with chemicals, simple carbohydrates, and fats designed in laboratories.
    Mark, a senior entertainment executive in his late