If you take a moment to look around you and think, you’ll notice that the majority of animals that are obese tend to be pets. Even animals like rhinos and elephants that are naturally large are more muscular than obese. The same goes for whales, sea manatees, cows, and walruses. They are not like the overweight dogs and cats that can hardly move from their owner’s bed. The reason for this, some claim, is because they are on a raw food diet.
The raw food diet has always been around, but was not until 2008when Angela Stokes shared her personal story with the world on CNN that it became extra-popular. Stokes went from 300 pounds to 168 pounds in spite of an underactive thyroid gland and claims that she did it by following tips in a diet book from her friend. She was enthralled with the idea of eating like animals do – raw, natural food that is both unprocessed and uncooked.
Dieticians responded to the news by saying, ‘Of course you’ll lose weight on the raw food diet. It’s high in fruits and vegetables.’ Mind you, before she was on the diet, Spokes ate junk food all the time and sat around her house doing nothing. Without all the extra carbohydrates, trans fats, and saturated fats found in the pizzas and doughnuts she was eating beforehand, she was bound to lose some weight. Furthermore, nutritionists point out that while it is true fruits and vegetables lose some nutritional value during the cooking process, any enzymes that are not lost during cooking actually go away during digestion. In other words, whether you eat a cucumber cold or cooked, it is basically as equally nutritious.
The raw food diet works perfectly for animals because animals are used to and evolutionarily equipped to getting most, if not all, of their food and nutrients raw. The cheetah, for example, might not get its vitamin C during its hunt and kill of an impala, but it does not need it because it has been conditioned to produce it by natural means in the body. Humans, however, have been designed to hunt meat and gather crops. So people on the raw food diet will do okay for a while, garnering high amounts of vitamins A and C, but they will be lacking in zinc, iron, omega-3 fats, and vitamin B nutrients. In other words, in order to stay on the diet, people would have to take supplements for the foods like meat and fish that they would be missing.
Page :« previous | next »