Put a cooked potato next to a fresh raw potato and what do you notice? The raw potato may look shiny and have small roots still holding on to its skin. The cooked potato, depending on how you cooked it may look shriveled up and sunken in, especially if you cooked it in a microwave. It’s obvious which one looks dead.

Our bodies are made of living cells and require a good amount of living food to keep it functioning properly and to repair damaged cells. Raw fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamins, minerals and enzymes. As you cook them, the enzymes which help your body to digest the fruit or vegetable are completely removed. They also retain less vitamins and minerals. For instance, when you boil broccoli, it loses 66% of its flavonoids (antioxidants with an extra punch for fighting free radicals), and when you use a pressure-cooker it loses 47%. Whereas steaming broccoli causes only an 11% loss of flavonoids. So the best way to eat cooked vegetables is to steam them and to increase your consumption of raw foods to at least 50%.

The easiest way to add more raw food to your diet is to eat more raw food as snacks– like carrots and hummus or a fruit salad. A quick and easy lunch could be raw or lightly steamed mixed vegetables with brown rice or quinoa. And don’t forget to consume bigger salads with a wide variety of raw vegetables for lunch and dinner. Ideally you should eat salad twice a day, but at minimum once a day. Salads are densely nutritious and low in calories and fat so long as you don’t go overboard on the nuts and salad dressing. Don’t use more than a couple of spoonfuls of nuts and try using a vinegar based dressing in a spray bottle. When you pour dressing it tends to come out quickly, and hence, you use too much. A great place to find recipes for fat free salad dressings is fatfreevegan.com.

A whole food concentrate is also helpful since most of us find it hard to get enough fresh raw fruits and veggies each day. How many times have you been to the store and found only the bananas, oranges, and apples to be worth buying? Juice Plus whole food concentrate is made from 17 different mostly organic, raw fruits and vegetables that have been vine ripened, picked and juiced shortly after, then dehydrated and put into one of the various forms for consumption. It’s great even for people who eat a lot of raw produce because none of the produce we buy in the store is vine ripened, and therefore is not as nutrient dense.

Keeping a food journal is the best way to monitor your raw food intake. When you write it all down on paper it helps you to keep on track with making changes and you can look back to see how much you’ve improved over a period of time.

So eat your raw fruits and veggies with a smile on your face, knowing that you are putting the healthiest form of nutrition in your body!


For more information on Juice Plus go to www.juiceplus.com/+gg28070