Patenaude - Raw food controversies : how to avoid common mistakes that may sabotage your health : a personal journey

Cover art: Martin Mailloux

Copyright 2011 by Frdric Patenaude

All rights reserved

First Edition, January 2011

Published by:

Raw Vegan

Montreal, Canada

www.fredericpatenaude.com

Customer support: www.replytofred.com

The information in this book does not constitute medical or health advice, but is presented simply with the intention of sharing the personal experiences of Frederic Patenaude with healthful living.

Frederic Patenaude does not provide any medical opinions or health advice. If you have questions regarding specific medical or healthcare matters, you should speak directly with your doctor or licensed healthcare provider.

The information contained in this book is not intended to replace the advice of a licensed healthcare provider.

Copyright 2011 by Frederic Patenaude

Except for brief quotations, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system (such as an Internet server), or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

It never ceases to amaze me how certain seemingly insignificant moments have the potential to define our existence. In writing this book, I realized how my thinking has been shaped by all the experiences that I have had, and all the people I have met.

Several people contributed to this book, including all the characters you will meet in it. They are all real people, who were part of this raw journey along with me. Id like to thank all of them, because they all had something to contribute to this book.

I have changed some of the names and sometimes altered the chronology of some of the events I relate, only to make the story easier to tell and to protect the privacy of certain people who would prefer not to be recognized.

Id like to thank all the raw food gurus that I have featured in this book. I know some of my writings will appear as harsh criticism of their philosophies, but in reality, I have no one to blame but myself for some of the mistakes I have made. I wanted to tell my raw food story without hiding behind obscure references to some well-known people in the raw-food movement, and so I have chosen to name all the people I feature, who have themselves decided to be public personalities by writing their own books.

Id like to thank my wonderful wife Veronica, who gave me the idea for this book. I thought I had already written my raw story in my book The Raw Secrets , but she knew I had much more to say. Our conversation in downtown Vancouver sparked the idea for Raw Food Controversies , and she contributed key parts to this book.

To a great extent, when you take up the raw food diet, you become a new and different person. You dont just stay the old person, only a little healthier...You become a person who is more a part of the one great life of Nature and less of the confused human world.

Joe Alexander,
Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda

This is my raw food story.

Again, I find myself writing a book about the raw food diet, meant for raw food newbies and rookies or simply anyone who wants to avoid common mistakes most raw foodists make.

Amazon.com is filled with books on the raw food diet, many of which are meant to introduce the concept to a broad audience. Those books have already done the job of explaining what exactly a raw food diet is. So why in the world would someone pick up another book with the unlikely title Raw Food Controversies ?

Ive been asked by my graphic artist Martin (my old high-school friend, who has done the cover design for all of my books, and has followed my raw food experiments of the past 14 years as an outsider), What exactly is a raw food controversy?

I get it. Raw foodists like to eat raw foods. Theyre vegetarians who prefer not to cook their food. That part is clear.

But what controversies could there be within this bunch of health-food enthusiasts?

When Martin asked me what kind of controversies I was talking about, so that he could get an idea for what to put on the cover of this book, he envisioned that perhaps some raw foodists said we should eat more apples, while others preferred pineapple.

I explained to him that its a little bit more complicated than that.

For example, in the raw food movement, theres the fat camp and the fruit camp. Some people think we should eat mostly fruit, while the rest think fruit is bad.

There are also people who believe we should take supplements and superfoods, while others say that we can get everything we need from bananas and lettuce.

Lets keep it simple, Martin said. How about we feature a banana and an avocado on the cover? That should be a symbolic representation of those mysterious raw food controversies.

It would be so much easier if one raw food guru thought we should eat mango, and another said that no, oranges are the way to go!

The controversies are everywhere. We ask a hundred raw food experts what a raw foodist should eat, and get a hundred different answers.

The raw food diet itself can be divided into different factions, such as the fruitarians, low-fat raw vegans, instinctive eaters, paleo eaters, living-foodists, nutritarians, liquidarians, sunfoodists... We even have the breatharians, who believe they can live on nothing but air, who are often raw foodists who decided to take their diet to the next level.

Should you follow the green juice approach? What about the ideas of Dr. Robert O. Young that all sugar, including fruit sugar, is bad for you? Then, of course, we have Ann Wigmore and her diet of sprouts and living foods, and on the other end of the spectrum, people who live on fruit alone, with no vegetables.

When some raw gurus dont want to recommend a specific diet, they become just-do-what-works-for-you foodists; that is, they dont want to commit to any one approach, so just suggest to their readers to try all of them and decide for themselves which one works. I have found out through personal experience that this can be a long and painful process.