Carol Alt - Easy Sexy Raw: 130 Raw Food Recipes, Tools, and Tips to Make You Feel Gorgeous and Satisfied

Eating in the Raw: A Beginners Guide to Getting Slimmer, Feeling Healthier, and Looking Younger the Raw-Food Way

The Raw 50: 10 Amazing Breakfasts, Lunches, Dinners, Snacks, and Drinks for Your Raw Food Lifestyle

Copyright 2012 by Altron II, Inc.
Photographs copyright 2012 by Usha Menard

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alt, Carol
Easy sexy raw / Carol Alt.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Raw foods. 2. Raw food dietRecipes. 3. Cookbooks I. Title.
TX392.A427 2012
613.265dc23 2011025696

eISBN: 978-0-307-88870-9

Cover design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Book and cover photography by Usha Menard

v3.1

Big differences can come from little changes.

IT HAS NOW BEEN MORE THAN SEVEN YEARS since Carols first book, Eating in the Raw, appeared to wide acclaim, and more than three years since the second, The Raw 50, was published. Both books passionately and wisely spoke about how the world is in need of healthy eatingwith an emphasis on whole raw foodsand about how the potential for great health lies within our grasp.

We need such guidance more than ever before, for the statistics would seem to show that our health in America isnt very good and that it continues to deteriorate, with heart disease, cancer, and other major diseases on the rise. Despite the advances of modern drug-based, high-tech medicine, disease is around us and its clear that it can wreak havoc in our lives. But there is good news: vibrant lasting health is not some mythic ideal but a question of choiceparticularly choice regarding the food we eat.

In the foreword to Carols last book, I touched on the classic text Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, written by the dentist Weston Price and first published in 1945, and which is a major influence on my practice. Though this text is well known and widely read within the alternative medical world, in the academic medical universe the book is unknown and typically never read. How does that figure into the world of eating raw? Read on and Ill explain.

For some seven years beginning in the 1920s, Dr. Price traveled the world studying isolated groups of humans who were still following a way of life largely untouched by Western industrialization. Prices journey took him from the Arctic of the Eskimos, to the high Andes of the Inca descendents, to the African savannah of the Masai, to the high mountain valleys of Swiss Alpine herders, to Polynesia and its fisherman culture, and just about everywhere else in between. Price focused his attention on the diet and the health of the people living according to centuries-old wisdom about food and eating. Then he investigated the dietary habits and health of those people in each area who had migrated to regional towns and adopted a more Westernized lifestyle and eating pattern, consisting primarily of canned, processed, refined, overcooked, and highly sweetened foodstuffs shipped from long distances. He compared the incidence of various diseases, such as cancer, dental caries, and tuberculosis among those living a traditional life to those eating Western.

Wherever Dr. Price journeyed, tribes and communities of humans who still followed a traditional locally and freshly obtained, whole, unprocessed, unrefined, often largely raw foods diet enjoyed superb and enduring good health. These peoples seemed remarkably immune not only to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, but also to degenerative illnesses already reaching epidemic and near-epidemic proportions in Prices day, such as arthritis, cancer, dental disease, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Among those who had migrated from their traditional communities, Price recorded a drastic change in dietand ultimately a catastrophic deterioration in their health. These folks no longer consumed the wholesome fruits and foods from the land but the fruits and foods of modern industry, heavily cooked and refined. Those who might have only recently abandoned the traditions of their ancestors still enjoyed fairly good health, though not as vibrant or as disease-free as their cohorts who still lived and ate as their ancestors had. But among the offspring of the citified migrants, living from infancy on the industrialized foods favored by their parents, Price documented an extraordinary surge in various illnesses, an avalanche of arthritis, cancer, dental disease, heart disease, and infectious disease such as tuberculosis. Price believed only the industrialized diet could explain this profound and rapid fall from good health.

In Prices worldview, appropriate diet and nutrition provide us with the tools we need to allow for healthy and long lives, free of the majority of diseases we fear so much in the civilized West. Far from some inevitable process, these diseases largely develop because of our own doing, as we live and eat indifferent to cultural traditions, enamored of a technology and industrialized agriculture that may ultimately be more of a problem for us than a solution.

Of course, now more than sixty years have passed since the publication of Prices book, and most of the traditional cultures he studied have long vanished, and many people ask if there is a way his findings can be incorporated into their lives. The answer is a resounding yes, and books such as this one and Carols first two certainly provide us with a road map to start on the journey.

Price noted that we humans thrived on a variety of diets, from all meat (the Eskimos) to more plant based (the Polynesians), though the majority were somewhere in between. So forget the dictates of any expert who says he or she has discovered the one perfect diet for all of us. There is no such thing; there are many perfect diets.

But in our genetically mixed modern society, how do we translate this information into a practical way of healthy eating for our modern lives? In our office we have specialized tests that help us with great accuracy sort through the confusion rampant in the nutritional world regarding the so-called right diet, but I understand that such tests are not widely available. The good news is that there are very simple ways of guiding one toward the proper dietand believe it or not, ones basic food preferences can point us in the right direction. So if you arent certain of your ancestry or your ancestry is mixed, go by what healthy foods you are drawn to (think green vegetables and protein rather than empty foods like coffee and sugar, which might draw you in but soon after result in a crash) and see how you feel when you eat them. While nutrition is indeed a science, I find that returning to our dietary instincts is a commonsense way of working toward an optimum individual diet.

For example, I find that people who by genetics and ancestry should be eating a meat-based diet invariably love meat, and they love fatthe more fat the better. They couldnt care less if they never ate another salad and tend not to care for fruit. They dont tolerate grains well but enjoy legumes, root vegetables, squash, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and fermented vegetables like sauerkraut. We often suggest that they consider cooking their meat as little as possibleeven indulging in steak tartare if they like.