Today, as I walked towards a woman enjoying a pizza with her friend in the sunshine, I thought, that looks like fun AND very delicious. I went past her and snuck a look at the topping, which was followed by that unmistakable fresh pizza smell. I actually had to take some deep breaths to resist and ride the temptation wave. Worse than the physical urges, I felt like I was missing out on something and that a part of my life which I once enjoyed, was gone.

This afternoon when I began looking for a post, I found this article which was first written by Victoria in 2006. Reading these wise words has opened me to the idea of applying gratitude to my diet. I can see that by being grateful for the opportunity to care for my body, the positive effects a healthy diet has on many other areas of my life and the rippling effect it has on the planets consciousnesses, I’ll walk past the next pizza with much more ease.  When we resist social foods from our past, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that we are missing out on something that a (mostly) raw, vegan diet can’t give us. The truth is, we have are being given so much to be grateful for.

With Love, Emily

One More Benefit of Practicing Gratitude: It Can Help You Stay Healthy!
By Victoria Boutenko

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
-Cicero

When we adopt a raw food lifestyle, we may feel deprived of our habitual pleasures, especially when we watch others enjoying cooked delicacies that used to be our own favorites. Being hungry, angry, lonely, or depressed at that moment could add even more frustration to our feelings of misery. I would like to share with you a  method that can help eliminate feelings of deprivation from your life forever.

We all have different perspectives on life. Some of us feel that life is becoming  increasingly more frustrating, especially considering all the natural cataclysms and  political challenges. At the same time, others view life as a totally beautiful and enjoyable experience. Initially, I thought that our opinions on the fairness of life  depended on the level of our material wealth. Later, I met some poor people who  were content with their lives and wealthy persons who were deeply upset about their lives. While watching many people caught in a material pursuit (including myself) I developed a strong interest in the true origins of people’s contentment in life. I came to the conclusion that there are two opposite perspectives on life: the materialistic perspective and the grateful perspective.

Continue Reading

Sprouts

For variety, we include several kinds of sprouts in our diet, but never more than a handful and only one or two times a week. Approximately from the third to the sixth day of their life, sprouts contain higher levels of alkaloids, as a means of protection from animals nipping them off and killing them.[1] That doesn’t mean that sprouts are poisonous or dangerous, but only that we cannot live on sprouts alone. Most sprouts are rich in B-vitamins and have a hundred times more nutrients than a fully developed plant because sprouts need more nutrition for their fast growing period.

Toxins in greens

Once in a while I read in the news or receive an e-mail about kale or spinach or parsley or any other green having a toxic ingredient and therefore being dangerous for human consumption. This is all true but not to a degree as to exclude any particular green from our diet. Let us learn to increase the variety of greens in our diet and to constantly rotate them for better nutritional results.

Medicinal herbs

The medicinal herbs are edible but contain higher than usual levels of alkaloids, and have to be used in smaller amounts. I enjoy a variety of medicinal herbs in my green smoothies in the summer, but I always put them in my smoothie with other greens, and not very often. Please use them with caution. The following are medicinal herbs:

Continue Reading

In this video Valya shows how to make a scrumptious raw coconut pudding. This recipe is from Valya’s Raw Desserts E-book which will be released this weekend on the Raw Family site. You will see that this pudding is really simple to make, amazingly delicious and perfect for ‘non raw’ children or friends.

News from Valya and Emily

On Monday the 8th of June Valya begins a two week video series on the You Tube ‘Boutenko Films Channel‘. Each day Valya will share a unique episode that covers a range of diet and health related topics such as cleansing foods, raw travel, meals for children, green smoothies, the secret life of plants, low calorie foods, and budget meals. Each show will focus on nutritional information and ways to use foods and especially green smoothies for healing.

Valya has a rare perspective because she has been a raw foodist since the age of 9. She grew up influenced by the raw food movement and her family’s raw diet experience and now, at the age of 24, has developed her own unique perspective and views. Throughout the series Valya will shares her opinions on topics such as how important it is to be raw, why we should reduce the amounts of nuts in our diet and simple, natural ways to experience health.

You may be interested to know that Valya and I will shoot an episode each day and have it edited and posted to You Tube the next (that is, if all goes to plan:).  From the 14th to the 28th of June we welcome your feedback and questions as we create the show.

Each day we will post a video with it’s recipes on the blog. You could subscribe to the RSS feed to keep record of the useful information Valya intends to share.

I was on You Tube recently and I came across a discussion about Victoria not being raw. People had all sorts of statements about Victoria’s diet, some even said she was never on a 100% raw food diet.  To keep the truth accessible and avoid confusion, I decided to post this article Victoria wrote to her newsletter group at the start of this year. It is her public statement about preferring to resin from her previous 100% raw position.

Why I say I’m 95% Raw

By Victoria Boutenko
January 9th, 2010

This month my family celebrates our 16th birthday as a Raw Family. Raw food saved our lives and I love every aspect of my raw life except for one. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable to feel the separation of us “purists,” (100% raw foodists) from anyone who is “below” that standard.

I first experienced this unease four years ago. I visited my relatives who eat a standard American diet, when suddenly my 9 year old nephew confided to me that he decided to become a vegetarian. He asked me if I would teach him to cook a vegetable soup. I froze, thinking. “How can I do that? I am a 100% raw fooder!” Yet, after looking into Sasha’s excited eyes, I went ahead and helped him cook a soup, which he loved.

Continue Reading

Please enjoy this guest post and a raw pate recipe from our friend Vanessa. Vanessa shares some tips on how to prepare and easily digest the large amounts of nuts often required in raw food recipes.

DIVE INTO RAW FOODS
By Vanessa Nowitzky

If you’re like me, after you’ve been drinking green smoothies a while, you start to feel more alive and crave more raw foods. Have you noticed this? Green smoothies alkalinize the body, and taste is relative to chemistry. When the body’s chemistry is more alkaline, acidic low-energy cooked foods lose their appeal. Instead, you hunger for high energy, living food. And now that you’ve got more energy from drinking green smoothies, it’s a good time to tackle some of those gourmet raw dishes we keep hearing about!

Many raw food recipes call for nuts and seeds, which can be difficult to digest, particularly in the large quantities used in many raw dishes. One good way to help yourself digest nuts is to make sure you soak them ahead of time. A seed is an amazing package of life lying dormant, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. To keep from sprouting before conditions are right, most nuts or seeds contain enzyme inhibitors that are like a lock on the door. All the life in the seed is asleep until that lock is unlocked. It could last years in this state of dormancy- no wonder raw nuts feel very heavy in the stomach. Soaking nuts and seeds in water at room temperature gives the seed the right conditions for sprouting. Then the enzyme inhibitors wash away and the enzymes begin to work their magic, bringing the seed to life. Once the living enzymes are at work, the seed fills up with energy, ready to grow. Before it even sprouts an actual “tail” it is an active live food and will yield its enzymes to the one lucky or wise enough to consume it.

Continue Reading

A chapter from Victoria Boutenko’s book ‘12 Steps to Raw Food: How to End your Dependency on Cooked Food’ , first published in 2000.

“Where there is love there is life.”

Mahatma Gandhi

1 – Many raw fooders do not eat enough greens.
Solution: regularly consume energy soup or green smoothie to guarantee the proper amount of greens.

2 – Many raw fooders do not consume enough fiber, soluble and insoluble.
Solution: Drink more smoothies or energy soups instead of juices.

3 – People on raw food often consume too many fats. When they try to imitate cooked dishes, they substitute starches with nuts. For example, when making raw cakes, they mimic a wheat crust with a nut mixture.
Solution: use nut pulp left over from making nut milks, use more seeds and less nuts, and use more fruit and vegetable pulp from juices in your mixtures, to minimize the consumption of nuts.

4 – Raw fooders commonly try to become too perfect too fast. They don’t give their bodies a chance to adjust to such a radical dietary change.
Solution: gradually adjust and purify your own individual diet to help you ease into the healthiest diet for you.

5 – When people change their diets, they usually decide the other components that make up health are no longer important, such as: sun bathing, exercising, proper rest, fresh air, etc.
Solution: practice a well-rounded healthy life style. Continue Reading

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about eating raw. People commonly believe that without a bowl of cooked food on a chilly winter day they would not be able to stay warm. I know many persons who quit the raw food lifestyle because they were afraid that they would become too cold during the winter.

Let us take a closer look at this situation. Would a quarter pound of rice physically keep a 160 lbs body warm? In order to get warmed by it, one would have to fill a bathtub with warm rice and sit in it for 20 minutes.

So why do we feel warmer after consuming cooked food?

A hot meal, a cup of coffee or an ice-cold shot of vodka warm our body in the same manner. When any impure substances get into our blood through the walls of the intestines, they irritate our adrenals, the endocrine glands located above the kidneys. The adrenals immediately begin to produce epinephrine, norepinephrine and a variety of steroid hormones. These hormones stimulate our sympathetic nervous system, which is why we feel awake at first. They also force our heart to beat faster and to pump larger amounts of blood through our body, which makes us feel warm. This feeling doesn’t last long and we pay a high price for it. After 10-15 minutes our body gets exhausted from performing extra work, the heart requires rest, the nervous system becomes inhibited, and we feel tired, sleepy and even colder than before. However we remember only the feeling of getting warmer after eating cooked food and repeat such stimulation again and again. This harmful practice wears the body out and by the end of the winter many people feel exhausted and depleted.

Continue Reading

I have received several e-mails from people asking if it’s okay to drink hot tea while on a 100% raw food diet. Here is Victoria’s answer from a past teleconference.

VICTORIA: I’d like to say that hot tea is okay because it doesn’t trigger your appetite for cooked foods or any food addictions, but you wouldn’t want to drink a lot of it because you only want to consume highly nutritious substances. We’ve been malnourished for generations and we don’t want to waste any energy on our digestive tracts. We only want high quality nutritious food in there. Teas are usually not of high quality. They have bleach in them and outdated herbs, although you could collect the herbs yourself. When you make tea, you boil out the nutrition. They are okay, but not the most nutritious. What Ann Wigmore did was make “Sun Teas,” where she would collect herbs herself, and put them in cold water or outside in the sunshine for five or six hours. It makes for nice, flavored water.

My friends,

On this Thanksgiving day, I would like to let every one of you know how grateful I am for the love and support I feel from you all.

I thank you for the many kind words you’’ve said to me, and especially for your honest feedback.

I thank you for enjoying my books, and making green smoothies.

I thank you for your many questions, which have inspired me to deepen my research.

And most of all, I thank you for your quest for truth.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely, and with love, 

Victoria