Getting Enough Nutrients on a Raw Food Diet

No matter what kind of diet you examine, there seems to always be a great deal of focus on getting enough nutrients. This seems rational enough and, of course, it is vital to our level of wellness that we have a sufficient amount of our essential nutrients in our body at all times. However, when we use the language “getting enough nutrients,” the focus is placed on consumption. We think that the key to being properly supplied with an abundance of our essential nutrients is through consuming them. This also might sound logical to us but only because we are culturally conditioned to believe that consumption is always the answer. Our entire society is built on it. We are trained from the cradle to be good consumers, and everything we need is produced, marketed and purchased.

What if we were all naturally supplied with everything we needed to live long, joyful and comfortable lives? What if nothing of virtue could be manufactured, bought or sold? How would our economy and our capitalistic-consumption based society survive? It wouldn’t. We would need to completely alter the way we lived on a cultural and societal level. It’s becoming less and less of a secret that our perceived dependency upon nonrenewable goods and energy is a self-created illusion that is slowly destroying us all. It is the essential dissatisfaction with our own wayward lifestyles that causes us to feel the need for products and services that are designed to temporarily distract us from our discontent. All the so-called conveniences we think we cannot live without are only remotely necessary because we use them to deal with the cumbersome obligations that are required to sustain those very technocratic conveniences.

Our giant medical industrial complex is praised and touted as a savior yet, in reality, it is only necessary because our food supply is denatured and toxic. Furthermore, the industries that manufacture dis-ease-creating foods are the same industries that are meant to “heal” us with their drugs and procedures. We are buying the poison from them and then turning around to pay them for the antidote as well. All the while we are calling it heroic and cosmopolitan.

The nutrient supplementation complex is no different. We pride ourselves on being able to manufacture synthetic or “natural” nutrient isolates. We have entire industries that supply vitamin pills and nutrient serums to supplement our food supply. All of this tail chasing is predicated on the belief that nature is broke or inadequate and that we need to fix it. They see widespread collective malnourishment in our society, so they immediately begin to develop a manufactured solution to a manufactured problem. They claim intellectual and technological superiority for this so-called solution, yet as their own predecessor so eloquently and wisely ascertained, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Our food must be selected out of an intimate knowledge of our own very nature and the ecological relationships that we are inescapably involved in. If the result of our diet and lifestyle is deficiency, then we must take a very careful look at the problem so that we can facilitate the solution rather than try in vain to produce one.

Of course, the raw food diet in itself is a great answer, in part, to this crisis of deficiency. Cooking food causing the destruction and decay of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables. The heating process also denatures minerals, ripping them from their organic form and making them inorganic and unusable. Cooked food also becomes essentially denatured itself and, as such, becomes acid waste in the body. As the acid waste collects in the blood, we begin to bleed calcium, magnesium and other vital nutrients to save us from the dangerous acidity of our cooked diet. As a raw foodist, much of this is surely avoided. However, one cannot overlook the very large market of “raw food” supplementation. The issue must go deeper.Nutrient deficiency as we know it is not a deficiency at all but rather an overflow. It is an overflow of superfluous substances consumed vainly through emotional attachment or ignorance. It is not the foods we eat that are lacking in nutrition; it is the foods we eat and the lifestyles we lead that disrupt the way nature attempts to nourish us. By design, the fruits and vegetables that we evolved with have become perfect packages of optimum health and nutrition.

No matter how much nourishment you think you are consuming by way of fresh fruits and vegetables, if you are not consuming fresh fruits and vegetables exclusively, then you are severely jeopardizing your body’s ability to absorb, assimilate and even use those nutrients efficiently. When you consume stimulating comfort foods like spices, grains, salts or anything abrasive to the digestive system, you are crippling your body’s ability to collect the nutrients that are contained within the fresh healthy fruits and vegetables that you are eating. When you consume dairy products, excessive nuts and seeds, animal flesh or oils, then you are creating a dangerously acidic condition within your blood that demands the misappropriation of stored nutrients to balance the problem you created. This is like living under condition of drought with a limited supply of fresh water and starting a fire in your house that you must use that supply of fresh water to extinguish.

In other words, the comfort foods that you are consuming out of your attachments and emotions as an effort to ease your mind, are creating a perpetual affirmation of lack, insufficiency and doubt in your consciousness. These subconscious thoughts are the undercurrent of our cultural dependency on consumption and institutions of the very limited mind. The human body and, by extension, our outward ecosystem is an infinite source of abundance when it is left unfettered by the fear-based interference of our limited perception of who we are. If we don’t believe that our own bodies, and that our planetary body is sufficient for a robust and joyful existence, then what chance do we have for true empowerment, sovereignty or self-realization in God?

If while truly eating a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables exclusively there is the presence of nutrient deficiency, then the issue is beyond the food we consume and a manifestation of our collective estrangement from our ecology. Our lifestyles outside of our diet can be just as responsible for deficiency. High levels of stress cause acidification in the blood, and the economic pressures put on 99 percent of society are the most toxic aspect of our consumption worldwide. If you are still voluntarily participating in the tail chasing of this society, then your most important work is to become as still as you can to navigate the detachment from those things that are keeping you entangled. The so-called conveniences, novelties and entertainments are the lead weight keeping you from living the life that is truly in the collective best interest of the one organism.

When people try to endorse supplementation, you must ask yourself what their motivations are. Is there money to be made here? Are the endorsers fearful of their own deficiencies and are they projecting those fears and needs onto you? Perhaps a bit of both? Always examine the entire life and philosophy of those sellers. Are they living naturally and truly eating and consuming and thinking purity? Isn’t supplementation just a lapse in faith of our intimate ecological bonds and an apprehension to look deeper into one’s self to see just what more you can let go of in order to receive more natural abundance and divine grace?

Check out Matthew David’s transformation story!