How Healthy is the Raw Food Diet?

The Weight Loss Program Involves Uncooked Food

Sep 24, 2009 Jennifer Marsh

The raw food diet is a weight loss program that promotes eating uncooked food as a healthy way to lose weight and stay fit.

Fad diets are inevitably a part of anyone’s research when trying to lose weight. The raw food diet is a method of using uncooked food. It’s normally an option in a vegetarian diet, but it is incorporated in some diets involving meat. Uncooked meat can carry microbes that make patients sick for several days. These diseases include E.coli poisoning, salmonella and trichinosis. Before following any type of raw food diet to lose weight, it’s important to take precautions when eating meat and obtaining the vitamins necessary for a healthy body.

How the Raw Food Diet Works

The raw food diet involves careful preparation of meals without any type of processed procedures. The weight loss diet fad claims that food is ruined and nutrition is devalued when the person cooks food with intense heat. Followers of the raw food diet believe that they eliminate toxins that exist after cooking any type of food including vegetables and meat. Furthermore, raw food diet followers believe the plan is not for the benefit of weight loss. Instead, the diet is a way of life and a lifestyle to follow for the benefit of the body’s health and fitness. Additionally, people who follow the raw food diet are instructed to eliminate toxic foods like alcohol, refined and processed sugars, and caffeine.

The Side Effects of the Raw Food Diet

The raw food diet has some side effects that mostly involve the possibility of acquiring bacterial and parasitic infections. When meat is uncooked, bacteria are able to grow on the tissue and infect the gastrointestinal tract of the human. This leads to food borne illnesses that can be deadly if left untreated.

Other studies have shown that people who follow the raw food diet also have deficiencies in vitamins. Although raw food diet followers were low in cholesterol and triglycerides, which is a positive aspect of the diet, they were also low in vitamin B12. This vitamin is mainly found in red meat, which most raw food dieters avoid. Vitamin B12 is an essential coenzyme in the development of nerves and red blood cells, so eliminating it from the diet can cause serious health concerns. Additionally, studies in Germany have shown that patients who follow this diet are also low in plasma lycopene, which is an essential component in disease prevention.

Before following any kind of diet, ensure that it maintains the best quality in nutritional benefits. The raw food diet may help a person lose weight, but the health concerns make food best fit when cooked. Before starting any kind of extreme weight loss diet, speak to a physician.

Reference:

WebMD – Health Food Diet

The copyright of the article How Healthy is the Raw Food Diet? in Weight Loss is owned by Jennifer Marsh. Permission to republish How Healthy is the Raw Food Diet? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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