Frederic Patenaude Raw Foods Diet

Help! I’m shrinking! I need serious support in eating more raw calories. I’ve been raw for almost three years now and have noticed weight loss to the point where I have no body fat. Are there specific recipes that are high in calories. I started having two big banana smoothies each day but in between I’m not sure how to keep up. I have a very hectic life working on film sets most of the time and non-stop lectures in grad school. Any suggestions to boost calories in diet? Specifically what raw foods help to put on weight? Thanks so much. Love your cleanse and all the wonderful advice you give. You’ve been my only support system in the transition to raw.

Gavin

ANSWER: I seriously doubt that you have “no” body fat. For a woman, a healthy body fat is between 11 and 20% or so. You should get that tested before making any assumption. At your age, you probably have pretty high caloric requirements.

What you need is more fruit. Bananas are great, but there are many other high-calorie fruits, including:

· Mangoes

· Durian

· Oranges (sweet varieties)

· Dates

· Figs

· Persimmon

· White nectarine or peach

· As well as many tropical fruits: jackfruit, mamey, sapote, etc.

I have no idea what a “big” banana smoothie is. But I think my own diet should give you an example of what it takes to eat enough calories. I eat between 3000 and 3500 calories at the moment. And likely, this is going to increase as I am training for my first marathon.

Breakfast: Smoothie made with 4 cups of freshly squeezed orange juice blended with 2 cups of mango flesh

Lunch: 7 extra-extra large bananas blended with 2 cups of frozen wild blueberries

Dinner: 5 Haitian mangoes, pause of 30 minutes, then I made two huge blended salads consisting of:

· 3 large tomatoes

· 2 mangoes

· 6 cups of spinach

· 10 stalks of celery

· juice of 1 lime squeezed on top

I had that blended salad in two sittings (two blendings)

I also had about 1 third of an avocado somewhere in there.

Total calories: over 3000, with about 6% coming from fat. Not that I worry about it, but the nutrients obtained is pretty much off the chart (including over 700 mg. of calcium), with at least double values for most requirements.

That was an extra-blended day! Normally I don’t have that much blended foods, but that really depends on what I feel like.

As you can see, to get enough calories you have to eat A LOT. Personally this kind of amount seems pretty normal to me. In fact, it’s very satisfying and surprisingly easy to digest.

If you don’t NEED to eat that much food, don’t panic! Not everybody needs 3000 calories per day. The amounts will be depend on your needs.

I also have to remind you that although you need to eat enough calories to maintain your health, energy levels and weight — in order to gain weight you need to workout with weights 2-3 times a week. That’s why you really need to figure out your true body fat soon. Go to a gym, and they will be able to tell it for you.

If it’s not under 11% (for a woman), then your body fat is NOT too low. What you need is more muscle!

Are Papaya Seeds Okay?

Hi Fred! Many thanks for all the information. Is it ok to eat papaya seeds? They are sort of bitter, but I was wondering if the seeds have health benefits. Please advise. Thank you.

Dale

ANSWER: According to T.C. Fry, the first rule of eating is “Thou shall not poison thyself”. There is absolutely no reason to eat papaya seeds. Why are a bit poisonous, and in fact in many countries they are used to force a miscarriage.

Papaya seeds also reduce the potency of male sperms in animal species.

Plus, they do not taste very good, which is a sign you should not eat them.

Food Combining Question

Hi Frederic! In the Raw Secrets book it states that we should not mix fruit with fat foods (nuts, seeds, oils) because the fruits may ferment since they digest quicker. So, how long should we wait after eating fat foods to eat fruits? Is two hours enough time? Thanks.

ANSWER: If the quantity of fat is very small (like 1/3 of an avocado, or 1 tsp. of olive oil), you don’t really have to worry about it too much. You can mix them with a salad that might even contain some acid or sub-acid fruit such as oranges and mangoes.

If you follow sequential eating, you know you should eat the fruit FIRST. For example, I might make a dinner that starts with a fat-free fruit soup, and THEN follow it with a spinach salad with an avocado dressing.

If you eat some fat first, you could follow it with some acid or sub-acid fruit. It’s not a perfect combination, but it’s better than waiting too long, getting hungry and then eating more fat.

Vitamin D and Vitamin B12

What brand/type of sublingual vitamin B12 and Vitamin D do you recommend?

ANSWER: The best brand of vitamin D is exposure to natural sunshine, about 30 minutes per day at mid-day in Northern latitude, and any time except midday in the tropics.

For vitamin B12, I still stand by my recommendation in Raw Secrets where I followed the lead of most vegan doctors who recommend supplementation, “just in case”. I don’t have a favorite brand and in fact I have not taken it myself in a long time. But because the debate is not completely over on the subject, I still recommend it. The sub-lingual varieties are best.

Fat Eating Time

Since you say you should have fat once a day, do you recommend doing so during lunch or during dinner?

ANSWER: I did not say you should have fat once a day. I said you should not have fat MORE than once a day. The best time will be after you’ve done your exercise for the day. So for most people that will be for dinner.

- Frederic’s Update: Raw Events This Summer!

- Feature Article: Fred Challenged on the High-Fruit Diet

I hope that you’re enjoying the spring as much as I am, even though here in Canada it feels like winter rather than summer is coming

I have three updates for you:

1)  Raw Chat Event! On Sunday, June 7th, at 9 p.m. Eastern I’ve been invited to host a 1-hour live audio/video chat for the website Raw Food Friends. Come to ask me any questions about raw foods and meet other raw food friends. All you need is join at: http://www.rawfoodfriends.com/member/join.php

2)  Raw Event This Summer! Are you looking for a great raw event to meet other like-minded people and learn a ton about this lifestyle with live lectures and demos? The event to attend this summer is the Vibrant Living Expo, on August 21-23, in Ft. Bragg, Northern California, organized by Cherie Soria and her team. I’ve attended many raw food events for the past 10 years and this one beats them all, hands down.

I will be there giving two lectures, and with a booth where you can meet me and get to chat a bit in person. Other lecturers include:

•    Dr. Doug Graham
•    Kevin Gianni
•    Howard Lyman (the Mad Cowboy)
•    Victoras Kulvinskas
•    John Robbins (author of “Diet for a New America”)
•    Matt Monarch & Angela Stokes
•    Don Weaver
•    Brian Clement
•    And many others

Get more information and sign up at www.rawfoodchef.com. Make sure you sign up early to get a discount.

3)  Low Fat Raw Vegan DVDs finally in! Last week I launched my first series of professional raw vegan DVDs, where I show you on the screen how to make simple, delicious and nutritionally sound raw recipes. This is the first DVD series that presents low-fat recipes.

The DVDs have already started shipping. Order yours at: www.fredericpatenaude.com/lowfatdvds/

“Who Else Wants to Watch Professional DVDs and Become Confident in the Kitchen With the Most Amazing, Simple and Delicious Low Fat Raw Recipes Ever?”

Watch the preview YouTube Video to get a peak at what’s inside this DVD series. For more information on the Low Fat Raw Vegan DVD Series, click here. On the video, click “HQ” after it has started for better quality.

To order the Low Fat Raw Vegan DVDs, click here.

Frederic Challenged on the High-Fruit Diet

I was recently interviewed by the Fresh Network for a special event they are doing for their magazine, where they are interviewing different raw food expert and challenging them with important questions about the raw-food lifestyle that are often left unanswered.

I’m publishing below a part of the interview.  Each expert got a slightly different set of questions. As you’ll see, mine featured a lot of questions on the fruit-based diet and the concerns that many people have about it.

1. Fruit

•    How much fruit do you think we should consume for optimal health, and why?

For optimal health on a raw vegan diet, we should consume enough fruit to provide us with the bulk of our calories. The reason is quite simple: no other food that can be eaten raw can provide us with sufficient calories, vitamins and other nutrients while at the same time be low in fat.

Fruits are packed with vitamins, minerals, and contain enough calories to maintain our weight.

One pound of lettuce only yields 63 calories, while one pound of bananas yields 400.

To this fruit-based diet, we add 1 to 4 pounds of vegetables and non-sweet fruits per day, which will provide additional mineral density, such as sodium, which may be lacking in fruit.

•    Please comment on the following: “Although it is clear from our anatomy and physiology that we are frugivores, the fruit that is commercially available today is so different from the fruit our earliest ancestors ate that it is no longer an ideal food for us. Specifically, it is much lower in minerals and much higher in sugar. Therefore, is it not wise to consume sweet fruit in moderation and favour non-sweet fruits, and vegetables, as those foods are likely closer to the fruits on which our ancestors based their diets?”

I don’t believe there’s any evidence for the sugar content of fruits that our “earliest ancestors” ate. If so, I would be interested to see it. We’re talking millions of years, so I don’t think it’s possible to know what the sugar content was back then.

From having travelled the world, I know that the sugar content of wild fruits varies greatly. Some wild fruits are not very sweet and others are extremely sweet. I believe it would have been the same for foods grown millions of years ago.

Let’s compare two raw vegan diets of 2000 calories. Let’s say that someone follows the advice of eating fewer sweet fruits and more non-sweet fruits and vegetables. Because there are not enough calories in the diet, the person will invariably be drawn to eat more fatty foods such as avocados. The result will be an unhealthy diet containing too much fat, even more than what is traditionally recommended as the upper limit.

On the other hand, a person eating mostly fruits grown today can eat the same quantity of vegetables and non-sweet fruits as the person described above, but will avoid the problem of excess fat. So the diet will be more nutritious, contain more minerals from vegetables and less fat.

•    Do you believe it is advisable to eat seasonally and locally? And if so, aren’t those living in cold climates where no fruit grows for 6+ months of the year better off focusing on foods that do grow in their locality, and enjoying local fruits when they are in season, rather than eating imported fruit year round?

Yes, I believe it’s a good thing to eat seasonally and locally as much as possible. However, it’s not advisable to make it a religion and avoid imported fruits when local fruits are scare and not sufficient to provide enough calories in the diet. If not, you will be forced to eat other things such as cooked grains, which are not as healthy.

•    It is very difficult to get ripe fruit these days. Most commercially available fruit is picked 1-2 months before it’s ripe. What are the consequences of consuming unripe fruit?

Yes, fruits are picked unripe but they ripen after they’ve been picked and should be fairly ripe when you eat them.

There would be negative consequences to eating a truly unripe fruit, such as a green banana, which could lead to indigestion. But no one eats them that way.

What I believe people should do is seek the best quality fruit they can. It doesn’t matter that it’s been picked a few weeks earlier, as long as it has had the right conditions to continue ripening properly. Even in the tropics, bananas are picked green, otherwise they would get eaten by monkeys and other animals!

• Sugar consumption is known to accelerate the aging process as it contributes to cross-linking of collagen in the skin and also the formation of Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs), both externally and internally. Given the link between sugar and aging is it not wise to consume sweet fruit in moderation or not at all and to favour low-sugar plant foods instead?

I did some research and found this (from http://longevity.about.com/od/researchandmedicine/p/crosslinking.htm)

“Researchers believe that if the concentration of sugar in the blood is high, then more cross-linking occurs. Everyone could benefit from keeping their blood sugar from spiking.”

If you read the above statement, you will understand that it’s not sugar per se that is the problem (after all, our cells need sugar), but high levels of blood sugar, which is completely different. One of the main factors resulting in high blood sugar is the overconsumption of fat (for proof, see the works of Dr. Fuhrman, Barnard, Mc. Dougall, Klaper, Graham, Ornish).

By trying to avoid sugar in fruit, a person will invariably consume more fat, which will lead to the very problem they were trying to avoid in the first place: high blood sugar. On a low fat diet, consuming large amounts of fruit only results in normal, not high blood sugar.

On a personal note, I have tested on myself and with many people using a blood sugar monitor the sugar response from eating fruit. I have found that even after eating a large quantity of bananas (as many as 15), blood sugar doesn’t spike, is extremely stable and in the healthy range, and that for hours.

The author Steve Pavlina also did similar experiments and came to the same conclusions: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/02/raw-food-diet/

•    Since it is known that sugar feeds cancer cells, and that cancer cells have more insulin receptors than normal cells and therefore will get fed first when sugar is consumed, is it wise for someone with cancer to cut down on all sugars, including those found in fruit?

Again, I believe here the key is to avoid high blood sugar, rather than sugar itself. The only way to keep your blood sugar stable and avoid the spikes and crashes is to eat a low fat diet and keep your body fat at reasonable levels. Other factors such as exercise will improve your insulin sensitivity.

It’s not possible to avoid sugar completely. If no simple sugars are consumed, complex carbs will be broken down into simple sugars. If no carbs are consumed, the body is forced to convert fat into fatty acids and ketone bodies for survival during a state referred to as “ketosis”, which is essentially what happens during fasting. The body needs a source of energy, and simple sugars are its preferred source.

The consumption of fruit in the context of a low fat diet promotes a stable sugar, which could be key in recovering from cancer.

It is good to note that the American Cancer Society recommends plenty of fresh fruits. ((REF: http://tinyurl.com/8a3e3)