NUTRIENT REQUIREMENTS ON A RAW VEGAN DIET

“I wouldn't have bothered you, but for some time I have been desperate to get an answer to the question of adequate nutrition on the raw food or vegan diet. When discussing nutrients I need specifics, such as, are the daily requirements of *essential* amino acids and fatty acids, as well as vitamins and minerals met on the raw food or vegan diet?

“Most health authorities that I have encountered agree that a vegan diet is healthy, but only in the short term. Consequently, I am afraid to totally switch over to the diet until I can get some answers. Do you have this information?” - Joyce

ANSWER: Any form of quantification over the exact amount of certain nutrients we need is totally arbitrary and at best very inaccurate.

There are so many factors that come into play into determining how much of each nutrient we need that the only thing it can do to try to keep track of that is confuse you completely. Here are some of those factors that influence our needs for specific nutrients:

Our activity level
Age, gender, height
Muscular mass
The intake of other nutrients (everything is co-dependent)
Sun exposure
Genetic predispositions
Etc.

In addition to that, there are “new” nutrients constantly being discovered, so we can only guess that we only know a tiny bit about essential nutrients and their relationships with each other. Therefore, there is likely a lot of nutrients you could probably worry about, but we don't even know they exist yet!

I'm sorry that I can't give you the kind of authoritative answer you're looking for. Are you saying that you believe that the Standard American Diet gives us adequate nutrition?

If you do believe that when you listen to “most health authorities”, then you probably are not looking at the evidence in our society of:

Rampant obesity
Rampant diabetes
Rampant osteoporosis and low-bone density (despite consuming an abundance of calcium)
Rampant illnesses of all kind.

There are hundreds of vegan experts, some of them have done extensive research to prove that you can get better nutrition from eating plants only. Just read the books of Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Klaper, Dr. McDougall and others and you will be convinced. All of their books are backed up by extensive research.

Unfortunately, this kind of research is not available on the raw vegan diet. You will have to trust yourself on this one, and not give away your power to “experts”.

But the raw vegan diet is not that much different from the vegan diet. After all, there are no nutrients found in cooked vegan foods that you can't find in raw vegan foods.

So as long as you understand the principles of optimal vegan nutrition, which include:

Nutrient density
Low-fat in the diet
High carbohydrate and low protein
Simple food combination

... you will understand that the same principles apply to raw food nutrition.

Thousands of people throughout the world are transforming their health by eating more raw foods, and thousands of people every day are dying because of their belief that a Standard American Diet is adequate.

Are you going to wait for approval from experts to do the right thing for you? Do you realize that those experts themselves suffer from innumerable health problems and have misled the American public for years by recommending heavily processed foods?