Raw Food Poisoning
Just when you think you’ve heard it all.
A woman came to the raw food potluck the other night claiming that she had suffered from “raw food poisoning”. She said that she had to be careful about the amount of raw food she ate. If she ate more than a certain amount, she would feel ill.
I don’t doubt the validity of this woman’s experience, but her choice of words lay clear her belief system about food’s relationship to her body. Two fundamental ideas are exposed, that raw food isn’t good for you, and that, somehow, it’s not natural.
I experience great humility as I’m reminded that human beings were on a raw food diet for over five million years before the discovery of fire and the subsequent use of it on food. Also, of the millions of species of life on our planet that consume food, only those that ingest cooked food suffer from degenerative disease, i.e., human beings, their pets, and other animals in captivity.
It’s such a simple idea that Mother Nature provides us with exactly what we need in exactly the right form. The human body is a product of this planet, and developed in synergistic harmony with all of the other forms of life around it. The modern diet is a perfect example of our continued effort to separate ourselves from nature by having to change everything that comes from it before we assimilate it. What does it take to realize that we’re already taken care of?
It’s amazing the massive amounts of time and energy that go into heating and manufacturing foods. Do we have a fear of the simple life? Like a variation of Occam’s razor, eating food in its least effort form is so simple that it must be true.
You simply can’t get “raw food poisoning”, unless your raw food is covered with poisonous chemicals or is infested with some kind of microscopic life which you aren’t used to. Usually, a person who feels ill after eating raw food is suffering from self-poisoning.
Self-poisoning is just another phrase for cleansing. When you eat foods that take less energy to digest, your body takes the opportunity to rid itself of some toxins that you had ingested in the past, that it had stored at the time to keep you from being inundated with toxins. It’s scary that a lot of cooked food meals are actually toxic events. That’s one of the things I used to “love” about eating junk food, the rush of my immune system being activated as a result.
The body knows the truth more than our minds ever will. It knows what is toxic and what isn’t. If supplied with superior nutrition, it jumps at the chance to rebuild the body with better building blocks, dumping older, weaker constructions as it does so.
A “true” body, one created with the best building blocks, in their most life-filled form, and operating with optimal nutrients, may look only subtly different from a “false” body, but the chemistry at work is a transformational leap.
This is why the body has to be trusted. Not with the “run away at the first sign of a symptom” mentality, but in the spirit that your body knows what it’s doing, and that if you give it the best fuel available, it automatically makes all the right choices.
It can take a lot of time for the body to make the transformation to actually operating properly instead of in immune system response mode. Cleansing can also be found to be an art form in itself. In all my experiences, I have found fresh, high water content, whole foods to be the best chaperones for cleansing. They seem to offer the best transportation for toxins out of the system, while giving you all the nutrition you need at the same time.
This woman’s blind spot may be her belief that she had always eaten very healthy. This could be preventing her from admitting to herself just how toxic her body is. And, of course, identifying with the belief of “this is how I am”, makes the condition very difficult to see, and thus to change.