by Layla Randle-Conde

Created on: January 10, 2009

Everyone knows that fresh fruit and veg are good for you, and that overcooked fast food isn't so great. Many people try to incorporate fresh fruit or uncooked veg into their diets. But the Raw Foodists differ from those of use who are just trying to make healthier choices. A completely uncooked diet they insist, is the only natural and completely healthy diet there is.

Raw foodists eat mainly fruit and vegetables, but they also include nuts, unpasturised milk and other foodstuffs in their diet, so they don't exist entirely on leaves and roots.

A diet of raw, completely uncooked food seems pretty bizarre to anyone brought up on a typical western diet. If your gut reaction is Yuck!' then you're not alone. But are our diets so unnatural and skewed that this old fashioned, cave-man way of eating is actually the right diet for good health?

Hype and fashion aside, there are some very real health benefits to leaving your beans unblanched. Much of the vitamin content and all of the natural enzymes in a plant are destroyed when it's heated above a certain temperature. Eating your veggies raw means you get all the nutrition, plus your precious enzymes get to go off and do useful work elsewhere in your body - fixing your skin or keeping your organs healthy. Enzyme levels deplete as we grow older, and this contributes to aging, both inside and outside the body.

On the whole raw foodists do have incredible skin. Scientists and nutritionists continue to debate the value of detoxing the body. But a raw food diet of just 2 weeks makes your skin glow and your eyes brighten. If you've ever looked closely at the skin of someone that exists on burgers and chocolate milkshake, go figure.

They also tend to be pretty trim. You lose a lot of weight on a raw food diet. But is this weight control and peachy glow to the skin because theyve added raw food or taken away greasy burgers?

It looks like a bit of both to be honest. The diet's devotees have devised many elaborate recipes and delicious combinations of food. You could eat a different raw meal every day of the year. But the diet is as much about what you don't eat as what you do. We've all sat there and devoured a whole carton of French fries. But who is going to sit there and eat that amount of raw potato? Going raw automatically cuts all junky foods out of your diet.

It's pretty much impossible to be overweight on a diet of mainly fruit and vegetables. You couldn't physically eat enough of the stuff. There's also a real lack of inflammatory

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