I often tell clients to stay off cold, damp, raw, sweet food. Which covers such foods as dairy, milk, cheese, yoghurt, ice cream, sugar, soft drinks, raw ffood, fruit and raw vegetables.

The dairy and sugar a client can accept, but they look at me as if I’m crazy when I mention raw fruit and vegetables. Especially when every other naturapath, chiropractor etc. tell them to eat more raw fruit and vegetables. However I then pose some questions – What does cold do? ( It constricts and slows down, causes stuckness ).

Have you ever been able to buy raw fruit salads or raw vegetable salads in a Chinese Restaurant? – No! Why not? Because the Chinese have learnt over thousands of years the dangers of eating too much raw food especially cold, sweet food. They have learnt to treat their food as medicine by using a balanced diet of cooked foods.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine the stomach is called the cooking pot. It cooks the food so it is more easily absorbed. The funny thing is it isn’t too far from what actually happens in the stomach. When food goes into the stomach it has already been broken apart by chewing (very important to chew well) this mixes the food with the enzymes in your saliva. The food hits the stomach ready for processing. The stomach secretes Hydrochloric acid which produces heat (calories) and releases the calories (heat), minerals, vitamins, proteins etc. The food is being cooked by acid. The chemical reactions are breaking the food up in to molecules that can be absorbed by the intestines.

The spleen/pancreas produces enzymes to further help the process. Now imagine what happens to stomach acid that is constantly being neutralised by cold, raw, alkalised fruit and vegetables. Acid is neutralised by an alkaline solution. So now the stomach has to produce more acid to get the balance right. If this continues to happen over many meals and many months, even years, then eventually the acid glands become exhausted and the food begins to move into the digestive tract only partially broken down, partially digested.

“Impairment of digestive processes can result in an imbalance of gut microflora. The inflammatory reactions triggered by these organisms and the physical and chemical damage they inflict on the (usually semipermeable) gut mucosa produces the condition of increased permeability known as’Leaky Gut Syndrome’. This ‘Gut Dysbiosis or leaky gut syndrome” may produce enterotoxins, the toxic waste of living bacteria or endotoxins, the cell wall fragments of dead bacteria”.
Extract from Metagenics Practitioner guide to Integrated Detoxification.

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