What constitutes a Natural and Healthy Diet for Perfect Health ?
For centuries, sages in ancient India sustained themselves on simple, raw foods — fruits, leaves, and vegetables — even during long periods of meditation in harsh climates. Their strength, clarity, and resilience often leave us wondering: what was their secret?
Interestingly, modern research points to similar patterns among the Blue Zones — regions where people routinely live beyond 100 years in good health. A common thread unites both worlds: a diet abundant in raw, natural plant foods.
Even in nature, we find lessons in simplicity. The orangutan, our closest cousin sharing 99.9% of our DNA, thrives on a plant-based diet of fruits, roots, and leaves. Scientists studying these animals note something remarkable — they do not suffer from the chronic diseases that afflict humans. This observation leads to a profound realization: if our biological relatives can maintain robust health through raw, plant-based diets, perhaps the key to our own vitality lies in returning to a similar natural pattern of eating.
Vegetables and fruits contain more than 10,000 different types of phytonutrients. There are many health benefits of eating fruits and vegetables in the raw form.
The Living Power of Raw Foods
Vegetables and fruits are not just sources of vitamins — they are living foods rich in over 10,000 phytonutrients and natural enzymes that sustain life. These enzymes are nature’s catalysts, essential for digestion, detoxification, and cellular repair. When food is cooked, many of these fragile nutrients are destroyed by heat, reducing their life-giving potential.
Enzymes are special types of proteins that act as a catalyst for all our body’s functions. Enzymes in raw foods help the body extract and synthesize vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids efficiently. When we rely only on cooked food, our body must deplete its own enzyme reserves to digest and assimilate nutrients — eventually weakening our system.
Raw foods also preserve vital vitamins like C, B1, B5, and folate, which are often lost through cooking. Even the cancer-protective compounds in cruciferous vegetables — such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower — begin to degrade when heated beyond 112°. Simply put, raw foods are alive; cooked foods are nutritionally diminished.
Acid-Alkaline Balance With Raw Vegetable
Significant benefits of eating raw fruits and vegetables include alkalinity, oxygenation, and hydration. All these benefits together boost immunity, lower inflammation, and help in detoxification of the body by raising energy levels. Illness and diseases thrive more and propagate faster in an acidic environment, which causes chronic inflammation, thus lowering our body’s immunity. Raw foods neutralize the acid and keep the body alkaline.
Hydration also plays a very important role in balancing alkalinity and aids in the detoxification process. All cooked foods form acid. Our blood should ideally be in the pH range of 7.3 – 7.4, i.e., slightly alkaline. Eating cooked food (i.e., acidic food) will only push our body’s systems into fighting all the time to neutralize this effect. Raw foods are high in nutrients like chlorophyll, which raises the oxygen levels in the blood circulating in our bodies, thereby increasing immunity, improving energy levels and balancing emotions (boosting satva guna or attributes of goodness).
Raw as well as cooked foods have their own place in our diets and both can be enjoyed together by reaping their maximum health benefits. The secret lies in knowing the right ratio of raw and cooked food in our regular diet. We need at least 40% raw food in our diet on a daily basis. It is important to note that the digestive function (with digestive fire or jatharagni) plays an important role in absorbing the nutrition from our food for the purpose of assimilating it into our bodies. Proper digestion requires 30% raw diet, moderate and timely eating habits, and light and early dinner.
Corroborative evidence of the unnaturalness of cooking our food, which is also unfavourable for a healthy body, is found in a process known as ‘leukocytosis’ or an elevation in the number of white blood cells (WBCs), which happens only after we have eaten cooked foods. In the field of medicine, an increase in the total number of WBCs, paralleled with a simultaneous disturbance in the percentages of different kinds of WBCs, is a sign of having some disease.
Biologists have often referred to this condition as ‘digestive leukocytosis’ and being unaware of the difference between consequences of eating cooked food or raw food, consider it a normal reaction in the digestive process. However, Paul Kouchakoff, a Nobel-Prize-nominee from the Institute of Clinical Chemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland, conducted more than 300 detailed experiments, which confirmed that leukocytosis was the specific effect of eating cooked foods and that it never occurred after a meal of raw food.
Low-Level Inflammation
Low-level inflammation has been found to be the root cause of all modern chronic degenerative diseases. Having cooked and processed acid forming foods without inclusion of raw vegetables and fruits in our diet is the primary cause of low level inflammation in the human body.
With 30% raw food in our diet, we can prevent and reverse low level of inflammation in the body to gain perfect health. Low-level inflammation has been found to be the root cause of all modern chronic degenerative diseases. Raw foods eliminate unwanted toxins from our digestive system and promote physical and mental health.
Elimination of Toxins
Raw foods not only eliminate unwanted toxins from our digestive system, but also promote healthy gut microflora that helps us maintain both physical and mental health. Raw foods also alkalize and purify our blood.
The Complete Spectrum of Nutrition
Nature and its laws dictate what each living being should eat to live and enjoy life to the fullest. It is quite obvious that human beings are biologically, physiologically and anatomically designed as herbivores. Our closest cousin -the orangutan – eats raw fruits and vegetables and lives healthy without contracting any chronic degenerative disease. The secret to disease prevention and reversal is to include 40% of raw greens, beets and protein rich sprouts in a regular diet and avoid processed foods and animal-based proteins.
My Reflection
While reading Pancha Sutras by Dr. Muralidhar, I was deeply inspired by the simplicity and truth in his approach to food and health. It reminded me that wellness doesn’t come from complex diets or modern shortcuts, but from reconnecting with nature’s original wisdom. I felt this understanding could truly help many of us regain our vitality and inner balance — and that’s what inspired me to share this reflection with you.
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