As we’ve mentioned in my previous blog, we’re pushing to ditch “Power Draining Foods” through the 30-day cycle. Let’s continue fighting your weak immune system diet.
Over Cooking Kills Power
While eating raw vs. cooked food has been a heated debate for years, the simple fact is, when you cook most of your food you lose more than you gain.
Yes, certain vegetables like broccoli and carrots can be difficult to digest in their raw state and can give you more of certain nutrients by lightly steaming or sautéing them but the sad fact is, our culture has been conditioned to fear raw food.
Since truth is a potent destroyer of fear, let’s take a quick journey into history when all this paranoia of eating raw food began.
If we dial back the timeline to the 18th Century we find an infamous battle between two well-known scientists Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908).
While both of these men wanted to make an impact on the world with their work, they eventually became adversaries with two strikingly different opinions about where disease comes from. Just check out this chart below:
Turns out just about everything old Louis proposed created inflammation and has, for the most part, been debunked. Quite ironically, Mr. Pasteur, for which pasteurization was named, suffered from two strokes, ate a lot of power draining food and died a lot earlier than Antoine.
Unfortunately, over 100 years later we’re still eating predominantly pasteurized foods (at least in the United States) that have been cooked to 161 degrees, which has created loads of inflammation and disease, the evidence of which you’ll soon learn, is overwhelming.
Of course, Hippocrates, the father of medicine himself discovered long ago that the real challenge was not the invaders from the outside but the power of the host to fight off invaders from both the inside and outside as he also so famously declared:
“It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”
For instance, if we took two people, one who ate fast food or just too much food and rarely exercised and one ate power foods and exercised regularly and exposed them both to the Coronavirus, can you guess who more likely be hospitalized and die?
Since a poor diet and lack of exercise are known contributors to heart disease, obesity, diabetes and a host of other ailments we’d be wise to bet on the first person and for several good reasons.
This relates directly to Hippocrates’s famous declaration and that study we mentioned earlier from the CDC where researchers found the majority of hospitalized patients due to COVID-19 had preexisting conditions. Specifically, about 90% of patients had one or more underlying conditions the most common of which were hypertension (49.7%), obesity (48.3%), chronic lung disease (34.6%), diabetes mellitus (28.3%), and cardiovascular disease (27.8%).
My own cousin is married to a super healthy guy who contracted the Coronavirus and unknowingly gave it to his family. Since he ate mostly power foods and exercised regularly he showed no signs of the virus while his family, who did not eat many power foods or exercise regularly, got really ill.
With all this mounting evidence, it’s time to return to Béchamp’s cellular theory, stop making excuses for our poor health and start looking within. And who better to put the cherry on top than our father of medicine Hippocrates who said:
“Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease”
So why did everyone believe old Louis and start pasteurizing food by cooking out most of the good stuff, while old Antoine got lost in the shuffle?
Apparently, old Louis was a good con artist. In a 250-page thesis on Antoine Béchamp, Marie Nonclercq, doctor of pharmacy, explains the clear advantage that Pasteur had over Béchamp:
“He was a falsifier of experiments and their results, where he wanted the outcomes to be favorable to his initial ideas.”
Ok so maybe we’ve been duped into believing some false evidence appearing real (FEAR) but don’t worry. If you’re thinking you may need to give up cooking, just remember, this is not an extreme diet.
To be clear, The Power Diet is NOT a completely raw diet. As just mentioned, there are some foods, which release more power steamed or boiled than if they were eaten raw.
For example, carrots steamed or boiled release more carotenoids important for visual function than if they were eaten raw. In the same token we must also acknowledge the fact that when you cook anything you also lose something and in the case of carrots and cruciferous veggies you lose vitamin C content.
But let’s say you have challenges digesting raw carrots, broccoli or zucchini and decide to cook them and supplement with vitamin C to replace any of the negative aspects of cooking. In this case, the method you use to cook also makes a big difference.
In a report published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, researchers demonstrated how boiling and steaming better preserves antioxidants, particularly carotenoid, in carrots, zucchini and broccoli, than frying.
While this all may seem like a lot to digest (pun intended), you don’t need to completely eliminate cooked foods. Instead, similar to our lectin draining foods we’ll simply limit them and the level of heat used to cook them in order to boost overall power.
The Guru Trap
If we look into the general mindset of a typical American, one of the biggest problems of cooked and pasteurized foods is how most people easily fall prey to “The Guru Trap.”
In other words, they believe Doctors and Scientists (remember Louis Pasture) simply because they have an advanced degree or plaque on their wall that says they completed school.
Unfortunately, guys like Pasteur were educated and trained to treat the effects of pathogens by eliminating them with drugs and surgery instead of looking for the root or cause of the problem.
This may be helpful when someone tears off their arm in a car accident or has a cancerous tumor that needs to be removed. But for the majority of cases, when requires medical attention, treating the effects simply does not solve the root of the problem and as a consequence, the problem just keeps returning.
In reality, most MD’s have very limited knowledge of nutrition. I know at least a half a dozen personally who have eaten mostly cooked foods their whole lives and either suffered from a heart attack or died from cancer or stroke (remember Dr. Atkins?).
Fortunately, we’re about to cast some bright sunshine on the darkness of dead food and boost your power to the heights of the Himalayas (pink salt anybody?).
To get a kick start on living that healthy life, check out the most comprehensive and easy to use guide: “The Power Diet” by Chad Scott.
