Common sense view to our fundamental physiological fruitarian natures

Article extracted from: http://www.rawfoodexplained.com

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Our natural foods must necessarily appeal to ALL our relevant senses. It follows that our natural foods must delight our eyes, be of a fragrance that tantalizes our olfactory senses, and be of such titillating quality to the taste buds as to be ambrosia. Eating should always be a gustatory delight. Our development in nature was such that discomforts and unpleasantness were never a condition of life. Only when we deviate from our natural adaptations do we suffer. Hence it is a truism that our natural foods are enchanting to the eye, captivating to smell, ecstatically delicious to eat and harmonious in the body. This truism invites comparisons based on sensual' involvement in the selection and consumption of foods.

When we were entirely the children of Nature, we did not have utensils or cookstoves as a part of our endowment. We had to eat our foods as we found and gathered them in nature. So the ascertainment of the value of foods is necessarily based on the condition in which foods come to us from nature, in their living or raw state, at the peak of perfection. The comparisons I am about to set forth must be valid for you only if they relate to your preferences.

Which would you prefer? The aromatic sweet flesh of a properly ripened pineapple or a head of broccoli? Would you rather have a delectable sun-ripened peach or a few raw collard greens? Would you prefer a stalk of celery or a bunch of purple concord grapes? Which entices you the most, a colorful juicy orange or spinach greens? Does a head of cabbage attract you as much as a properly ripened, brilliantly yellow and brown speckled banana? Which lures your eye most for beauty, a large red delicious apple or a freshly dug carrot? Does a basket of brussels sprouts turn your head as much as a basket of strawberries? Is the heavenly delicacy of a Cornice pear matched by anything you've ever eaten from the lettuce family?

If you've ever eaten a cherimoya, mango, mangosteen, soursop, sapodilla, fig, date, watermelon, cantaloup, honeydew or other mouthwatering delights, you know well their joys. Can you compare the eating of any single vegetable in its raw state to eating any of these heady delights? Can you not see that, in order for a food to be a natural item of human dietary, we must be capable of relishing that food eaten by itself in the raw state?

Not only must the food be a gourmet experience in its living state but our fill of it must furnish us with most if not all our nutrient needs. This is a most vital consideration.

Can you name a single vegetable that you'd ravish, as a full meal of itself in its raw state? Almost any vegetable that you can name fails in the first prerequisite of a food: it must furnish us amply of our fuel requirements. Almost every vegetable you name does not furnish us with any significant amount of caloric values. All green leaves, regardless of their calorie rating, yield us no net increase in calories. The energy of digestion and assimilation often exceed the calories obtained therefrom. Most of the calories of vegetables are bound in indigestible cellulose. Ruminants with four stomachs, true herbivores, can digest cellulose and thereby obtain fuel and nutrient values. We humans become as thin as a rail if we try to sustain ourselves on vegetable fare.

The potato, a tuber, is regarded as a vegetable. If eaten raw, it cannot be relished. Moreover, its starches cannot be utilized for two reasons. First, most of its food values are inaccessible to us because they are encapsulated in cellulose membranes. Secondly, those values which are freed quickly exhaust our supply of the starch-splitting enzyme, ptyalin (salivary amylase).

Cereal gains, which are popularly regarded as vegetables even though they are not, have the same drawbacks in digestion as does the potato. Grains occur in an edible state but a day or two in their cycles. Otherwise they're inedible except upon heavy soaking or sprouting. Even when soaked or sprouted, every grain is deficient in one or several aspects of its nutrient complement. Most also offer digestive problems. The gluten of wheat, for instance, is indigestible. We simply don't possess the enzymes to break it down. Wheat protein is bound as gluten. Further, most grains contain phytic acid, which we cannot handle. They bind calcium and thus rob us of that mineral salt.

An examination of every vegetable reveals it, when it stands on its own, as unsuited for human sustenance in some significant aspect or other. Fruit, on the other hand, supplies us amply with all our needs including proteins, mineral salts, vitamins, fuel and other vital food components, known and unknown.

We can relish fruits in their raw ripe state without any special preparation beyond pitting and/or peeling. I know of very few vegetables that would even begin to furnish our needs amply that we can make a meal of, even if we did relish them. Turnips, rutabagas, kohlrabi, fresh sweet corn, sprouted legumes and fresh sweet peas (where starch has not set) would be some of the near exceptions.

Without cookery and condiments most vegetables are unappealing. We must jazz up their lack of taste appeal with stimulating herbs or unwholesome flavorings, fats, seasonings, etc. We must deceive our senses in order to consume vegetables. Condiments and cooking are very destructive to our health.

Most vegetarians eat fruits, even a preponderance of fruits, yet call themselves vegetarians. Many vegetarians consume fish, milk and dairy products and eggs and still fancy themselves vegetarians. Of course these products are not even vegetables. Vegetables are plants. But the seeds of plants, the legumes, the grains, certain fruits such as cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are regarded as vegetables though technically they are not.

A good indication of what our natural foods are can be determined by the natural preferences of a child that has been fed nothing but its mother's milk. Does it like cereals or bananas'? Apples or cabbage? What will a child go for if let to choose its own food? In my experience such a child always has chosen fruits. When served vegetables, my child found them a chore to eat, though he ate them to some extent.

We have considered vegetables and fruits based on aesthetic appeal and fuel requirements. There are other touchstones for consideration which we shall now explore. Humans are classed as frugivora or frugivores or fruit eaters because of their anatomy, their primate character, their digestive faculties, their psychological disposition and their background in nature. Research has shown that we had an arboreal past—that we were once tree dwellers. At that time we depended upon the products of tree, and later upon the fruits of stalk and vine, for our sustenance.

For example, Dr. Alan Walker, an anthropologist of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has done research that shows that humans were once exclusively fruit eaters. By careful examination of fossil teeth and fossilized remains of humans with the aid of electron microscopes and other sophisticated tools, Dr. Walker and other researchers are absolutely certain that our ancestors, up to a point in relatively recent history, were total fruitarians. These findings were reported in depth in the May 15, 1979 issue of the New York Times.

These findings complement other findings and verify the consistent scientific classification of humans as frugivora.

Creatures that live in accord with their biological heritage do not develop disease. They live out their normal life spans and die natural deaths. Humans have by and large strayed from their natural dietary and for that reason suffer disease and early death. Humans who undertake to live on their natural dietary and observe other modalities of healthful living also live unto a ripe old age and die a natural death. Although it is a rarity, people who touch base with life's requisites have lived well past 100. In Hunza such a lifespan is a rule rather than the exception, even though their dietary is far from ideal.

Green leaves and stalks contain a greater concentration of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients than fruits. But they also contain, in most cases, compounds we cannot handle well. Lettuce contains minute amounts of a poison called lactucarium, which is a soporific. It is contained in a milk-like substance, just as in the poppy. Large amounts of lactucarium can be gathered and converted to substances resembling opium and heroin.

Celery has bitter properties in the leaves which make them repulsive to the normal palate. Anything that disagrees with our taste buds has, ipso facto, been rejected at that point. That is not to say, on the other side of the ledger, that a pleasant taste is the sole criteria by which to select foods, even with foods as they occur in nature, our taste is the surest guide we have if our taste buds are unperverted.

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Hugs,
mango.

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