The Importance of Live Foods

Once again, the Mediterranean diet is being quoted as providing the best defense against a variety of ills, not the least of which are Alzheimer's disease and the degenerative conditions of aging.  The Mediterranean diet emphasizes eating a diet consisting of mostly "live" whole foods that have not been processed.  Live food refers to food that grows in the earth or on trees.  Live food is food that is not processed, not manipulated in any way, with no additives or colorings or artificial chemicals added to improve the taste.  So, for example, a raw apple is a live food, but apple pie is not.  Apple pie consists of white-flour crust, sugar, butter, cooked apples and spices.  It contains almost nothing that supports good nutrition or good health, unless one wants to argue that feeding the soul is akin to feeding the body.  A raw apple exists that way in nature.  There is only one step from picking the fruit to consuming it; and it might be argued that it is just as delicious as apple pie.

Our bodies were meant to do the processing of the food we eat.  We have chemicals in the saliva and stomach that break down the elements of our food.  If that work is done for us in factories, our bodies are thus being deprived of the pleasure.  Consider the following story: A child came upon a cocoon, and saw it shaking and moving this way and that.  As he watched, the cocoon began to crack and split, eventually revealing the head of the butterfly that was ready to hatch.  As the butterfly emerged, it was all wet and its wings were stuck together, so the child picked it off the cocoon and blew on it to dry it up, put it in the sun, and so hurried the process.  The butterfly died.  There is a natural process by which a butterfly that emerges from its cocoon must allow the fluids to start flowing through its veins in order to gain the full use of its flight apparatus.  So it is with chicks breaking out of their shells.  And so it is with us. 

We cannot hurry the process.  To live, we must allow nature to take its course.  To live, we must feed our bodies what nature intended.  And this does not mean rabbit food.