This book has been recommended to me more times than any other.

The book is all about the use of raw foods by the author to heal himself and others. The first part of the book is about how he saved himself and his son from very serious illness, using raw foods. The second part of the book basically goes through a long list of health problems and gives raw food prescriptions to fix them.

Over the years I have become more interested in raw foods, and less dismissive of them. Though I still know that food alone cannot supply all nutrients, the fact that we culturally eat mostly cooked or processed foods means that we have less enzymes to actually digest that food and do other things in the body. (Enzymes do most of the work in the body, and they are destroyed by heat and processing).

The raw food theory has some good points, but I don’t appreciate how swiftly they tend to dismiss all forms of supplementation, or anything “unnatural”. We do many “unnatural” things that have improved our wellbeing spectacularly (wearing clothing and writing/reading being two easy examples).

I don’t wish to rebut the raw food theory, rather, I have incorporated what I see as its strong points into my own programs. But, there are some big problems with the extreme end of this theory, which this book exists in.

I wish the author provided more evidence to substantiate its claims. I realize there isn’t much science behind it, but the authors experience is just not enough for me to take his protocols as gospel. He claimed several problems to only have marginal results with his program, yet I know we can get better results using MORE than food.

I can’t recommend this book as gospel, but it has been influential and I enjoyed the story in the first part of the book. It’s worth reading.