Chef Chad Sarno

Preparing food with a deep connection to the Earth allows our channel to open that much more. When we bring this truth and balance into the kitchen, because the kitchen is the heart of the home, it ripples throughout all we do, feel and think. Passion is fully expressing ourselves through our work. When the fire of passion ignites inside of us, work transforms now into purpose and we are ready to walk in truth.

Why Raw?
(Excerpted from Chad's Published Workbook, VITAL CREATIONS)

Any person attempting to learn about any specific area of nutrition can easily become confused by the mass contradictions inherent in the different approaches that exist.
The foundation of human vitality is simple and very obvious; which is Raw Living Plant Food and is ever so abundant and present all around us in nature. When one engulfs self with simply ingesting raw plant matter it brings us back to our ultimate purpose, being one with nature and the Earth. No matter what your religious path is, even if you do not feel spirituality is important in life, living as close to nature as we can is our divine blueprint as a species of this planet.

The concept of nutritional individuality is key to understanding why any given diet may or may not work well. Twentieth-century mainstream nutritional science has intricately analyzed, dissected and removed the vitality of Raw Plant Food, which is undisturbed in nature. However, now it has become our responsibility to pick up the pieces to assemble a more complete picture of food in its natural state.

For all its technological brilliance modern science is cognitively stuck in a mind-set that is woefully inadequate to the task of synthesizing nutritional wholeness in a way that many of us would like. It has done more than just leave us on our own; it has led us down a path of nutritional error, falsehood, conspiracy and fraud.

The fraud revolves around one idea: the loss of the truth that our food and the soil from which it grows is a living system. When you forget that food is alive, it can easily become conventional wisdom to cook, can, salt, skin, dilute, dissect, adulterate, and/or irradiate food into an enzymatically dead substance. This depleted food is the source of almost all dietary and health problems. It has become commonplace to drown crops chemically instead of growing or feeding the soil, which is the life of the plant. So why embrace vegan and living foods as a major component of any diet?

To easily understand why living foods can rebalance and restore optimum health, we must focus on one key area; that is how digestion really works.

Enzymes in their natural form, by far, accomplish the largest part of digestion. Every living food has naturally occurring enzymes, enough to digest that particular food. Nature has wrapped up its bounty in a self contained, flawless package. An apple, for instance, has the right amount of enzymes needed for your body to digest it. The millions of enzymes that produce life are what allow us to talk, blink, walk, digest and simply be alive.

Digestive enzymes are destroyed by heat. Beginning at a cooking temperature of 115 degrees the complete enzymatic content of food begins to rapidly decrease to 0% by 120 degrees. Cooking foods can also destroy other nutrients, and render natural oils indigestible.
Organically grown living foods reduce the depletion of the body's enzyme reserves, allowing them to fight off outside toxins and viruses. What typically happens when enzyme production cannot keep up with processed, cooked food intake? Absorption of partially digested proteins into the bloodstream can cause allergic reactions, and cause further toxicity of the immune system. Remember, our immune system identifies and eliminates that which is not us. Foreign proteins, or undigested animal protein in our blood causes an immune reaction called Leukocytosis1. This is the rapid production of a large number of white blood cells immediately following ingestion of many cooked, processed foods and animal products. In a nutshell, this process throws the body into shock, acting in self-defense by pumping out its own enzymes to digest the foreign substances that were ingested.

By simply ingesting a raw plant based diet, you have completely eliminated all the toxins that nutritionists routinely target for elimination from the diet - no matter what. Here is a brief list of these toxic foods:

• Food additives
• Refined flour, sugar and salt
• 100% animal products
• Coffee, black tea
• Alcohol
• Chocolate
• MSG
• Cholesterol (except coconuts)

Finally, living foods are great cleansers of the organs and tissues, allowing these oxygen filled enzymatically rich foods to allow our flexibility and endurance to increase. Ultimately, this lifestyle helps to put us back together again as truly harmless, genuinely, non-toxic beings.

Organically grown living foods provide the highest profile of truly usable elements, while naturally conserving the digestive and immune functions. Another key factor is that by ingesting these life-giving foods they naturally tend to keep the body alkaline; another key element in health building.

Compromised digestion, resulting from highly refined and overcooked foods, creates a ripple effect through toxic-accumulation and immune over-stimulation that detrimentally affects the physical, emotional and spiritual levels of our being. The ingestion of organically grown living foods is a critical foundation for the reversal of these conditions. Further it initiates and restores our being whole again, and closer to nature. The true essence of life is to be one with the earth.

1. The Influence of Cooking Food on the Blood Formula of Man. Proceeding; First International Congress of Microbiology, Dr.Paul Kouchakoff, Paris; 1930