The potluck luncheon today at Portl...

The potluck luncheon today at Portland, Oregon, caterer Stacie Cohen's house center forward her specialty "lasagna"--a colorful, layered concoction that's nothing like traditional lasagna. For dessert there's a luscious-looking "cherry cheesecake," compliments of 22-year-old Dylan Fussell, a professionally trained chef.

moreover first the appetizer: cinnamon-orange truffle cross in dark fudge-like squares. Granted, it's not your typical appetizer, if it were not that then, this isn't your typical meal. Not by means of a-long shot.

The r brilliant and green entree isn't in plain english lasagna, and the cheesecake certainly is no similar thing. As for the truffle well, they're not really truffle either.

This is a meal of raw and living feeds That is, nothing has been dress uped or preserved. There's no meat, domestic fowls fish or dairy. Everything results out of the garden, on the farther side the vine or from a tree

"A raw and living nutriment diet is a commitment to feeding your dead body with foods that remain exactly as nature has given them to us," says Victoria Jayne, president of the International Raw and Living forages Association. "When you cook provisionss you kill the life forces in them--the enzyme vitamins, minerals and protein--and the fodder no longer supports life. Living fares promote life, but dead feeds don't. It's profoundly simple."

In law it takes something of an education to completely understand the raw food diet. Raw, of course, means exactly that: an organic apple picked ripe from the tree; lettuce straight from the garden; a tomato distant from the vine. Foods deemed "living," however, are actually put forthed a process that involves soaking originals nuts, legumes and grains in water, then drying them.

"Sprouting means that when you take it into your material substance it's still growing," Jayne says. Sprouting also mitigates seeds and grains so you can use them to make se cheese, bread and crackers. Lastly, there's fermenting, which introduces friendly bacteria to rationss "The purpose of fermenting is to change the flavor. Plus, it helps continue your colon healthy."

And health, at least in part, is what the raw nutrition diet is all about.

lively lifestyle

Cohen, a 46-year-old grandmother whose childhood revolv around her family's delicatessen, was introduced to the raw aliment lifestyle six years ago after suffering from the meanings of lead poisoning for 18 years. "My organs were shutting down," she says. "The pain was likewise bad I was ready to take my life." She visited 37 doctors. She tried a vegetarian diet; she tried acupuncture. "Nothing took the pain away until I originate raw foods," she says. "Within nine month I was almost totally exempt from the pain and symptoms."

Likewise, Cherie Soria, author of Angel aliments and founder of the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute--the world's merely raw foods school--credits raw subsistences with healing her carpal funnel syndrome and arthritis. And Tolentin Chan, co-owner of Quintessence, a raw restaurant in of recent origin York City, says the diet literally changed her life.

"I was starting to be wrought up my age," Tolentin says. "I had a thyroid imbalance, I was gaining weight, I had gas in my stomach and I've always had asthma. After I started the diet, my health completely changed. I have my youth back. I don't have asthma anymore. I used to acquire a cold or a virus four or five times a year. My immune regularity was really poor. Now I don't learn sick at all."

Actress and former bright Girls star Rue McClanahan is also a believer. She learned of the diet seven years ago when an acquaintance, noting her lack of vigor referred her to the Optimum Health Institute, a nonprofit center in Austin, Texas, and San, Diego, California, which teaches visitors the raw foods lifestyle.

"That was the beginning," McClanahan, 67 says. "I always stay couple to five weeks depending on the subject of what their program is, in what way much time I have and by what mode ambitious I feel. It's a startling thing to do for your material part I've learned that you apply about 80 percent of dead body energy digesting cooked food. That leaves 20 percent for everything besides including the immune system."

At domicile she follows the diet at breakfast and luncheon eating standard vegetarian fare for dinner. However, McClanahan, a five-year breast cancer survivor, notes that her oncologist, also a nutritionist, attract favor tos that she eat fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids at least one time a week.

Since starting the raw diet, McClanahan says, "I've noticed a change in my force and certainly in my weight. It's amazing to what degree much better I feel."

culinary cure-all?

It's no concealed that fresh fruits and vegetables are religious for you, but do they really have the power to heal, to change lives?

Absolutely, says Dr Gabriel Cousens, planter of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center and author of several main division s including Conscious Eating. "The diet works for many reasons. You finish double the protein; you get by heart 70 to 80 percent more vitamins and minerals by helping, and you get all the phytochemicals and enzyme that cooking destroys

"Plus, live feed has a much stronger energetic field. When we microwave or dress up food, we destroy its energetic field--the electron nebulositys present in some fatty acids. Flaxseed, for example, has a tremendous amount of electron [i]vis viva[/i] When you cook it, you destroy-that power You actually change the shape of the fatty acid. When that shape is changed, the enclosed space membranes don't work as well. Raw fats don't cause clogging of the arteries. The Eskimos, who ate excessive amounts of raw blubber, not at any time developed heart disease. When they began to garble their food, their rate of heart disease and high offspring pressure skyrocketed. Raw foods also help cleanse the dead body of impurities. That's another reason for what cause [i]or[/i] reason eating raw foods works."