Today we want to share with you all an old interview on raw-food or fruitarian diet. This is an excerpt from a classic 1997 interview with Stephen Arlin & David Wolfe, co-authors of one of the first major raw food books, the one that started it all – Nature’s First Law: The Raw-Food Diet.

Stephen is a personal trainer and weight lifter that has been eating raw living foods for about 5 1/2 years. He claims that this lifestyle makes him stronger, with more endurance. David Wolfe has been raw for 6 years, comes from a family of M.D.’s, and is one of the foremost proponents of a raw food lifestyle.

What is wrong with cooked food?

Cooked food is dead food. You cannot revitalize living cells with dead food. Cooking destroys the vitamins and minerals in your food. Isn’t that obvious? Fire destroys! Cooked food eventually clogs up your body, beginning with your large intestine or colon. It damages and irritates all your internal organs. It causes you to behave erratically. It causes you to degenerate prematurely and it creates diseases artificially. All the diseases of civilization: cancer, heart disease, diabetes are all directly attributable to the consumption of cooked food.

Don’t you eat anything that is cooked? How is that possible? How do you do it?

No, we don’t eat anything that is cooked, dead, or denatured in any way. This diet is easy, once you know the facts. No one could have the discipline to do this diet if there wasn’t something going on biologically. Eating cooked food has nothing to do with the normal biological requirements of the cells.

Haven’t humans adapted to cooked food?

We have, but not in the way that most people think. How is it that an animal such as a field mouse, that has never eaten cooked food in its genetic history, can be captured, fed cooked food, and still live. Did it instantaneously adapt to cooked food? Just because you can chew up something, swallow it, and live long enough to tell others about it does not mean you’ve adapted to it. White bread, for example, has only been around for the last 100 years. People eat white bread en masse and they are still alive, does that mean they’ve adapted to it? Cooked food has a cumulative effect on the body. It builds up over time and prematurely wears out your body and severely damages your internal organs. Just because its dangerous effects are not felt immediately does not mean it is not damaging.

But I feel healthy right now, why do I need to get into a raw-food diet?

Do you ever suffer from any colds, fevers, headaches, body pains, allergies, etc? These symptoms, which are considered normal by civilization’s standards, are actually dangerous, pathological conditions caused by eating cooked food. How many animals do you see blowing their noses? How many primates do you see coughing their lungs out? People think they are healthy, but they have never experienced real health.

What is a raw-food diet?

A raw-food or fruitarian diet is a natural diet. Every single natural organism on the planet eats exclusively raw foods. No free-living creature ever tampers with its food. Some people consider this diet the next step past a vegetarian or vegan diet, but it really transcends all diets. It is simply the natural way to nourish your body.

What about meat? Do you eat raw meat?

No. Humans do not have it in their physiological ability to take down a wild animal, kill it, and rip out its guts with their teeth like a carnivore. Humans are not biologically carnivorous nor are they omnivorous. Could you imagine yourself nude, barefoot, with no tools or fire, trying to tackle a wild animal, kill it, and eat its guts out?! Eating animals is not in our biology. Think about it, if you gave a child a banana and a rabbit, it would eat the banana and play with the rabbit every time.

How did you get into this raw-food way of life?

It was the reading and self-education we did on health, diseases, and diet that got us into the raw-food diet. We focused only on success — success stories, people who cured themselves of disease, people who lived the longest and healthiest, people who had traveled and observed human beings all over the world. We did not focus on the standard medical dogma, because that has all been a failure. There is more disease, sickness, and misery now than ever before in human history. We started bouncing some ideas off of each other and our partner R.C. Dini and we really got into some amazing things.

Do you think your philosophy is extreme?

Today’s heresy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. We represent a force of resistance against enormous odds. We are at the forefront of a movement which proposes to reshape the world. Therefore, we serve the future and not just the passing hour. The greatest and most enduring successes in history are those which were least understood in the beginning, because they were in strong contrast to public opinion and the majority views and wishes of the time. Every great idea once began on the fringe. The response we have received from the youth, ages 14 to 25, has been startling and incredible. They know there is a lot of power in what we are saying. They don’t believe we are on the fringe at all, they see our message as being very logical and ideal for the future.

• Source: Raw Food Life, adapted by Create&Share