armchair health

Recipes from The Raw Gourmet left-vegetable nori roll-ups
right-stuffed avocado delight

More and more people are turning to raw food as prevention against cancer and heart disease. True enough, the enzymes in living plant foods have been proven to offer health benefits by
aiding digestion.
But how do we maintain a raw-foods diet without getting bored? Where do we find the time to prepare the juices and salads that are staples of the diet? Health food consultant Nomi Shannon answers these questions in The Raw Gourmet while offering plenty of encouragement and abundant enthusiasm for the benefits of eating more plant foods.
Shannon's enthusiasm for raw foods is motivated by personal experience, having overcome fibromyalgia, hypoglycemia, mood swings, allergic
sinusitis, acid reflux, weight problems, and candida by adopting a live foods program. Further motivation comes from witnessing hundreds of "recoveries" from diabetes, arthritic pain, high blood cholesterol, and chronic headaches during her years at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida.
To boost our enthusiasm, Shannon works through the basics of how to soak nuts, seeds, and grains, offering 10 raw-food handy hints and emphasizing the use of organic ingredients. She encourages us to be creative with food, suggesting that we "think of salad
making as an art." From breakfasts to drinks, salads, and exotically flavoured entrees, dips, sauces, and desserts, each recipe is explained with ideas for
quick preparation, substitutions,
and entertaining.
Whether readers simply want to choose more whole foods, go raw part-time, or dedicate their diet to a lifelong living foods plan, The Raw Gourmet covers all aspects. Readers can stock their kitchen with juicers, dehydrators, and slicing machines or, as Shannon points out, it's possible to eat a
completely raw diet if all you own is a grater, a good knife, and a blender. This flexibility makes the book ideal for everyone seeking health.
Readers will enjoy her "how-to" focus, which provides equipment lists with descriptions and photographs, sprouting charts, and, for the serious health enthusiast, guidelines for
combining food to decrease stress on the digestive system.
The three-week menu plan is a tempting way to get started straight away, and with all the information and encouragement found in The Raw Gourmet-readers can do just that.