Victoria Boutenko of Ashland, Oregon, just gave a series of five Raw
Food
Un-cooking Classes in Seattle which ended tonight.  I had the
opportunity to
attend four of them.  Here are some impressions and notes.

Victoria is a fine speaker, and very enthusiastic about raw foods.
Her
whole family went 100% raw 6 years ago when her 9 year old son was
diagnosed
with juvenile diabetes.  She passed around a picture of herself when
she was
very obese, taken in her pre-raw days.  Her style is to talk for a
while,
then to pass around some raw food, along with the recipes.  Everything
I
ate, with one exception (seed yogurt) tasted very good to me.  I will
definitely be trying some of these recipes on my family and friends.

One of the first topics she spoke about was enzymes.  She passed
around a
page from Edward Howell's book Enzyme Nutrition which states that by
eating
foods with their enzymes intact (i.e., raw) and by supplementing
cooked
foods with enzyme capsules, we can stop abormal and pathological
aging.  She
claimed that at birth we have only 65% of our enzymes left, and that
by age
40 we have only 30% left.   This last statement is a little confusing,
as
I'm not sure what the baseline of 100% is (in the womb?).  I also
wonder how
our enzymes can be measured.

Raw fooders have, according to Victoria: no calcium in their urine,
lower
blood pressure, lower while blood cell count, and lower pulse.  She
claimed
that raw fooders experience much greater assimilation of their food.
Cooked
fooders she says, assimilate 0.1% to 0.3% of their food, while raw
fooders
may assimilate 10 or even 30 percent.  When asked where she got these
numbers, she was unable to provide a specific source.   Personally, I
would
be quite interested in that source.  She said that because of the
increase
in food assimilation ability, she does not advise going all raw until
you
are really ready for it.  She said that if you are all raw for a few
weeks
or a few months and then eat some cooked food again, you will likely
experience severe negative reactions because due to your body's
greater
assimilation, you are now assimilating a greater amount of toxins than
you
were before.  I would be curious whether people on this list have had
this
experience.  In my own experience, the longest I was 100% raw was two
months.  When I slowly began adding some cooked foods back into my
diet,
even junk foods like chips and crackers, I don't remember experiencing
any
major negative symptoms.

One one of the evenings her two children, ages 14 and 15, got up to
speak
and answer questions.  Her son, the 15-year-old, was diagnosed with
juvenile
diabetes six years ago.  He claims that his symptoms went away in two
weeks
after going 100% raw.  Some of the foods he says were of particular
benefit
for his pancreas were mangos and blueberries.  His 14-year-old sister
said
that her asthma disappeared, and cited olives and figs as being
helpful.
Both of them were very poised and seemed wise beyond their years. I
believe
that one of them, I can't remember which, even said that his or her
cavities
filled in with new enamel!  This sounded pretty amazing and
unbelievable,
but Victoria topped that on another evening when she told us that her
tonsils, which had been removed when she was 12, grew back after going
raw.
Did I really hear her right?  Having had mine removed at age 5, I
would have
liked to have heard more about this.

Tonight, the last night, she talked a little about breatharianism.
Humans,
she said, were and are almost all breatharian.  But today we can't get
all
of our nutrients from the air because we don't have clean air anymore,
and
the oxygen in the air has declined from 55% in the past to only 12%
due to
factors such as trees being chopped down to grown corn for pigs.
(And, I
might add, for firewood for cooking and heating in much of the
world.).  As
a result of this lower oxygen level, she says, we have lower life
energy and
a lower life span.  She said that indoors, the oxygen level is only
6%, and
she strongly advised sleeping outdoors to get more nutrition from the
air
and even the stars.  She claimed it will also reduce our need for
sleep.
She had us do an exercise of exhaling every last bit of air out of our
lungs, and claimed that this will dislodge mucus from the lungs.  By
doing
this once a day for one minute, she says that our lung capacity will
increase and that we will absorb more oxygen from the air.

She also talked a bit about heirloom seeds versus hybrid seeds.  It is
illegal, she says,  to sell heirloom seeds from your own plants,
because
companies selling hybrid seeds don't want the competition.  She also
claims
that the U.S. is preventing the import of heirloom seeds.

She strongly encouraged the class (probably at least 35 people each
night I
was there) to help build the raw food community with potlucks,
classes, and
businesses.   Seattle already seems to have a pretty good start with
the
Seattle Raw Food Community (www.rawseattle.org).  I feel a renewed
desire to
continue with the raw lifestyle and would strongly recommend this
class to
anyone.

Mark Hovila