Liza,

> My problem is that every colon hydrotherapist that I have ever
> talked to (and I know an awful lot of these personally, across the
> U.S.) tells me that he or she (they're almost all female it seems)
> has never PERSONALLY seen anyone eliminate this kind of thing
> (although they all seem to have all those same pictures and books
> and charts, too). Adding to my confusion is that what I learned in
> college anatomy & physiology is that the colon sheds and eliminates
> it's lining every day, which would preclude it from accumulating the
> kind of black stuff that adherents of this theory speak about.
>

> I happen to be a clean freak (kind of like Howard Hughes. or the
> Church Lady), so I'd just love it if I could do a cleanse thing on
> myself and get all those nasty dirty things out. And I'd be the
> first to start espousing this widely as a new cult. But so far I
> can't seem to be able to find any trustworthy evidence to support
> this theory. Sell me on it, please! :D What has convinced you?

My own experience, that's all. Now I have never eliminated any black
stuff (just some extremely rancid brownish-gray ropes of mucous on
occasion), but considering what I ate for 30 years, well, the body
has to do something with material it can't digest - I would not be
surprised by anything.

>
> > I don't follow. What is it that I don't want to see expressed?
>
> It seemed that both you and Mark readily agreed that 100% raw vegan
> diets are not, in fact, good for everyone. And yet you both took
> issue with my expressing this. Why is that?
>

I did not take issue with you expressing this - I clearly agree with
you on that. My issue was with this quote - many anecdotes besides
mine refute it:

>the abundance of anecdotal evidence that
>shows clearly that this notion of rawness having any particularly
>significant importance in the diet is just silliness.

> > I used to browse on a veggie forum when I was interested in the
> > issue, on Compuserve, and was looking for people who said they
> > were feeling noticeably better health-wise on the veggie diet as
> > opposed to non-veggie. I seldom found them, UNLESS the form of
> > veggie diet was mostly or all-raw. But I also always found people
> > reporting improvements on low-carb and candida diets. Funny that
> > people rarely consider the two together - low carb and mostly raw.
>
> Well, you've unintentionally made my point for me. Could it be which
> foods these diets EXCLUDE, rather than the fact that the food is raw?

What I am saying is - one might consider both rawness and the right
types of natural foods and macronutrient balances for the best results
- but unfortunately in my view there are few popular alternative diets
that promote this (key word being popular). Nobody on the Compuserve
forum ever tried or promoted a mostly raw diet that was not the raw
vegan diet (a very different equation than mostly raw foods but some
animal protein daily or even a few times a week).

You seem to discount the value of raw almost totally in all cases and
that's what I disagree with. Is that your position - that it makes
essentially no difference whether any food is eaten cooked or raw as
long as it is a natural food? If so, fine. But in that case also I
would also seriously wonder like Mark what the heck you are doing
hanging around in any kind of list titled 'Raw Food Diet Support'.

Paul