Eating Healthy in the City: The Ultimate in Healthy Eating: Eating Uncooked Fruits and Vegetables

When asked what eating healthy means, people come up with different ideas. For some, it could just be staying away from fried food or cutting out the fat. For others, it could mean going vegetarian. However, what I've observed over the years of looking for the perfect diet is that people need time to transition to a healthier lifestyle. People who quit cold turkey (literally and figuratively) sometimes end up feeling so deprived that they quickly abandon their healthy lifestyle, writing it off as another fad diet, never to be tried again.

I recently attended a seminar on raw food preparation and what I saw there made me realize that transitioning to the ultimate in healthy eating - eating raw fruits and veggies - is easier than it seems. As a matter of fact, the food they prepared in that seminar was so good that I didn't get the feeling that I was sacrificing taste and presentation for the sake of good health. Imagine eating pasta, burgers, cake, and chocolate - all vegan - and you can see that eating healthy need not ever mean eating tasteless food.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the stuff we ate over the weekend:

Regular fettucine would, of course, require wheat pasta and heavy cream. It's a dieter's nightmare - being high on fat and carbs. But this one is not. The noodles were made from uncooked vegetables, and the cream was made from cashew nuts. There is nothing in this dish that will give you a heart attack.

The fast food variety of burgers would naturally come with grease, charred protein which is cancerous, fat, and the antibiotics that were given to the cows. Who would have thought that you could actually make burger patties from dehydrated vegetables? This one was served with teriyaki sauce made from Bragg's liquid aminos and raw honey from Palawan.

Desserts, anyone?

Diabetics think they're doomed for life, but cakes and chocolates made from things like nuts, extra virgin coconut oil, raw cacao powder, and fruits could never harm anyone. (The desserts were made by Asha who runs a school where the kids are given a steady diet of nutritious food.)

Raw Food (Uncooked, Not heated above normal body temperature)

Cooking destroys the enzymes that are naturally found in fruits and vegetables. Most people think that veggies are just for fiber, but apparently, more than the fiber itself, what makes them good are the live enzymes. The seminar entitled "I Love it Raw" which is conducted by Daniw, usually in Bahay Kalipay in Palawan, was run in Greenhills so that made it easy for city dwellers like me to get a taste of Bahay Kalipay's unique dishes.

The first thing that comes to mind when people hear "raw fruits and veggies" is a salad. But eating nothing but salads can get boring very quickly. I was therefore surprised when Daniw taught us how to make salads that looked like Japanese food.

Vegetables wrapped in nori sheets

Vegetables (and mango slices) wrapped in raw cucumber and drizzled with a creamy cashew-based sauce that tasted just like cheese

Veggies wrapped in lettuce

Miso soup with mushrooms

After tasting all of these, I see now that salads can be made to look more interesting. But considering that all of the recipes used raw veggies and fruits, virtually everything in here can be called a salad.

This is what we had for breakfast on Day 2 of the seminar: raw bananas, banana chews (bananas drizzled with coconut oil & cacao and placed in a dehydrator overnight), and papaya on top of banana pancakes, drizzled with coconut cream. Looks good, doesn't it? It tasted even better than it looked.

Daniw shows the class how to make all-veggie lasagna (without wheat pasta)

And for people who must have rice and ulam, Daniw had the perfect solution:

Instead of beef with broccoli, how about mushrooms with broccoli?

Daniw shows the class how to make rice from turnips

And a salad on the side.

Green Smoothies, your own liquid sunshine!

Plants have the unique ability to harness the sun's energy and turn it into food, and we know this from our biology class as photosynthesis. In a way, chlorophyll is liquid sunshine. Imagine taking in more quantities of this on a daily basis! Plant cells though are wrapped in tough cellulose, and you'd have to chew endlessly to get inside them. But thank God for blenders, we can just liquefy greens and drink them in the form of really delicious and refreshing smoothies.

These are the stuff that go into the blender. You'd be surprised - they don't taste like greens. The smoothies taste more like fruit shakes.

Jessica lets the blender do the work of releasing the phytonutrients.

To know more about the benefits of making green smoothies, check out http://www.rawfamily.com/green-smoothie