As an adult, fueling my life with more raw vegetarian food like fruit, vegetables, seaweeds, nuts, seeds and sprouts not only catapulted me into another wonderful orbit, but it gave me a shocking insight into what heavy, processed cooked foods do to us and how they detrimentally affect and debilitate our minds, bodies and moods. You don't really know this to its fullest extent until you cross over to the 'high raw side' - even for a little while - and experience the exhilarating energy and beautiful clarity of thought that such eating brings. If this is what occurs to an adult. then how much greater the magnitude for a little baby whose biology is not unlike a Tabula rasa - a blank slate where certain imprints are laid for life?
It is common knowledge, and has been scientifically proven, that pumping a child with sugar laden food will see them becoming very temperamental over the course of the day - not mention the ubiquitous additives, E numbers and other unpronounceable ingredients that a stroll along the baby/children's food section of any common supermarket aisle will reveal. A great deal of it is clever marketing and the colourful 'natural' slogan with a gurgling blonde baby on the front is hardly natural at all when one learns to read between the lines of the back labels.
With all this in mind, even before giving birth, I knew that I would have to devise my own eating plan for my child. When he was born, I used the first six breast-milky months to research further, getting my hands on everything I could find for the classical, standard baby nutrition books to the other end of the spectrum with books written for largely raw vegan children, to speaking with nutritionist that were raw food-friendly and of course meeting other mothers on a similar path. I had no intention of being strictly raw or vegan with my son. In fact through my reading it emerged that exclusive raw veganism wasn't advocated as there are certain nutrients very difficult to obtain, like choline and vitamin K2, and so supplementation is necessary - an added burden when you are chasing after a lively toddler...
A baby's body and brain grow exponentially, at a tremendous pace, and so its diet cannot be the same as an adult's. There are a few successful raw families out there like the Taliferos who run the Garden Diet website but they are rare and don't live lives governed by alarm clocks and deadlines and routines that the average Cypriot family reluctantly abides by - nor do the Taliferos have carnivorous, cola-guzzling family members.
Dr Gabriel Cousens, a well known raw foodist, advises that a baby's first food have some warmth to it, something that makes perfect sense particularly from ayurverdic point of view. In one of his books an insightful chapter, wonderfully entitled Raising Rainbow Babies, explains how a baby is the Kapha phase of life when a little one's body is 'cold, damp and mucous-forming' and for this reason their diet must be warm. Spices like ginger and cardamom are recommended for use in baby meals to ignite its 'digestive fire'. The meal can then be can heated over a very low fire until it is suitably warm but not hot to the point that all beneficial, life giving nutrients are lost to heat which is usually the case with most cooked meals.
The basic principle of raw food is that when you heat food above 48 degrees Celsius (118 F) then that is when 100% of enzymes are killed and there is also a dramatic reduction of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. This is one reason why cooking fruit largely renders it nutritionally useless, as well as altering its molecular structure and making it far more sugary.
Recommended further reading
- Rainbow Green Live Food Cousine by Gabriel Cousens
- Evie's Kitchen by Shazzie
- Baby Greens by Michaela Lynn and Michael Chrisemer
- Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko
- Optimum Nutrition for your child by Patrick Holford
- The Drinks are on me by Veronika Sophia Robinson
- Sunfood Diet success system by David Wolf
- The womanly art of breastfeeding by La Leche League
- The Continuum Concept by Jean Leidloff
