Foods that we ingest every day, most specifically, organic vegetables and fruits-are built with nutrient-producing digestive enzymes. These enzymes help our bodies build, grow, and regenerate our cells through proper digestion. With proper digestion, our bodies can not only eliminate waste and glean useful energy from foods, but also, they can operate our metabolic rates of consumption at an ideal rate. Cooking foods break down the enzymes needed that help our bodies work at optimum level, thereby making them work harder to get around less easily digested foods that are cooked. Have you ever wondered why when you eat processed cooked food or even just cooked food, your mind is still feeling hungry, and it usually results in over eating because of that?

By cooking organic or non organic foods to a mere 115 degrees, which for clarity is just lightly steaming-these natural enzymes inherent to raw vegetables and fruits is lost-thereby eliminating a thorough and much needed digestive process from our body's reaction to these foods. By making digestion much more difficult for our bodies, it is as if we are introducing a foreign object each time we choose to consume cooked foods, and our bodies become more prone to poisons and toxicities. Moreover, raw foods contain bacteria that our digestive tracts need for long-term digestive health. Raw foods restore these bacteria and promote digestive enzymes in the process of efficient digestion.

So, what more specifically does a diet rich in organic raw foods give your body's overall health through efficient digestion? As noted, for your comfort and bodily health, you are able digest food better. This allows your body to eliminate wastes and use food energies more efficiently without the extra work leaving your mind feeling grounded thus letting it do what it was designed to do, being connected to the total YOU. Moreover, your body is able to take full advantage of the vegetables’ and/or fruits’ intrinsic nutrients, by using and storing these nutrients for your body's future need. This keeps your body operating, as it was intended-at optimum levels.

Nervous tissue is composed of two main cell types: neurons and glial cells. Neurons transmit nerve messages. Glial cells are in direct contact with neurons and often surround them. The neuron is the functional unit of the nervous system. Humans have about 100 billion neurons in their brain alone! While variable in size and shape, all neurons have three parts. Dendrites receive information from another cell and transmit the message to the cell body. The cell body contains the nucleus, mitochondria and other organelles typical of eukaryotic cells. The axon conducts messages away from the cell body. Three types of neurons occur. Sensory neurons typically have a long dendrite and short axon, and carry messages from sensory receptors to the central nervous system. Motor neurons have a long axon and short dendrites and transmit messages from the central nervous system to the muscles (or to glands). Interneurons are found only in the central nervous system where they connect neuron to neuron.

Many people who begin or have eaten a raw foods diet for quite some time, report a feeling of calm and contentment within their body, a feeling of overall bodily wellbeing. What is it about consuming mostly uncooked or unmodified organic fruits and vegetables that changes not only how healthy their bodies are working but also how healthy they feel on a daily basis? Quite simply, raw foods do not stimulate the body in the same ways that cooked foods do, by leaving your nervous system in a synchronic unity.

This makes sense if we take a closer look at the breakdown of the enzymes of vegetables and fruits and apply it to the body's digestion. For review, digestion needs the right amount and a well-balanced amount of enzymes to be able to process foods efficiently. If the foods being taken in do not offer these enzymes but also seek to break them down once in our central nervous system, our bodies are constantly working harder and harder to digest these cooked foods leaving our nervous system in a position to over throw the balance of: Sensory Input, Integration and Output, Endocrine Systems, Divisions of the Nervous System just to name a few. Secondly, since our body is constantly working to digest foods that will not digest properly, we feel like our body's needs have not been met. This, in turn, keeps us from that feeling of calm associated with raw foods.

On the other hand, if we choose to consume caffeine or chocolate, not only does our digestive system not know how to process these, but our central nervous system is at full stimulation due to the unhealthy poisons in our bodies-caffeine and sugars respectively-and will leave us feeling speedy and malcontent.

Our bodies have been designed to know what is best for them. Our bodies process foods not only for sustenance and life, but also for energy, waste, and optimum function. What we eat determines not only how healthy we will be, but also how healthy we will feel. The higher enzymatic level foods that our bodies take in the better it is for our health. This is due to the fact that they know how to process these foods for energy, waste removal, and function. Conversely, if we give our bodies foods that have no enzymatic value, we are depriving them of a map of efficient processing, and they must constantly endeavor to digest these non-nutrient foods into our bodies.

Choosing a raw foodist lifestyle is a choice for your overall bodily health. Enriching your diet with mostly uncooked and uncompromised foods contributes to better digestion, less disease, less unnecessary storage of fats, and more proactive use of enzymatic proteins for energy. In short, with the best nutrition of raw fruits and vegetables, your body is able to work like a well-oiled machine: efficient and like new. This is perhaps something you already know, as vegetarianism and raw vegetarianism has long since promoted the selection of foods for maximum short and long-term function and health of our bodies.

What is widely unknown, however, in regards to raw foodism, is its effects on the general feeling and wellbeing in our bodies. Very often how we feel is downplayed for the sake of how healthy we are, but it is time we start recognizing that feeling and being are one in the same; and that when we eat nutrient-optimized fruits and vegetables, our health is optimized through processes in our central nervous system, and this leads to feelings of calm and contentment. Less stress and feelings of malaise can affect our entire lives and greatly improve our quality of life.

Raw foods were the foods that history began with-before the discovery of fire, heat, and means of cooking. In the grand scheme of life, this was the original design. Cooking and technology has only served to complicate things-not only our lives but also our digestive health.

By TTS Cofounder Botanical Chef Omid Jaffari