In Episode 4 with Raw Chef and author Rowena Jayne you’ll learn the importance of having a lot of raw food in your diet. In particular
– How enzymes are crucial to health and how cooking kills enzymes
– Ways to boost enzyme content
– How to prepare raw foods
– What a raw food diet looks like
– How and why Clint went raw for 8 months
– How Rheumatoid Arthritis symptoms can be reduced on a suitable raw food diet
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Clint: Good day, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. In today’s wonderful, action-packed episode, we have Rowena Jayne back again. She’s our favorite guest, after being so helpful and so generous in sharing everything in our previous episode, about bikram yoga. Welcome back, Rowena.
Rowena: Welcome. Thank you.
Clint: Today, we want to talk about raw foods. The reason I wanted Rowena on this call to talk about raw foods is because they played such an important part in my recovery from rheumatoid arthritis. When I first started experimenting with my foods, I just tried to move away from processed and fast foods and stuff, and I ate more conventional Western foods. That wasn’t working for me. In fact, I couldn’t eat any foods at all without getting inflammation.
I looked for a solution that would give me the least amount of pain and still be able to meet my calorie or energy requirement. For me, that was raw foods. So Rowena is actually an author in the area of raw foods. What’s the name of your book, Rowena?
Rowena: “The Joy of Real Food.”
Clint: The joy.
Rowena: The joy of real food.
Clint: Makes it sound easy and fun.
Rowena: Yeah, that’s one of the intentions.
Clint: Well, I found it difficult. It was hard for me, but, boy, it gave me pain relief. Did you want to explore some of the principles behind raw foods as a healthy lifestyle choice for people?
Rowena: Yeah, sure. Well, I guess there’s a lot of research being done in terms of . . . If we’re looking in terms of RA, inflammatory disease . . . Right? So there’s a lot of research showing that cooked food increases the white blood count, which we know is inflammation. So that’s a major, major thing to want to have a look at.
This Swiss doctor that did a lot of this research, he was testing hundreds and hundreds . . . I think it was like over 250 different cooked foods, and was getting the same results. Then of course, you can look at it from the term of you’re getting nice nutrition and all of that through the body. We’re obviously trying to create healing in the body, and we need maximum nutrition in order for that healing to take place.
I found that raw food, for me, personally . . . I find my gut health is always better when I eat more raw food. I find that I have more energy. I find that my skin is clear, all those other things that we’re looking at. In terms of RA, it was the inflammation and the fluid retention. When I’m having juices and when I’m having salads and things like that, I just didn’t get nearly as much inflammation, particularly if you compare that to grains. I find grains, for me, aren’t so great, but everyone is different on that. Some people have found grains are really great. But for me, no.
Yeah, definitely the raw food has mainly really decreased inflammation, decreased fluid retention, which leads to that inflammatory-type response.
Clint: Yeah, I can definitely, definitely echo those comments. Your intro was quite short on this episode because we covered a lot of your background in the previous podcast. So if you haven’t listened to the previous podcast, go back and listen to that first, because Rowena goes into great detail about the suffering that she went through with her rheumatoid arthritis. So you’re speaking from not just a point of view of being an expert of raw foods, but also someone who has suffered greatly in experience with this particular disease.
So now, one of the things that I found most intriguing about raw foods was . . . Well, there’s several, but let me ask you about enzymes. So when we cook our foods above 40 degrees Celsius, we lose our enzymes.
Rowena: Yes, yes.
Clint: How can that . . . That’s obviously a bad thing for the body.
Rowena: Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course. Yeah. We need enzymes to actually survive. If we don’t have enzymes in the body, we die. So that’s massive. We don’t want to die. But also, there’s a major correlation in terms of the enzyme productions in the stomach and the gut.
So if we’re eating dead food, which is what I like to call it if it’s not living, and it doesn’t have a lot of high enzyme. Then it’s causing the body to have to try to produce even more . . . try to basically cope with the fact that we haven’t got these enzymes, and that affects the gut health. It affects the ability to be able to produce everything that we need for the chemical reactions to take place in the body, and the list just goes on and on and on.
Of course, when we have high-enzyme food, we feel more alive anyway. We know how tired and how unhappy we feel when we’re suffering from RA and how down we feel. It’s amazing how just having these enzymes and this living food pumping through the body, that’s full of life, we feel more full of life. We feel more full of energy. We feel more positive. We feel more positive to go and heal our disease or take steps towards at least trying to recover, rather than just sitting in the dumps, going, “Oh, my God. I feel sorry for myself. My life is over.” You know? Which we’ve all been there too. I definitely have been there.
But it makes us a little bit more empowered as well. I think it gives us that little bit of accountability. I know sometimes we’re relying on the doctors to give us a pill, and we’re taught this is the only thing that’s gonna fix you. I guess my experience working with clients and my experience with myself is that, no, I can actually take a lot of power into my own health and in my own hands by just eating better foods.
As the last podcast talked about, was the exercise and the bikram yoga, particularly. So yeah. I think massive.
Clint: Absolutely. So the enzyme . . . The first book about enzymes I read, I think the author’s name was Edward How [SP].
Rowena: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Clint: The enzyme nutrition.
Rowena: Yes.
Clint: Yeah, he’s the godfather.
Rowena: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Clint: He talked about the concept of an enzyme bank. So for people who aren’t familiar with enzymes, there’s metabolic enzymes in the body which help us to do everything, as you said. It’s every blink. It’s every breath. It’s every movement. It’s the growth of our hair. It’s everything. We need enzymes.
Then there are the digestive enzymes, which help to break down our foods from large components, as we know them, like a piece of rice, down into the carbohydrates, into the simple sugars, and the fats into fatty acids, and the proteins into amino acids. So we need enzymes to assist with those processes.
Rowena: Yes.
Clint: So in enzyme nutrition, the author talks about how we have an enzyme bank. We’re born with an ability to contribute to everything, like spending money out of our own bank. But if you don’t eat any food that contains enzymes within the food, then you’re spending. You just spend, spend, spend.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: You can run out of enzymes.
Rowena: Yeah, you just put it well. Yeah, and that’s why I was saying then when the enzymes are depleted, we’re done. We die.
Clint: We’re done. We literally die.
Rowena: We literally die. Yeah.
Clint: We literally die.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: In fact, I read about how we actually have enzymes in our body that aren’t used for any other purpose except to break down the dead carcass when we’re dead.
Rowena: Sad.
Clint: How about that?
Rowena: Yeah, God.
Clint: Yeah. So anyway, exciting stuff. I found that when I went raw was the only thing that I could do that would give me a substantially less amount of pain than when I was eating anything cooked. Right? Including the cooked foods that I now recommend on my program. It’s because I just couldn’t break anything down. So let’s dig a little bit deeper about the other benefits of raw.
First of all, let’s define it a little bit more because some people might be thinking, “Are you talking about just eating salad all the time?” Tell us what does a raw food look like.
Rowena: Oh, gosh. So obviously, yes, salad is a big part of it, but we use dehydrators. Basically you’re basically minimizing, as we’ve just spoken about, the killing of nutrients and killing of enzymes. So basically we have dehydrators, where we cook the food but only cook it to 48 degrees or, if you’re in the states, 100 and, oh, gosh, 100 and . . . I’ll have to look it up. 115, I think it is, between 100 and 117.
Clint: 115. So that level there is a little bit . . . It seems to be a bit of variation in what that particular temperature is. Right.
Rowena: Yeah, it is. Each book I’ve read is slightly different. It can be between 46 to 48.
Clint: Okay.
Rowena: You know?
Clint: Interesting.
Rowena: Yeah. I don’t know what you’ve heard.
Clint: Well, my reading . . . It’s been a couple years since I’ve read about it.
Rowena: Yeah. Yeah.
Clint: I remember thinking around the 40 degrees, but then if you’re looking at desert . . . Right? In a desert, there are still things living when temperatures are at 40 degrees. It’s when things hit 50 degrees, when there’s not much living in that desert.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: So I think you’re probably closer to the mark.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: I think there’s probably a curve. I think probably things start to die.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably depends on each thing too, I think.
Clint: Yes.
Rowena: I’m just looking at a dehydrator point of view.
Clint: Okay. Yeah.
Rowena: When you’re looking at dehydration, if you understand it . . . This is the chef-y talk now. But if you’re looking at the dehydration, we might turn up the dehydrator to 50, I think it’s like 55, if we’re just trying to warm something. We put it in. Bang. It’s in there for half an hour. It doesn’t actually reach that core temperature of the degrees that we’ve turned it up to. So I think that’s probably what we’re more looking at.
We’ve got that 40 . . . We’ve set it to 47, 46 degrees or whatever when we’re generally cooking. We might cook it for eight hours, six hours, or whatever. I don’t think it gets to that level. It’s the same as what we use as a hotbox.
Clint: That makes sense.
Rowena: So you are actually bringing it above that degrees. It’s just that it’s gonna take that time to even get to any higher temperature.
Clint: For total newbies . . .
Rowena: What is a dehydrator?
Clint: No. Well . . .
Rowena: What do you put in a dehydrator?
Clint: So a dehydrator . . .
Rowena: Buy my book. No.
Clint: I’ll explain briefly what a dehydrator is. A dehydrator is basically a way of removing the moisture, the water, from a food, so that it can have more appealing crunch.
Rowena: Well, it’s funny you say that because that’s one aspect. I actually speak about that in the book because when I studied ayurveda, my raw teacher . . . My ayurveda teacher was saying, “Raw is no good. It’s just dehydrating. That’s just dry food, and dry food isn’t always good for the colon.” Depending on your constitution . . . It made me explore more.
But yeah, no, raw doesn’t always . . . Yeah, it does create the dehydration. So it does bring out the water content. However, say you wanted to make a spinach, and we wanted to keep the enzymes alive and wanted to have some nice steamed spinach. Then we just put it in a bowl, and we cover it slightly, and we put it in like the hotbox, like I mentioned. Then basically it starts to . . . Because of the heat, it starts to wilt a little bit. Then it stays moist, and then you get this steamed spinach.
Clint: Oh, wow.
Rowena: So there are other things to do. Often, you’ll just put something in for an hour just to warm it, because nourishing food, warming foods can be very helpful for the body as well. It is nourishing to have warm food. But again, we don’t want it to be so warm to the fact that it’s completely depleted of all the nutrients and the enzymes. So we use it for various different things in the raw food world. Yeah, if we’re making a raw pizza, it’s gonna be in there for a while, and it’s gonna be crispy and yum. Oh, my God. Yum, yum, yum.
Clint: Most of our listeners don’t eat pizza on a regular basis.
Rowena: No, because you wouldn’t want to. When you’re sick, you get to.
Clint: A lot of exciting things you just mentioned. One is on the raw food diet, one thing absolutely. You’re always eating cold food, or at least I was. I was. Right? I wasn’t doing gourmet.
Rowena: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be. Yeah.
Clint: I would have really enjoyed that at the time.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Eight months of . . . Nothing was cooked for eight months. Nothing was heated for eight months. That was tough going. So that’s a great tip.
Rowena: Yeah, you went hardcore.
Clint: I went hardcore. Tell us what you’re eating. Tell us these raw foods.
Rowena: Okay. Yeah. So that’s one aspect with the dehydrator. Then we’ve also got a blender. So often in the raw food world, we use what we call a high-speed blender. There’s so many on the market nowadays. There’s the Vita-Mix, which is the most expensive because it comes from America. Then there’s a Fruithy, which is less expensive. There’s a Buyer Chef. So you can get them for relatively $200 and up to $800, depending on how much you want to spend.
So you can make all sorts of stuff, dressings and juices and smoothies, obviously, in them, but you can also make raw soups. That’s how you heat it. You keep it to a temperature, and then it just gets warm.
Clint: The Vita-Mix does that. Doesn’t it?
Rowena: Yeah. Yeah, all the high-speed blenders.
Clint: If you put the Vita-Mix on the high level . . . All of them. Do they?
Rowena: Yeah, yeah.
Clint: Okay.
Rowena: So if you just heat them to a certain level, five minutes, three minutes, or whatever, it starts to warm. Obviously if you want it spiking, steaming hot, but then I’m always a bit wary that that’s going to cross over. You know?
Clint: Yeah, we don’t want to do that. That’s just from . . .
Rowena: I just make it warm.
Clint: Just from friction. Isn’t it?
Rowena: Just make it to the point of warm. Yeah.
Clint: It sounds so simple.
Rowena: That’s why you don’t want to do it too high.
Clint: But you’re basically just letting the blades create friction against the contents of the container, and the soup will warm itself.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: It’s pretty awesome.
Rowena: Yeah, it is pretty awesome.
Clint: Okay. So you’re . . .
Rowena: That can be done in five minutes. That’s the thing. People say, “I’ve got no time.” I’m like, “Okay. Here’s a recipe.” Now you tell me you got no time. Yeah, also, raw food consists of a lot of . . . You can sprout. We use a lot of sprouting. We’ll sprout nuts. I don’t know if you know, but active-added nuts are massively important, particularly if we’re looking at digestive system stuff for RA and any disease really.
As a nat-path, the first part of the body that we actually concentrate on . . . Well, one of the parts we support is always digestion. Whenever there’s illness going on, the digestive system is in the center of the body. So we always have to address it. So yeah, the sprouting is really important when you’ve got nuts, like almonds, macadamias, mainly almonds and . . . What’s the other one? Walnuts.
Certain nuts, basically, when they’re growing, when they’re out in the world, trying to grow, trying to germinate, they have to protect themselves. So they basically have all these enzyme-inhibitors. If we eat that, it’s not so great because we’ve just discussed enzymes, and we don’t want to inhibit the enzymes. You’ve got phytic acid. So then you’ve got issues of aggravation even in the stomach and all kinds of stuff.
So we always have to make sure that we activate the nuts or at least soak them, and same thing with legumes as well, if you are into the legumes. So you soak them. Certain nuts need to be soaked for two hours. Some need to be soaked for four hours. Some need to be soaked for eight.
Almonds are the most because they’re the roughest on the colon. They need to be soaked for 12 hours. Ideally almonds are actually better for us. I don’t know if you know this, but almonds are better with the skin off as well, because they are quite rough on the colon, which can affect . . .
Clint: What’s that word again for removing the skin? There’s a word for that.
Rowena: Blanch. Blanch? Is it blanch?
Clint: Blanching. I think so. I think so.
Rowena: Doesn’t blanch mean . . . Hang on. I should know. I’m a chef. Blanch. Doesn’t that mean you throw the food in and quickly take it out? No.
Clint: It does. It does.
Rowena: That’s how they do it though, generally.
Clint: That’s how they do it.
Rowena: Yeah, you don’t have to do it that way.
Clint: That’s why I didn’t do it.
Rowena: No, you just soak them overnight, and they pop off, or you can do it in a nut milk way. So you blend it up, and then you strain it through a nut milk bag because you’ve already taken the . . . Then you’ve got the milk, but that’s obviously when you don’t want to eat the nuts. Yeah, you can buy them activated, and they’re already done for you. They are obviously more expensive. Most health food stores stock them this day and age.
Clint: They do. They do.
Rowena: You can just buy them already done for you. Activated, if you don’t know what that means, it basically means that we’ve rehydrated it, re-dehydrated it again. So we’ve soaked it for all the hours that we need, and then we’ve put it back in the dehydrator, so that they’re not wet. So you’re not keeping wet nuts in your cupboard, which will go moldy.
Clint: Yeah.
Rowena: You know? Often, what we’ll do is we’ll just soak the nuts overnight, and they’re ready for the next day to consume. Then again, legumes and sprouting. So sprouting is another big part. We’re talking about enzymes. So many enzymes in sprouts. They’re super foods.
Clint: Let me . . .
Rowena: Interject?
Clint: Yeah. Well, not interject, but more . . . In this episode, I feel like I’m the student. I’d like to run past the teacher here. What I did with my eight months of raw . . . You can comment on it. Jump in at any time and let me know what your thoughts are on it. Some people have said to me, “Why isn’t a full-on raw food diet part of your program,” the program that I taught. Right? The reason is because I found it so hard. Let me tell you what I did.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Clint: I don’t want the feeling of responsibility that some people are gonna run out and do this, because it’s not easy.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: It could cause them to find new challenges. Right?
Rowena: Yeah, yeah.
Clint: So this is how I did it. I found that the most pain relief I could possibly get in the world was from green, just celery and cucumber juice. Okay? Massively rich in enzymes, cooling.
Rowena: Yeah, very cooling.
Clint: It just seemed very anti-inflammatory.
Rowena: Yeah, they are. They’re both anti-inflammatories. There’s high sodium. I don’t know whether there’s a correlation there. Yeah, but celery is an herb. We actually use it as an herb for inflammation.
Clint: Great. Well, that came to me just through trial and error, but that juice was the greatest.
Rowena: Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
Clint: No sugar. Notice that there’s no sugar. Right?
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: Then the more salad that I ate, the better I felt, and I wasn’t putting any oils on this. I was just having raw salads, just all the bok choy and cost lettuce and romaine lettuce and any plain iceberg lettuce, anything that was green and leafy because I read about how that feeds bacteria. Okay. So if our bacteria like to eat fiber, I thought, “Why not give them as much leafy greens as they can possibly . . . ” Just like a snail . . .
Rowena: Support the liver at the same time.
Clint: Okay. Right.
Rowena: If you’re on drugs, you want to support the liver because it’s the metabolic part.
Clint: Right. Exactly.
Rowena: The liver has to metabolize everything in the body. So if you are taking Methotrexate or whatever some of you guys might be on, you want to get those green leafies in to support the liver.
Clint: That’s it. My liver did start to go at one point, on Methotrexate, and then it came back again. It turned the corner again. Now at that point, I’ve obviously got no energy coming in. I’ve got just juice. So I found the way to get as much energy as possible, without causing inflammation, was exactly what you said. You know what I was doing? I was buying raw almonds and raw macadamia nuts. I tried all the other types of nuts, and nothing would sprout well.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah.
Clint: They’d come out slimy.
Rowena: Yeah, you have to buy raw.
Clint: Or they just . . . It just would sort of dissolve in the water. Maca nuts and almonds, I lived off them, and I would buy them in bulk. I would soak a small portion for my next day, overnight. The next day, I would then drain the water off, dry them with a towel. Yeah. Then what I’d do is I’d put them in a small container, only just bigger than the actual amount of nuts. So I didn’t have a lot of air.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: I put them in the fridge, to try and keep any airborne bacteria away.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: The almonds would last about two to three days. The macas would only last a day. They’d go off real quick.
Rowena: Yeah. Yeah, they go slimy.
Clint: I would then wrap them into nory [SP] rolls. You know the Japanese nory rolls?
Rowena: Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The seaweed. Yeah.
Clint: Yeah, with alfalfa sprouts.
Rowena: Oh, I love it.
Clint: Okay. Sometimes I’d also add some other seaweed on top for more salty flavor.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: I would eat these nory rolls, we’d call them, totally self-invention, nuts and . . .
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Anyway, they were a huge part of my calorie intake.
Rowena: Wow.
Clint: I just kept inflammation extremely low on that, very low on that for eight months.
Rowena: Yeah, and then seaweed is good too because you’ve got all that removal of heavy metals and all kinds of stuff. Seaweed is great for removing all that as well. So you have to add that. I kind of out myself as the nutritionist and the naturopath.
Clint: Right. Well, this is why I’m telling you this stuff. I want your input.
Rowena: Yeah. You’re getting your plant fat. You are getting some plant fats in there. I know we spoke a little bit about that yesterday. You said that you don’t really have a lot of plant fats.
Clint: No, I don’t have a lot of unnatural or processed fats, no oils.
Rowena: Okay. I must have misheard what you said. Oh, right. Okay.
Clint: Yeah, no oils.
Rowena: So it’s the oils, but you were still having the nuts and stuff.
Clint: I was having that, but these . . . I’m so glad you mentioned that.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: Here’s the profound thing. You know we mentioned before. Through the activation, it’s not just the enzymes that lose the enzyme-inhibitors, but the fatty acids get broken down into . . . Sorry. The fats get broken down into fatty acids. My audience know from my materials . . . Well, it’s from the science that tells us this, that high-fat foods tend to increase the intestinal permeability, allowing more bacteria to enter the blood and also more food-borne proteins to enter the blood. So we don’t want to be putting excess fat in our diet.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: When you consume the fats that are already in the fatty acid format, which is their derivative, it has no effect on the gut wall.
Rowena: Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah, so I was getting that.
Clint: This took me years to work out. Right.
Rowena: Right, because I was getting that confused yesterday when we had that quick chat on the phone. I was like, “Really? I had nuts and seeds, and it was good for me.” Yeah, okay.
Clint: Yes, but an avocado, for instance . . . I broke a fast one time with an avocado.
Rowena: It didn’t work for you.
Clint: A lot of avocado, and it just slammed me.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Slammed me. But if I’d have broken it with the activated nuts and seeds, I expect that I would have had a much better transition away from the fast. So it’s fascinating what the sprouting can do. Yeah.
Rowena: It’s interesting. Isn’t it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Massive. Massive, massive, massive.
Clint: Tell us then. What does your diet look like now?
Rowena: Okay. I’m not predominantly raw. I do eat probably about 80%, maybe sometimes 90%, sometimes maybe 70%. It really depends on the season. It depends on where I’m at as well, but there’s a lot of raw, and then there’s some cooked.
Clint: So you mean you are predominantly raw, not exclusively.
Rowena: Did I say not predominantly raw? What did I say? Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Thanks for correcting me.
Clint: You said not. No, that’s all right.
Rowena: I’m not exclusively raw.
Clint: Not exclusively. Yeah.
Rowena: Yeah. I eat some raw, and I eat a little bit of cooked food, but it’s interesting. We spoke yesterday on the phone, and we eat similar cooked food.
Clint: We do.
Rowena: I eat dol [SP]. If I eat cooked food, it’s a little bit of dol and sometimes a very simple soup if I have that as well.
Clint: Yeah. With your dol, do you have any rice with it?
Rowena: I don’t eat a lot of other cooked food. No. See, I don’t.
Clint: You just have it, just the lentils.
Rowena: I don’t do well on grains.
Clint: Okay.
Rowena: I just don’t. I don’t know whether that’s the trigger of what I did when I had the eating disorder, because that was . . . Wheat was a massive trigger. No, grains just don’t do well for me.
Clint: Most people don’t do well at first on any of the cereal grains. That’s why in our program, it’s only buckwheat and quinoa.
Rowena: Right. Okay. Yeah. Well, they’re also very alkaline grains as well.
Clint: That’s it. They’re one of the very few . . .
Rowena: Yeah, and buckwheat is not actually a grain. So I just cut you off. Yeah.
Clint: Neither of them are. Are they? They’re both pseudo grains. They’re actually seeds. Aren’t they?
Rowena: Well, yeah, seeds. Fruit seeds is the buckwheat.
Clint: Every one of these little differentiating points are profound. There is a huge profound difference between putting together buckwheat and quinoa, versus having oats.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Massive, massive, massive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Wildly, wildly different.
Rowena: Yeah, massively different. Yeah.
Clint: Yeah. So it’s all in the detail. It’s all in the detail. So you can just see in the scientific literature, the studies that are being done when people react to various foods. This has been going on for 20, 30 years.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: Everyone with rheumatoid arthritis has trouble with the cereal grains when they first challenge them, the wheats, the oats, and stuff.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: But similarly, one of the greatest offenders of all are the milk products and the dairy products. So you think, “What on Earth do I eat?” That’s where I was. That’s why I ate raw for eight months. But then I discovered that after the eight months of raw, my gut had healed enough for me to be able to tolerate some buckwheat and quinoa.
Rowena: Yeah. Do you sprout your buckwheat and quinoa? Or you don’t?
Clint: We don’t. Some people do.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: I tried sprouting at home, the quinoa, for a period of time. Sometimes it would go off.
Rowena: Okay.
Clint: I wasn’t great at controlling the environment.
Rowena: You just have to keep rinsing it, because buckwheat . . . The thing with the buckwheat is that, again, it’s similar to the nuts and seeds, in that it has the . . . What were we talking about?
Clint: Enzyme-inhibitors?
Rowena: Enzyme-inhibitors. So you do have to at least soak it and stuff. You at least have to soak it. Do you soak it?
Clint: No, I don’t soak it either.
Rowena: I’m educating you now. Yeah, you’re supposed to soak it. Then if you sprout it, you never, ever sprout that grain longer than the seed itself, because then it’s got phagopyren [SP]. That can become toxic to the body. So anyway, if you are thinking of sprouting, because we’re talking about sprouting, if you want to go off and sprout, then now you know. Yeah, interesting.
Clint: Yes. I didn’t know that it had the length of the sprout. That’s really good.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah.
Clint: Okay. So what if someone is listening now, and they want to just get started on putting a little bit more raw food in their diet?
Rowena: Okay.
Clint: What’s a good . . . I can say straightaway, salad will save your life.
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clint: Whack as much salad with every meal. I don’t care if it’s weird to have salad at breakfast. If you’re in pain, your life is weird already.
Rowena: Yeah, true.
Clint: Right?
Rowena: True. Yeah.
Clint: So salad would save my life, did save my life. So that’s my first tip. What are some of your thoughts on how to start with a little more raw food?
Rowena: Yeah. Again, it’s just adding. One of the best things is to add. If you’re still wanting to have your meal for the night, and you’re not ready to go all the way and change, that’s fine. Then you just keep adding. Add a bit of salad. Add a juice every day to your diet. Start adding, bit by bit.
What will happen is, as you add, you’ll start to feel better, and you’ll start to want less of the other stuff anyway. Salad, like you said, salads are an easy way because it’s something that anyone can do. You can just put anything together. If you are still wanting to have your cooked veggies or whatever, you can throw some of that into salad. Again, it’s training you to eat that high-enzyme food. Then you’ll, again, want less and less of the cooked food in there.
Juices, I find, are amazing because it’s something you can just . . . You can have a juice at breakfast. You can have a juice when you’re out. That’s the thing too. If you are going out somewhere, and someone is taking you out for the day or whatever to get you out, if you are crippled at the moment and sitting at home, it’s something you can do outside. Sit in the sun and have a nice juice.
Juices are also a great way of getting packs of nutrition into the body. If you’re thinking turmeric, and you start using the turmeric root in your juice, you’re pounding these anti-inflammatories. You use turmeric and celery. That’s just two already now that you’ve just started to add into the diet, that you weren’t adding before. So that’s two anti-inflammatories that you’ve just started to increase into the diet.
Long-term, it’s large quantities, because you have to use quite a large quantity in order to yield the juice. So that’s why we use juicing as medicine, because it’s not just . . . You wouldn’t be able to consume that much turmeric sitting there. Oh, my God. No way. Or even that much celery. You might use half a bunch of celery in a juice, for example, making a big quantity. You can’t sit there and eat that much celery.
So you’re getting massive amounts straightaway through the bloodstream. They’re gonna start to cause change to the body, change to the cells.
Clint: It’s so easily absorbed.
Rowena: It’s easily absorbed, and it’s easy to do.
Clint: It’s just straight into the blood. Yeah.
Rowena: A lot of people go on about, “Oh, but the fiber, the fiber, the fiber.” But if you’re gonna have all the other, you’re gonna have some salad, you’re gonna have all the other, you’re getting the fiber anyway.
Clint: You’re getting so much fiber. Your body is just gonna be jetting out poos all day long.
Rowena: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It frees up the digestive system as well.
Clint: What about . . .
Rowena: It gives it that little bit of a chance to start healing.
Clint: Absolutely.
Rowena: Because it’s not having to actually do the work, which takes a lot of energy. You know?
Clint: That’s why the first two days of my program is a complete juice cleanse.
Rowena: Yeah, right. Yeah.
Clint: For two days, it’s just . . .
Rowena: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.
Clint: We haven’t spoken about this before.
Rowena: Yeah, we haven’t. I don’t know what your program is yet.
Clint: For the first two days, it’s just celery and cucumber juice. That’s all it is, and plain leafy greens without any additional unnecessary oils and fats and stuff. It’s not nice to eat those greens at first. You feel like a chimpanzee. But let’s face it. We’ve got the same digestive systems as a chimp. So it’s not crazy to think that we can just eat some plain leaves.
The reason it’s not just juice, it’s just green juices and nothing else, is because I do have a little bit of an interest in having people’s bowels move a little bit, just a little bit. If you’re chewing something a bit more, it just keeps the . . . You’re getting a little bit of bulk, tiny bit, and it’s getting things to move. Although, you might have one bowel movement or maybe a small one in the two days, but there’s not much going through.
Okay. So what about green smoothies? Because I know that with green smoothies, you have to include fruit. It’s just disgusting just to put a bunch of greens into a blender.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: So some people in their journey with trying to heal from rheumatoid arthritis still have a lot of trouble with eating any sugars. So let’s say for the 60% who are okay with sugars, do you have some green smoothie favorite recipes?
Rowena: Yeah, let me think right now. Kale, cucumber. See, I use a lot of cucumber as well.
Clint: Okay.
Rowena: Kale, cucumber, celery. Often, I will add a bit of pineapple. See, pineapple has all the enzymes [inaudible:00:30:16], the anti-inflammatory. So that’s where I’ll add pineapple.
Clint: Yeah, beautiful.
Rowena: Now that I’m fine, I can have apple in there if I want to.
Clint: Of course. Of course. I’m talking about . . .
Rowena: Apple is a good way to just . . . Apple is also high in pectin. So again, you’re looking at the digestive, the fruits that aid the digestive as well.
Clint: They’re just tasty.
Rowena: What else would I put in it? Sometimes a bit of spinach. I just throw anything in, really. I have recipes, but I just have them in my head.
Clint: Of course, of course.
Rowena: They’re in my book but not in my head. Yeah, kale, cucumber, celery, a bit of pineapple. Sometimes I like to put spinach in there as well, or a bit of seaweed. I like to mix up the green leafies. Sometimes I put zucchini.
Clint: Okay. That’s a little sweeter. Isn’t it?
Rowena: I find zucchini brings a really nice . . . It is a little sweeter.
Clint: It’s got a little bit of vegetable sugar.
Rowena: It’s got that little bit of sugars. Yeah.
Clint: That’s fascinating.
Rowena: I don’t know. For me, that works. Everyone is different. Another good one is turmeric, carrot, and lime. That’s a yummy one.
Clint: Wow. I bet that has some zest.
Rowena: Turmeric, carrot, and lime. It’s yummy. It’s a popular one.
Clint: All right. Well, that’s great. Now your energy levels are very high.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: You’re very . . . Do people tell you that all the time?
Rowena: I’m a buzz. Yeah.
Clint: Yeah. I think that’s what raw foods can do. I didn’t get the full real fair experience of raw foods because I was on the Methotrexate at the time.
Rowena: Yeah, right.
Clint: The Methotrexate, coupled with the disease side effects, you’ve got heavy fatigue, plus heavy fatigue, equals two times a lot.
Rowena: Fatigue.
Clint: So I didn’t feel that buzz that I know most people who do raw food diets for a period of time speak of. Do you find that it’s a way of life for you now? Is it something that you’ll probably stick at for a long period of time?
Rowena: Oh, the way I eat?
Clint: Yeah.
Rowena: Oh, yeah. It’s funny for me. I can’t even go a day without a juice. I’m like, “Something is missing. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel as good.” I just notice such . . . I become so in tune with my body. My body just tells me straightaway. Yeah, I don’t think I can ever go back to that other way. You know?
Clint: Yeah. Well, I certainly always fall back on salads.
Rowena: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Clint: If I don’t eat enough salads, it’s not that I actually get anything digestively or symptom-wise. There’s nothing there.
Rowena: You just don’t feel as good.
Clint: I don’t feel as good.
Rowena: Yeah, you just kind of feel off.
Clint: We’re meant to eat some raw food. We’re meant to eat some leafy greens. So I can totally appreciate that. Okay. Well, we’ve covered a lot in here. You’ve got a book. Tell us about where people can find out about your book.
Rowena: Okay. So you can come to my website, which is www.Rowenajayne.com. That’s Jayne with a Y. Don’t forget the Y. You can buy the book online, either with me . . . If you buy it with me, you get an autographed copy couriered to your door. Otherwise, you can buy it on Amazon, certain yoga studios stocking it. Certain bookstores are stocking it. Just look around. Amazon. My publisher is Balboa. It’s obviously on there.
There is an e-book as well. So there’s a printed book, as well as an e-book. Obviously a massive difference in price. So those of you that are a bit short on funds, you can get the e-book. Obviously a cookbook is always better to see the visual, but it’s a starting point. Yes, it’s available online. If you just look up “The Joy of Real Food” or even “Rowena Jayne Real Food Yogi,” you will find it.
Clint: Okay. It’s certainly at the yoga studios that I go to.
Rowena: It is.
Clint: It’s all over the place. It’s very popular. So that’s fabulous. So thanks so much for everything that you’ve shared with us so far. Is there any parting action items for someone who’s thinking about doing a little bit more raw foods in their diet?
Rowena: Okay. Well, obviously we’ve already spoken about my book, but the other thing is I honestly thing juicing is the big one, to start with a juice. If you’re looking for a juice recipe, I actually have a few on my website, on my blog. We’ve given you the website already. So I think that’s a good place to start. Start with a juice. Just tomorrow, wake up, have a juice.
Clint: Brilliant. Then they can get more juice recipes via your mailing list.
Rowena: Yeah.
Clint: Thanks so much, Rowena. You’ve been awesome, once again. Really appreciate everything you’ve shared with us today.
Rowena: My pleasure, Clint. Thank you. Good luck, everyone.