In this article, Jameth Sheridan shares on his journey to a raw food lifestyle. Jameth Sheridan is the co-author of Uncooking with Jameth and Kim and the co-founder of the superfoods company HealthForce Nutritionals.

Kevin: Dr. Jameth Sheridan, I want to welcome you to the program. Let's first start with raw foods, because, hey, it's pretty appropriate for this program. Why raw foods for you?

Jameth: I originally got into raw foods for health. I wanted to be as healthy as I possibly could. I started out being a whole-foods vegan, being very athletic prior. Raw foods has had tremendous benefit for me personally in my health. However, there's some concerns about raw foods that, when people go from a regular, conventional diet to a raw food diet, it can be counter-productive in many cases, because they go from Kentucky Fried Chicken and regular pizza, hamburgers and junk, regular junk food, into a raw food diet, and usually someone doesn't go cold turkey forever, they fall back, they do the best they can, you go back and forth. And when they go back and forth, they're eating, and when they binge, they'll be eating cookie dough and Kentucky Fried Chicken and animal products and other things that are absolutely horrible for you, and I see that happen more often than people staying on a 100% raw.

Kevin: So explain that in terms of default. The animal products, like if you don't develop that, right, then you go back to your default, correct?

Jameth: Yes. And it goes on a misconception that a raw food diet, that the benefit of a raw food diet, the single benefit of a raw food diet, and this is what is taught by virtually all raw food teachers, is the fact that it is raw. And that is a major misconception, people get into trouble with that. When you go on a raw food diet, you don't go from cooked Twinkies to raw Twinkies. You don't go from cooked milk to raw milk, you don't go from a cooked piece of animal flesh to a raw piece of animal flesh, that's not the only factor that's changing. It's one of the many. A raw food diet, immediately, you are a vegan. Right away you're a vegan, and just by becoming a vegan you can lower your chances of heart disease, of cancer, of arthritis, of osteoporosis, of kidney disease, so many challenges just alone by becoming a vegan. But in raw foods, there's two categories of food - raw, or cooked. Nothing in between. So it doesn't really matter. If it's cooked, if it's either cookie dough or a vegan bran muffin, it's in the same category, it's just bad for you, in the raw mentality.

Kevin: In the raw mentality, right.

Jameth: Yes. So becoming a raw fooder, all of a sudden you're a vegan, that's a huge, immense increase in your health. You also, almost all raw fooders are focused on eating organic foods, which is another huge benefit to your health. You also become a whole fooder, versus a raw fooder. For example, you can go on a vegan diet and eat white sugar, white flour, and hydrogenated oil and be sick. Be sick, look sick, feel sick. Or you can do things like eat all whole foods, like grains as they come off the stalk. Potatoes, other tubers, fruits and vegetables, even if you're cooking them, it's all whole foods. When you're a raw fooder, for the most part, everything you're eating is the whole food, you're becoming a whole fooder. That is a huge benefit to health. You also tend to eat a different class of foods now, it's not just that you're a whole fooder and a vegan, you're now eating a large percentage of fruits and vegetables. And even if you do that cooked, your health is immensely increased. That's another benefit when you become a raw fooder that tends to be automatic.

Also, when you're eating lots of fruits and vegetables, high water content foods, you're getting much better hydration in your cells. Just hydration alone is an incredible asset to your health. You're also having more chlorophyll, when you're a raw fooder, which is also beneficial. There are so many levels that automatically happen when you become a raw fooder. However, people don't usually recognize that, they just recognize that, "I'm raw", versus "I'm cooked."

Now, I was a whole-food, health-conscious vegan before I got into raw foods. So in the early days when I was experimenting with what worked, and so forth, when I "fell off the wagon" or I was eating too much fruit or other things and I needed to go back to something, I would go back to brown rice or quinoa, or sprouted steam legumes or baked potato or steamed vegetables. And you just can't really get into trouble with steamed vegetables. And many raw fooders will say, "I'm having steamed vegetables, I'm cooking something, I'm evil, I've fallen off the wagon, I'm a loser, I might as well just go ahead and, you know, have a burger. I'll just go to Burger King or McDonalds, because it's all cooked anyway. It's all poison, it's all crap."

Kevin: Yeah.

Jameth: And that dramatic difference is not healthy.

Kevin: It creates neurosis.

Jameth: It creates neurosis, and it creates the all-raw neurosis. When I first, I was 100% raw for three years, I'm not 100% raw right now, haven't been for quite some time, but I'm mostly, depending on the seasons. The first couple of months that I was 100% raw, I was doing a lot of athletics. So I was determined to stay raw at all costs, no matter what. So for the first month, it worked beautifully.. I trimmed down a little bit, I got a little more ripped, got some more veins, which guys really like, it's like "got ripped to shreds." I was doing a lot of athletics, a lot of distance running and weightlifting. I only had a part-time job at that point, so I could spend a lot of time on athletics. I was burning so many calories that I had to eat a huge amount of food per day. And to stay raw, I needed to make a choice because I was starting to get really, really hungry and too thin, so I started eating a lot of dried fruit because I could not eat enough fresh fruit during the day, caloric-wise, to maintain my caloric needs. And that wasn't enough, and I couldn't just eat dried fruit because it starts to feel too sugary, so I started eating nuts and seeds. And I started eating a pretty good quantity of nuts and seeds.

And what I noticed is that by doing that, my teeth started to rot out, I started to have bladder infections from the quantity of fruit, and also I started to break out. Excess oils of any nature tend to make a lot of people break out and I'm included in that group. Now, the oils that I was having in the form of the nuts and seeds were healthy oils, but for acne and breakout, my skin could care less whether it was toxic or not. Other parts of my body did care. And I started actually gaining weight, I started to get a little heavy again, with eating all these nuts and seeds.. And then I found myself saying, "I don't really feel like running or lifting today, I don't really feel like exercising," I got kind of fat and docile, because I was determined to stay raw.

Kevin: Right.

Jameth: And when I went on these really long runs, and I actually did a 33-mile run that particular summer, just preparing for a marathon and some other things, I would crave complex carbohydrates. I would salivate at the thought of having something like a baked potato or quinoa. Because I needed those complex carbohydrates to fill my glycogen back up, and I was able to do it raw, but I did crave those things, and if I had just had a little bit of a baked potato, or a little bit of quinoa, I would not have had, you know, a hundred pounds of nuts. Just a little bit, it's like throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I did, I stayed raw. To my detriment.

Kevin: Right.

Jameth: I could have stayed mostly raw, but I was in that mentality that "if it was raw, it was law," it was the best, period, and that was the main factor, even though I had been a whole food health- conscious vegan.. But I also knew that when I was eating that much fat and sugar from raw, coming off of a whole food vegan program, I thought I felt better on my 40-50% raw whole-food vegan program than I do on this version of a raw diet.