Raw Power
Natalia Rose
Home base: New York City
Claim to fame: Author of The Raw Food Detox Diet.
Claim: A careful transition to a diet high in raw foods will detoxify your body, increase your energy levels, and help you lose weight.
Argument: Cooking food destroys many of the very vitamins and enzymes that we most need for optimal health and energy. Raw foods—plant foods that have not been heated above 118° F—have all the beneficial, health-promoting components intact, giving much-needed rest to the digestive system so the body can heal.
Her regimen: Starts each day with vegetable juice or fresh fruit. Lunch is at least half raw-vegetable-based. If she cheats and eats cooked food, she does so at dinner.
Must-do recommendation: Foods should go from light to heavy in the course of the day. "We don't want anything interrupting our energy flow," Rose explains. "And if your body is busy digesting food all day, that's where all the energy will go."
What she's most interested in now: Rose's next book, The Raw Food Energy Diet, is based, she says, on the Einsteinian concept of matter as a manifestation of energy. "Our bodies, which we experience as matter, are also made of light energy. Trying to sustain these bodies on dense material food alone is ridiculous. If we want to become vibrant, virtually ageless beings, we need to feed our 'energy bodies' living light energy, which is exactly what raw foods are."
Research nuts and bolts: Rose doesn't conduct research, but points to work by Francis Marion Pottenger Jr., who studied the effects of diet on cats in the 1930s. Some cats got cooked meat and others, raw. The raw-food cats were more fertile and freer of disease. Though no studies have been conducted to show similar benefits in humans, says Rose, "You don't need a study to know you're losing weight and feeling great."
Inspiration: When Rose was in her 20s, she was dissatisfied with her body. Studying nutrition at the Natural Healing Institute of Naturopathy in San Diego, she battled depression, anxiety, exhaustion, niggling physical ailments, a belief she was overweight, and an ever-present discomfort in her own skin. She knew she needed help. Dieting made matters worse. Then she picked up a book about a raw food regimen. "This wasn't just a diet, it was a lifestyle," she says. "My energy improved and any inclinations towards depression dissolved."
Plan of the Caveman
Loren Cordain, Ph.D.
Home base: Fort Collins, Colorado
Claim: Eating as your ancestors did will keep you lean, healthy, and young.
Claim to fame: Wrote The Paleo Diet.
Argument: "We're Stone Agers living in the Space Age." Human nutritional needs are genetically determined and our genes are shaped by natural selection. People gain weight from foods introduced since the agricultural revolution. The result is heart disease, diabetes, and obesity in epidemic proportions. The solution is to return to the preagricultural diet of Paleolithic people.
His regimen: Like the South Beach Diet except with no grains, salt, or sugar. Eats only fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, nuts, and seafood. Does not eat any sugars, saturated or trans fats, salt, bread, legumes, potatoes, pasta, processed foods, dairy, or grains. Even whole grains are disallowed.
Must-do recommendation: Eat only foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors could have eaten. So, nix whatever has to be cooked: potatoes, peanuts, beans, grains, breads, pastas, processed foods. Since the dominant food source for hunter-gatherers was animals, lean meats compose 55 to 65 percent of Cordain's ideal diet. He recommends exercising 90 minutes a day, seven days a week, noting that hunter-gatherers probably did three times that. Cordain concedes that nobody living in the modern age can follow every one of these proscriptions all the time. Most of the beneficial health effects of eating a modern day Paleo diet can be achieved with about 85 or 90 percent compliance.
Research nuts and bolts: Using remains of Stone Age people from around the world, Cordain calculated the energy expenditures of our prehistoric ancestors. A thigh bone, for instance, can tell us roughly how tall and how heavy its owner was. Once he knew the weight, Cordain could calculate how much energy it took that person to move around—the same way treadmills use your weight to figure the calories you burn during a workout.
By strapping GPS systems onto male Paraguayans while they're out foraging in the jungle, Cordain and his colleagues determined that cavemen probably ran 10 miles a day carrying 25 pounds. Cavewomen worked as hard, carrying children, setting up shelter, foraging for fruits and vegetables, and curing animal skins.
Critics point out that the lives of hunter-gatherers were nasty, brutish, and short, with a life expectancy in the 20s. Why emulate that? Cordain's response is, sure, Stone Age people had it rough, but most died when they walked into tarpits, got clubbed in the head by enemy tribesmen, or were swallowed by saber-toothed tigers—not from disease. Today's hunter-gatherers live well into their 60s, free of "diseases of civilization," such as obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
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