Raw food

I doubt any diet can CURE T1, but I'm all for raw food.
I eat raw veggies by the bucketful, but don't fancy raw meat, fish or eggs.
Hana

depends what it is you are eating, surely? You don't need to inject for raw celery. You do for raw banana. It's about the amount of carbohydrate in it.

It's a complex subject. Many raw foods contain the enzymes that the body requires in order to digest it. Cooking usually destroys these so you need to produce your own. There's nothing wrong with this until you have some sort of problem producing them. These are enzymes for digestion, nothing to do with insulin production by the way. Most common is the group of Amylases.

but your stomach acid rather rapidly destroys the structure of most enzymes, after all that is what it is meant to do. For enzyme read protein, stomachs digest proteins, hence no oral insulin delivery mechanism.

That said, there is a compelling argument to eat at least part of your diet raw as there are some macro and micro nutrients that are more easily accessed from raw food or are destroyed by cooking.

I suppose also it depends if you like raw vegetables, I certainly don't! I don't like veggies in restaurants as they are served hard!


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ElyDave said:

but your stomach acid rather rapidly destroys the structure of most enzymes, after all that is what it is meant to do. For enzyme read protein, stomachs digest proteins, hence no oral insulin delivery mechanism.

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No you've got role of enzymes completely wrong I'm afraid. They are selective catalysts, starting or stopping biological reactions. Gastric acids don't destroy enzymes they activate them and enzymes are not the same as proteins at all. Rather they break down proteins.

"Gastric acid is a digestive fluid, formed in the stomach. It has a pH of 1.5 to 3.5 and is composed of hydrochloric acid (HCl) (around 0.5%, or 5000 parts per million) as high as 0.1 M,[1] and large quantities of potassium chloride (KCl) and sodium chloride (NaCl). The acid plays a key role in digestion of proteins, by activating digestive enzymes, and making ingested proteins unravel so that digestive enzymes break down the long chains of amino acids."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_acid

Digestive enzymes are secreted by different exocrine glands including:

Salivary glands
Secretory cells in the stomach
Secretory cells in the pancreas
Secretory glands in the small intestine

Of the many stomach or gastric enzymes, Pepsinogen is the main one. It is produced by the stomach cells called "chief cells" in its inactive form pepsinogen, which is a zymogen. Pepsinogen is then activated by the stomach acid into its active form, pepsin. Pepsin breaks down the protein in the food into smaller particles, such as peptide fragments and amino acids. Protein digestion, therefore, first starts in the stomach, unlike carbohydrate and lipids, which start their digestion in the mouth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsin

All true; enzymes break down the food. And one of the things lots of food breaks down into is sugar. Then you need insulin to handle that. Insulin isn't in food, raw or otherwise, so eating your food raw might be nice/good/whatever but it's not going to give you the insulin to 'cure' yourself.
Which brings us back to TT's original comment about the crazies!

TonyTruthful said:

Hi Guys,

Has anyone tried the raw food diet?

Some crazies on the tinterweb reckon you don’t have to inject with it and it eventually cure it….

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Be careful what you read on the web Tony, I think the word 'crazies' is adapt here as without insulin we would die... :thumbdown:

My grandma always used to serve me raw vegetables as a child.. She always used to say they were better for you than cooked.. I've always eaten raw vegetables can't get enough of them.. Although I wasn't diabetic as a child... I did used to hate them when I was younger but I learned to love them as I grew up and now that I am type 1 my Dietician said I can eat as many raw veggies as I like as long as I don't go for the carby ones... Plus raw veggies make a good snack for me during the day

Kerry xxx


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Snodger said:

All true; enzymes break down the food. And one of the things lots of food breaks down into is sugar. Then you need insulin to handle that.

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Insulin is sometimes wrongly referred to as an enzyme but it doesn't catalyse any reaction, so it's not an enzyme. It's a polypeptide hormone. Hormones which exist in plants are there to facilitate plant health. They exist only at very low quantities. They are not a pancreas substitute.

Sorry, brain fart, I was thinking hormones, not enzymes. Very embarrasing really as I'm a chemical and bioprocess engineer by degree, although that was nearly 20 years ago.

Yes, quite corret to think of enzymes as biological catalysts, but also not entirely true that all of them will be equally at home in the pH 1.5-3.5 range as a lot will be easily denatured by that acidity, and some are denatured in pretty mild chemical and physical ranges like T>45C for example. Aren't they still essentially specialist proteins though? I may be tempted to dig out one of my old textbooks here

which veg? do you mean like lettuce celery and salad types or actual cabbage sprouts etc?


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ElyDave said:

Yes, quite corret to think of enzymes as biological catalysts, but also not entirely true that all of them will be equally at home in the pH 1.5-3.5 range as a lot will be easily denatured by that acidity, and some are denatured in pretty mild chemical and physical ranges like T>45C for example. Aren't they still essentially specialist proteins though?

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Yes they are proteins, but specialist one as you write. They don't unravel themselves like they unravel ingested proteins. My understanding is that stomache enzymes denature when they pass through to the small intestine. They're happy in their own environment, but not in the next one in the process.

So for example, Pepsin which is a gastric enzyme acts within the stomach so its optimum pH is around 2, an acid pH. When the enzyme passes to the duodenum, it meets a higher pH and its enzyme activity ends.

Andy12345 said:

which veg? do you mean like lettuce celery and salad types or actual cabbage sprouts etc?


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I'm not sure if this is a question for me but the veg my grandma served up raw was cauliflower, carrots, cabbage and sweet corn, she did put broccoli and peas in boiling water for 2 mins then served them up, which she said gave them a better taste, this is haw I always eat my veggies..

I find those Birdseye steam veggie bags amazing for a snack and to go with dinner too as they're quick to cook and the veg is crunchy and that's how I like them.. Also it fills me up

Kerry xx


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hi yes thankyou, im kinda into veg but never tried it raw so I wondered which were good to eat carrots and sweetcorn are too carby for me ill try some cauli tx

Andy12345 said:

hi yes thankyou, im kinda into veg but never tried it raw so I wondered which were good to eat carrots and sweetcorn are too carby for me ill try some cauli tx

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No problems I love raw cauliflower it tastes better than cooked and you loose all the nutrients from boiling vegetables so for me it's raw or steamed for 2 mins in those Birdseye steam bags in the microwave

Kerry xx


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The raw food certainly has its benefits. There are some people who have made claims about it curing or reversing type 1 diabetes.

Most of us would argue that that is hyperbole as a raw food diet generally won't reverse the condition. What it may do is to help people with type 1 to better manage their diabetes and to allow them to take substantially less insulin.

Dr Cousens is one of the people who advocates a raw food diet and everything I've read shows that he understands that, with type 1 diabetes, the effect of the raw food diet is to help better control diabetes and reduce insulin doses. I can see how some may interpret his words differently which is fair enough.

There are some possible benefits of reducing insulin intake which include helping to reduce the risk of heart problems later in life and making weight management more achievable.

A raw food diet probably has it's best effect amongst the people with type 1 diabetes that are on the so called Western diet of high fat and high carbohydrate diets based on processed foods.

Some advantages of having raw vegetables over cooked vegetables are:

1. They require more effort to break down by the body therefore more calories are burned by digestion
2. In most cases, raw vegetables have a higher vitamin content -which helps the body feel satisfied
3. They may also help to better slow down or even block the absorption of some carbohydrate -I'd struggle to get a source for this but I know vegetables in general can help slow down the absorption of carbs and I'd expect raw vegetables to be even better at this

One of the obvious reasons a raw food diet helps to reduce insulin intake is that it means no eating of starchy carbs like rice, pasta, bread etc. Therefore daily carbohydrate consumption usually is substantially reduced and therefore insulin requirements decrease.

There are a number of safety issues that need to be considered with a raw food diet including making sure food is well washed and agrees with food safety advice and making sure you get all the vitamins and minerals.