The food we eat is crucial to the quality of our day-to-day lives. Bidii speaks with Raw Food Consultant Derin Bepo about eating raw, the affects on the body and how it can help us regain balance and control of our health.
How do you find people’s approach to the “raw food” lifestyle?
A lot of people come to me with illnesses and one of the first things I do, is to increase the amount of raw food they are eating. I think I have become a bit more mature. Before, I was a bit “raw-food zealous”, chanting “go eat raw food, go eat raw food!”
Now I get people eating raw food without even using the phrase “raw food”. So, I’ll explain; to reset your body over the next 30days, you need to eat a bowl or large portion of fruit for breakfast, at least a litre of vegetable juice a day, then a large portion of salad. Even if there is something cooked in the salad, have it be only 20%. They usually say, “oh, I can do that!”, but what they do not realise is that I have just inducted them into raw food eating. If they can do that, their whole health framework changes because they are getting huge volumes of plant molecules in a raw form now, and it is getting into the body. Some people after 30days start to feel different. They, all of a sudden, start to get a huge amount of raw unprocessed plant molecules in their natural and hopefully organic form into their body and this has an exponential and radical change in how the body works, and begins to function at a different level. The body begins to wake up and does what it needs to do; namely, the repair and reversal of diseased states. So it is really that simple. People think it is some kind of regime. And when I finish the 30days, it can go back to business as usual, and there are several scenarios after this. They often have a loss of taste for certain things like common foods. They might ‘treat’ themselves to certain processed food after the 30days and they become violently sick and feel ill. Then they get it, and the body is saying ‘hey, we don’t want that. We never wanted it! Now we have gone really clean and clear, and you are dumping this back into the system?’. So, the body will sometimes react violently and feel ill; and I welcome that! That physical reaction is the body talking more eloquently, loudly and more persuasively than I ever can.
So, the key thing is, the body understands and functions optimally with plant molecules, those plant molecules in their pure form which are unheated.
Is the cooking process effectively killing the food we eat?
Everybody can understand that. That is basic, but in fact it is 1000 times worse than that! The specific plant molecules and nutrients destroyed by heating is not well understood and people say, “well, I am OK with that!”. Let’s make an example with vitamin C. This is the first plant molecule to be destroyed by heat. It is the most labile and delicate of the molecules in the plant kingdom.
There is Vitamin C in everything. People think vitamin C is only in oranges, but it is in potatoes and cabbages too. It is widely dispersed throughout the plant kingdom, but people do not eat enough fruit and what they are eating are harvested way before they are ripe. So the vitamin C levels are low anyway, and the compensation plan is that vitamin C is widely distributed throughout nature. Like sweet peppers are high in vitamin C. There is a high amount of vitamin C in surprising number of plants, but the heat process destroys all that to an extent that everyone is now drastically low on vitamin C. Moving onto the immune system, the number one driver is vitamin C. The immune system is such that it is the number one beneficiary from the intake of vitamin C. This is then linked to cancer rates. Now when we look at someone with cancer, we find in every case there is no vitamin C in their body, or it is at very low levels. Thus, due to cooked food, diet and lifestyle, no one is getting enough natural sources of vitamin C. Everyone’s immune system is depleted from lack of vitamin C, amongst other things.
Plant based molecules are the foundation of good health. Without plant-based molecules, the body will not work. The body will be in a constant state of degeneration.
What effect does eating cooked food have on us?
Another way of looking at it is that it is not just cooking that takes out the vitamins and other molecular structures within plants. Here’s another thing to note; all plants have melanin! [By the way, this is very important.] Like green vegetables and red cabbage, purple aubergines and grapes, blueberries, these are melanin. They are called plant melanin. These melanin are very essential for life and health; hence, all melanated people have need for melanin from fruits and vegetables to furnish and empower the human melanin systems, which consists of 12 in the body. And the most sophisticated is in the brain, called the Substantia Negra, which is a major part of the brain functioning for consciousness, IQ and everything. What’s interesting is, have you noticed what happens (especially to the colours) when people cook something like cabbage? The colours are gone, all bleached out by the heat process. What has happened is it has destroyed the biochemical bonds in the food, which hold the melanin components in the plant together. Now, what’s interesting is it’s not just that we loss things when we cook something. We actually create something. When you think back to school when you were doing chemistry to create new compounds, you must have a Bunsen burner; therefore, when people are heating things up, they are basically doing chemistry. They are creating compounds, the only thing is, these compounds are highly toxic.
There are many types of highly toxic compounds especially when you heat carbohydrates at high temperature. They produce specific biochemical toxins. Anything barbequed, gets these brown molecules. We call it browning, and people like that ‘browning’. But when you heat food at a high temperature, there are many destructive compounds. Those chemical compounds create a challenge for the immune system. The immune system starts to react against compounds formed from heating food, and that’s one of the reasons we have the modern diseases such as “auto-immune”. These are linked to the compounds in food which are triggering abnormal reactions from cooked food. Multiple Sclerosis (MS) for instance: It is really important to eat raw food if you have MS, because there is a severe auto-immune reaction where the immune system is actually destroying the fine points of the nervous system.
All your immune system is on alert when you eat, as soon as you eat even the tiniest molecule of cooked food. In medical science it’s called “white tide”. White Tide is what happens when you eat something cooked and it is a known fact that your immune system will go into overdrive, and you start kicking out a whole load of white blood cells. This happens as soon as you eat anything cooked, you make a huge amount of white blood cells. The body is over stressed, over loaded. Which is not sustainable, and this is why people’s immune system starts to break down; and the system goes into level of overdrive which is auto-immune. The immune system is so disordered and disorganised it begins to attack you and specific cells. This is all linked to cooked food. Heated carbohydrates anything like chips, toast. Any heated carb above a certain temperature is highly carcinogenic. People do not realise this. The damage is happening slowly, because you did not see the guy with the smoking gun the link is not understood. What really happens is; when you eat something your body starts to repair the damage from that food. So it takes years and years of eating certain food, and the body is going through a state of degeneration.
A protein contains toxins from heating, cooked carbohydrates produce toxins that are not only toxic but are highly addictive. So all wheat based products are opiate, they create opiate compounds and are highly addictive. The opiate compounds in carbohydrates only manifest when cooked. So most people on wheat, bread, pasta do not realise they are having a drug experience. They are addicted to some of these compounds made when the food is cooked. So we are seeing a lot of things now, we have a lot of GM foods we are seeing huge amounts of things like anxiety, mood disorders. So now a lot of Black people are not eating yam. I promote a raw food diet but if you insist on eating cooked food here are the rules of engagement only eat 20% of your food cooked. When you go above 20% you are in trouble. Now within that 20% there are a few foods you can eat if they are steamed, which will be too much trouble on the body. One of those foods is yam. Yam is primarily a medicine, so steamed (can be boiled but better steamed) yam has certain health implications because of the compounds when you eat the yam. We have a generation of people that do not eat yam anymore and defaulted to pasta. The trouble with that is we are seeing young people getting sick, serious weight gain and opioid which is drug addiction. Understand, it is really important all wheat-based products are drugs. They act as drugs in the brain. They produce opioids which is extremely addictive, that’s one side of it. The other side of it wheat-based products are extremely high in gluten compounds. There are several types of gluten. It will totally destroy the intestines and they can’t absorb nutrients anymore. So people are running round low on nutrients and their cells are starving, leads to more craving, eat more of the same thing and their health literally goes out.
To repair, start juicing. There are certain compounds in the humble broccoli, the humble cauliflower, beetroot, which will actually remove man made toxins out the body and escort them off the premises, which is what we call detox. Plant compounds can remove heavy metal toxins, chemical toxins out of the body. But then again, you have to have your liver working and your intestines working to be able to do that. Most people’s liver is not working. Most people’s intestines are not working and quite blocked up and liver cleansing and bowel cleansing is where you start to repair the organs. Get them working, so they can start to escort the chemical toxins out of the premises. Get the detox pathways open up again. Get the kidney working. Get the skin working. Get the lungs working, to move things out the body.
So these pathways do work based on many people’s diet. People have a diet of Krispy Crème, crackers, pasta. These things clog the body up. So you want to have a diet of foods that unclog the body…that is fruits. Fruits like lemons, lime, papaya, pineapple will unclog the body, and keep it unclogged. This is the power and potency of raw foods, foods in an uncooked state.
What is the body’s response to raw food? Is there a White tide to that too?
You don’t get it at all. You see, with white tide, what we can learn from that is the body sees the cooked food as an enemy. The body only releases huge amount of white blood cells when it is under attack; the white blood cells are soldiers. So you want to see high white tide, microwave (or I call it ‘micrograve’), micrograve something. Eat some micrograved food that is when you get the highest amount of white tide reaction. Because that will be a whole other level of destruction on the food when you micrograved it. There is now radiation compounds embedded in that food into the body. It drives the immune system just absolutely berserk. You don’t see that with raw food. Your immune system is stable on raw food. Your immune system works on raw food. Your immune system will not be doing abnormal things. The compounds in raw food’s green compounds, purple compounds they are just wonderful and the immune system just loves them. So if you don’t have enough of them on a daily basis you are in trouble. It is easy to work out and it is interesting, cancer research people worked it out. That is why they came up with ‘5 a day’. Which is actually 9 a day, what they said years ago “if you eat 9 (it was actually 9 but they dumbed it down to 5) portions of fruits and veg a day, you minimise your cancer risk”. Having such knowledge, they worked out what “in fact” they were saying was that cancer is the absence of plant molecules. So if you increase your plant molecules, basically you minimise cancer. So if they said 9 a day will minimise cancer what would 15 a day do? What would 20 a day do? What would only plant molecules do? It’s very interesting, we have access to raw foods, organic foods. We have access to everything we need. We just have to really understand that we need it, and just go for it. We are reaching a time when people are to realise this increasingly. Since lockdown I have seen there’s been a change in consciousness massively, and people begin to wake up and realise we need to take care of our health.
Derin Pepo
Bidii Health supplement – Issue 2
Sept 2021