Like this reader:

“Hi! My health-conscious friend suggested I join your email list because you write compelling emails about raw and plant-based eating. I am just starting out with more whole raw foods and want to learn how to eat and live like you do. What tips can you give someone who is just starting out and wants to learn how to eat this way? Thank you so much!”

Here are some resources I have used, and still use, myself:

* Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s research on whole food nutrition -

Which I can say, without exaggeration, saved my health when I started building my diet around whole foods instead of processed junk. When I committed to greens, vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes as the foundation of my meals, everything changed. i.e. my meals either supported my health or I was back to the same fatigue and cravings most people accept as normal. I would NOT have been able to pull that off without his work as my constant companion.

* Dr. Neal Barnard’s clinical nutrition research -

Specifically, about how food choices affect the body and how diets centered on whole foods can improve metabolic health and help people regain control over their health.

* Dr. Dean Ornish’s lifestyle medicine research -

Ornish spent decades studying how lifestyle changes, including diets centered on whole foods, affect chronic disease. His clinical programs showed that nutrition and lifestyle changes can dramatically improve overall health.

* Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s heart disease research -

Esselstyn was a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who studied how diets centered on whole foods affect cardiovascular disease. His work demonstrated that dietary change can halt and even reverse coronary artery disease in many patients.

Anyway, those are a few authorities I learned from early on.

And guess what?

All of the above, plus many others I have not mentioned, are part of the foundation that shaped the way I now approach raw and whole food eating every day.

To many (it would have to me too, if I didn’t experience it myself) people that sounds too good to be true.

But it’s real as a fresh apple and you either believe it or you don’t.

I know it’s real, because I not only studied in depth many of the teachings from these doctors, but I applied many of the principles myself, and to this day, 17+ years later, I’m STILL using a lot of the information from their work to have an advantage over the confusion most people have about food and health.

The benefit is not just adding plants, but replacing calorie-dense, nutrient-poor processed foods - meat or no meat (raw food diets also include sea vegetables and cold-water fish).

Tips from someone who has lived this way for years and raised both my children eating this way.

If this is something you want to try, start here:

​Raw Food Secrets​

Irina Valeva