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A burger a day will kill you, basically, was the big health news this week. And since burgers are no friend of the environment, carnivores who cut back on red meat will be saving both themselves and the planet. Which begs the question (at least for me): If too many burgers can be so deadly, how, um, lively(?) can an anti-burger diet be?
The answer of sorts to that question comes from 6 diabetics who volunteered to drastically their eating habits, going on all vegan, all organic raw diet for 30 days in an effort to reverse their disease, and having their experiences turned into a newly-released documentary, Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (trailer below).
So -- Does eating raw reverse a disease that, according to the American Medical Association, "has no cure"? The answer, as I interpret the film, is yes, but....
Let's start with the yes part. The raw food diet yields rather miraculous results for the six people -- ranging from a healthy-looking 20-something grad student to a 30-something mother and receptionist to a retired chiropractor with little sensation left in his feet. We watch as all six people's blood sugar levels and blood pressures drop rapidly to normal levels, even as they stop taking insulin and prescription drugs.
The achievement's especially astounding considering the fact that the diabetics can eat all they want -- including chocolatey desserts -- so long as the food's raw. At the end of the 30 days, the participants talk about their weight loss, their feelings of health, and their improved mood and energy levels. The chiropractor tears up, saying he's been given a second chance at life.
But here comes the but part. To participate in this raw experiment, the 6 diabetics were flown in to The Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona, where junk food doesn't exist, where a variety of gourmet raw foods are prepared for them multiple times a day, where constant medical supervision and psychological encouragement is offered by the staff, where fellow diabetics also going raw have all the free time in the world to chat, commiserate, and push each other.
That sort of setting, as you know, is nothing like the real world.
In fact, even in the pristine, isolated setting of The Tree of Life, real life still sneaks in to disrupt the raw experiment. After all, we're dealing with real people here -- Real people with ingrained habits, problems, and addictions. One young dude's clearly got some alcohol and depression issues. He's unable to stay off the sauce and ends up sneaking booze into the center, messing up his stats for the experiment and ending up remorseful, repeatedly talking about how he doesn't "deserve" to be part of the experiment. Another older man successfully brings down all his stats into the normal range -- but gets so depressed that he stops getting out of bed and drops out of the program, saying his brain's rejecting the food, health be damned.
Which is to say that the true experiment really only begins when the diabetics leave the center to return to their lives at home. Because really, even if the diabetics' regular doctors at home may not have preached an all raw vegan diet, surely those docs must have conveyed to their patients that cutting back on sugary processed unhealthy food is necessary to control diabetes. And clearly, the diabetics must've found those directions difficult to follow under the pressures of real life -- which is why they decided to try the center in the first place.
And as you might have suspected, when Simply Raw catches up with the six a few months after the end of the 30 days, most seem to have fallen at least partially off the raw and/or healthy eating wagon. The film's descriptions of the diabetics' "new" lives are positive in tone but extremely vague, in the vein of "She has kept most of the weight off." There are few specific details about what sort of diet the participants were able to maintain, or how their blood pressure and sugar levels are holding up.
That's not to say that the lessons in Simply Raw aren't valuable. I'm sure that some diabetics, shown visual proof that a permanent diet change can get them off insulin and meds, will really give healthy eating a serious go. One of the six in Simply Raw got so gung ho about the raw diet that he's
