Bozeman Raw Food Diet

The Bozeman raw food diet comes from a raw foods group based out of the Community Food Co-op in Bozeman, Montana. Raw food is also referred to as living foods. By definition, raw foods are uncooked or heated to no hotter than 116 degrees F. This diet also recommends eating organic and local foods when possible to reduce the amount of chemicals released into the environment.

Cooked Food Permitted

You are allowed to eat cooked food on a raw food diet, but only 25 percent or less of all the food you eat. The theory behind reducing cooked food to 25 percent or less begins with the notion that digesting cooked foods releases toxins in your body. Supposedly, the human body can only eliminate the amount of these toxins when 25 percent or less of the food you eat is cooked, according to RawFoodLife.com.

Get Started

To get started on your raw food diet, think about your food consumption as four meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Each day, eat three of your meals as raw food and one of them as cooked foods. If making this kind of change seems too overwhelming at first, try changing one meal at a time to raw foods over the course of one or several months.

Enzymes

Enzymes are complex proteins essential for all body functions. They are found in every cell in your body. They cause a chemical change without changing themselves. Temperatures higher than 118 degrees are believed to destroy the enzymes and some nutrients in food and cause chemical changes in the food. This is why a raw foodist eats a minimal amount of cooked foods.

Alkaline Foods

Raw foodists place emphasis on the benefits of alkaline-forming foods in contrast to acid-forming foods. A raw food diet is full of alkaline-forming foods, which absorb more hydrogen in your body than acid-forming foods absorb. Raw foodists believe that alkaline foods promote a healthy body, while acid-forming foods cause disease.

Meat

A typical raw foodist is vegan. This means he is vegetarian and also does not eat egg products, milk products and insect products like honey. A different type of raw foodist that follows the Natural Hygiene Movement eats raw and organic animal products such as sashimi, carpaccio, eggs and dairy, notes RawFoodLife.com.