Many have spent lifetimes wondering what caused humanity’s “fall from grace.” What has caused humanity’s disconnection from living in a natural paradise? Why is civilization out of balance with nature? These thoughts are often triggered by a study of the classical, legendary, or religious stories of a former perfect age.

Every culture seems to have a story about how human life began on Earth. Most describe a place where humans lived in harmony with the plants and animals. All the stories indicate that, while living this way, humans experienced happiness and peace.

These stories generally indicate that everything was in harmony…until something happened. Some stories tell of a great flood, others tell of humans gaining an understanding of good and evil. Still others tell of a shift in Earth’s alignment. A few even tell of some godly or spiritual powers that drastically changed the state of life on Earth.

Those such as myself, who follow a balanced, thoughtful raw-food vegan diet, believe that we have found an answer to humanity’s apparent disconnection with nature. I, along with a multifaceted collection of grassroots raw-food enthusiasts, believe that the great change in human life occurred after humans discovered fire and began cooking food.

The tremendous amount of time and energy people spend to cook food, the use of massive amounts of resources to create today’s cooked-food culture (with its billions of kitchens and restaurants), the construction of factories and shops all churning out cooked and processed foods, the packaging and wrappers involved in the entire cooked-food process, and the lack of “life energy” in cooked food are all major contributing factors in humanity’s fall from grace.

Humans are the only creatures on this planet that eat cooked food. No other creatures on this planet cook or tamper with their food in any way. All animals living in the wild eat their food raw and, almost always, fresh. Only domesticated animals eat cooked and processed foods, and these food items are served to them by humans.

Cooked and processed foods are artificial. The cooking and processing of foods has become so common that most of us do not even question it. The assumption that cooked and processed foods are natural is just that…an assumption. Most people do not know for sure because they have never tried a balanced raw-food approach. Einstein once said: “The essential is to get rid of deeply rooted prejudices, which we often repeat without examining them.”

Here is a visual experiment to consider: Feed a tribe of gorillas a diet of coffee, donuts, and other processed human foods for a few years. Let us just watch what happens. Even a child would laugh at the silliness of animals eating such concoctions. Or consider a herd of deer who, instead of eating their grass raw, decide to collect it and boil it in a giant cauldron. Picture what would happen in that situation!

What is it that constitutes the basis of human nourishment? Is it pills and supplements flowing out of the roaring jaws of factories? Is it the flesh of animals being churned out by combinations of torturous factory farms and horrific slaughterhouses? Is it the milk of cows, naturally intended for baby calves? Is it cooked and processed foods containing dyes, flavors, and preservatives?

No.

The basis of human nourishment is obvious: It is raw plant foods, which nature presents to us in abundance. Raw plant foods are simple, easy to find, fun to eat, enjoyable, contain thousands of health-giving nutrients, and conform to the biological design of the human digestive system. The sun is the source of all life and raw plant foods represent the purest form of transformed sun energy.

When one eats a bag of corn chips, the wrapper goes into a landfill. When one eats an orange, the wrapper (peel) becomes compost. When one follows a raw-plant-food lifestyle, the amount of trash produced by that individual decreases to almost nothing. Test for yourself and see. Cooked food and pollution are directly related.

Individuals who eat the typical foods found in so-called “civilized society” and then change to a raw, plant-food-based diet can discover health as they have never known it. Eating a balanced mix of raw plants restores the body on a molecular level, building strong cells, radically naturalizing the body, raising alkalinity, and grounding the person in the natural world. Of course, the body resists shocking changes and everyone should ease into the raw-food approach at an appropriate pace. Also, everyone should educate him or herself on this subject (by visiting www.rawfood.com, reading raw-food books, and attending lectures), so the most common mistakes can be avoided.

Every person is a work of art in progress. One can become progressively more beautiful, or one can follow the fate civilization has prescribed (mis-education, wage slavery, decay, illness, and an untimely death). Every action one takes determines which of these two destinies will be achieved.

What we eat helps to guide our path. The food we eat determines what level of health our body will experience. Every bite of food put into the body should add to our strength and beauty. Each meal becomes part of who we are at the deepest level.

“You are what you eat” is a natural law. It is a concept that has been known in every culture and civilization through-out history. It is a simple law of nature that should be remembered each day, and at each meal. Those who wish to heal themselves and the planet should eat the most healing foods.

For me, “healing foods” means quality, organic, homegrown, or wild foods in their raw natural state. I have found that following this principle is not only the simplest way to choose what I eat, but is simply the best way for me to bring about good health and spiritual transformation. Because of this, I have made my life’s work a study of how to help as many people as possible succeed and prosper within the raw-food lifestyle.

I encourage anyone who wishes to experience the bounties of nature to consider eating what nature provides to us: raw plant foods. I encourage people to learn which plants are most edible, to learn a new way of living, to experience the incredible health Nature will give to you by accepting the foods she provides, and to live a life in harmony with the plants and animals. By doing so, you may experience and reclaim your own little bit of paradise!

David Wolfe is the author of the Sunfood Diet Success System, and co-author of the book Nature’s First Law: The Raw Food Diet. For more information on the raw food approach, visit the websites www.rawfood.com and www.davidwolfe.com.