Raw & Vegan

A friend of mine who is dipping her toes into the raw food world, and who is on a pension, just asked me if this $49.95 dehydrator was suitable for raw and good value. 

When you’re looking to dehydrate foods for a raw food lifestyle, you must ensure the enzymes stay intact and the temperature is below 120 degrees Fahrenheit / 40 degrees Celsius.  This is noted in nearly all books on raw food.

It was was this knowledge that the description for the Hottop KN-128E Food Dehydrator on DealsDirect.com.au stood out to me as contradictory.  

Firstly, there is what appears to be the manufacturers description, which says “Temperature is fixed at approximately 80 degrees C, 176 degrees F.”

Scanning further down the page, I notice a very raw foodie sounding statement: “When a raw food is heated to an internal temperature of120F or higher, much of it’s nutritional value is lost, especially enzymes.”

“Okay….” I thought, “Something dodgy’s going on here!”

All it took was a simple google search for this line to discover it has been ripped directly off the Excalibur website! 

Excalibur have a website explaining Living Raw Food Dehydration, which states:

Dehydrating is the best way to preserve the essence of a raw apple, as well as other fruits and vegetables.
Dehydrating doesn’t subject foods to high temperatures associated with traditional canning methods. For safety reasons, low-acid foods are heated to temperatures of 240F degrees in a pressure canner. High-acid produce reaches a temperature of 212F in a water-bath canner. When a raw food is heated to an internal temperature of 120F or higher, much of it’s nutritional value is lost, especially enzymes. Canning also leaches out water soluble vitamins and minerals, which further depletes the healthful qualities of raw-living foods. 

While the Deals Direct dehydrator description states:

Dehydrating is the best way to preserve the essence of a raw apple, as well as other fruits and vegetables. Dehydrating doesn’t subject foods to high temperatures associated with traditional canning methods. For safety reasons, low-acid foods are heated to temperatures of 240ºF degrees in a pressure canner. High-acid produce reaches a temperature of 212ºF in a water-bath canner. When a raw food is heated to an internal temperature of 120ºF or higher, much of it’s nutritional value is lost, especially enzymes. Canning also leaches out water soluble vitamins and minerals, which further depletes the healthful qualities of raw-living foods.

This is clearly a case of cutting and pasting, giving Australian consumers contradictory and misleading information about a product!

So, yes this dehydrator is a good deal - if you want to cook the life out of your food.  It could even be suitable for someone who would modify it in some way such as raising each tray so it doesn’t get so hot - but I haven’t done this so don’t take my word on it. If you want to be truly raw, stick to the better known brands such as Ezidri or Excalibur.

However, given the blatant ripoff from the Excalibur website and disregard for authentic and accurate information, I personally would not support Deals Direct!  

If I could contact them without having to create an account, I would do so.  So I just hope this post reaches as many raw foodies as possible, to let them know that if the deal is too good to be true, it probably isn’t!

~Kate

Thank you to everyone who left a comment for my new year’s Raw Book Giveaway (all 6 of you!!). Using Random.org’s number generators, a winner has been chosen…

Congratulations Rachan!

Rachan’s wrote:

Creativity and new frontiers is my goal, just like with what you’re doing now! Hope it goes well for you! Personally, I’ll start getting into painting and writing and maybe some sort of vocal expression, but generally I’ll try to be conscious of gaining some perspective from outside the norm with regards to everything…. Life doesn’t need to be cooked, does it?

Thanks again to everyone for entering!   Have a great Saturday!

~Kate

photo by Clearly Ambiguous

My focus for 2009 is going to be Transformation, across all areas of my life: career, mind-body, family and home.  This focus primarily came about during the Embracing Life! retreat I attended in October. With my mind clearing through the juice fast, I finally realised something I had always known – there’s bigger and more important things that I must do in this lifetime! And rather than be part of the ‘machine’, I want to be my own entity!

My passion is spreading knowledge though words and actions.

A few months ago I sat down and pondered the question – what is my purpose in life? After listing my skills, habits, morals and beliefs, positive and negative aspects of my personality, the one thing that stood out was my core belief in spreading knowledge through words and actions.

This has manifested in my current career as an educational technologist, where I saw the internet as an amazing resource that could be used to share knowledge and skills, and reach people who may have not been able to access such resources previously.
As my career has progressed, the focus has turned on maintaining systems and troubleshooting technical problems rather than helping people and exploring the possibilities of the medium. I have tried to find a balance between the two, but my passion and drive in this area had slowed down as politics, problems and people have made me too cynical to progress.

It has been approximately 7 years that I have been following this particular path, which interesting coincides with the concept that our cells rejuvenate every 7 years, as does our emotional and physical selves. A very interesting article about this cycle from a Steiner perspective is Every cell in your body is changed over a seven-year period. Does your personality change too?

Within a month of turning 28, I started following a raw food lifestyle, 100% for the first six months and high raw since. The change broke through the barrier I had built up using junk vegetarian foods and weight gain, and I began to see the world less cynically. The article noted above says of the 28-35 year old cycle “that if there is an inspirational influence at work in the life, it would possibly reach its peak during these years” and we begin to determine “what is us”.

If only we were given at manual when we were born, which says – “everything’s a phase”!

photo by =Mr+G=

I am turning 30 this year, and I want this year to be big. My twenties feel lost, I have been overweight and overall unhappy the entire decade - but it has been a decade of lessons. Now is the time to take those lessons and do something with them, allowing my true and authentic self to blossom.

2009 will be a year of transformation with the changes that have been building up for the last few years coming to fruition. I can see the possibilities, envision the future, and I now believe it is achievable.

Over the next few weeks I am going to set myself some challenges, each one a step to achieving my overall goal of transformation.  You’re invited to take part in these challenges also - more information is coming this week.

I’m excited - 2009 is going to be a great year!

~Kate

This is a beautiful short film about making people smile. Watch below, or click through to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/v/Cbk980jV7Ao

via Angela Stokes’ blog - Thanks Angela!

Happy New Year everyone, 2009 is going to be the best! I have so many plans for what I want to achieve in this new year that it warrants it’s own post, but first I would like to introduce you to my new website!

I have simplified things greatly, changed the color scheme to bright and positive colours that represent my renewed outlook on life, and brought a focus on my new projects.

Living Raw in Perth ‘zine is a self-published 20-page magazine that I will have finished mid-January.  It contains fantastic information regarding shopping in Perth, including in-depth reviews of stores that I have actually visited (and in some cases frequent!) as well as a location guide.  I’m also writing articles on related subjects such as plus-sized eco-clothing - which is so darn hard to find! Living Raw in Perth will be available in print from a range of outlets, and available for purchase online in print and/or electronic format.   If you are in regional WA, I’d love to know about any organic shops or farmers markets to put into the locality guide.  There will also be a section on travelling raw, and Melbourne will be my first subject — so if you know of places to get great raw food or produce in Melbourne, please let me know so I can visit when I’m there in February!

Workshops and Classes is something I am particularly excited about!  Thanks so much to everyone who came to my TAFE class last November, your feedback was invaluable and has given me the kickstart I needed to offer more to the raw food community!  In 2009 I will be offering classes through TAFE, private classes in your own home, and public classes in any venue that’s foodsafe and has a kitchen — so a call out to the country / south-west folks: if you want a raw food workshop or demo in your town, please get in contact!  If you’re near Bunbury or Mandurah please let me know as these are great places to start!  The coolest option is the Girls Night In, which is for girls only, to enjoy decadent raw desserts and chat about life, love, weight and other girly issues!

Resource Library contains books, magazines, and websites that are my favourites and are recommended.  There’s a lot of aussie content here, and I have also put up my extensive library of books (I’ll be updating it regularly as I add more books to the library, but right now there’s only 3 books listed…)

There’s still a few things to tweak and finish writing, but Raw & Vegan is an evolving expression of myself - I’m so glad you’re on this journey with me!  And to say thanks to all the fellow raw foodies online, I want one special person to begin the year with RAW ENERGY!   Yes, it’s the first……….

RAW & VEGAN BOOK GIVEAWAY

Up for grabs is a copy of Leslie Kenton’s

THE RAW ENERGY BIBLE

The Raw Energy Bible is a compilation of the bestselling titles Raw Energy Food Combining Diet, Raw Energy Recipes and Juice High.

This is a brand new book that isn’t 100% raw but contains brilliant raw food recipes and advice.  I bought this for myself but then realised I already had a copy of the New Raw Energy and decided to share rather than horde such similar books!

Sweet! How do I enter?

To enter, leave a text or video comment below in answer to the question:

What are your goals for 2009, and what is your plan to achieve them?

I will assign a number to each comment, and will put them into a random number generator to draw the winner. I will contact the winner by email so please make sure you leave and email address!

Closing: Sunday 11th January at 12 noon Australian WDST

Looking forward to reading your responses, which will no doubt be inspiring!

~Kate