Essential Fat

The best fats are seeds and nuts. It’s essential we eat seed milk or yogurt 3-5 times a week. Symptoms of fatty acid deficiency are dry skin, brittle nails and hair, and stressed-out nerves (over-reacting to small things).

Please don't eat cooked fats like roasted nuts. Focus on fresh seeds, and leave the salted nuts for parties. 

Swallowing flax oil is not the answer. See why to Eat Whole Nuts and Seeds, Not Oils under the Ann Wigmore chart, here in Eating Raw.

They are LNA or Omega-3 (best source is flax seeds) and LA or Omega-6, found in sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

Nuts have Mono-unsaturated Fats that help to build our cell walls. The poly's and the mono's link arm-in-arm to form a strong membrane round every cell, a few poly's to every one mono. That's why we need more seeds than nuts.

The mono-unsaturated fats are – avocado, olive, and most nuts like almond, brazil, cashew (not a raw fat), filbert or hazelnut, macadamia, pecan, pistachio.

Walnut is more poly-unsaturated, but is often infected with liver-fluke says Hulda Clarke in A Cure For All Diseases, the craziest title I ever read for a book that leaves out living foods!

Children need EFA's daily. In an Oxford University study they gave elementary school children capsules of Omega-3 oil each day – they used fish oil, but flax seeds work better. Within 90 days, their reading, memory and concentration improved by as much as 2 years! Omega-3 fats make it easier for signals to jump the gap between brain cells.

In the raw food world we've known for eons that SEED food, not sea food, is the best brain food. We're experiencing it first-hand. You will too. Make seed and nut milks a regular part of your child's diet.

Occasionally you can use a coffee grinder to grind unsoaked seeds, then blend. But soaking is best.

I don't believe in long soaking times. Precious minerals leach out into the soak water. I soak just long enough for the seed or nut to soften.

Soaking transforms the beta-starch in seeds (hard-to-digest) into alpha-starch (easily digested). Read about how we digest starch here in Eating Raw Carbohydrates.

Soaking also eliminates the anti-digestive enzyme normally found in nuts. Many rawfood books claim that soaking for eight hours "activates the enzymes" but I don't buy into this.

Out of all the nuts and seeds, only sunflower and sesame will grow little roots if you sprout them (after soaking). So only they have living enzymes to activate.

To increase enzymes, simply make a yogurt or cream out of your seed or nut.

I may alternate like this – flax and sesame on Monday, flax and sunflower on Wednesday, flax and pumpkin on Friday. In-between days I'll add avocado to my Green Smoothie, Energy Soup, or salad.

Of course it's not so rigid, it's more of a flow. I know what fat I ate last time, so I'll eat a different one today.

Soak almonds for 3-4 hours, pour off soak water,
Blend with a little fresh water into a smooth cream.
Don't use the soak water, it has low-level toxins from the almond skins.
Pour the cream into a bowl and place in a warm place for a few hours to ferment.

Almond soak water is the only one I throw out. For all the other nuts and seeds, I blend them in their soak water.

It ferments quicker when you use Rejuvelac as the blending base, or add living viable acidophilus. I find Solgar's "Multi-billion Dophilus with FOS" works well for cream and yogurt.

Cashews ferment the best, and make yogurt taste creamier.
1/4 cup cashews (optional),
1/4 cup dates (fresh or dried),
3/4 cup of mixed seeds,
Soak together for 2-3 hours, blend in soak water, and ferment.

Amazingly, blended cashews will ferment in the refrigerator in a closed jar! I like to keep cashew cream in my refrigerator – blend 1 C cashews, 1/3 C dates (raw unpitted), 1 C pure water (use soak water from dates) and 1/2 tsp vanilla essence (optional).

Cashew cream is good with blended or whole fresh fruit. If it sits in my refrigerator for a while, that's fine, because it ferments into a delicious yogurt.

Cut up 2-3 small dates into blender, cover with water and soak while you prepare seeds – if they're hard dry dates then you need to soak them earlier,
Grind in coffee-grinder 2 Tbsp flax seeds, and one each of 2-3 other seeds, so 4-5 Tbsp of seed total – I use 2 flax, 2 sunflower and alternate one pumpkin or one hemp or one chia because flax and sunflower are cheap, I don't use sesame for yogurt because I make raw sesame tahini butter,
Blend the dates in their soak water, then
Pour ground seeds on top of blended dates, and cover with a little more water,
Blend into a smooth cream,
Pour into jar, cover with nylon mosquito netting (from hardware store) held in place with elastic band,
Leave overnight about 16-24 hrs depending on weather – goes quicker when it's warmer,
It ferments into lovely fluffy yogurt, all bubbly and sweety-tart.

This is the healthiest way to eat nuts and seeds. Yogurt is rich in living enzymes, busy breaking the fat chains down into simple fatty acids. It gives you more energy, because the food is pre-digested.

Grind any quantity – e.g. one cup – of raw sesame seeds in coffee-grinder,
Pour ground seeds into a bowl and add raw sesame oil while mixing with fork,
Stop the oil when you have smooth buttery texture, you want to use as little oil as possible to make the butter spreadable with a knife,
One way I like to eat this is to slice a banana down the middle, like a banana split, then spread tahini thick between the two slices, it quickly and effortlessly satisfies my hunger – without any effort because the tahini's in the refrigerator.

I make almond butter the same way, except I use raw almond oil and a little raw honey to sweeten it.

Nut butters are a heavy concentrated fat. Ann Wigmore advised that cancer patients should not eat them on raw sprouted-grain crackers, which are a concentrated starch. In fact I'd advise anyone with cancer to stick to seed yogurts and nut milks. leave out the butter for now.

Soak one type of seed or nut, e.g. 1/4 to 1/2 cup of pumpkin or sunflower for one hour, sesame or almond for three hours. Fill the cup with water, it should cover the seeds or nuts with a couple of inches to spare.

I prefer shorter soaking times, but it's okay to soak overnight or while you're at work all day. Use the soak water with its minerals.

Soak with it, 1 to 2 Tablespoons of Flax seed. 

Blend the seeds in their soak water with one tablespoon soya lecithin granules. The lecithin helps to emulsify the fats. Later when you're clean inside and digest fat easily, you can drop the lecithin, it's a processed food.

Be sure to use only a little water at first, then add more. If you start with too much water in the blend, then the smaller seeds like flax will stay whole. You want them ground into a smooth mush.

Once you have a smooth blend, add more water and a banana or any other fresh fruit for sweetener.

For Chocolate Mint milk, add into blender peppermint essence, organic cocoa powder and brown rice syrup to taste (or dates instead of syrup); leave out the fresh fruit.

For Pina Colada, add to blender dried pineapple and coconut flakes with maple syrup.

For heavenly sweet seed milk recipes, see Candia Lea Cole's book, Not Milk–Nut Milks! I lived on these recipes for about a year, then their mixture of dried fruit and nuts began to give me a tummy ache.

kills any microbes on the seeds and dates, like mold, and

helps our body to digest and absorb the calcium in seeds.

Apple cider vinegar increases the flow of hydrochloric acid in our stomach. The acid ionizes the calcium, which makes it easier for our intestines to absorb it so long as Vitamin D is present. The malates from apples also combine with calcium into calcium malate which is very soluble.

Dr Benedict Lust in his book on Apple Cider Vinegar writes that it: "regulates calcium metabolism." Little vague, but you get the picture.

A few hours later I'll blend my soaking seeds with some greens and fruit, such as celery and broccoli with banana and pear, or spinach with apple and pear. I use the soak water of course.

Once you experience the power of blended greens, you tend to add GREEN to everything, even to your seed milks!

Do you know how to grow in self-worth, how to love yourself? By eating RAW foods! It’s amazing! Your brain focuses, your body fills up with energy, you discover you’re realizing every dream, one by one over the years.

When you do what you love, you love yourself. It’s natural. Your stress goes down. You feel fulfilled and happy. Talk about self-worth, you begin to feel on top of the world!

Raw foods help you to discover what God/dess already knows about you. You’re here for a unique reason.

Your worth is not simply that you were born. It’s far more than that. You are created for a destiny. Raw foods will carry you to your unique destiny, a role in creation that only you can play.

When we don’t play it, there’s a little hole there. A hole in our life, and a hole in the tapestry of creation. That’s why there’s so many wars on our peaceful earth. We’re at war within ourselves.

But raw foods WILL take you to a LIFESTYLE where it’s easy to sit still every day for an hour or more, and go within.

When your life grows free of stress and pain, you find the time to go inside, and discover YOU.

Why wait another day to try a rawfood recipe? When so much is in store for you?

It’s a simple switch. Stop buying cow milk at the supermarket. Start buying nuts and seeds at the health food store. Cow milk is for calves, not for adult humans.

Seed milks taste divine!

They will transform your life.