Raw food means healthy food for Ashland family

Victoria Boutenko's family was a mess. Victoria had arrhythmia and edema and was obese and depressed. Her husband Igor had rheumatoid arthritis and hyperthyroid problems. Her son Sergei was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and was supposed to go on insulin and her daughter Valya had asthma.

But their ill-health was not due to a diet of burgers and ice cream.

"We were eating a standard diet, according to the (nutritional) pyramid that existed at the time," she said. "We actually considered we were eating better than most others."

Victoria's arrhythmia was the fulcrum for the change. Her doctor told her there was nothing more that could be done for her condition, a condition that had claimed her father.

"I believe in my heart it's not right to die at 38," she said. "First I cried all night and it didn't help. I prayed but didn't hear anything. So, I went out on the street and asked people who looked healthy what they did."

After two months of such on-the-ground research Victoria met a woman in her sixties who told her about raw food, though it was another four months before she made transition to raw foods.

"I had no willpower," Victoria admitted, "so we needed to do it as a family."

On Jan. 21, 1994 they went raw.

Within just a few days they felt much better and three and a half months after that, they ran a 10K race together. Their illnesses cleared up. After that, Victoria was so sure of their health that she cancelled their insurance.

"Why should I pay when I could just buy organic mangoes?" she asked.

They became converts, so much so she said that they lost friends from their proselytizing. So, to reach more people, but retain their remaining friends, Victoria began writing and self-publishing books, including "12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food" and their original and best seller (and winner of an award from the Independent Publishers Association), "Green for Life."

But that was not the end of things. After seven years of excellent health, Victoria said the whole family began to decline, not to the pre-raw level, but substantially nonetheless. They felt their energy drop, began to lose hair and had gum problems. The crisis she said lasted a year. The problem was, although they were vegetarians and ate only raw food, they did not particularly like greens! Humans, according to Victoria, have inadequate hydrochloric acid in their stomach to easily break down the cellulose in plants. So she developed what has become a foundation of the Raw Family diet, the "green smoothie." This was a combination of greens, blended with banana. The "green smoothie" helped them regain their health.

Some, however, see "raw foods" as nothing more than a hoax for the credulous. Victoria's claims of cure for the most stubborn ailments may strike some as more faith than science, despite her claims of extensive research.

In an interview with Kate Zimmerman, former Les Halles chef Anthony Bourdain, of TV's "No Reservations," was characteristically blunt.

"I deplore this new 'raw food,'" he said, "I find it evil, absolutely evil. It's anti-human, it's anti-food, and any time you get a bunch of knuckleheads using words like purity, hygienic, clean and healthful with such zeal and with a rigid philosophy overlaying it, generally the sound of jackboots follows."

Less vitriolic, but no less passionate, critics, like Tom of the post-vegetarian website BeyondVeg.com, point to what they consider the excessive cost of a raw food diet, the inconvenience of maintaining it and the difficulty in getting critical nutrients from uncooked foods, which can lead to serious health effects. They also find what they consider the pseudo-religiosity of raw food proponents dangerous, as they claim it can get in the way of both science and common sense.

"Green for Life" has gone through four printings and now the North Atlantic publishing house wants to introduce it to an even wider audience. The time does seem propitious, if TV is any indication. On a recent episode of "The Girls Next Door," a show on the E! Channel that presents the day-to-day life of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's three girlfriends, the book made half a dozen appearances. The girls in question were attempting to fine-tune their fitness in advance of the filming of an exercise video and used Victoria's green smoothies to do so.

"The optimal diet is a 100% raw diet with greens," insists Victoria. She believes there are phytonutrients in raw produce that do not exist in cooked, that are essential for human health. But she does not recommend anyone jump in without preparation. She recommends adding the "green smoothie" to one's current diet, to bump up the percentage of green vegetables being eaten, currently at an average of only two percent Once the body loses its cravings for sugar and other overused substances, then is the time to go raw.