Raw foodism

Depending on the philosophy, or type of lifestyle and results desired, raw food diets may include a selection of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, meat, and dairy products.

For example, John of Egypt, a hermit from the Nitrian Desert in the 4th Century, reportedly lived on a diet of dried fruit and vegetables for fifty years; he never ate anything cooked.

[26][27] This posed a problem for his Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church monastery because he refused to eat the bread of the Eucharist, which is cooked.

[26][27] Contemporary raw food diets were first developed in Switzerland by Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867–1939), who was influenced as a young man by the German Lebensreform movement, which saw civilization as corrupt and sought to go "back to nature"; it embraced holistic medicine, nudism, free love, regular exercise and other outdoors activity, and foods that it judged were more "natural".

[4]: 41–43  In 1904 he opened a sanatorium in the mountains outside of Zurich called "Lebendinge Kraft" or "Vital Force", a technical term in the Lebensreform movement that referred especially to sunlight; he and others believed that this energy was more "concentrated" in plants than in meat, and was diminished by cooking.

[4]: 41–43  These ideas were influential to Ann Wigmore, a notable raw food advocate, but were dismissed by scientists and the medical profession as quackery.

[28] Shelton was arrested, jailed, and fined numerous times for practising medicine without a license during his career as an advocate of rawism and other alternative health and diet philosophies.

Shelton's legacy, as popularized by books like Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, has been deemed "pseudonutrition" by the National Council Against Health Fraud.

[30] Leslie Kenton's book Raw Energy – Eat Your Way to Radiant Health, published in 1984, added popularity to foods such as sprouts, seeds, and fresh vegetable juices.