fruitsIN the biblical account of creation, immediately after God gave His first instructions to Adam and Eve about being fruitful, multiplying, and ruling over all the earth, He gave them another instruction. You’ve read it before, but it’s just so important, it truly bears repeating.
And God said, Behold, 1 have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in th which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat food (Genesis 1:29).
LIFE FROM LIFE
Genesis 1:29 is an amazing clue from our Creator about the fuel our bodies were originally designed to use. In the Garden of Eden, God revealed that all animals—including humans—were designed to take energy directly from plant life. That was the most direct path to transferring power from pure light into a form that would sustain life itself! Just think about it—the life-force in a plant is sustained by collecting sunlight via photosynthesis. That life-force is then transferred directly to the human’s physical body that consumes the plant—like a flame passed from one can- dle to another. This is the simple yet brilliant way God designed to pass along the life-giving energy from one living thing to another in the form of living foods.
In our sophisticated human civilization, however, we have learned to cook and otherwise kill most of our food. Remember that all the vegetarian animals in the wild eat foods whole and intact, directly as it comes from nature. Whether vegetarian or carnivorous, all animals eat their foods in a natural and raw condition. Man, on the other hand, takes that which God provides in its natural raw state, and before putting it in his mouth, he puts it on a fire, destroying its life-force and much of its nutritional value. And nowadays, he laces it with chemical additives, preservatives, coloring agents, and emulsifiers—then wonders why he gets sick!
In addition to our typically poor choices of foods, we com pound the problem by cooking them. Think about putting your hand into boiling water for a few moments. Pretty destructive, don’t you think? Now imagine food that is baked, broiled, or barbecued!
We share this planet with over 700,000 other species of animals, but we are the only ones who have tamed fire in order to cook our food. Consequently, we suffer debilitating, diet-related diseases like cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and a host of other noncommunicative diseases. This should be no surprise once we come to understand the damage we inflict on our food with heat:
• enzymes are lost;
• proteins are denatured;
• heated oils and fats convert to trans-fatty acids, which are
carcinogenic;
• sugars are caramelized;
• vitamins and minerals become less available;
• water is reduced; and
• fiber is refined to the point of losing much of its benefit.
A daily dose of these empty, cooked foods—often in excess—leaves our body handicapped to rebuild our cells or per form other important metabolic function. This is particularly true if cooked food is all we are consuming, to the exclusion of any thing raw.’ Digestion becomes more and more difficult, and constipation becomes the norm. Year after year of eating these• a depleted food is more than our body can cope with, and the results are easily predicted:
• disease;
• low vitality;
• loss of quality of life;
• loss of spiritual and mental clarity; and
• early death.
The typical American diet of today has little resemblance to the natural way of eating God designed for us. Think about the foods you have eaten in the past 24 hours. How many of them would you describe as living foods?
WHY LIVING FOODS?
First, what are living foods? Living foods still contain their life-force, which is indicated by the presence of active enzymes. Those enzymes supplied in all living foods are crucial to proper digestion and absorption of the nutrients found in that food.   As we shared earlier, there is a little experiment you might like to do to learn the difference between living and dead food. Take five raw carrots. Cut the top off the first carrot, and place it in a shallow basin of water to watch it grow. Take the four remaining raw carrots and cook them—boil one, steam another, bake one, and microwave the last. Take each one out of their heat sources, cut off their tops, and put each in a shallow basin of water to watch them grow. Will the four cooked carrots grow? No, they won’t—because they’re dead; their enzymes have been destroyed.
When we cook or process food at 107 degrees or higher, we modify the nutrients and reduce and, in some cases, completely eliminate their value. The body then has to work harder to move the dead, unnatural substance through the digestive system, causing great stress on the colon and robbing other organs of their enzymes. When we cook our food, we lose up to 97 percent of some water-soluble vitamins like Vitamin C and up to 40 per cent of the lipid soluble vitamins.
All cooked food is dead food, which renders it into a low- octane fuel with less of the original energy it was created to provide. Look at your automobile for a moment. Your car was designed to run on a certain octane of gasoline. If you put a low-grade fuel into the gas tank, it will start pinging and knocking! And if you put contaminated fuel in your car, you can literally destroy the engine. So shouldn’t we be at least as careful to put the right grade of fuel into our own bodies—without contaminants-in its most dynamic and energy-providing condition? Our body, after all, is a much more precious instrument than any machine.
Regarding cooking, there is a very fine line between life and death in terms of temperature. For example, I was driving around Detroit several years ago, listening to a local news station. They were talking about a mother who hastened home from her shop ping because she didn’t want to miss the beginning of her soap opera. Upon arriving home, she jumped out of the car and ran into the house, leaving her three kids to fend for themselves, and only remembered them 90 minutes later. When she came outside, she found that the two older children, who could walk, had got out and closed the door behind them. The toddler in the car seat had suffered in the oven-like heat for 90 minutes. The child was still breathing and was rushed to the hospital, where they found that the internal body temperature was 107 degrees. The child lived, but suffered permanent and severe brain damage.
On another occasion, I heard news about a mother who had just gotten a new job. The first day on the job, she couldn’t find a babysitter and decided to leave her child in the car all day. After work, she had to rush the child to the hospital where he was found to have an internal body temperature of 108 degrees. Unfortunately, this child died.
There is a similarly fine line between life and death regarding the temperature of the foods we eat. At 107 degrees Fahrenheit, the enzymes—the life-force within the food—start to break down and die. By 122 degrees Fahrenheit, all enzymatic activity is gone—the food is dead. At 150 degrees Fahrenheit, the protein molecules start to become altered and die. By 160 degrees Fahrenheit, the molecular structure of protein is totally changed.
Look at a raw egg before it hits the hot frying pan, and you’ll see a yellow yolk and clear jelly surrounding it. It’s almost pure protein and easily digestible by the developing bird embryo! Notice how it changes in appearance when it hits the hot frying pan? It transforms from clear jelly to a white rubbery substance.
Back in the 1920s, some zookeepers thought they could economize by purchasing leftover cooked meat from restaurants and serving it to the zoo animals. The animals began to get sick and die. Have you ever been to a zoo and watched them feed the carnivorous animals? Did they feed them raw or cooked meat? It’s always raw; it has to be raw or the wild animals won’t remain healthy.
There was an experiment performed in the late 1930s and early ‘40s by Dr. Francis M. Pottenger. He fed 900 cats the identical diet for nine years. The only difference was that half the cats ate their food raw, while the other half ate their food cooked. The half that ate the raw food over the entire nine-year duration never suffered any type of physical breakdown. The half that ate the same food, only cooked, developed many of the same physical problems people in civilized societies suffer. In addition, they found that many of the cats that were producing healthy kittens when they started the cooked diet were unable to reproduce after eating the cooked food for a period of time, while the cats which fed on raw foods still reproduced normally.
Pottenger ‘s experiment also showed that the longer the cats were on the cooked food diet, the earlier and sooner the kittens started to suffer physical breakdowns. The same thing has happened to recent generations of our human population, starting at about the same lime processed foods, fast foods, and massively meat-based menus became the staple of the American diet. The diseases that used to be “old age” diseases—like arthritis—are now found in increasingly younger people. Today, we even have juvenile arthritics. Diabetes used to be for old people; today, we have juvenile diabetics. A mother told me in one of my seminars that her child was born with Type 2 diabetes! Cancer used to be for old people; today, the number-one cause of death for the children of America, after accidents, is cancer.
A diet of living foods is not something that’s just for old people; it’s not just for sick people. This is the way God designed the human body to function! A living organism is designed to be fueled with energized, living foods and not devitalized, dead, cooked foods.
THE HEART OF THE HALLELUJAH DIET
L-i-v-i-n-g f-o-o-d. It spells out the bask foundation of The Hallelujah Diet. It is primarily a raw-food diet in which people eat as many foods as possible in their natural, uncooked condition.

You may find it eye-opening at first to discover how many varieties of raw, whole foods aren’t only palatable, but truly delicious! It’s fascinating that these living foods exhibit the vibrant colors, sweet fragrances, and juicy textures that appeal to our natural senses, while dead foods appear so much more pale and empty, needing something added to give them eye appeal and flavor. Each of the living foods has its own unique and vivid taste, whereas the dead foods share only three basic tastes: sweet, salt, and fat.
Later in Part Three of this book, we’ll fully examine The Hal le Diet. There, we’ll learn more about living and dead foods, fruits and vegetables, and other essentials to The Hallelujah Diet and Lifestyle. Consider the snapshot below as a primer to help you get started on the road to a healthy understanding of what your body truly needs.
Raw vegetables. In their raw and living condition, vegetables are the greatest source of all minerals and the second greatest source of all vitamins. All kinds of green, yellow, red, purple, and orange vegetables can be used to create a spectrum of savory salads, slaws, and main dishes. Green leafy plants like romaine lettuce, spring mix, and spinach are rich in folic acid and many other nutrients. Iceberg lettuce, by comparison, lacks any deep color or flavor and doesn’t provide much nourishment either, serving as a reminder that we should work at acquiring tastes for more colorful, natural foods.
Fresh fruits. The greatest amount of vitamins and the second greatest source of all minerals are found in fresh fruits if they are fully tree or vine-ripened. Fruits are nature’s cleansers and help keep the digestive tract swept clean. Fruits are the perfect convenience food for portable snacks and can be made into countless salads, smoothies, and sorbets. Fruits can be categorized as sweet and non-sweet, but ideally, sweet fruit should not constitute more than 15 percent of your total diet. Fruit today is mostly hybrid and contains 30 percent more sugar than in our great- grandparents’ day. It is harvested green and lacks much of its natural enzyme activity.