Monday Night Raw
By Lindsay Norcott
Staff Writer

In an effort to "boil it all down" and give students some "food for thought," Dr. Douglas Graham delivered an energetic lecture on liking it raw to a full and varied crowd on Monday night. He aimed to enlighten the crowd as to the benefits of a raw food diet and good health in general.

Making his entrance after a ridiculously long and laudatory introduction, Dr. Graham took the microphone in a "Planet Fruit" T-shirt, yellow swim trunks, and sandals. His constant pacing and unflagging energy were immediate testaments to the lifestyle he advocates, although his leathery skin suggests that sunscreen doesn't fit into his "raw" version of health.

Dr. Graham, who considers himself a "doctor of health" as opposed to the usual "doctors of sickness," has worked with every range of health and fitness, from tennis star Martina Navratilova to people who cannot get out of a chair. Graham personally has been eating a raw food diet for 25 years and wishes he had started earlier.

"I'm not here to tell you what to think, I'm here to ask you to think," Graham explained as he began his lecture. The repeated intent of the evening was not telling people to do what he does, but getting people to think about their own level of health and working towards improving it.

Stephanie Stewart '05, who, although vegan, expected to find Dr. Graham's recommendations too extreme, came away with a positive attitude about raw food. "I don't think he wanted us to be how he is; he was just encouraging us to do little things that we all know are good for us," she reflected.

The way to live healthy, according to Graham, is to eat more raw foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and some types of fungi and legumes. These foods should not be cooked or refined in any way since food processing removes some of the best nutrients of raw foods.

A key benefit of raw foods is that they most closely match our nutrient needs and are thus easier to digest. Because energy is not going into digestion, Graham explained, it can be used for other things. Graham also claimed that heating denatures proteins and prompts an immune system response, which is apparently a bad thing.

A lot of Dr. Graham's talk was spent trying to make things apparent: the benefits of raw food, the media's role in determining how we eat, the subtle ways that processed foods support the livestock industry. His most common statement, "If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets," attempted to make it apparent that being "normal" in your lifestyle can no longer be equated with being healthy. He spouted statistic after statistic about rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes to point out that we don't want what everyone else has got.

It isn't an immediate transition. After this talk, Dr. Graham was not encouraging anyone to immediately switch to an exclusively raw food diet. He encouraged people to think of this new philosophy as their dog. One walks with their dog slightly ahead of them, never letting it get too far away. This gradual approach toward healthy living appealed to much of the large audience. Following the talk, audience members skimmed through cookbooks for raw food and books explaining the philosophy behind a raw food diet that were for sale outside. T-shirts, such as the "Planet Fruit" design sported by Dr. Graham, were also for sale. Some attendants, however, left the talk feeling frustrated.

"I wish he would have gone about it more systematically, so that we could have gotten a practical framework, instead of philosophizing so much," commented Anjuli Mahendra '03 after the talk. Students who wanted a more tangible description of how to practice a raw food diet on a meal plan were left unsatisfied.

Dr. Graham's stand up comic style was better suited to a large public lecture than the health conscious attendants he was talking to. Ultimately, however, he achieved his goal of getting people to think more about the foods they choose to eat. While we may not all stop eating grains and cooking our food, we can certainly remember that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."