Diet Novelties .com

…„Imagine life without pizza, bread or a hot meal. No meat, no cake, not even a glass of milk.

In fact everything you have ever taken for granted about food is turned upside down. It is likely you will never eat in a restaurant again.

This is the world of Elaine Bruce, an extraordinary 62-year-old who looks years younger, who has followed a diet of organic and enzyme-rich plant food and juices for more than 15 years.

Based in Ludlow, Elaine claims to be the only practitioner in the country of what she calls the Living Foods Programme.

It is based on a very simple principle although its ramifications are enormous. Nearly everything we eat today, down to a boiled carrot, is harming our body and its ability to protect us from disease.

“When we put processed food into our mouths, the first reaction of the body is to produce more white cells. This is how it reacts when something alien or foreign enters our body. We know the body produces more white cells when it fights disease but it illustrates the point - it is very important what we choose to eat.”

Elaine has taken a leaf from our ancestors and gone back to the roots of food literally - the plant life around us. She lives on the greens which contain the highest possible proportion of plant enzymes and will heat nothing over 40C because this kills off the active enzymes and their nutritional properties.

Living Foods is based on three basic principles. Our evolution means our bodies were never designed for the sophistication of modern and processed foods, which sprang from the need both to preserve food and feed a growing population; that we are naturally herbivores and the enzyme properties in plants give us every nutrient we need; and that a pure diet of certain natural foods can make us resistant to every illness and cure the body of toxins and disease.

“If you look at the molecule of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants and compare it with a blood molecule, they are exactly the same. The only difference is the central atom, which in chlorophyll is magnesium and in blood is iron. This explains why there is such an affinity between plant enzymes and the blood.”

A life on this diet means a completely clean blood stream. In 15 years Elaine has never been ill, not even with a headache and she has the energy of a teenager. She has lost her taste for chocolate and alcohol and her daily diet consists of a wheatgrass shake for breakfast, an organically-reared green salad and seed sauces for lunch and a tea of fresh fruit.

Her face is line free and she is well built, springing up the stairs of her basement which has been converted into a large, multi-purpose kitchen where she teaches courses on Living Foods.

The idea was imported from America by Dr Ann Wigmore, in Boston, who in 1978 discovered the healing properties of a plant diet when she was laid up with gangrene. “For some reason she got this notion that if she chewed the grass she was sitting on it would help her so she literally pulled the grass with her hands and chewed, spitting out the fibre,” says Elaine.

Since she read about Dr Wigmore’s work, Elaine has turned her back on her first career as a community worker in Manchester, and retrained in naturopathy and homeopathy. She turned vegetarian and then vegan before finally turning her back on conventional diets 15 years ago.

Her line-free face breaks into a smile when she argues her beliefs because what they suggest is so extraordinary. If we do not cook our food and insist only on organic produce, supermarkets will be run into the ground. If we do not get ill, the pharmaceutical industry will disappear. There will be little need for doctors and even the growing industry of alternative medicine will appear processed and unnatural.

But what about energy? What about the nutrients you are meant to get from animal fat, meat and dairy products? “You don’t need calcium from milk. That has been put about by the milk marketing board, which is a very recent industry. You get the highest proportion of calcium from grasses and leaves. How do you think the animals we eat, like cows and pigs build up their calcium? By eating the grasses. They get first class nutrition. We kill and eat them but we are only getting second-class nutrition. What I’m saying is it doesn’t have to be like that.”

Publications like Peter Cox’s Why You Don’t Need Meat and RC Siebuld’s Cereal Grass, What’s In It For You? reveal research on the benefits of a plant-rich diet has been rumbling in the background for many years. The benefits of the diet proposed by Elaine have already been felt by many people diagnosed with serious illnesses, who are sometimes prescribed a pure enzyme diet to clean out their systems. What Elaine wants to do now is reach out to the rest of us.

One such convert is Patricia Morgan, from Ludlow, who admits she thought Elaine was “completely mad” when she first heard her theories.

“I was suffering from nervous problems and headaches and within three days they had cleared up. I don’t follow the diet completely but I think it’s a very important idea because it is about rediscovering what we need to survive.

“Until the war most of us lived organically because there weren’t the pesticides and the processed food industry had not developed until after the war.

“It cannot be purely coincidence that children are born today with leukaemia and more people suffer asthma. The pharmaceutical industry has taken off only in the last 50 years. It seems to be there is a massive structure built on people being ill.”

Juicy way to cultivate your mealtimes

Changing your diet can be difficult at the best of times, but the Living Foods way is not as complicated as it might first appear.

Eating organically is still an expensive business, with most fruit and vegetables priced sometimes 20 per cent more than the foods you can easily get your hands on in the supermarkets.

But Elaine Bruce can show you ways of cultivating your own kitchen on a window sill. The essentials for a Living Foods diet are wheatgrass and sprouted seeds which can be cultivated on trays of compost and left to sprout on your windowsills and shelves.

And there is plenty of variety, from chickpeas and lentils to alfalfa and aduki. These can be used to make raw pates, hummus, seed loaves and nut cheese or dehydrator crisps and cookies which have lots of flavour.

The most essential piece of equipment is a juicer, which takes pride of place in Elaine’s kitchen. Here she extracts the nutritious juices from vegetables while eliminating the fibre.

If the Living Foods lifestyle appears too demanding at first, you can start to introduce the foods into your diet gradually. “There is a great deal of difference between the nightmare burger in a bun and a slice of organic bread, which is at the top end of the scale. Also, eating plenty of raw fruit and vegetables during the day gives you a lot of nutrition and helps your body to cleanse and detoxify itself.”

Elaine offers courses for those who are looking for an introduction into the Living Foods lifestyle or want to take on board its philosophy on a permanent basis.

A one weekend or a week’s introductory course will show you how to set up your own Living Foods kitchen on your window sill, with lots of recipes which show greens can be exciting. These are conducted in small groups and each person has a chance to think about their own health goals.

If you want time to practise your new-found techniques, some of these courses can be residential and Elaine also offers the opportunity for you to stay at her Ludlow home. …”