What it is: A thinly veiled weight-loss book (with some cleansing promises) that shifts your daily menu to mostly raw foods in five steps – the diet's principles. It differs from hard-core raw food diets by allowing some cooked foods.
Duration: Depending on your "raw food transition number," the program shifts a certain percentage of daily cooked foods to raw foods gradually over one month. Eventually you can choose to become a 100 per cent raw food eater for life.
Claims: Waste matter in the body is the main source of excess weight: if your digestive system is able to move food quickly (thus eliminating it quickly) you will "avoid weight gain for the rest of your life."
The theory behind it: Eating raw foods with still-intact "live" enzymes (proteins that catalyze chemical reactions) helps "scrub" the body. Eating them in combinations that ensure quick exits will help you keep the weight off. Supposedly, some foods, such as starches and meat proteins, take longer for the stomach to digest when they're eaten together.
Restrictions: You eat fresh fruit or homemade fruit juices in the morning, and a raw salad at lunch and dinner when, depending on your transition number (determined by a quiz), you can also eat a cooked meal of healthy, unprocessed or all-natural foods, including organic meat, taking care to avoid certain combinations. Dairy is excluded.
Most outrageous claim: Only a raw food diet will address a sluggish digestive system – the reason you can never lose weight.
What the experts say: The notion of eating only fresh foods is commendable because we eat too much processed food, says Nelson. And we know that compounds in raw food – for example, flavonoids in citrus fruits and legumes – boost the activity of the body's natural enzymes, which work to break down toxins. (We still get enzymes in cooked food, just fewer.) The challenge, of course, is finding and affording the freshest produce and specialty raw foods. But do you need to eat them in different combos? Khalili says some people find various food combinations, such as meat and wheat, or dairy and wheat, give them gas, but there's no research-based evidence that types of food counteract to speed or slow digestion. And even if there was, adds Nelson: "What they are saying is that if you can induce diarrhea you won't get fat. They're right. A lot of people will find they spend all day on the toilet after eating all these fruits and vegetables. So 'speed of digestion' prevents you from gaining weight, but it will also prevent you from absorbing all the essential nutrients you need to keep you healthy."
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