(reprinted from my article in Detox Your World's e-zine, Passion)

A reason often given for eating uncooked vegetables and fruit is that raw food contains more 'life force' than food that has been fried, baked or boiled. Absorbing life force from food is believed by raw food fans to have a beneficial effect on our vitality and health.  For people who are familiar with concepts such as Chi or Prana, this makes perfect sense...and they may even be sensitive to the movement of such ‘vital energy’ within themselves or between other organisms.

For those who are less comfortable with the idea of subtle energies, a more methodical approach to understanding invisible forces may be needed. Well the good news is that scientific methods are now so sensitive that we are getting closer to understanding previously undetectable forms of energy.  It’s now possible to measure many of the different electromagnetic fields and sources of radiation emitted from living organisms and appreciate their role in health. All around the world there are groups of boffins generating results on graphs and charts to help confirm scientifically, what ancient wisdom has taught us for thousands of years.

Tripping the light fantastic

During the past year or so I've been examining evidence in support of various therapies and treatments that might once have been labeled witchcraft.  I’ve learnt that; healthy strong blood carries a radio signal that can destroy tumour cells, electromagnetic fields precede and predict the shape of developing limbs and organs, fields surrounding human hearts can synchronise when people are standing up to four feet apart…and much, much more.  Yet, it is the immense amount of work carried out on radiation in the visible part of the spectrum (light) that has particularly caught my eye. Biophotons are particles of light that are emitted from almost every single living being.  The light is 1,000 times less intense than we can detect with our eyes but is emitted in a stable, phased, laser-like manner to create a field of light used by our cells for communication.  When you consider that there are over 50 trillion cells in our bodies, each carrying out 100,000 chemical reactions per second – it puts high speed broadband to shame. Biophotons were discovered way back in the 1920’s but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that the work of Fritz-Albert Popp proved their coherent laser-like nature.  Last month I was lucky enough to interview Johan Boswinkel, who for the past 20 years has been using this form of light to marry acupuncture with homeopathic principles.  Boswinkel has treated tens of thousands of patients and claims to have an 80% success rate on any disease.  

Life Supports Life

So, the evidence for the existence of biophoton fields is undeniable, yet as a raw food fan, the question that remains on my lips is whether or not ingesting live, biophoton-rich food helps contribute to our ‘life force’.  Can our body actually make use of components of life, such a biophotons, that are not found in cooked, dead food?  Reading ‘Life as Energy’ by scientist, Alexis Pietak has helped me come to a pit-stop conclusion on the way to answering this question.  Pietak provides an elegant argument for the ‘livingness’ of life as a very real kind of energy that must be recognized along with other kinds of energy such as heat.  Furthermore she shows that ‘higher order’ ecosystems such as forests emerge when life force is ‘insulated’ and passed on from one organism to another.  Now, the picture I’ve cobbled together in my head goes something like this: 
·      In order to maintain life we need to counterbalance entropy…loss of structure and decay.
·      To maintain high levels of order in our body, or an ecosystem (and therefore counterbalance entropy) a free flow of information for communication and cooperation is needed.
·      New science tells us that much of this information is made available through energy fields (biophoton and electromagnetic and other frequencies) that are exclusive to ‘living’ organisms.
·      These fields diminish during sickness and during the death process. 

From this we can understand that in the same way that good communication is essential for healthy human-to-human relationships – it is likely that good communication and the transfer of information (via biophotons) from the food that we eat can help us maintain a healthy relationship with our environment. Whereas cooked food (scrambled information) can tip the balance of a healthy body towards a confused body and ultimately illness or decay.  Pietak’s comparison of ‘life energy’ to ‘heat energy’ offers another much simpler way to look at our questionable need to eat live food. In the same way that central heating and hot water bottles are not necessary during warm summer months – but become vital to our health and comfort in winter….when the environment is starved high-order life force (think of a high-rise block in the middle of London or a huge industrial estate)….then supplementing with live foods may give us a much-needed boost. Our cities and towns may look structured….but in comparison to focal points of life on earth such as rainforests – cities are in a comparatively low state of order or vibration. 

Boom!!!  So, there we have it…eat more life…get more information in your body….feel more at ease with your environment and ultimately benefit the ‘livingness’ of the whole earth (Gaia).   In the next article I will be looking at different types of food and their role in creating an electron cloud around our cells in order to help support the storage and transmission of light.