Crudivorism (or living food) is a dietary doctrine in which food consumed is farm-sourced and raw. Not altering their natural form, advocating the nutritional policy that cooking and/or frying would devastate the full nutritional capacity of the food. It does not include any products of animal origin.
In this doctrine, nothing can be prepared cooked over an open fire, due to the fact that it causes loss of nutrients. Food is necessarily eaten in its natural, raw form.
A crudivore diet, also called a "live diet" or "live cooking," is a form of eating based on raw foods, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, sprouted grains or sprouts such as wheat, rice, barley, rye, oats, lentils, chickpeas, peas, alfalfa, and seaweed.
Crudivores also usually eat small amounts of salt in fermented foods or better quality salts, and cold-pressed oils such as olive oil. Unlike frugivores, who eat only fruits and leaves and do not use condiments.
Scientific View: Raw foods are rich in enzymes [lacks sources]. We can say that raw food is an enzyme diet. According to the crudivore theory, by cooking food (from about 40°C), we would destroy the enzymes. If we eat raw food, we would avoid the destruction of the enzymes that the food contains, thus making digestion easier and avoiding using up our own reserves.
According to Dr. Edward Howell, the lack of enzymes in cooked food is still one of the biggest reasons for aging and early death[1] . It is still the underlying cause of most diseases[2] .
If our body is busy digesting cooked food and producing enzymes for saliva, gastric juice, pancreatic juice and intestinal juices, then it will have to decrease enzyme production for other purposes. When this happens, then how could the body produce enzymes for the work of the brain, heart, kidneys, muscles and the other organs and tissues?
This lack of enzymes would occur in most of the world's population in civilized countries who eat cooked food[source missing]. Even domestic animals fed more and more artificially and cooked food would suffer from the same diseases that attack us[lacks sources].
Religious / Spiritual View: Various religions and peoples of antiquity used mostly or strictly raw food. Essenes, some groups from the Indian region, Tibetans, South American Indians, and Rastafarians are some examples. This diet is attributed to a greater "lightness" of the body and an accelerated capacity for self-healing. Many practitioners of the living diet do intestinal washes and fasts, as part of an accelerated detoxification from what has been consumed during a current lifetime.