Comparison of the Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine Diet by Gabriel Cousens and the 80/10/10 diet by Douglas Graham

Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine

Since introducing a bit of bread into my diet six months ago I have been constantly battling with candida again, which once it flares up is incredibly difficult to get rid of. I have since removed the bread from my diet again, but once our bodies are harbouring a yeast infection it doesn’t just go away when the cause is eliminated.

While I have successfully healed flare-ups in the past, this time it is not going away with my usual high raw diet. My diet is made up of mostly green salads, fruits, nuts and seeds, oils, a couple of non-raw foods like kefir and hommous, a few powdered superfoods like maca, and the occasional raw treat like raw 72% cacao chocolate. For maintenance and nutrition I think this is an amazing (and delicious) diet, but to get rid of candida and bacteria that has already formed a colony requires a short-term elimination diet.

There are two such diets based around the raw food lifestyle that claim to heal the body from candida and other systemic infections. While both of these diets are high in greens and vegetables, the diets and the mechanics of how they work are very different.

The 80/10/10 Diet

The first of the two is The 80/10/10 Diet which is based on natural hygiene. This diet works by eliminating grains, flesh foods and fats from the diet. The premise is that glucose is the natural fuel for humans and that ingested fats and proteins block insulin receptor sites and cause insulin insensitivity and rising blood sugars which then go on to feed yeasts and other pathogenic microorganisms. The author, Dr Douglas Graham claims that there is enough essential amino acids and essential fatty acids in fruit and vegetables, that these are not required to be added as additional food, and so he claims that it is quite healthy to live on this diet long-term. This diet requires a substantial amount of exercise to ensure that the muscles have a glucose deficit so that the sugar is always moved into the muscles instead of remaining in the blood. This diet is very high in water, very alkaline and has a huge cult following in the raw community. Many people on 80/10/10 describe their diets as euphoric. This diet is effective against candida with many people saying their symptoms disappear overnight due to their bodies regulating their blood sugar better when fat is taken out of the picture. I am not going to follow this diet for a number of reasons that I will describe later when comparing the two.

The second diet is the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine diet by Gabriel Cousens (I haven’t read it, but I am sure one of his other books There Is a Cure for Diabetes follows the same principles). This diet is an anti-mycotoxic diet. Gabriel Cousens espouses removing sugar from the diet in order to starve the microorganisms in the body. Unlike the traditional anti-candida diet however, which is quite high in meat, low in water and is highly constipating, this diet is 100% raw, vegan, alkaline and hydrating. The diet goes a step further than the anti-candida diet and eliminates all foods that have a high toxic microorganism count such as meat, dairy, eggs, grains, corn, peanuts and mushrooms. The goal is to ingest as few pathogenic microorganisms as possible and simultaneously keep your blood glucose low so that any pathogenic microorganisms that do enter the body are not provided with the food they need to grow and multiply. While Cousens does not describe it as such, in the early stages this diet is low in carbohydrate and is likely to be ketogenic. Ketogenic diets have been studied by nutritional scientists and have been proven time and time again to be very effective against epilepsy, diabetes and PCOS (the latter two being diseases caused by insulin resistance).

For some time now I have been trying to decide for myself whether I want to base my long-term diet on Graham’s or Cousen’s principles. These two diets are the fundamental (and I guess you could say extreme) basis for all other raw food diets and can be returned to in their foundational form if healing is needed. Graham’s is high in glucose and very low in fat and Cousen’s is high in fat and very low in glucose (its not really possible to have a diet high in protein unless you consume a diet primarily consisting of synthesised supplemental powders such as soy protein isolate, whey protein isolate, egg white protein isolate, spirulina and chlorella – and that diet sounds disgusting and constipating). I want a foundation nutritional base from which I can gently experiment rather than swinging around wildly trying this and that and never being very efficient or effective. I also want to eliminate disease from my body, even as I age. I am extremely sensitive and have a generally poor constitution so for me this is a challenge.

There is a Cure For Diabetes

The reason why I have chosen the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (vegetarian, low carbohydrate, high fat and moderate protein) is for the following reasons:

– I have never been very athletic, and while I try to keep moderately fit, I am never particularly active. My favourite activities include reading and writing and my day job involves sitting at a desk as a computer programmer. Regular intense exercise is an essential part of the 80/10/10 diet and many people for whom it works well are athletes. See my article about why exercise is essential when eating fruit here.

– I feel satisfied and do not require much in the way of snacks if I eat a high fat diet, whereas if I eat a lot of fruit I want to graze all day. I do not at all feel comfortable eating a third of my day’s supply of fruit all in one meal and stretching my stomach like Douglas Graham suggests, so inevitably I snack and so I am consistently hungry/eating/digesting if I eat a lot of fruit.

– Eating fruit all day without brushing teeth can result in an acidic condition in the mouth, leading to tooth decay. Tooth decay is the #1 most prevalent disease in Western culture due to the high quantity of starches and sugars we consume. There are numerous reports on the internet of fruitarians losing teeth.

– Wild fruits are lower in sugar than their modern, hybridised counterparts and there is some possibility that in the past fruits in general were lower in sugar. Douglas Graham says that this isn’t true, because if it were we would have to eat more in order to get out calories and this is unrealistic. However, he hasn’t considered that if fruits in the past were lower in sugar they would have naturally had to be higher in fat (like olives and avocados), and the fat would have been the significant macro-nutrient for energy, not sugar.

– When I attempted to eat a diet very high in fruit while pregnant, I found myself constantly craving fat. I craved hot chips, fish, butter, avocado and ice cream. Once I even craved bacon (but didn’t eat any as I am vegetarian). As a result, I added fats to my diet and my high fruit diet became undone.

– Douglas Graham describes the 80/10/10 diet as satisfying the desire for sweets, but when I eat a lot of fruit and zero or little fats I crave honey, dried fruit and bread. I don’t crave these foods when I eat a diet low in sugar and high in fats. Inevitably every time I try eating 80/10/10 I end up giving into my cravings for more refined sweets and then end up with candida infections.

– While the phase I of Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine is quite limiting, it does allow fruits in the second phase, and overall the diet is less limiting than 80/10/10. If I wanted to stop being vegetarian in the future for some reason, or if I wanted to travel and try different international cuisines, the foundational low sugar diet – eating plenty of greens and no grains – is a good base for adding grass-fed organic meat, grass-fed organic dairy, eggs or oily fish.

– Scientists are discovering that high fat diets promote mental health and cognitive function.

– Gabriel Cousens quotes more scientific literature than Douglas Graham does, and Douglas Graham makes some outright errors in his analysis such as on page 169 saying that a large man should eat 6,250 calories when his figures add up to 4,800. He also contradicts himself on the same page by saying a sedentary woman can follow the diet, when he has previously stated that doing a lot of exercise is a must for the diet to work. These kinds of statements in the 80/10/10 diet makes me feel that less consideration has been put into the facts than Gabriel Cousens’ books which are typically very detailed with a lot of reference to scientific studies.

– Long term raw foodist doctors such as Fred Bisci do not agree with eating high levels of glucose and believe that in the long term it is very dangerous. Gabriel Cousens is a medical doctor with 35 years clinical experience.

– There are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but no essential carbohydrates.

I have more reasons but wordpress is starting to get slow as I pound away at the word limit

So today I am starting the Phase I diet of Rainbow Green Life Food Cuisine; I have been grain free and high raw for a while so I am hoping that I can get through the first (detoxifying, elimination) phase with minimal cravings for sugar. Here I go!

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