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By raw foodie – Sarah Lea – search on Sarah’s name to find more raw food blogs, or check out her Facebook page.

Where do I get my protein from? The same place as gorillas, giraffes, horses and elephants. Still not got it? What about cows? Now, I’m not saying that you will see me chowing down mouthfulls of grass in the lushly fertile fields of the bay! Although if you see my eldest wolfing down her alfalfa you may wonder on her lineage…but plants are actually holding the best sources of protein. Truth! Will you look at the size of some grazing animals! Granted, they get insects thrown into their daily diet too, but I see that as a B12 freebie. Nope, you don’t need to be wolfing down animal products in order to grab your daily protein needs. Uncooked fruits, nuts, seeds, sprouts and sea vegetables will allow your essential building blocks of life to go to work. Spirulina, seaweeds, bee pollen and green leafy vegetables are extremely high sources of protein too, if you want to make sure that you are meeting your needs. Personally, I don’t worry too much about it..Watching my breast-fed babies grow on the 2% protein-filled mamas milk has been enough evidence to show me how much we need in our diet. To be strong and healthy like a rhino, I do well keeping at their diet.
The best sources of protein come from plants because they’re clean. Today’s animal food industry just cannot be trusted. Just looking behind the scenes at the dairy and meat marketing campaigns is enough to make you see green!
Real protein can be found in hemp, a complete protein source. Although a bit of a stumbling block here in NZ, you can still readily source hemp protein powder to add to smoothies, biscuits, cakes and puddings. Hemp creates flexible muscle which creates the neurotransmittors for proper brain chemistry. I used to make our morning milk from the delicious hemp seed in the UK where we were lucky enough to get it. Splashed over cereals and made into not-so-hot chocolate, it was an everyday treat. Now I use almonds. A yummy alternative to dairy milk, the protein in nuts and seeds is readily absorbed into the body without much deviation from a mainstream diet.

A protein is a chain of amino acids. These are our building blocks of life. Strung together in special sequences, amino acids make up all the proteins there are. However, only 8-10 of them appear to be essential for human nutrition, and our bodies need all of them almost all of the time.
The protein in raw food is highly absorbable, so you don’t need as much as western nutritionists tell you. When proteins are heated however, some of these amino acids become so denatured that they’re basically useless. The digestive enzymes in the gut can’t digest them, consequently some amino acids are destroyed completely. Damaging these proteins by cooking means that your body is going to want to eat more to get the amino acids that it needs. This can mean risks between high protein consumption, early aging and the development of many degenerative diseases. Poorly digested proteins only create more than their fair share of toxic wastes. An excess of protein can cause all sorts of mayhem at the cellular level too…tired cells are bad at picking up oxygen and nutrients and eliminating wastes…only pushing the body towards discomfort and dis-ease.
Thankfully, with our daily green juice and smoothie, superduper salads sprinkled with sprouted seeds and sea vegetables and outa-this world sinless treats, I know that my natural grazers are consuming more than their body needs.

Almond Milk
Presoak 2 1/2 cups almonds overnight…in the morning, drain and rinse.
1/ Pop the nuts into your blender
2/ Add 6 cups of filtered water and a pinch of sea salt
3/ Blend on high until the nuts are broken down
4/ Pour liquid into a nut milk bag and squeeze the milk through leaving the nut pulp. Alternatively, if like me, you have no bag…pop socks, muslin cloth or a sieve will do the job just as well.
I make this once every two days and it’s used in cereals, smoothies, for hot chocolate, ice creams and soups. Anywhere you would usually use cows milk.

Like Sarah’s facebook page ‘Love Life Raw’

Tags: raw food