These days, there are so many diets popping up there is no way to keep track of it all. The Atkin’s diet, the South beach diet, there is even a cookie diet! A growing movement that has been gaining in popularity is the raw food diet. The raw food diet seems simple enough, followers eat only raw foods. It is straightforward like the name says. If you look closely at the diet though, there is more to it than meets the eye.

To adhere to the raw food diet, there are hidden pitfalls. Anything that has been pasteurized becomes prohibited. For example, milk and most cheeses. Unless you can find somewhere that sells fresh milk, you might find it hard to include much dairy in your diet. Many of the popular yoghurts, for example, are made from pasteurized milk.

Meat becomes harder to stomach on the raw food diet also. There are some sources, such as sushi, but fish is not everyone’s cup of tea. To consume raw meat with any degree of safety the meat (or fish) has to be as fresh as fresh could be. Most of us do not butcher our own animals, making most raw meat sources unsafe. If you can find fresh meat from a grazing animal, at the very least ensure that it is grass fed, rather than grain fed. Grass fed animals carry less E. coli bacteria, making them a marginally safer raw meat source.

There are a few other things that you should ponder if you are considering the raw food diet. Freezing and subsequently cooking meat kills parasites that can be present in many kinds of animal flesh. For example, toxoplasmosis is found in many types of meat, and becoming infected during pregnancy can have fatal results for the baby. To make matters worse, there are multiple other food sources that can transmit a toxoplasmosis infection to a pregnant woman. The parasite is present in soil, making unwashed veggies and fruit also a risk. Unpasteurized milk products can also contain toxoplasmosis, such as goat’s milk or feta cheese. If you are pregnant, the raw food diet can be very risky indeed. Take it from someone that developed the infection halfway through her own pregnancy. Being told that your child could be blind, deaf or mentally handicapped is no picnic. Why take the chance?