Perricone Diet Review:
Raw food benefits from cooked food

The Perricone diet is remarkable in that it gives the benefits of raw food (LINK) without the trouble? Want great skin? What about preventing major causes of aging?

Dr Nick Perricone is a dermatologist who has synthesized different elements from the scientific literature to provide an easy way to think about cooking food and eating healthy. The tips offered by Nick Perricone in The Perricone Prescrption and Ageless Face, Ageless Mind give a road map to remove age-accelerating influences from your diet. As we'll discuss below, the Perricone diet offer advantages similar to eating a raw food diet, offering you better energy levels, mental clarity, and skin health by removing toxins from your diet.

    The Basics of the Perricone Diet
1. Removing toxins from the diet.
In Ageless face, Ageless mind, Dr Perricone goes deep into the causes of wrinkles, and how many of those same influences result in brain degeneration. In particular, we're talking about toxins like advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). These toxins arise from high temperature cooking methods like grilling and searing. If you eat browned food, these toxins are getting into your system. Ultimately, AGEs disrupt protein and cellular interactions and create sites of inflammation, which leads to aging. Dr Perricone makes the good point here that you can severely limit your consumption of these toxins by sticking to low-temperature cooking methods like poaching, or cooking heavily marinated meats. Basically, as long as you have sufficient water around during the cooking process, you will be able to minimize browning reactions that produce AGEs.This point in particular is where overlap with the raw food diet comes in. As we describe on the previous page (LINK), many of the benefits of eating raw arise from eliminating toxins from the diet. By cooking under moist, low temperature conditions, you can eliminate these negative influences from your diet.

2. Limiting toxicity from within.
A major thrust of the Perricone diet attempts to reduce the impact of AGEs on your health. Let's get more specific for a second here. AGEs form when a sugar molecule crosslinks to a protein molecule. This process can result from the hot, dry conditions in a frying pan or the toaster. But a similar process can also happen in your body, especially when you eat foods with high sugar content. When blood sugar isn't absorbed quickly, then it can crosslink onto proteins to form AGEs.
The Perricone diet goes into detail about which foods to avoid, listing all kinds of high-glycemic foods you probably thought were innocuous like bananas, carrots, strawberries and bread. By avoiding these foods, you limit the associated blood sugar spikes that result in inflammation and aging.
But some people like sugar. Fortunately, the Perricone diet offers techniques to limit the impact of high glycemic foods on your system. It boils down to this: eat protein and fiber first, carbs second. If you follow that sequence, then the carbs don't get broken down as quickly, and the blood sugar spike isn't so high.
On this point, Dr Perricone offers something for raw foodists to consider. Eating large amounts of fruits and vegetables unbalanced by protein and fiber can induce high blood sugar spikes and internally create the toxins you are trying to avoid in cooked food. Just something to consider before you drink that strawberry-banana smoothie.

3. Increased Antioxidant Supplementation.
The Perricone diet prescribes an extensive antioxidant regimen and counsels high omega-3 fatty acid intake. The details are in the books, but if you follow his prescriptions, you'll be taking quite a few pills per day. I have to say I don't recommend following these instructions to the letter. For one thing, the rationale for most of these supplements falls far short of definitive proof. For another, taking 10-15 pills per day may overwhelm your liver and kidneys. Don't underestimate the load you're putting on your system with high-dose vitamin and supplement consumption.
With this disagreement aside, Dr Perricone makes the good point that adequate vitamin and antioxidant consumption, whether by supplement or high fruit and vegetable intake, has substantial positive impact on your health in general and skin health in particular.

So why is the Perricone diet like eating raw?
As we've talked about on other pages, the benefits of raw food are:
higher energy levels
mental clarity
better skin qualtiy
weight loss
disease prevention

These benefits mainly arise from by eliminating toxins from the diet, improving digestion with high fiber, and reducing the impact of animal hormones on your system. By focusing on removing toxins from the diet, Dr Perricone's approach can offer similar benefits. With adequate fiber intake to avoid the blood sugar spikes from carbohydrates, you can also improve digestion. To complete the trifecta, I recommend eating meat and dairy certified to be free from artificial growth hormones.

To be clear, the Perricone diet is not the same as eating raw. But enough of the elements are similar as to offer a healthy alternative to people who want the benefits of raw food without many of the difficulties. Raw food lite, if you will.

Of course the Perricone diet is NOT raw food. Get the real deal here.

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