“At what age can children start on a 100% raw food diet?” My question is why haven’t you already started them? Every creature on this Earth should be eating a 100% raw food diet. I don’t. I’m sinning a little bit.

 This time of the year when it’s ungodly humid down here in Florida, I eat about 90% raw. In the winter when I’m traveling all, I sneak into vegan and organic restaurants. I may be up to 15% to 20% cooked food in my diet. If you’re healthy, you can do that.

 I have four children. Three are grown. I have a little guy who is 10 years old at this point.

 They were eating raw foods when they started to be fed out of their mother’s umbilical cord in the womb. That is where they began. When they came out, they exclusively ate raw food diets. Later they chose to eat cooked food.

 What’s interesting when you bring kids up on a mostly or all raw food diet, they always gravitate toward raw food. My little guy’s favorite juice in the world is green juice. He literally pushes me out of the way, knocks me down, grabs the juice and drinks 30 ounces of it every night if I let him.

 When he comes to the Institute, the guests are in awe. They are 60 to 80 years old and they’re having a difficult time with green juice. He’s slugging one down after another. If you bring children up in a normal, healthy way, it works.

 The question you’re asking really comes from your own mind. You’re really asking yourself, “Should I be eating 100% raw food?”

 Of course, if you love your children, feed them a 100% raw food diet. Should their percentage of food be different from adults? The answer is no.

 Let’s look at some rational thinking on this. What is the difference between taking healthy food and cooking it and eating that same healthy food raw? The difference is you have some nutrition in the raw food. You don’t have nutrition in the cooked foods.

 The cooked vegan, whole, organic foods that I and others may eat are recreational. It does little to no good for you. All it does is you give you a psychological perk. One hundred percent raw is what you need.

 You ask, “Will they grow too thin?” No, once again here is some rational thinking. What if I cook a grain, make it into a powder, add sugar and yeast to it and make bread from it? It’s a cooked grain putting weight on the body. It's the same grain I can eat as a sprout.

 The grain that is sprout has energy in it. It doesn’t break down to very bad sugar and contaminate the body’s blood with blood sugar. That will start to feed anything from diabetes, low blood sugar and every disease known to man.

 The nutrients already broken down from complex carbohydrates and simple sugars are readily absorbed into all of the 95 trillion cells in the body. That’s why you want to give your children exclusively raw food from the earliest ages. I think it’s good to allow the child to make choices of vegan cooked food if they wish.

 No one should ever go more than 20% to 25% cooked food by weight. Our work at Tufts University in Boston back in the mid-80s showed that once you went beyond 25% to 30% cooked food by weight in your entire diet, the immune system was compromised over 17%. If you went up another 10% to 35%, your immune system is compromised a little less than one half.

 That’s why it feeds into all of the work going back to the 1920s and the work we and other people globally have done on leukocytosis.  Leukocytosis is a disease caused by the consumption of cooked foods. The white blood cell attacks the cooked food, even if it’s vegan and organic, the same way that it would a virus, mold, fungus or cancer.

 You don’t want to give your child more than 20% to 25% cooked food. Hopefully you’ll only give them 10% to 15% cooked food. I hope you’re loving parents who do the best for your children.