Fivelements: Bali's Healing Cuisine

Fivelements recognises that optimal wellness comes from embracing and respecting the body, mind and spirit, ensuring there is harmony between all these things and the world around you. This Balinese retreat provides fine-dining healing cuisine of ‘Living Foods’ comprising of raw vegan fare, and other lightly-prepared plant-based dishes. Nilanthi, a Fiveelements therapist, identifies the unique properties of raw food and how its consumption can contribute to cancer prevention. Read below for this information in addition to specific diet tips.

In recent times it seems to have become something of a trend to follow a raw food diet. However, beyond being just a fad trend there are actually some valid health and wellness benefits associated with eating raw food, especially when it comes to cancer prevention and support.

What’s special about raw food?

For starters raw foods contains more nutrients than processed and cooked foods, where we can lose lots of heat sensitive nutrients such as vitamin C, B and enzymes that help with healthy digestion. Often an unhealthy digestive system along with stress is the precursor to a poor immune system and various diseases can stem from here.

How can this help prevent cancer?

The main reason to support a nutrient high diet is to protect the non-cancerous cells and build the immune system. However, it is important to note that it is thought many raw fruit and vegetable nutrients can also kill or stop cancer cells from spreading. To make it easier to consume and digest larger amounts of the nutrients it is recommended to juice the raw food, with some general recommended vegetables including carrots, cabbage, beetroot and tops, asparagus, broccoli, peppers and turmeric (which is abundantly and natively used and drunk in Bali). Some general recommended raw fruits are pineapple, tomatoes, and any purple or dark blue coloured fruit such as grapes, raspberries, blue berries, mulberry, strawberries, also peaches and apricots. In Bali you can also find some of the main cancer preventative and supportive super fruits readily available, such as mangosteen and its inner skin flesh, soursop, noni and goji berry, along with the moringa plant.

It is suggested that a plant based raw food diet is easier for the body to digest than one consisting of meat, cooked food, refined sugars, and carbohydrates, meaning the body has more energy to use on the immune system and remaining healthy.

An important note is to not consume vegetables or fruits containing high levels of glucose unless they are cancer destroying ones as mixing them into the diet would dilute the amount of cancer destroying nutrients and make the treatment less effective.

Any disease including cancer can be used as a gift, an opportunity to look within and reassess where stress, diet and lifestyle may have contributed and use the moment to make empowered, informed changes that may support your wellbeing.

The benefits in action

More than being just a theory, there are plenty of examples of a change in diet being used to treat disease, one stemming from within the team at Fivelements itself. When Chef Tantra started working at FIvelements, his wife discovered she has a lump in her breast that was the size of an egg. She had not been to the doctor to know for certain whether it was cancer or a tumour, but her and her husband looked for a cure anyway. In an effort to help his wife, Chef Tantra did much research, reading articles and discussing the options with the Fivelements founders. Together him and his wife decided to try make some changes to her diet to see if it would help the situation. His wife made the following alterations to her diet in hopes it would make a difference:

• No oil or sugar as it is said that cancer cells thrive on the glucose.
• Regularly drinking soursop juice and a drink made by boiling soursop leaves as it is suggested that this fruit inhibits the growth of cancer cells.
• Eating fruit and drinking green juices daily
• Not eating meat or dairy products.

While it took some time to notice the differences, gradually over a 6 month period the lump began to grow smaller and by the time a year had passed it had actually disappeared completely. Whether it was the sole benefits of a changed diet, it is no doubt clear that making such positive changes to her diet made a difference to her overall health and wellbeing.

Guest blog by Nilanthi, Fivelements Guests Liaison and Therapist 

Discover more about Fivelements or call or wellness experts on 020 7843 3597 to book your stay in this fantastic retreat today.