May 8, 2026 May 8, 2026 2026-05-08

In 2009 I wrote a raw food primer based on a few weeks of personal experimentation. Sixteen years later, the diet landscape has shifted so profoundly that rereading that article feels like finding a map of an alien world.

Let me walk through what actually happened, what I kept (hint: not too much), and what I’m doing differently now.

What the Actual Experiment Created

The first two weeks were really uncomfortable. Not from hunger, but from the social friction. Eating raw in Romania in January is a particular kind of tomfoolery. I looked like – and in all honesty, I actually was – a precious weirdo.

By week three things started to fall into their designated places. My digestion calmed down noticeably. I was sleeping deeper. My mind felt clearer in the mornings, which I attributed to raw food but which may simply have been the absence of the heavy cooked dinners I’d been eating before. The experiment did what most constraints do: it revealed what was happening by removing something I thought was neutral.

How long did it stick? Parts of it permanently. I never went back to eating the way I had before — random hours, heavy cooked dinners, cheap processed food, no attention to food quality. The experiment gave me valuable insights into what kind of food works for me. I still eat cooked food nowadays and always will, but I’m much more attentive to what I’m putting in, how much, and when. Spending a lot of time in Vietnam and having my wife cooking extremely diverse and tasty meals, also helps a lot.

How the Original Advice Holds Up

Some of it holds up fine. Eating more whole foods is still good advice regardless of what label you put on it. The emphasis on reading your own body rather than following a rigid prescription — that was also right.

What didn’t age well: the framing of raw versus cooked as the meaningful dietary axis. In 2009 we were talking about enzymes and nutrient density in numbers. What we know now is that the more useful distinction is between heavily-processed and minimally processed food. A cooked sweet potato and a raw carrot are both completely different from a bag of anything with seventeen ingredients listed on the back.

The carnivore and keto movements that emerged in the 2010s pushed back hard on plant-forward eating, and they had some valid points about protein, metabolic health, and the limitations of pure carbohydrate-based diets. I felt that heavily during the raw food diet. The energy
spikes followed by crashes became tiring. Also, the gut microbiome research that followed complicated everything further — fermented foods, fiber diversity, the relationship between gut health and mental clarity. The conversation is genuinely richer now, and I think the raw food framing, while well-intentioned, was too narrow a window onto a much bigger room.

What Social Pressure Does to Food Experiments

Back then, people wanted me to share my notes on this raw food thingie because seeing someone else experiment publicly makes the experiment feel possible. That hasn’t changed — it’s actually more frequent now, just moved to different social platforms. It turned out so popular, that food experiments have become a content niche of their own.

That creates an interesting shift: you start optimizing the experiment for documenting it rather than learning. You make it look nice, you make it dramatic, you pick 30 days because it’s a proven number (I might have something to do with this, actually, all those 30 days challenges I did back then might have been influencing the blogging ethos).

What I’d Do As a 30-Day Food Experiment Today

Not raw food. Probably a no-ultra-processed-food challenge, which sounds simple but is excruciatingly difficult once you start reading labels. Or I would re-do the intermittent fasting challenge I did in 2017, only this time in an Asian food context. I think this would be interesting.

The 2009 version of me was curious and willing to try things. That part hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that I no longer need
the social media push, nor the exoticism. I’d just do it for the sake of doing it — which, if I’m honest, is probably the only reason worth doing anything.