When you cook foods, the colors and textures change and all the precious water is burned off. Eating RAW food keeps you closer to the earth and connects you to the original product, the real thing. Eating food that is alive keeps you feeling alive.
Living on raw foods enables you to effortlessly shed not only excess physical weight; other, less tangible burdens are lifted. For some, it's that overall "unhealthy relationship" with food. For others, it's the persistent and lingering fear of disease which we can begin to let go of with the reassurance of knowing that good health is our natural right and we are now armed to claim it. Further, there can be an indescribable happiness, along with the sense of communion, that comes from not eating animals anymore, being less taxing to the enviroment, and reducing the weight upon the medical community - in short, living in a way that lessons the burden on the rest of the world.

--Excerpt from Raw Food Real World--