Many variants of Raw Vegan Diet abound. Food sources that are always eliminated: Processed Foods, Sugar and Animal Products (Meat, Fish, Dairy, Eggs). Out of the three SOS Extracts (Sugar, Oil, Salt), Sugar is always eliminated but Oils and Salt may be retained. Some Raw Vegan Diets eliminate both Oil and Salt. Those would be called SOS-Free Raw Vegan Diets, where SOS denotes no-Sugar, no-Oil, no-Salt.
Raw Food Recipes is a great website to get a glimpse various preparation techniques adopted by different Raw Vegan communities. Some include Oil and Salt; others exclude one or both.
Raw Foods are never subjected to high temperature cooking. Consensus on the highest admissible temperature is lacking — it is somewhere between 104-118℉ (40-48℃). Raw Vegan Diet is sometimes called Live Foods Diet because the food is deemed 'live' if not cooked at high temperatures.
Most Vegetables and Fruits can be eaten raw. Most Grains and Beans can be sprouted. In the modern world, Raw Vegans commonly use blenders to prepare smoothies, soups and dressings from delectable combinations of ingredients. Raw Vegans also use dehydrators at low temperatures — this way, it takes much longer to dehydrate foods but they are still 'live'. Grating, spiralizing and chopping using a mandolizer are some of the techniques to convert simple vegetables and fruits into interesting shapes — this changes the taste and texture of the final preparation. Raw Vegans also employ fermentation. They often consume blue-green algae as well. Juicing and fasting are also common.
There is a long history of raw vegan healers and enthusiasts in various parts of the world. Two contemporary clinics in USA which have existed for multiple decades center around Gabriel Cousens and Ann Wigmore.
Note: Both Dr Cousens and Ann Wigmore use oils. So they are not SOS-Free Raw Vegans. But I thought of listing them here because their clinics are the closest I could discover which have a 'Raw Vegan' / 'Live Foods' tradition that might possibly allow SOS-Free Raw Vegan lifestyle (not sure if they allow elimination of oils from their food protocols).
Dr Gabriel Cousens: He founded the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Tennessee, USA where he treated patients with Raw Vegan Diet (Live Foods Diet). After 25 years of operation, this center closed its doors in 2017; Gabriel Cousens is now 76 and continues his private medical practice.
Gabriel Cousens' food guidelines are described in the book Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine (544 pages, 2003). He divides the transition to live foods into three phases called Phase 1, Phase 1.5 and Phase 2. See list of ingredients for all phases and list of recipes (scroll to the bottom of this page). To understand Gabriel Cousens' philosophy, see list of books (Amazon).
(DVD) Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (92 minutes, 2009) is an interesting documentary (available on YouTube here and here). Six patients with diabetes were tracked for 30 days as they lived at Gabriel Cousens' Tree of Life Center. They followed Raw Vegan Diet guidelines and daily exercise routines. Within days, all patients improved dramatically. All of them continued with their lifestyle changes beyond these 30 days.
Ann Wigmore: Biography (Wikipedia) is remembered for popularizing wheatgrass juices. She was brought up in Lithuiania and her grandma was a herbal healer. In 1956, she founded the Hippocrates Health Institute in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA. As of 2019, the institute is still operational but has been relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida.
Ann Wigmore's lifestyle guidelines continue to be taught at Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute in Puerto Rico as well. An overview of Anne Wigmore's food guidelines are available in this blog post: Ann Wigmore Chart for Raw & Living Foods.
Living Light Culinary Institute: Offers courses in raw vegan cuisine. Located in Fort Bragg, California. See Website.
Fruitarians and Sproutarians: Among those who follow a Raw Vegan Diet, we also have fruitarians (see Hua Nui / Fruiticulture Institute in Hawaii — Free Book explaining Fruiticulture — FaceBook group) and sproutarians (see TheSproutarian website).
The 80/10/10 Diet by Dr Douglas Graham (348 pages, 2006) is a raw vegan diet centered around 80% carbohydrates, 10% proteins and 10% fats.
The diet by Dr Gabriel Cousens tends to be a high fat, low carb diet. In this podcast: Plant-Based Keto Diet for Optimal Support of Brain, Heart and General Wellbeing (March 2019), Dr Gabriel Cousens explains how his food system is actually a keto system.
The 80:10:10 Diet by Dr Doug Graham is a high carb, low fat system.
Whole Food Plant-Based doctors strongly discourage low carb and keto diets!
Dr Cyrus Khambata of Mastering Diabetes fame has personal experience with both systems: he first tried Dr Gabriel Cousens' food system, then moved on to Dr Doug Graham's system, and then adopted Whole Food Plant-Based guidelines which encourage a mixture of raw foods and cooked foods, but not 100% raw or 100% cooked.
Raw foodists (Wikipedia) have invariably gravitated towards juices and fasting as well. By browsing through biographies of various raw foodists, I sense that thousands of people report benefits by switching to Raw Vegan Diet. However, the science is scant. In fact, raw food healers in the West have often run into legal troubles because their protocols are unusual — they are very different from popular Western medical techniques, so they are not accredited by a recognized medical organization. In contrast, Raw Food healers find much more social and legal acceptance in India.
A detailed history of raw vegan systems in USA is showcased in Chapter 2 of this book: Becoming Raw (352 pages, 2010).
Raw food diets are tricky to adopt. We need to learn new recipes, food mixing guidelines, food timing guidelines, and so on. My understanding is that Whole Food Plant-Based doctors are okay with raw food systems as long as they are carefully constructed to ensure that we get all macro- and micro-nutrients in the approximate ratios that WFPB doctors encourage us to get.
Brenda Davis has written Becoming Raw (352 pages, 2010), which summarizes scientific research into raw food system. Anybody attempting to adopt a raw food system should read this book.