Community & Stories
A Closer Look at NMN: What It Is, Quality and Formulation
NMN has become an increasingly familiar name in the world of nutritional supplements. Short for Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, NMN is a naturally occurring compound that has attracted interest as consumers become more familiar with specialist nutritional ingredients and place greater emphasis on understanding what supplements contain, how they are formulated and the quality of the ingredients used.
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Who Decides What Counts As Medicine? A Guest Post by Anima Mundi Herbals
Raw Living began in 2002 as an educational resource for raw and living foods. The first superfoods we sold were Klamath Lake Algae, Bee Pollen and Aloe Vera, and then came Goji Berries, Cacao and Maca. As we were introduced to more and more potent plants, the website expanded to become a directory for people to discover in-depth information, gathering everything we were learning into one place. In 2013, new regulations were introduced (you can read about that here), and we were forced to remove ten years of work from the website. It was a devastating time, but having come so far, we did our best to keep sharing what we were allowed within the new restrictions. But still, we hope the time will come when we can speak freely on everything that we have learned from decades of research, without the heavy censorship that we currently face. Our friends at Anima Mundi Herbals, being in America rather than Europe, have more freedom of speech, and do an incredible job of conveying the physical and energetic benefits of the plants that we have come to know and love. You can read more on their blog here. Here, we wanted to share a recent post from them that puts some of this journey into powerful perspective. Have you ever wondered who actually gets to decide what counts as “real” medicine, and who doesn’t? Or why plants, the oldest remedies on Earth, are considered “alternative” today? Modern medicine, as an industry, is only a few centuries old. Plant medicine is as old as the human relationship with the living world. We did not inherit an “alternative” system of healing. We inherited the remains of one after long-standing traditions were systematically displaced, discredited, and separated from the cultures that carried them. This is the history of how that happened: who patented what, who profited, and who got erased along the way. It is not an anti-science story. It is the missing chapter of the science story. It Started With a Crown, Not a Cure The word “patent” comes from the Latin for “open,” and what became known as “letters patent” were literally open letters from the crown, publicly announcing a grant. In England, the monarchy had been issuing letters patent for monopolies since at least the 1400s, and by the reign of Elizabeth I, dozens of monopolies were granted over goods ranging from soap to salt to iron [1]. By the late 1600s, that system extended to medicine: the crown began granting exclusive rights over secret drug formulas, with no requirement to prove the remedy was safe or that it worked; only that it was “original.” One of the best-documented examples, Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, was patented under King George I in 1726. It was a mix of opium tincture and roughly 32 percent alcohol, marketed for coughs, colds, and children’s ailments, and exported to the American colonies by the 1730s [2]. That is the logic patent medicine ran on for the next two centuries: neither proven safe nor effective — just proven original enough to own. America’s First Medicine Patent On April 30, 1796, Samuel Lee Jr. of Windham, Connecticut, received the first U.S. patent ever granted for a medicine: a laxative called “Bilious Pills,” advertised to treat everything from yellow fever to jaundice to “female complaints” [3]. Lee’s pills spread up and down the East Coast, carried by traveling peddlers. His patent didn’t require clinical evidence, just paperwork. Over the next century, that same pattern—a bold claim, a secret formula, no disclosure requirement—morphed into the patent medicine industry as a whole. Tonics, elixirs, and “cure-alls” were sold door to door and by mail order, most containing undisclosed alcohol, opium, morphine, or cocaine [4]. This is the era that gave way to “snake oil” being used as a literal description, not just a figure of speech as it’s often used today. War, Morphine, and the Birth of an Industry The Civil War accelerated everything. Morphine and opium were distributed at a massive scale to treat wounded soldiers, and many veterans left the war dependent on them. 19th-century writers later referred to this as “soldier's disease” or “the army disease,” though some historians today debate how widespread the phenomenon actually was, since verified contemporary records are sparse and the modern concept of “addiction” as a medical diagnosis didn't yet fully exist [5]. What’s well documented is that the war created the first mass market for the American drug trade. Physician Edward Robinson Squibb, who had left the military in 1858 to open his own pharmaceutical manufactory in Brooklyn, became one of the Union Army’s largest suppliers of medical goods, including morphine, quinine, and surgical anesthetics. By some estimates, Squibb provided roughly a twelfth of the Army's’s total medical stores by the war’s midpoint [6]. Out of that wartime drug economy, several companies still recognizable today took shape: Parke, Davis & Co. (formally incorporated in Detroit in 1875, later part of Pfizer) manufactured and marketed cocaine in cigarettes, powders, and injectable kits before cocaine was criminalized [7]. Eli Lilly opened his Indianapolis laboratory in 1876, building an early product line that included quinine and other era-specific tonics, while positioning his company in explicit opposition to the unregulated patent medicine industry around him [8]. Chemist Felix Hoffmann, working for the German dye-and-chemical firm Bayer, synthesized both aspirin and diacetylmorphine (heroin) within a two-week span in 1897; Bayer trademarked and marketed heroin as a non-addictive cough suppressant starting in 1898, a year before it patented aspirin [9]. In Chicago, physician Wallace Abbott founded what became Abbott Laboratories in 1888, building his business on “dosimetric granules,” or standardized doses of morphine, quinine, strychnine, and codeine [10]. And Merck & Co. was founded in the U.S. in 1891 to distribute chemicals, an offshoot of the German Merck company, which had been manufacturing morphine since 1827 and commercializing cocaine since the 1880s [11]. Meanwhile, a Licensed Botanical Medicine Thrived While patent medicine boomed unregulated, a very different, fully licensed system of plant-based medicine existed alongside it: Eclectic medicine. Formally organized in 1847, Eclectic physicians earned medical degrees, practiced botanical medicine at dedicated colleges such as the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, and openly credited the Indigenous and folk knowledge their formulas drew from [12]. Their central reference text, King’s American Dispensatory—first compiled by John King and later revised by John Uri Lloyd and Harvey Wickes Felter—documented plant preparations in detail and is preserved today in the National Library of Medicine’s digital collections [13]. The Reckoning: All the Rules Aren't Neutral In 1905, journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams published an eleven-part exposé in Collier's Weekly, “The Great American Fraud,” documenting the alcohol, opiates, and false claims inside patent medicines [14]. That same year, the American Medical Association formed its Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, which began grading drugs and awarding a “Seal of Acceptance” to the ones it deemed legitimate. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the first federal law requiring companies to disclose dangerous ingredients like opium, cocaine, and alcohol [15]. These reforms were badly needed. They were also written entirely by a single institution, deciding for everyone else what counted as legitimate medicine. The Flexner Report In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation sent Abraham Flexner—an educator with no medical degree—to evaluate every medical school in North America. Schools teaching botanical medicine, homeopathy, or Eclectic medicine were judged “unscientific” against a single biomedical standard. The Rockefeller-funded General Education Board subsequently directed significant philanthropic funding toward schools that restructured around that biomedical, pharmaceutical-aligned model [16]. The scale of what followed is well documented: from roughly 160 medical schools in the U.S. in 1904, only 66 remained by 1935 [17]. The closures fell hardest on institutions serving the students least able to absorb the loss: of seven medical schools then training Black physicians, five closed, leaving only Howard University and Meharry Medical College [18]. Most schools focused on women's medical education closed during the same period. The Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati (nearly a century old) graduated its final class in 1939 [19]. Now & Beyond Many of the pharmaceutical drugs on the shelves today can trace their origins to compounds first identified and used within Indigenous and traditional medicine systems. The plants get folded into patents, whereas the traditions that pointed researchers toward them in the first place rarely get the credit, and never the royalties. “Decolonizing herbalism is not about rejecting science,” says our founder, Adriana Ayales. “It is about asking who gets to produce knowledge, whose traditions get called ‘evidence,’ and who has been erased from the conversation entirely.” Now and in the future, we are so fortunate that we don’t have to choose between plants and doctors, or vice versa. Decolonizing herbalism is not anti-science or anti-medicine. What it emphasizes may not be widely discussed, but it is vital work: restoring credit, context, and reciprocity allows us all to imagine a medical future where ancestral healing and modern medicine are integrated. Can you visualize a world with more humility, evidence, and care than any one system of care has offered on its own? Your own home apothecary carries that same lineage forward. Keeping your shelves lined with plants is still one of the oldest forms of self-care. Stock yours now to keep the botanical knowledge alive. Consider this your invitation to start working with plants as daily companions rather than one-off supplements, just as our wise ancestors did long before it had a patent number. Shop Anima Mundi Herbals at Raw Living here. We stock the widest range of Anima Mundi Herbals products in the UK, and have been working together for over a decade.
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Discover Seggiano: The Finest Artisanal Italian Foods Available in the UK
Discover Seggiano: authentic Italian artisan olive oil and artichokes, sourced from small traditional farms. Shop the finest Italian food products at Raw Living UK.
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Farmacy: Manifesto on the Future of Food
Long-time friends and collaborators with Raw Living, Farmacy, have released a beautiful Manifesto for the Future of Food. Featuring a guest appearance from Woody Harrelson, it’s inspiring, bold, and absolutely worth a watch. Caring about the food you put into your body goes far beyond personal wellbeing. It’s about stewardship. It’s about how we relate to the land, the soil, the water, and the plants and animals we share this planet with. Every meal is part of a bigger ecosystem. Food is also a quiet but powerful political act. Where you spend your money matters. Which companies are you supporting? Are they regenerative, ethical, transparent? Are they thinking about the long term, about soil health, biodiversity, and future generations? Or are they driven purely by short-term profit? At Raw Living, this is something we take seriously. We choose to work only with brands and producers whose values align with ours. People who care about quality, sustainability, integrity, and impact. Brands like: 🌊 Algamar – Awarded by the Spanish government for biodiversity conservation, environmental respect, rural development, local resource enhancement and technological innovation. 🇯🇵 Christopher Dawson, founder of Clearspring – The only non-Japanese recipient of the Japanese government’s Award for Overseas Promotion of Japanese Food, recognising his global contribution to organic Japanese cuisine. 🌿 Auroville (India) – Multiple award-winner for sustainability, ecological restoration and conservation initiatives. 🍫 Paccari (Ecuador) – Multi-award-winning chocolate producers and a certified B Corp, recognised for ethical sourcing and regenerative cacao practices. 🌍 Ancient + Brave – Certified B Corp and proud members of 1% for the Planet, committed to purpose-driven business and environmental stewardship. Every time you shop with us, you’re not just buying a product. You’re participating in a chain of conscious decisions that supports farmers, growers, and makers who are actively working to create a healthier, more beautiful world. And for that, we’re truly grateful.
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Meeting The Cacao Farmers
At the end of my three week trip to Peru, one of the highlights was visiting some of the cacao farmers who produce our raw cacao. There are very few companies in the world who are committed to raw, organic, cacao, and having gone to the Amazon region and understood the logistics better, it's easy to see why. The company we work with has over 300 farmers in the Amazon region working with cacao. Often these farmers have only very basic literacy, they don't have their own vehicles, or even access to electricity and hot running water. Co-ordinating production and then being able to transport the cacao beans across the country to be processed into liquor, butter and powder is a Herculean effort. Even before it's shipped all the way to us in Europe! It was amazing to see the cacao growing in its natural habitat, and I ate a lot of the raw fruit and crunched on the raw beans. I particularly loved the beans in their semi-dried state, they were almost gooey in the centre and not as bitter as fully dried beans. You can read more about it and see more pictures on KateMagic.com.
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Peruvian Super Food Factory Visits
I visited two factories during my stay, one in the Cajamarca region and the other in the Jauja region. These are two of the biggest superfood facilities in the country (so I guess by default, in the world!), and it was a real privilege to get a sneak behind the scenes, and to learn about the incredible amounts of work that go into producing our superfoods that we take so casually off the shelves and spoon into our smoothies. One of the most difficult feats I think, is the co-ordination of the process. These companies work with uneducated people in remote regions, and are often supporting them into transitioning out of the standard crops like potatoes, corn and rice, that they get a very low income for, and into these higher value crops like maca and yacon. It’s a massive logistical operation to work with the farmers and ensure they are following organic procedures, and then to transport the harvested crops to these central facilities, and to make sure that there are customers who want to buy them at the other end. Especially considering many of these crops only have one harvest in a year, so demand has to be carefully managed to make sure that farmers aren’t out of a job and retailers aren’t out of product! The other thing that blew my mind was the scale of the machinery. I have heard it so often from small businesses, that you have to invest huge sums in getting the correct machinery to be able to scale up, but then it's not always reliable and when it breaks down, so does your whole chain of production. It takes a lot of skill to be able to firstly source the right machinery in such a niche industry, and then maintain it when its dealing with such high capacity volumes consistently. At the first factory, I saw the golden berries and the cacao being processed. They are first inspected and prepared by hand, before they go into the machines. The workers can sort through 100kg cacao beans in one hour, and 20kg of golden berries. I liked that they take the waste, and compost it outside. Then when they go to collect the crops from the farmers, they return the compost to them, thus creating a circular economy. Hygiene procedures are followed strictly, and everything is tested thoroughly, to ensure a product that meets international standards. In the second factory, most of the workers had already stopped for the day, but we saw the women scraping the dried camu camu berries off the industrial drier, ready to grind to a powder. I also saw the biggest amount of maca and cacao I’ve ever seen in my life – one tonne of maca powder, and ten tonnes of criollo cacao beans! They had a new state of the art machine that they were just installing, so they could up production of cacao butter and powder. Peru is the biggest exporter of organic cacao in the world; the total value of cacao exports from Peru in 2022 was estimated to be $22million USD. This is big business!
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Triple The Impact of Your Charity Donations This Winter
STOP PRESS! We just had some amazing news. Made in Hackney have a funder who is matching donations this December. This means that for every plate you donate, Made in Hackney will receive six! That's right, your £3 will provide a healthy vegan meal for six people. There's literally never been a better time to donate. At Raw Living, we’re proud to support three charitable organisations who share our values and are making a real difference in people’s lives. 🌱 Made in Hackney is a grassroots community kitchen on a mission to tackle health inequalities and improve food access, all through the power of plants. For just £3, your donation covers the cost of an organic, plant-based meal for someone in need. This year, we’ve been matching your donations: for every plate you donate, we donate another. For this season of goodwill, we’re going to double that donation, so every plate you donate will feed three people. 🌳 Trees for Life is a multi-award-winning conservation charity dedicated to restoring the Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands. For just £6, you can plant a tree in our dedicated grove, and for every one of your generous donations, we’ll plant two more this winter. 💧 Charity: Water addresses one of the greatest challenges of our time, access to clean drinking water. It’s hard to believe that in the 21st century, over 700 million people around the world still live without it. Charity: Water are on a mission to change that. You can donate to our Spring here, and together, let’s see how many people we can help. We collect donations all year round, but this special seasonal drive, doubling the impact of every donation, runs until 19th December. So please consider giving generously. Just think about it, what feels better: splurging in the sales, or supporting these amazing organisations ensuring everyone has access to clean food, air, and water? ✨ Thank you in advance for your kindness, we are excited to see how many people we can help together this year.
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Meeting The Maca Farmers
Kate recently went to Peru, and met some of the farmers that grow our Raw Living Maca. It's grown in a remote region of the northern highlands of Peru, five hours drive from the nearest major city, and at an altitude of 3,500m. Being able to farm and sell the maca provides a valuable source of income to farmers who have very limited education and opportunities. You can read all about it on her post here. There's more photos on our Instagram here. Buy Raw Living Maca here.
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Made In Hackney Visit
Last week, I had the joy of visiting the Made In Hackney community kitchen. It's set up in the Queen of Hoxton nightclub in Shoreditch; they use the dancefloor to serve up the meals before the post-work revellers start to arrive in the evening. Everything is community funded: as well as fund-raising projects, they are sponsored by the enormous generosity of local restaurants and food businesses donating leftover food, and volunteers who come to help chop veg and serve around 200 meals a week. I turned up to chop a copious amount of cabbage, peel potatoes, and stick labels on take-away containers. It felt really good to be back in a busy working kitchen again, and I had a wonderful time, meeting lovely people and doing something truly worthwhile. I was introduced to Made In Hackney by Asa Simonsson, naturopath and author of "Fermentation", who had come to some of my events. I was looking for a space in London to run my Raw Chef Certification Courses, and she recommended them as a community venue, I think probably in 2013. I wanted to support Made In Hackney for a few reasons. Firstly, I am Made In Hackney! I lived there until I was 7, and my earliest memories are all in Hackney. I went to Hackney Infants school and my mum worked in the playground in Victoria Park. She was a single parent with no support, and Hackney was very rough back then. One of my earliest memories is of my little kiddie plastic trike getting stolen from the front garden! So who knows, if it was a few decades later, we could be a household who was applying for the meal service. As a long term vegan (33 years now), veganism is obviously very important to me, so I love the fact that everything Made In Hackney do is vegan without making a song and dance about it. I think although our business model with Raw Living is quite different from MIH, at the heart, the ethos is the same: a desire to help people improve their lives through providing them with organic plant foods, produced and made with love. I am passionate about a lot of things, but giving people access to high quality nutritious foods and witnessing how much better they feel about themselves when they start eating well, is probably my biggest passion in life. I also feel strongly that we are here to serve. In yoga, they call it "Bhakti Yoga"; living life from a place of selflessness. I feel that once we are ok for our own survival needs - food, water, shelter - then our responsiblity is to help those in our community meet their own survival needs. It's not to amass material possessions and elevate ourselves above others. So I feel like its important to do that, and important to be seen doing that, and set a different example than the Hollywood celebrities with their multiple homes and yachts and extravagant lifestyles. It upsets me deeply that theres so much unnecessary suffering in the world, when it should be a simple thing to make sure everyone has food and shelter. That's why I always say, women are the leaders of the future! Because it's our instinct to say, "Have you had a cup of tea? Have you got your coat on?" rather than, "Lets go to the moon! Lets invade that city!" So I love that Made in Hackney is taking that ethos literally. Doing their best to ensure that everyone in their community has access to good quality plant-based food, made with love. We are supporting them with superfood donations for the community kitchen and the cookery school, and I will be getting involved in various fund-raising activities throughout the year. On October 15th, I am dressing up as an avocado and joining them on their charity run. You can donate here https://localgiving.org/fundraising/MIH-Veg-Dash-Team-Sarahs/. If you want to support them further, you can also "Donate A Plate" here. Just £3 covers the cost of the salaried staff and any food and equipment that has not already been donated, to make one delicious vegan meal for a person in need. Kate
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Charity Partners - Made In Hackney
Made In Hackney's mission is to tackle health inequalities and food access, and bring communities together using the power of plants. They work across cultures and communities to ensure everyone can adopt a climate friendly, health-supporting, compassionate diet, and they do it all with joy and respect. Originally setting out to provide critical food education, giving people the skills to grow, cook and eat more plants, when the government restrictions of 2020 were brought in, and they found themselves unable to offer their usual classes, they pivoted to providing thousands of emergency plant-based meals for households across Hackney in need of food support. Today their in-house team of chefs and volunteers prepare over 1200 meals a week with input from the community meal service family on what dishes they’d like to see on the menu each week. The service is more than a meal. It’s care, it’s connection, it’s community. Learning to cook and eat more plants is one of the most impactful things you can do for the health of people and the planet. Their joyful, culturally diverse cookery classes support people to evolve to a plant-centred, planet friendly diet in an inclusive and enjoyable way with delicious, nutritious food at the centre of all we do. Having the confidence and skills to cook meals from scratch is a vital tool in tackling food poverty, child-hood obesity and lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes type 2 and cardiovascular disease. Their classes are available both in-person and online and they work with a range of community groups from young carers and young people in care, families, pensioners, people with long-term health challenges, hostel residents, people in recovery and other community groups. We support Made In Hackney with regular donations of super foods like Goji Berries, Shelled Hemp Seeds and Cacao Powder, so their community can receive the benefits of these wonderful foods. You too can get involved by supporting them with a donation next time you shop with us. Just £3 buys an organic plant-based meal for someone in need. Donate A Plate here! Learn more about Made In Hackney.
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Farmacy Giveaway!
Farmacy is our favourite restaurant in London. As well as being fully vegan and organic, they try wherever possible to source their fresh vegetables, herbs and flowers from their own biodynamic farm in Surrey. These are principles that are key to us here at Raw Living - not just eating plant-based, but organic and seasonal wherever possible. Fresh fruits and veggies should always be the mainstay of a healthy diet; all the lovely dried goods, pills and potions that we sell here are just the icing on the cake. So we are pleased to partner with Farmacy for a book giveaway. Go to @katemagic on Instagram for your chance to win two recipe books - the Farmacy book and Kate's newest book, The Magic Kitchen. Competition closes 22nd Aug 23. To celebrate the collaboration, Kate visited the Farmacy farm to learn more about biodynamic farming, and help harvest courgettes, cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes. Check out Kate's new book here. Visit Farmacy in Westbourne Grove for some of the best organic and vegan food in the UK!
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Visit To Islensk Hollusta
On a recent visit to Reykjavik, we were delighted to visit the Islensk Hollusta factory, and learn more about how they produce their amazing Icelandic teas, seaweeds and salts. They even took us to a part of the coast where they forage their dulse and sea truffle from. Here is the Arctic Thyme being dried. Arctic Thyme grows wild all over Iceland, and is distinguishable by its pretty purple flowers. It is a medicinal plant that has been consumed by Icelanders for thousands of years. You can make a tea from it or add a little to your savoury dishes. Here is the Seaweed Salt being mixed. They take Icelandic geothermal sea salt and mix it with ground kelp and dulse. Here we are picking dulse. It was cold and extremely windy! Dulse is one of my favourite foods, and it was wonderful to see where the dulse that I eat actually grows, and to learn more about the harvesting and production methods. Next time you enjoy some Icelandic seaweed or herbs, give a thought to the hardy souls who go out in extreme conditions to gather it for you! Shop Islensk Hollusta seaweeds, salts and herbs here.
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Visit To Clearspring
One beautiful sunny day in June, I cycled over to the Clearspring warehouse in West London, to learn more about the products and the business. Clearspring is a family-run company, founded by Christopher Dawson in 1993. They specialise in working with Japanese organic farmers to produce high quality traditional Japanese foods. Even in Japan, a lot of these products are difficult to find in organic form, and so many of the farmers that Clearspring work with are dependent on them for their business. Christopher was even recognised by the Japanese Government in 2007, one of the only non-Japanese people to receive the Award for Overseas Promotion of Japanese Food, for his distinguished contribution to the promotion of Japanese organic food worldwide. The team gave me an in-depth talk on miso and umeboshi production. Clearspring produce six types of unpasteurised miso, all working in conjunction with Japanese farmers who have been using traditional methods of miso production for many generations. These range from a sweet white miso (rice and soya), to dark hatcho miso (pure soyabeans). The darker the miso, the longer it is fermented. They also recently launched a Chickpea miso, which is an innovative soya-free miso. Although technically not a raw product, because it is made from cooked ingredients, unpasteurised miso is a living foods product, because due to the fermentation process, enzymatic activity is still occurring. I am a big fan of umeboshi, and found it fascinating to learn more about umeboshi production. Clearspring produce Ume Su vinegar, Umeboshi Paste, and Umeboshi Plums. Their umeboshi has been grown on a mountain farm in a region which is known for producing the best and fattest plums, and has been grown there for four generations. The plums are harvested once a year, in late June, and then pickled. The plums can be added as a garnish to dishes, used in a broth recipe, or you can even make tea out of them. They are super alkalising, and support the liver; a Japanese superfood! The paste is easier to use, and I love to spread it in nori sheets when I am making cauliflower sushi, or make a salad dressing with raw tahini. The vinegar is another easy way to get the benefits - use it as a salad dressing, or try adding it to sparkling water for a refreshing alkalizing beverage. It's a great alternative to apple cider vinegar, being equally good for the digestion. Because the ume plums are pickled in salt, no heat-treatment or pasteurisation is needed, and they are still in their raw state. I love to learn more about the food I eat, and through chatting with Chris and his team, I really got a greater sense of the dedication and care that goes into producing these foods. I probably use a Clearspring product every day, and I will appreciate even more now, how lucky we are to have access to these traditional Japanese ingredients in organic form. It's wonderful that in this era of mass-commodification, they are keeping these artisanal food preparation methods alive. Shop Clearspring products here, including sea vegetables, cold-pressed oils, Japanese seasonings, and teas, as well as miso and umeboshi.
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