One of the problems facing anyone trying to eat healthier, especially for someone trying to move towards eating more raw foods is the convenience factor. Raw and natural foods are so much healthier for you, but it's not as if there are drive-through raw foods restaurants on every street corner in the country.

And of course, there's no such thing as a raw foods snack machine, is there? So if you get hungry during the day, you're going to have a challenge of finding something appropriate to eat if you haven't packed any raw fruits and vegetables. And when you're rushing around in the morning, sometimes it's next to impossible to find the time to put together a selection of healthy snacks to take with you.

One thing to try so that you have healthy snacks available quickly is to dehydrate your fruits or make fruit leathers. Those fruit roll-ups you see in the grocery store are derived from a pretty good idea - fruit leathers. But it's better to make your own - commercial fruit leathers are going to be loaded with preservatives and sugars - just the things you want to avoid.

When you're switching to a raw foods diet, that doesn't always have to mean fresh off the farm. It means not cooking foods with processes that strip all the essential vitamins, amino acids and enzymes from them. Drying fruit is a great way to add variety to your diet and make yourself tasty snacks of dried fruit or fruit leathers. It's not hard to do. There are recipes and inexpensive food dehydrators on the Web. These are also great snacks to pack for your kids' lunches!

You get all the benefit of the raw fruit, just packaged and preserved in a healthy, nutritious way!