Raw Energy Hotline - Sept 2004 (Part 4)

RAW ENERGY HOTLINE
SEPTEMBER, 2004
(Continued from Part 4)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 6
Part 7

Part 5

Naz: Long-Chain Fatty Acids

But that's just B-12, though.

Yes, like I was indicating, and it's really complex. What we know, based on that article, the research published in the American Vegan that I cited, is that vegans die more of degenerative brain diseases.

Jinjee's Note: This is probably from all the processed TVP and soy products eaten by vegans.

Naz: Now, then the question is why? And this is new information; it didn't used to be known that vegans get more of these brain-wasting diseases. Now that that is known, people are looking for the answer. And they're coming up with certain answers, like that there's a particular long-chain fatty acid that is not available in a vegan diet.

Jinjee's Note: In my opinion, if its a long-chain fatty acid that isn't available in raw vegan foods then its either because it hasn't yet been identified in raw vegan foods or because we don't really need it.

Naz: What I stick on there as an extra is that we don't even know right now what brain nutrients might be lacking in the vegan diet, because they're just barely discovering this. They barely discovered this long-chain fatty acid that isn't present in the vegan diet. So for us to now buy a supplement of that one thing and think that we've solved the problems with the vegan diet, I don't think that would be valid. How do we know that two years from now, six years from now they're not going to be discovering other little things that we didn't know existed before that are lacking on the vegan diet? What we do know is that there are some sorts of nutritional deficiencies in the vegan diet, and we're starting to discover what some of those deficiencies are. For instance, David Wolfe and Gabriel Cousens want to develop a supplement for that long-chain fatty acid.

Frederic: DHA?

Naz: EPA. That's a long-chain fatty acid and one of the things it protects against is depression, which is one of the reasons vegans also have a higher incidence of suicide, clinical depression, anxiety attacks and panic attacks.

Jinjee's Note: I'd like to see the statistics/evidence for this statement.

Rhio: Me too!

Naz: It may be because they're not getting enough of this EPA long-chain fatty acid. So Gabriel and David Wolfe are interested in developing a supplement they would sell that would be a vegan source for EPA. Right now, there's one plant source that some people can get their EPA from. It's an herb that grows wild like a weed and is called purslane. The thing about that is that only people with good digestion can absorb the EPA from the purslane. People with good digestion can do that. But people with less than average digestion can't.

Rhio: Purslane is a wild vegetable that is characterized as a weed. It is easy to grow and even E A S I E R to digest. Why would a supplement of EPA be easier to digest than the actual item? One of the benefits of a raw diet, over time, is that the digestion becomes very good. It's one of the first areas of improvement for most people.

Frederic: If you were a vegetarian who eats dairy and eggs, would you get EPA from the animal products that you're eating?

Naz: Here's what we know: we know that vegetarians who eat a bit of dairy and some eggs live longer and healthier and have less nutritional deficiencies.

Jinjee's Note: Again, I'd like to see the studies. I've done extensive research on my own and read the medical journals and haven't heard of any such thing. How old are these studies? Are they from before the relatively recent proliferation of organic produce?

Naz: You've got the possibility to eat some dairy and/or eggs, but since some people have problems digesting dairy, eggs are a good option. Eggs seem to have some nutrients that dairy doesn't have, and it seems to me that eggs seem to have everything in them that meat has, but the dairy only has most of what meat has. So I think that the person who eats dairy will be helping themselves nutritionally, but not as much as if they eat eggs. So then the thing is to get organic eggs from free-range chickens.
I guess this is my point: rather than try and figure out what exact supplement or what exact fatty acid we need to take to be a vegan, it seems to me that by far the safer thing to do is just be a vegetarian who eats some eggs and a bit of dairy, because of that point that I keep coming back to. They keep discovering these different things that are deficient in the vegan diet every couple years. So even if right now you take a particular supplement that's supposed to handle some particular problem now, you don't really know that in two years or eight years they're not going to discover that vegans are still dying of these problems and so, we still are lacking something. We don't know how this is going to come out. So, the safest thing to do is to simply start eating some organic eggs.

Frederic: Is Fish Healthy?

But then, if we take your arguments further and someone was just interested in health, would that be healthier not to be a strict vegetarian, and have fish occasionally?

Naz: If a person doesn't have the ethical considerations, then the healthiest diet might be to include some fish. However, I do have myself the ethical problems with that, so that's not what I'm recommending to people. I feel that if we can make the step to become vegetarian, this generation, that we're doing a great thing. We are making a giant step in the right direction of ethics. Just becoming a vegetarian is doing a good thing. But to answer your question, if a person didn't have the ethical problems with eating fish, would that be healthy? Well the answer is probably yes, as long as it wasn't fish from a polluted source that has mercury or something like that.

Rhio: And where would you be finding that source, pray tell? And while we're at it, let's just add a little meat… and we're back where we started… looking for health in all the wrong places.

Frederic: Raw Versus Pasteurized Dairy Products, Eggs

Here in Canada you don't find raw dairy products, except cheese. You only find pasteurized dairy milk. So what would you recommend?

Naz: What I would recommend is going to a health food store and buying the health-food store variety of yogurt or kefir. The reason is that those are live-foods, because of the fermentation process and the culture, even though they're not raw.

Frederic: So that still would give you the benefits?

Naz: You see, even though we all hear about all the problems with pasteurization, we shouldn't forget the problems with non-pasteurized dairy. For instance, dying of the worst case of diarrhea you can possibly imagine! Because when you drink raw milk, there's the possibility that it's contaminated with E-coli. So there are the pros and cons of unpasteurized dairy products. If a person is not concerned with things like E-coli in a raw egg, they could simply put a couple of raw eggs in their smoothies, if they are trying to be raw-foodists.

Frederic: Just the yolk or the whole thing?

Naz: I would say the whole thing, and the reason is because the egg white has the protein, but the yolk has certain fatty acids that seem to be important for the brain.

Frederic: The Latest Raw Vegan Diets

Some people recommend a fruit-based, low-fat raw diet, and say that you actually won't get the problems that all these other raw-food people are getting because they're eating so much fat. What are your thoughts on this?

Naz: Over the years, I've seen every imaginable variety of the raw food diet, and the one common denominator that I've seen over a period of time is that the raw-vegan diet over a period of years seems to be nutritionally deficient. That's my opinion. It seems to me that a raw-vegan diet, over a period of years, leads to severe nutritional deficiencies.

This is one of the problems: there will always be people pitching some particular variation of the raw diet, which is going to be the true solution, if you just do this. And of course they'll write a book about it and will be on the lecture circuit about it. The problem is that a couple years go by and that's no longer the "in" variation - it's some other variation take its place, a couple years later some other variation. What I've seen is that no variation that is raw-vegan for years in a row seems to be adequate.

Rhio: But Naz is pitching his version of the "true solution" too! I think we should stop disparaging each other and just give the information and opinions and let people engage their own intelligence in the discussion and implementation. I also notice from the whole interview that Naz seems to have a problem with people writing books and going on the lecture circuit. He seems to feel that raw food authors have nothing of value to say. My opinion is that raw food writers/speakers have a lot of value to say. Many of them have certainly informed and inspired me! Even the less than credible information (like this interview, for example) is good because it gets me "inging"; that is, thinking, investigating, studying, evaluating, reevaluating, canvassing, rejecting, reformulating, researching, rechecking, inquiring, exploring, probing, stimulating, analyzing, etc.

Naz: The diet that you're particularly mentioning there: where is it going to get that long-chain fatty acid that we're talking about? Where is it going to get its B-12, where is it going to get its complete protein? Those are very real issues. In the raw food movement, people will read an old Arnold Ehret book, which talks about the possibility of making protein from the air we breathe, and they'll just believe they can do it. And yet, not one human being has ever been shown to be able to do it. They'll read in an old fruitarian book that suggests that we could make B-12 in our gut, like some of the animals do. And even today, if you ask vegans, if they believe that they can make B-12 in their own gut, more than half of them believe that they do. Because I've asked that question, and most people have that belief in the vegan movement that we are making our own B-12 in our gut, in a way that we can live off that B-12 and utilize it. In reality, not one human being has ever been shown to be able to do. That's the science. Not one human being has ever been able to demonstrate that they were living off the B-12 in their gut. In Gabriel Cousens' latest bulletin on this B-12 problem, he says that the only way a human being could live off B-12 made in their gut would be if they ate their own feces. And I don't think that that's going to become a popular option.

Jinjee's Note: According to Dr. Gina Shaw and others, B12 is created in our bodies in our small intestines, which is where many nutrients are absorbed into the blood stream. Storm has had no animal products in over 30 years and is not B12 deficient so either he is manufacturing it in his gut or he is getting it from the raw fruits and vegetables he eats or he doesn't need B12 to be a fully functioning 54 year old who looks 30. Now if a person doesn't have access to fresh organic foods, and if they feel or look deficient, and if they have tried to handle it with a balanced raw vegan diet including juicing and that didn't work, or if they don't have the time or desire to do juicing, then perhaps a B12 supplement would benefit them.

Naz: That's the problem with these variations of the raw-vegan diet, like the one you asked me about specifically. Those variations don't supply the essential fatty acids that the brain needs; they don't supply enough of the complete amino acids. They don't supply enough of the B-12 and other essential nutrients, and that's why people, after they've been on those diets for lengths of time, end up having nutritional deficiencies. So I don't know that there are exceptions to the rule, but I acknowledge that there might be. What I say about that is that the dangerous thing for everyone who comes to the raw-food movement is to just believe that they are going to be the exception to the rule, when statistically, most likely they're not going to be.

Jinjee's Note: I would like to see some of these statistics but put together by a party that doesn't sell supplements.

Frederic: But then these people, like in the case of that diet, would take your argumentation and dissect it and then explain with science how you can find all these things in their diet. That's usually what happens.

Naz: You're right, that's usually what happens. However, if one takes their science and shows it to a nutritional scientist, the nutritional scientist will pooh-pooh their argument, and will show the flaws in it. It gets as bad that in a lot of these books that are used in the raw-food movement where it lists the amount of protein available in certain food sources, and a lot of those table are just plain old non-accurate. They're printed in a book, and it looks scientific, but it's just not true. There are people that believe that there's a whole bunch of protein in watermelon because one of the old raw-food authors used to claim that and put it in his book. There are people that I personally know who started eating only watermelon, or made that the chief element of their diet, thinking it's their primary protein source.
In the raw-food movement the problem is that you have a lot of pseudo-science, which doesn't hold up to the scrutiny of actual science.

Rhio: There are amino acids in watermelon as in every other fruit and vegetable. As far as more concentrated protein, it is in the watermelon seeds, which can be made into a tasty drink.

Naz: True Raw-Vegan Believers

I want to say that you will never convince "true believers" of any "ism" that there are problems with their "ism." And so I don't even attempt to do that. For the interview, I simply honestly answered questions that you've asked, but I'm not attached to changing anybody's mind, and I'm not living in the illusion that I'm going to change a bunch of raw-vegan minds, because I've already experienced the fact that I'm not going to. Already, all that's happened to me by sharing honestly the information that I've shared with you is that I got kind of blackballed by the raw-vegan movement. They just tried to discredit me, instead of deal with these realities of nutritional deficiencies in a raw-vegan diet.

Jinjee's Note: Actually, I'm getting lots of letters from people saying that this interview has affected them and that they are considering going off the 100% raw vegan diet.

Naz: But there are some regular folks who come to the raw-food movement because of all the hype and then start to experience problems in their own bodies.

Jinjee's Note: What you have given us is opinion and personal experience, which is valid. The information that you have given us would be more useful if backed up with studies, articles or sources.

Rhio: Also, most people come to the raw diet in the first place BECAUSE of illness. There are thousands of cases of recovery on this diet that cannot be discredited. Last year when I did a fundraiser for the Ann Wigmore Institute, I had many of her former students come out to support; still recovered, still healthy, still grateful. Brian Clement had a radio show in Florida where he interviewed many people who have been "divested" of their diseases after going through the program at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach. (I use the word, divested, because the allopathic medical system has coopted the word "cured" and made it illegal for any other system to use the term, except themselves.) Even though science does not admit the value of "evidence-based studies", most health seeking individuals would not discredit it. Evidence-based studies are called "anecdotal" and disparaged. But I believe if you have 1000 cases of people who were healed of cancer, as an example, by the raw/live food diet, this is indisputable evidence that the diet has contributed to their healing. "Science" of course, presently, will never admit this... but enlightenment is coming...

Naz: If they see the information that I've given you, a few of them might be moved to take positive steps, which could result in saving themselves a lot of pain and misery,

Jinjee's Note: Or it could lead them TO a lot of pain and misery.

Naz: and that's why I bother to share this information at all. It's not because I have the delusion that I'm going to convince the defenders of an "ism" to give up their "ism" - rather, I'm more concerned about members of the public receiving all this hype, that if you get into the raw-food vegan diet, you're going to live to be 120 years in really good health. See, I used to believe that, and I used to teach that. I believed it because that's what people told me, and that's what was in the raw-food books, and so I parroted it.

Frederic: A Challenge to the Raw-Vegan Movement

Is there anything you'd like to add before we end this interview?

Naz: I want to with a challenge to the raw-vegan movement. Find us one really old raw-vegan. One. I've been in the raw-vegan movement for over twenty years, and I have never met a healthy, really old raw-vegan, who's been on the raw-vegan diet for decades or anything like that. In other words, if by eating the raw-vegan diet, we're going to live to be a 120 years old and be disease free, then how come, when you attend a national raw-food conference, there any isn't old raw-vegans there? There's some in their 60's and 70s who have been trying to do the diet and have problems in their own lives. But why aren't there any 100 year old raw-vegans anywhere? The raw-food movement is not new, but was popular in 1800's, when the first Natural Hygiene movement started advocating the raw diet. Then it was really big in the 1940's with Shelton. Why have we never seen a single 100 year old raw-vegan? Why has there never been a 90-year-old raw-vegan speaker at any of raw-vegan conferences?

Jinjee's Note: The raw-vegan movement has always been a fringe movement. It is now for the first time coming into the mainstream. I think we will definitely see some examples of 120 to 140 year old raw vegans in the next 70 years or so. Enough of us have to hold fast for this to come about. What happened to a lot of the raw-vegan gurus of the past is that they were so passionate about sharing the diet that they burned their candle at both ends, working insanely to get the information out there, seeing hundreds of people a week who came to them for healing, often charging nothing, that they overworked themselves. Then when their health started failing they would fall prey to self-doubt, and they would start eating meat. But as we age on the raw-vegan diet we have to realize that we are still mortal, that we will age, and realize that we would age much faster if we weren't raw, and keep the faith. Another thing that happens is that really successful raw-vegans often go into seclusion as Storm had before I brought him out of it. They get tired of the teaching, healing, public grind. It doesn't pay that well, and can be an incredible drain. There comes a time when you say, why try to help all these people. Its really simple knowledge. Just do it. I'm going to use my raw energy to just have a good life myself.

Rhio: Just because something hasn't been done before doesn't automatically make it undoable. This was one of the arguments that I had with my partner, Leigh. He used to always tell me "Well, show me, show me someone who's doing it." and I'd say to him, "We are the new pioneers attempting this. We will prove it." Not a satisfactory answer for him, although he's been a very good sport about it. Looking back at the raw food enthusiasts from the last two centuries, we can learn from their mistakes.

We have the right to aspire to something different. A more equitable world, lived in peace, is not something that has been accomplished yet either, but we have the right to dream and aspire towards it. So, I will continue to dream of these things and like Jinjee, work to make them a reality in my own life and lifetime.

Frederic: So that's your challenge?

Naz: Yes, that's my challenge. And even if someone were to come up with one 90 year old raw-vegan, I think that my point is still made, because they'd have to struggle pretty hard to find that one. There aren't a bunch of old raw-vegans! I'm a child of the 1960's. I was born in the 1950's, and so, I was shaped by the 1960s, and believe me, in the 1960's, we had raw-food gatherings then. Ann Wigmore, before her Shelton - all these people existed back then. All of them died. All the great leaders of the raw-food movement in the 1960s are dead. And at no raw-food conferences in the 1960s was there ever a 100-year-old speaker, or a 90-year-old speaker even. And in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, I've never met any of them. You hear legends about Dr. Walker...

Jinjee's Note: Let's take up this challenge and become the examples he is looking for! Walk that second mile! Any 90+ year old raw-vegans lurking out there?

Rhio: Even if there were, they might not want to admit to it, given that we're living in a society of ageism. I met a woman in one of my visits to the Ann Wigmore Institute, she was in her forties but looked 30. She told me that recently she was in a social situation where a young man was flirting with her and she was flirting back. Their conversation came to ages and when she told him hers, he noticeably cooled. All of a sudden, they had nothing further in common to talk about. It's brutal, the attitudes that are held in our society.

Frederic: But he wasn't a raw-vegan?

Naz: He wasn't a raw-vegan and he wasn't a vegan. In one of his books, he talks about how important goat's milk is, and he was drinking goat's milk. And even with him, who wasn't a vegan, definitely there are questions about how old he actually lived to be. Because, you hear all sorts of different numbers. Unless someone actually produces a birth certificate, we don't really know how old he was. But he's the only example I've heard people give. And then I point out to them that he wasn't a vegan. So you have to admit that most people who come in and hear the hype believe that if they become a raw-vegan, they are going to experience some great health benefits, and are going to live a long time. And yet, if that's true, since the raw-vegan movement has existed since the 1800s, and certainly was very popular since the 1940's with natural hygiene and became even more popular in the 1960s, why aren't there any old raw-vegans speaking at the raw-vegan conferences?

Final Comments by Frédéric Patenaude

Nazariah's experience with the raw vegan diet is not unique, although not everybody will experience such dramatic problems. The conclusion we can clearly draw from his experience (as well as backed up by my own experience and research) is:

1. The raw vegan diet is not a guarantee for health.
2. Eating 100% raw is not necessary for optimal health. If this is practiced, it should be done with careful planning.
3. Every vegan should be taking a B-12 supplement to insure optimal health in the long-term.
4. We shouldn't believe invariably raw-vegan "experts" or what is written in books, because the information is often not accurate.

As for whether we should be vegans or not, I do not necessarily go in the same direction as Nazariah. I do not believe that everybody should start eating some animal products. I believe that every vegan should be taking a B-12 supplement, but also that the inclusion of some animal products in the diet can be useful to many people.

I wish to say that I'm personally not convinced that a vegan diet cannot be healthy. I think it depends on each individual. I personally have found benefits in including some animal products in my diet, and many others have found that too.

There are many health benefits to becoming at least mainly vegetarian or even mainly vegan, as well as increasing the amount of raw fruits and vegetables that we eat.

Jinjee's Note: Storm has in the past taken groups of young gang kids to McDonalds and bought them all hamburgers, then taken them running in the heat of the high-desert summer in the mountains. He enjoys watching them drop like flies along the trail, as he preaches raw food to them. In conclusion, plenty of evidence is available to support whatever you want to do, raw, vegan, vegetarian, cooked, or SAD. My Mother pulls out studies showing that smoking may be good for you. I don't know how she finds them, but they are out there! Search your own soul. Examine your own experiences honestly. Experiment with different variations of the raw vegan diet. Maybe the raw-vegan diet is for you and maybe it isn't. I only hope I have dispelled any fears that the raw-vegan diet is unsafe for everyone in the long-term. And I hope that I have shown that nobody really understands the whole complex composition of foods, diet, and the human body. Science can't prove very much. One person's experience can't prove very much. Human health, the journey of life and death, is a mysterious journey that is not just scientific and not just spiritual but that is a dance between the two, within each one of us, and created by all of us as we move together through the ages towards our breathtaking destiny!
Contact me, Jinjee at info@thegardendiet.com or visit our family online at http://www.thegardendiet.com

Jinjee's Sources:
* http://www.rawfoods.com/articles/b12issue.html
-article by Dr. Gina Shaw explains well how vitamin B12 is absorbed in the body
* http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2000/dec2000_report_b12_3.html
-B12 supplements are better than meat for B12 deficiency. Cooking meat may affect vitamin B12
-Symptoms of B12 deficiency include: dizziness, numbness in extremities, chills, erectile dysfunction, irritability, painful tongue, white spots on tongue, and exhaustion
-Americans in general are B12 deficient because of over-cooking of meat and pharmaceuticals which rob the body of B12* http://www.mercola.com/2000/aug/27/vitamin_b12_deficiency.htm
-Tufts Study shows 40% of Americans are B12 deficient
* "Eating for Health and Wellness"
-Joel Robbins, M.D., N.D., D.C., PhD in Bio Chemistry

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