There is a sizeable community of people who practice raw veganism near where I live and these folks are hard core. Needless to say, these folks love the green smoothies diet.
This is easy to understand as those who embark on raw veganism typically feel fantastic for quite some time while eating this way. Â Raw veggies are extremely detoxifying! For several months or even a year or two, increased energy, clear skin and resistance to infection may be observed.
Is this because raw veganism is the right way to eat long term? Is the vegan Netflix film What The Health really on to something big?
Far from it.Â
Raw Veganism is for Cleansing the Body, Not Nourishing It!
Raw veganism is really a cleansing diet which helps to detoxify the body. It does not optimally nourish the body long term, however.
The raw, whole foods that vegans consume are certainly a huge leap forward from conventional processed foods and anyone would initially feel better eating raw vegan if he/she had been eating the Standard American Diet previously.
Over time, as the body becomes depleted of minerals, serious health issues start to emerge if raw veganism is continued.
This is because the fat soluble activators A, D, and K2 – only found in animal foods – supercharge mineral absorption and without these critical nutrients in the diet, mineral depletion and ill health is the inevitable result.
The bottom line? You can eat loads of mineral rich foods as a raw vegan and still be mineral starved.
Nutritional Deficiencies Rapidly Occur on a Raw Vegan Diet
Watch this 3 minute video below where Maria, a former fan of raw veganism and the creator of the Green Smoothie Challenge discusses her abrupt conversion to nutrient dense animal foods due to the health and tooth challenges she experienced after two years as a raw vegan. Her vegan catharsis came after reading Rami Nagel’s book Cure Tooth Decay.
You will be shocked how rapidly her health challenges resolved after she began to consume nutrient dense animal foods such as cod liver oil, raw butter, and organ meats.
If you know any folks that practice raw veganism, please forward this video.  Folks who follow veganism are in serious denial about how this way of eating is going to eventually destroy their health if it hasn’t already and a testimonial from a former hard core vegan may be just what they need to realize that humans are not designed to subsist purely on plant foods.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
More Information
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12 Year old vegan has bones of an 80 year old
Thank you! This article seems to be all about bashing veganism from every angle, and is attracting the usual level of mainstream response. I agree it’s guilt-driven – people have to find excuses to justify their actions, especially when so many people are finding the nutritional wonders of a natural (aka vegan) diet. I think someday it will be common sense, as it already is for many people. In the meantime, people are very motivated to bash it and spread misinformation.
Having been a vegan for almost 20 years, I find that this kind of disinformation never stops, regardless of what facts are found. Nevertheless, it is disappointing to see the level of ignorance in the article as well as many of the comments. I especially hate to see ignorant people advising others on nutrition of all things. Readers beware.
“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car.” ~Harvey Diamond
This ‘article’ is complete bunk – there are many factors to health, such as exercise and emotional health, that could have caused her failing health, and her ‘recovery’ could have also been the result of many factors, even psychological. I have been completely vegan for almost 20 years and my health has continuously improved (vastly). Raw is even better (I am not completely raw, but 50% raw and going ever higher – all cooking does is destroy nutrients and create toxins, so raw veganism includes more nutrients!). I have never followed any diet – I merely eat colorfully (variety) and listen to my body.
The human body is not designed for animal products at all. We have the long digestive system and dull teeth of herbivores because that’s what we are. Every animal product is linked with disease and dysfunction when consumed by humans.
Educate yourself on nutrition for real, rather than following anecdotal scare stories. Record numbers of people are returning themselves and their children to vegan and vegetarian diets. As a result, there is a push to scare people back into the fold of disease and unethical treatment of animals. I highly recommend that anyone interested in this subject read John Robbins books: Food Revolution as well as the older Diet For a New America. Robbins is a man who walks his talk, and there is real science there.
I’m not sure about not being designed to eat meat at all… our digestive tracks are nowhere near the length of veg-eating animals.
As to this statement:
“Every animal product is linked with disease and dysfunction when consumed by humans.”
I think it’s just plain untrue. Read some of Dr. NCM’s research for GAPS.
While I agree that this anecdotal story is not the end-all, noone is suggesting you go on an all-meat diet, and from unhealthy animals at that. There is a happy medium.
Magda, For their size, the human digestive tract is very long, unlike all meat-eaters. When a dog ingests meat, it gets no cholesterol poisoning – dogs are carnivores. When a human eats meat, cholesterol poisoning occurs, and many other diseases as well. If you believe you’re made to eat meat, let’s see you eat a rat corpse using nothing but your teeth. Your teeth are suitable for breaking the skin of fruit at most – they will have a heck of time even breaking the skin of the rat, let alone chewing it. Not to mention you’ll vomit and find it disgusting – this is your body saying NO! Eat an apple – your body says YES! It’s just common sense.
You can think what you want about it being untrue, but disease rates are elevated with consumption of any animal products. The reason is simple – it’s the wrong fuel for the machine. The idea that veganism is some radical diet is merely the product of a twisted culture that includes all kinds of self-destructive behaviors and myths. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds – this is what the human body truly thrives on. Anything else you put in it just weighs it down and causes dysfunction.
The person who had a problem with the raw vegan diet, if true, was probably simply not eating a well-balanced diet. Especially with raw vegan, a little knowledge is needed simply because new sources of food must be included. Simply eating the standard American filth diet minus animal products will be very unhealthy because you’re not balancing your diet.
I also recommend taking a quality multivitamin, especially for B12. B12 is available to vegans in a natural setting (from natural water sources, minute amounts of soil on the skin of vegetables, etc), but with modern farming practices and water treatment it is largely missing. See http://veganhealth.org/articles/everyvegan
And don’t forget the compassionate side of veganism – it feels GREAT to know one’s diet is cruelty-free. Factory farms are true horrors suffered by millions of animals everyday. Why? So you can eat unhealthy stuff posing as food.
Anyone interested in a vegan diet should read up on the basic nutrition from a reliable source, and don’t be scared by this irrational nonsense. Like I said, John Robbins has great nutritional information in Food Revolution – even for meat-eaters. We simply aren’t taught reality by most ‘experts’ and other sources of information in our culture. There are lots of people telling you all kinds of things, most of it untrue. Believe what you will – it’s your health.
Some interesting info on B12 and its interaction with B9:
Vitamin B12 normally plays a significant role in the metabolism of every cell of the body, especially affecting the DNA synthesis and regulation but also fatty acid synthesis and energy production. However, many (though not all) of the effects of functions of B12 can be replaced by sufficient quantities of folic acid (vitamin B9), since B12 is used to regenerate folate in the body. Most vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms are actually folate deficiency symptoms, since they include all the effects of pernicious anemia and megaloblastosis, which are due to poor synthesis of DNA when the body does not have a proper supply of folic acid for the production of thymine. When sufficient folic acid is available, all known B12 related deficiency syndromes normalize, save those narrowly connected with the vitamin B12-dependent enzymes Methylmalonyl Coenzyme A mutase, and 5-methyltetrahydrofolate-homocysteine methyltransferase (MTR), also known as methionine synthase; and the buildup of their respective substrates (methylmalonic acid, MMA) and homocysteine.
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12
Sorry I don’t believe it. Victoria Boutenko who popularized green smoothies cured her family of several serious illnesses including type one diabetes which doctors say is incurable. and her son who was cured of this has been on the diet for maybe 15 years and the illness did not return.
She said many of her friends started feeling less healthy after MANY years on the diet and had to add some cooked or animal food; however, she did not want to do that and so she searched for the answer which came from her intense study of nutrition and the diet of our closest relatives the chimp who share 9.4% of our exact gene sequence and whose ability to create new words with sign language by stringing 2 or 3 together and having their own sign language in the wild and the study of their diets convinced her of the need to eat greens the most nutritious food on the planet pound for pound.
She found the best way to take the large amounts we need was via green smoothies. She added large amounts of this to her diet when she felt after 13 years of excellent health and feeling younger om a 100% raw vegan whole food diet, she and her husband began to feel older with small signs of health concerns.
After adding the green smoothie to their diet, they felt reversal and either better than when they were 100% raw. In fact, she now states she feels the green smoothies are even more important than the raw veganism. They after time did tend to eat more whole foods rather than gourmet raw vegan foods and that may have also helped them.
Others like Dr Gabriel Cousens, Dave the raw food trucker, David Wolfe etc also have improvements in health from switching to raw vegan which they still maintain..
But even common sense shows this if you believe in God. Why would we be the only animal on earth that needs our foods cooked. If so, why did nature not put stoves on trees rather than hope that man would find how to harness fire. What we need is all found in nature. Why do only our animals we fed get ill (not withstanding the damage we do to animals in the wilds with our factory farm runoff,s gm foods, chemicals, etc). why are green plants which contain chlorophyll said to resemble a human blood transfusion so prevalent in nature.
Nature shows us it is the leaves and above ground fruits and veggies we want..the fruits carry the seeds so the plants die out and animals in nature know to rotate the greens as the plant does not mind you eating some but not all as they put plant poisons like oxalic acid in spinach to force animals to rotate feedings to various types of plant lest they die.
The below the ground produce like carrots and beets etc contain more sugar and are not designed for us but to attract the microorganisms in the soil that the plants need. I do not feel God would have said in the bible I give you plants for your food and herbs for your medicine if this was not the case. Before the flood people were told to eat plants and afterwards they were permitted to eat animals as the plant life was gone and this is when they went from long long lives to much shorter ones.
People who used a raw vegan diet years ago often lived to be very old and in near perfect health such as juice originator Dr Norman Walker and Arnold Ehret Walker lived to be 97 and Ehret and his disciples achieve health beyond their wildest dreams but one must realize they were not eating all the manufactured raw vegan foods but plants as they came from the earth.
Fruits are cleansers and vegetables are builders. Were you eatign too many fruits? How about vegan store products, Also consider that even whole foods can no longer guarantee their foods do not contain gmos
It is ridiculous to think the Creator in his wisdom would create plants with a vast myriad of health benefits, nutrients, phytochemicals and things yet to be discovered but only make them be of help to us if we have a way to cook them or have access and ability to catch animals. Why would he make plants be of substanance to herbivores and give the carnivores the sharp claws and teeth and speed to catch prey but require us to have stoves or fires to survive in health.
I think maybe there is more to the picture. People like Boiutenko and family who were eating a very alkalizing diet still were not able to process beets without it turning their stool and urine reddish but after they added the green smoothies they all were able to eat beets with absolutely no color changes indicating they had reached the perfect ph.
I feel if they try to emulate her and the chimps they need to eat about 40-50% greens in the diet and this is what most animals do that are not meat eaters in the wilds.
I feel what the girl in the video experienced was too rapid cleansing causing healing crisis’s that were too intense. Generally when this happens one goes to a little cooked or animal to slow down the cleansing and then go back to the raw vegan and back and forth until the cleansing period from years of bad eating is reversed. Even Dr Walker advocated a transitional diet to proceed the change to total raw. I recall a lady doing Arnold Ehret diet thought she was in perfect health..she had been vegetarian for years and attended to her diet yet when she went to the produce diet he advocated.
She experienced things like skin softer than a baby’s. zero fatigue despite climbing big hills and standing on her feet all day as a waitress feeling as refreshed as when she arrived, personality changes everyone commented on like being so happy, so calm and peaceful etc and a host of other things. Some like Boutenko’s husband and more notably Anne Wigmore have their hair change from gray back to black..Wigmore who founded the Hippocrates Health institute, had dark non-dyed hair into her 80s and would in her profound energy run for several hours a day..they generally report needing just 2-4 hours to sleep.
oops that should have said chimps share 99.4% of our exact gene sequence in the statement I made (copied below) not 9.4% sorry
“and the diet of our closest relatives the chimp who share 9.4% of our exact gene sequence and whose ability to create new words with sign language by stringing 2 or 3 together and having their own sign language in the wild and the study of their diets convinced her of the need to eat greens the most nutritious food on the planet pound for pound.”
Chimpanzies catch members of rival tribes and eat them raw, guts and all. They’ll also eat other small amimals, and bugs.
A must see for people who believe that a raw vegan diet will build health. Well said. Thank you.
There may be a time and a place for a raw vegan diet. During my own child-bearing years certainly isn’t the time for me. 🙂
I am waiting until my daughter is weaned and then I will start a raw vegan diet until I feel healed from some issues I’ve been having. I have never felt more alive and balanced when I go raw vegan. I am fixing issues I’ve had from 36 years of a SAD lifestyle, obesity, and thyroid issues. Once I am on the mend I will introduce my favorite- chicken broth and start a GAP style diet. I think my ethnicity (Native American, Spanish, Pacific Islander) effects the way certain foods react in me but I won’t be able to figure it out until I get more balanced. Living raw forever makes people look sickly. In my experience anyways.
Raw veganism…not my fav diet and here are some reasons why! http://t.co/MrusBjPq
I’d like to see the evidence/research where you can prove that people are curing cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc… with veganism. Let’s see the facts.
You don’t have to eat organs and blood to absorb the fat soluble vitamins……you need…….fat.
Animals that are herbivores have a different make-up than humans. We were designed to be omnivores. For example – Cows have 4 chambers in their stomach to process the grasses they eat. The grasses are indigestible to them until their specialized stomach process it.
Humans can’t do that. So, you can’t say that because all a cow needs is raw plant food (grass), then by definition all humans need is raw plant food too. That type of reasoning just doesn’t work.
Humans and animals have similarities, sure. But to say we can all process foods the same way is simply and obviously untrue. To say otherwise is ignorant and completely dicredits you.
i hate blanket statements like this. i am not a vegan, but i think a vegan diet suits some people. there are many raw foodists who are among the healthiest people around, like david wolfe. hard to deny- that guy glows! people like clinton, he probably needs some meat. i’d like to see a follow-up article on the overconsumption of meat, esp in this country, and how it affects health and the environment.
Is there an overconsumption of meat in this country? I have never heard this before… do you have any references for this? To add, there is a huge difference between consuming nitrate/nitrite laden ‘meats’ like hot dogs and bacon to consuming local grassfed meats with their fat. There is no comparison and no studies that I have seen account for this fat. The GAPS diet is based on healthy fats and meats and their broths for healing – I don’t think you can argue with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride there…
I think vegetarian diet can be followed long-term and be health. Vegan – not long term, unless supplemented and even there I’d be careful.
Go see the website for The Harvard School of Nutritional Science. The average American consumes about 12-14 oz of meat a day, when the recommended daily intake is no more than 9 oz (2-3 three ounce portions). The average size for a steak is 8 oz. The average hamburger in a restaurant is 6-8 oz. A chicken breast is typically 6 oz. Looks like overconsumption to me.
Who recommends the 9 oz?? While I don’t know exactly what the daily intake would be, on the GAPS diet (especially intro) you would probably eat more than 12-14 anyway… For me it would be all or mostly pastured/local meats with no antibiotics, etc. Is that bad if I’m trying to heal and happen to believe in Dr NCM’s protocol? I don’t think so. Long-term I would probably scale down the meats and eat more veggies but meat and fat happen to heal the fastest.
Wow, that David Wolfe sure sells a lot of products through his site……….people like this I always distrust. They’ve turned their ‘beliefs’ into a business, instead of just teaching and sharing. I find someone like that very hard to take seriously or have much legitimacy. Is he doing it for the money or to enlighten and help people? I think he’s a clever entrepeneur.
Wow, just looking at his website now. He promotes this Longevity Warehouse? Is this his own online store? It’s very unclear. If so, this guy is definitely in it for the money. Just look at the supplements alone!! I very much doubt they are all raw and they are from so many different brands as well. That website alone tells me this guy’s not the superhero he makes himself out to be. Just cashing in on the popularity of ‘wellness’.
Plus, if you need all those supplements to stay healthy, then that’s a problem as well – that’s not a raw foodie lifestyle – that’s an eat what I want and let the supplements fill the gaps, kind of lifestyle. Definitely unhealthy. Just like a junk food eater who takes vitamins so he/she thinks they’re covered……..when in fact they are just getting sicker and sicker.
I don’t know anything about David Wolfe, but I fail to see how him promoting certain products and profiting from that promotion is any different than what is happening on many nutrition websites including this one. The so-called “Resources” page right here on this website is simply a page of ads. Sarah doesn’t suggest any resources unless she is paid to do so. I’m not saying that makes her a bad person. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for the content you provide on your website, but it is silly to pretend what he is doing is any different that what Sarah is doing simply because you agree with her agenda and disagree with his.
well making money or not people like this do help a lot of people. I personally stay away form making money so the info I give is strictly from the heart and mind and people know my 50 hours a week of helping others free is not done for money.
However, Victoria Boutenko makes money and has tremendously taught and motivated me. David Wolfe motivated the lady with 5th stage kidney disease so much she gave up animals, starting eating a lot of produce and reversed her kidney disease..due to him and Dave the Rae food trucker and my posts on curezone (neither of the last two do this for any money) she was motivated and hopeful and reversed her disease.
Here is a lady who ate the SAD die for 60 year, completely unacknowledgable of everything nutrition related and I can bet you when she saw what this new lifestyle did for her healthy, you can be sure she is never going back to the sad diet
So regardless of if he makes money, I would guess he motivates and indirectly helps a lot of people as do those like Boutenko who cure themselves of serious illnesses and then research so thoroughly we can all benefit form the info in her books.
Maybe these people would not be able to devote so much time to speaking and helping and motivating etc if they had to work the regular 9-5 job.
As long as they give some help and info for free unlike people like say Kevin Trudeau or Sam Biser who are after megabucks for their info and care more for moeny than dying and sick people, I don’t care if they make some money off it ..what is more important is do they change and educate people and motivate then to eat better Are they the kind of people who if you approached them personally with an illness, would they take the time to help you.
I am sure many people do it for free before they start getting burned out and need a little something back and chose it to be in the form of income.
@ theresa: “That guy glows”. . . yeah, but you don’t know what he really eats. Just because he promotes the vegan lifestyle and sells tons of stuff on his web site, doesn’t mean that’s truly how he lives his life. Remember, this is the internet and you aren’t face to face with him either. If you live in the same town, look him up and track what he eats, otherwise take the whole deal with a grain of salt. None of us knows for positive how ANYONE else truly eats, we only know what they say they eat. Isn’t that true? It’s true of me, it’s true of you and it’s true of everyone who posts here, right?
10 bucks says Bill Clinton is eating The Standard Vegan Diet of processed meat replacements, too much white pasta, and too many refined grains. That is NOT healthy vegan eating. That’s not whole foods vegan eating.