Blogdate 7/12/06

This blog is in the form of a letter that I answered today. I think that we get on the average of 30 emails a week asking about our stand on the supplement issue. I don't like to come into direct conflict with anyone in the movement if I can help it. I think that the main thing is that we come together on the points that bind us. The common denominators that most raw fooders agree on is that we should not put our food in the fire. I think that supplements would be totally wrong for me. The whole reason that I eat raw food is so that I can have my food with all of its nutrients intact. But supplements might be right for some people for whatever reason. In the end you have to find a way that works for you. Here is the letter I wrote today on the subject:

Dear Joe,

I'm going to try answering your question as best as I can without sounding like a pompous know it all. There seems to be this huge issue raging around the vitamin B12 question. I have been a raw vegan for over thirty years and during that time I have not taken any supplements. I have been able to get all of my nutrients from the food that I eat. My children have never taken any supplements in their whole lives and they also get all of the nutrients from the foods that they eat. My wife has been pregnant and/or nursing for 13 years straight and has not taken any supplements during this time. We have regular check ups and we are all doing fine.

Let's say the human race is two million years old. These supplements have only been around for the last 100 years. My question is how did we make it for all of those thousands and thousands of years. They say humans have only used fire for cooking for 10,000 years so for most of the existence of human kind we have eaten raw food without supplements.

I think that what happens when we have a balanced raw vegan diet is that we eat the building blocks that our bodies need and we are then able to build the different nutrients that we need. For example if we eat foods that have the protein building blocks such as dark leafy greens then we don't need to eat the flesh of animals to acquire protein. I know that this is a simplification of a very complex process.

I have seen some research that suggests that we make B12 in our stomach. Other research shows that we recycle B12 and that it is not passed out of our bodies or destroyed. My response has always been when people tell me that you can't get B12 from any plant source so therefore you have to eat meat - well nine times out of ten you are eating a vegetarian animal so where did the animal get the B12 from? This is a huge issue and it is bringing me in direct conflict with a lot of people in the raw food movement. But most of those people are selling supplements from their websites.

As for the MDs I think that what is happening is that they are dealing with people who almost 100% of them eat cooked food. Fire destroys the nutrients in our food so just about all cooked foodists are missing nutrients. So it is just normal and natural for doctors to put us on supplements. I guess my main problem with supplements is that sometimes they can do more harm than good. It is all about balance and when we start trying to out-do nature we often come up short. We continue to discover new vitamins so there are probably still a lot of vitamins that have not yet been discovered. Many of these vitamins must be present for other vitamins to be absorbed. So when you depend on a vitamin pill regimen that may be lacking in essential components then your are really placing yourself at risk. But when you eat food in its natural state that also has a lot of nutrients present that have not been discovered yet then I feel like you are covering all of the bases both known and unknown.

When we take calcium and it doesn't get absorbed then it turns into stones in our bladder and kidneys. When we take iron supplements and it does not get absorbed then it also turn into lumps or stones in different organs and can cause inflammations and other health problems over a long period of time. Some vitamins in the form of supplements not only do not get absorbed but they also prevent other vitamins from being absorbed.

I think that one of the reasons that the supplement industry became so big is because of the shelf life. Here you have a product that takes up hardly any space and it sells for 30 or 40 dollars. It has a shelf life of anywhere from 6 months to a year and it is easy to scare people into thinking that they really need them.

But on the other hand organic produce is expensive. It takes refrigeration, it is only has a shelf life of a few days and then the store has to take a loss. In fact a lot of health food stores make over 85 percent of their profits from the sale of supplements. And now that the raw vegan movement is gaining momentum a lot of raw food websites are getting major traffic. There is almost no way to make money from this traffic by selling produce; just the shipping alone would wipe out any prospect of profit, but on the other hand if you can sell supplements from a website then you stand to make a fortune.

Anytime the industry wants to sell us a new supplement they get an actor and dress him up like a doctor and tell us all of the bad things that can happen to us if we don't take this supplement. Most of us are feeling so run down from trying to process massive amounts of cooked food with hardly any nutrients in it that we totally want to believe these marketing tactics. This is very very effective. I have sometimes even wondered if I was doing myself irreparable harm by not buying into these trends. But after the years went by and I just kept feeling better and better I realized that I might be onto something. I realized that the people who were spending hundreds of dollars a month on supplements were not doing as well as I was.

So at this point based upon my own personal experiences I would say that it is possible to get one hundred percent of the nutrients you need from the Raw Vegan Diet. Jinjee and I are not rich people. We struggle every month like most of the people in America to make ends meet and to somehow have enough time to spend with our kids and we worry about where the future is going to lead us. We have a lot of traffic to our website and we have been approached by some major players in the supplement industry. If we were to place ads for supplements on our website and endorse them we could easily make over 100,000 dollars a month. This would be heaven to us. We could actually exhale. But this is something that I feel so strongly about that you won't find one supplement ad on any of the websites that we control.

I wish you all the best and please check out our new media site The Natural Paradigms Channel because we are going to be taking a lot of really simple common sense ideas and putting them into a story format in the form of entertainment instead of a lecture.

In health,

Storm

Comments to Storm’s blog can be emailed to storm@thegardendiet.com

My Previous Blog Entries

Blogdate 6-23-06 - Quantum Physics, Aging and the Art of War....Solar Energy.....

Blogdate 4-3-06 - Who Am I ...Aging....Energy on Demand....Most Memorable Retreat....

Blogdate 12-10-05 - The future is bright...

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