As an internationally known surgeon, researcher and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D., made the case for a plant-based as a cure to cardiac trouble, a feat he explains in his book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. Yes, you read right – prevent AND reverse. But you don’t have heart disease (yet), you say? Read on. In this revealing interview, Dr. Esselstyn, who will soon be talking plant-based heart health on the big screen in the groundbreaking film Forks Over Knives, speaks about the surprising young age we start to develop heart disease, how grave the situation is, and how we can completely avoid it.

Maryl Celiz: What in your practice prompted you to think of a plant-based diet as a treatment for heart disease?
Caldwell Esselstyn: It was sort of an evolution for me. I started out as a surgeon, and it was halfway through my surgical career when I was chairman of our breast cancer task force that it was apparent that no matter how many patients for whom I was doing breast surgery, I wasn’t doing one single thing for the next unsuspecting victim. In other words, why were people developing breast cancer, was the question. And I began sort of a global research pattern and it was striking to me that in the late 70s early 80s, even in Kenya and Africa, for instance, breast cancer was something like 20-30 times less frequently seen than in the United States. In Japan, in the early 1950s, it was very infrequently seen. But as soon as the Japanese would migrate to the United States, the second and third generation of Japanese-Americans began to have the same rate of breast cancer as their Caucasian counterpart. Perhaps even more compelling was cancer of the prostate, which, in the entire nation of Japan, in 1958 how many autopsy common deaths were there from cancer of the prostate? Eighteen – in the entire nation. Very striking public health figure. By 1978 they were up to about 137, which still pales in comparison to the over 28,000 that will die this year from prostate cancer in this country. About that time I began to feel that my bones would long be dust before I really had the answers to nutrition and cancer, although in hind sight I’m not sure that’s true. But the decision was made at that time to get at cancer through heart disease, because it was quite striking that in this global review, there were a number of cultures that were plant-based, where cardiac disease was virtually unknown. I mean, even today, if you want to look at rural China, the Papuan islands and New Guinea, central Africa, the Tarahumara indians in northern Mexico, heart disease is virtually non-existent. So, it was really very powerful epidemiological evidence, and there was some experimental evidence with animals to suggest that, if they did have a diet that was plant-based, they would be absolutely free of heart disease, and perhaps if we employed this on patients who are ravaged with heart disease, we could actually not only halt it but reverse it.

MC: How and why does a plant-based diet work to reverse heart disease?
CE: Well, to answer that question, all experts I think would agree that the initiation of heart disease, and the build up of plaque in the arteries is caused by injury to the inner lining of the artery. It’s the inner lining of the artery that has the amazing capacity to make a molecule called nitric oxide, which protects us. As long as we have absolutely lots and lots of nitric oxide being made by the lining of our artery, we’re fine. But, sadly, the typical Western diet we’ve now learned over the last 15-18 years that, every time these certain foods pass our lips, they impair, they compromise, and they injure the lining of our artery, so that it’s making less and less and less of this wonderful protective nitric oxide.  So much so that by, let’s say, age 20, the average age at which our GIs were autopsied in Korea and Vietnam, and even without a microscope, 80% of those GIs autopsies had evidence of coronary artery heart disease. That’s a pretty darn young age to have this. Now, they weren’t far enough advanced in the disease yet to have the heart attacks or the clinical events, which were probably still several decades away. But there it is, already established in people who are that young. And we thought for some time that it might be due to the stress of the military. So, another study was done 40 years later, where they looked at thousands of adults between the ages of 17 and 38, who were dying of accidents, homicides, and suicides. And low and behold, they found that the disease is now ubiquitous: everybody had it. This is pretty powerful evidence that it is the Western foods that are doing it.

MC: What are the Western foods that are causing heart disease?
CE: Studies have shown that it’s these processed oils. Olive oil – yes, even sacred olive oil. Corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil – all these processed oils injure our endothelium – our lining of our artery. So do dairy products. So do meat, fish, and chicken. We found that when we took patients who were absolutely ravaged with heart disease and had them completely eliminate those foods that injured their arteries, not only did they begin to lose weight, lose their high blood pressure, and also lose their diabetes, but most importantly, their chest pain would go away – and it would go away often extremely promptly. And also, when we did the follow up angiograms, a number of these patients had shown striking reversal of disease. And I think the ultimate proof was, how so many of them lived well beyond 20 years.

MC: The body heals itself.
CE: It certainly does.

MC: Can a single meal have a negative effect?
CE: Yes. That’s how the evidence against the Western diet was discovered. There was a classic experiment that was done by Robert Vogel, who was a wonderful cardiologist at the University of Maryland. There’s a special test called the brachial artery tourniquet test, which can show how the artery can dilate in a normal situation. They put a tourniquet in the upper arm for about five minutes and measure the diameter of the artery after you put on the tourniquet and after it’s released, and you can see a striking dilatation – that is to say, the artery will widen greatly when the tourniquet is released after having been on for five minutes. That’s due to nitric oxide. However, when they took a group of healthy young people to a fast food restaurant, one half of the group got corn flakes, and they had a wonderful normal artery response. The other half had the hash browns and sausages, and within 120 minutes after that meal, they were unable to dilate the artery. It had so injured and so compromised the endothelium. Now, being young, a couple of hours later, that slowly began to recuperate somewhat. But you can just imagine the next morning for breakfast – scrambled eggs and bacon – and lunch, they might have white bread, mayonnaise and cold cuts, and at supper time, a baked potato with sour cream, lamb chops, vegetables soaked in butter, ranch dressing on a salad, and ice cream. In other words, we in Western civilization just hammer and hammer, injure and injure, repetitively, the lining of our blood vessel – and the vessel becomes diseased.

MC: So what is your recommendation – the rules of your program?
CE: What we want people to try to avoid, especially those ravaged by heart disease, are: Any of the processed oils, dairy, meat, fish, and chicken, and for the patient who has heart disease, I include nuts and avocados. What we want them to eat are all these wonderful whole grains, whether cereal, bread or pasta, and all the different types of legumes and beans, all the different vegetables – red, yellow and especially the green leafy vegetables. Can’t get enough green leafy vegetables, they are so power packed with the nutrients that help the lining of the blood vessel. And fruit. Not fruit juice – fruit. The other thing I ask people to think about is coffee with caffeine. There’s a significant study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that took a group of young adults and half got coffee with caffeine and the other half had coffee without caffeine. The group that drank the coffee with caffeine had injury and impairment to the lining of their arteries and their blood vessels. So, you can still have coffee, but we would prefer that it be without caffeine.

MC: Since chocolate and green tea also have caffeine, does that apply too?
CE: That will have to be independently studied to confirm, but my sense is that the other study was so clear cut in being positive as to whether or not there was caffeine, I think that if someone has a group of patients who are ill with heart disease, they would certainly be ill-advised at this point to have the caffeine even from other sources because when that evidence becomes available, if it confirms that the caffeine in tea has the same detrimental effect as does the caffeine in coffee, the you will have spared the patient further injury. On the other hand, if it doesn’t, you’ve certainly lost nothing.

MC: One of my favorite chapters in your book is the “moderation kills” chapter. Can you explain why moderation doesn’t work in this case?
CE: Let’s make it as simple as we can. Let’s suppose you’re someone who has heart disease and you have chest pain because you’ve got significant narrowing and blockage of the arteries to your heart. Why in the world would you want to, on Friday and Saturday night, continue to eat foods that are going to worsen your heart disease, and have another heart attack. How much food that is going to continue injuring me can I eat, and still get away without making my disease worse? It’s kind of a crazy thing when you think about it. It’s like saying, “I really love cigarettes, but I wonder if I just smoke half as much, whether my lung disease wouldn’t get worse at a slower rate.”

MC: In other words, if these animal foods and processed oils cause harm, why would you want to harm yourself – period.
CE: That’s right. Why would we want to have it in our school lunch programs? You can have ice cream and butter and cheese and milk, when we know that by age 12, when you carefully measure the carotid artery going to the brain of our young children, they are developing thickening of the artery. When you think about it, this is the age you really want to do it because all their doing right now is starting at a very young age to injure and impair their very delicate lining of their artery.

MC: I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of moms ask us – is it safe for children to eat a plant-based diet?
CE: Totally. Again, just go back to the cultures where heart disease is virtually absent. Personally, all of our children and our grandchildren eat plant-based and they are champion athletes as well as getting the job done elsewhere.

MC: Why do you recommend avoiding olive oil and avocados?
CE: They also have saturated fat, that’s why I’m particularly cautious, in the patients who already have heart disease. If somebody doesn’t have heart disease, and they’re eating avocados, they want to be sure that their cholesterol numbers are in a very acceptable, normal range. Under 150 total and maybe an LDL of 85. But otherwise in these products, especially for somebody who already has heart disease, you’re eating saturated fat and the various kinds of fats that are counterproductive to the disease. The olive oil, the studies are really quite clear. It has to do with the brachial artery tourniquet test – on a healthy individual, the artery should get 30% wider after they had the tourniquet on. Now, if you give somebody olive oil and administer that test, it will be compromised, meaning, there will be enough injury and impairment of the lining of the vessel so it can’t dilate sufficiently. The olive oil injures the lining of the blood vessel and its ability to make our protective nitric oxide. I’ve seen it in a patient where he was eating really well, but he was eating olive oil. And the only thing we changed was taking out the olive oil – and his chest pain disappeared.

MC: What about the brain – doesn’t the brain need good fats?
CE: I’m not sure that there’s any data that shows that there’s any deficiency of these good fats when you’re eating fully plant-based. I’m totally unaware that there’s any fat deficiency – most people want to know that you’re getting enough omega-3 and  omega-6, well, no question everybody gets enough omega-6. Omega-3 you get when you’re eating plant-based, and especially in the green leafy vegetables. And, interestingly enough, people who are plant-based, there is a recent study that suggests that  they are much more capable than meat eaters of naturally converting to omega-3 right within their own bodies. So, not only is there conversion, but you’re gonna get plenty of omega-3 through eating vegetables. I don’t know any study that suggests that your brain requires saturated, artery-killing fat to survive.

MC: What about flax seed?
CE: You certainly have that option – you can have a tablespoon or two of flax seed meal on your cereal to enhance the amount of omega-3.

MC: What would you like to say to people who still see a plant-based diet as an extreme option?
CE: Let’s suppose that we have a plant-based type of diet where you’re not going to be obese, not gonna be diabetic, you’re not gonna have high blood pressure, you have no risk of heart attack or the common stroke, and you markedly diminished your likelihood of the common Western cancers, and you’re obeying the kinds of suggestions that many of the societies like the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association have suggested – more fruits and vegetables – but you’re just carrying it a step further. On the other hand, let’s suppose you somewhere else where they’re eating a Western type of diet. What have you got? Sixty million people who have heart disease, 22 million diabetics, millions and millions of hypertensive, people with high blood pressure. And 63% of the population is overweight, 33% of those are literally obese, and the nation is being taken to the cleaners by the health bill, which is now unsustainable. For instance, I don’t know how many are aware of the fact that Medicare is taking us to the poor house faster than anything else, due largely to a lot of unnecessary illness – 45% of the expenses of Medicare are cardiology. Heart disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist. And if it does exist, it need never ever progress. It’s a food borne illness. And about 75%-80% of these common chronic diseases are preventable if we were to eat plant-based.

MC: What is it about animals that is not healthy?
CE: It’s the animal protein as well as the animal fat that contributes to the plaque and blockages in the arteries – it injures the endothelium. In chapter three of The China Study, Dr. Campbell explains how lethal animal protein is in the production of cancer. It is really quite striking. But there is also clear cut experimental evidence that the animal protein and the animal fat is what seems to be injuring the lining of the blood vessel.

MC: Is there a specific amount of fats that you would recommend for healthy people?
CE: Eating is supposed to be an absolute joyous and pleasurable time. I don’t want people to have to sit down and calculate how many calories they’re eating, or how much protein, fats or carbohydrates they’re eating. What I want them to do is to recognize what are the foods that are going to injure them, and what are the foods that are going to protect them and enhance their health. And when you eat from a spectrum of the healthy foods – the whole grains for your cereal, bread, pasta, rolls or bagels, the different types of beans, the many different vegetables, and fruit, you’ve got a marvelous variety of healthy foods, and the idea of having to get mathematical about that suddenly takes away from it and makes it a burden, and it doesn’t have to be that at all. If you think about all of these wonderful varied plant-based cultures throughout the world – I mean, obviously the people in rural China are eating differently that those in the Papuan islands, or eating differently than those in central Africa, and yet the common denominator of these populations is that they just don’t have the common Western diseases and that’s so powerful, and yet none of them ever calculates beyond portion control and common sense.

MC: What’s your sample daily menu?
CE: I love breakfast – I have a huge bowl of oats, and not as oat meal as most people have it. Oats are wonderful because they have a natural compound within them that helps lower cholesterol, and another compound that decreases inflammation in the body. So, I really like to have oats on a regular basis. Now, what do I put in them? Either oat milk or hazelnut milk or even almond milk – unsweetened. In addition, I’ll have some strawberries, blueberries and banana, and often I’ll top it off with some grape nuts or some non-sugar cereal – it’s really reprehensible that they even manufacture sugary cereal. So, that will last me for six to seven hours. Then for lunch, usually we have a hummus sandwich with Ezekiel or Nestennacher, which is a wonderful bread lightly toasted with almonds. Now hummus is garbanzo beans, which I like to have without tahini – so no olive oil. On top of the hummus, some kale or spinach, chopped up scallions, a little lemon – eaten as an open sandwich – and then fruit for dessert. For dinner, a favorite meal might be beans and rice, covered with either peas, carrots, chopped up peppers, tomatoes, water chestnuts, chopped up scallions, corn. And a treat might be a little salsa on top of that or a light sprinkling of low-sodium tamari.

MC: That sounds delicious. Any final thoughts?
CE: Would just like to say that this country is going to have to have a seismic revolution in health. And it’s never gonna come from another pill, or another procedure or operation. It’s really gonna come when perhaps we, in public health, or in medicine, have the determination to share with the public what is the healthiest type of lifestyle that they can follow, and let them know that although exercise and social interchanges are terribly important, nothing can trump food in terms of health. It’s either going to devastate you or it’s going to enhance your health and well-being.

]]> http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/11/htalk-dr-caldwell-esselstyn/feed/ 12 http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/10/five-questions-with-brian-wendel/ http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/10/five-questions-with-brian-wendel/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:00:25 +0000 Maryl Celiz http://silvieandmaryl.com/?p=6890

We were in love with this movie after we saw a rough cut of it a few months back, and now Forks Over Knives is ready to be seen in advanced screenings all over the country. This movie is what Food Inc. was to the food industry: The first truly eye-opening and very real account of a currently dire situation, this time, pertaining to the health of Americans and how food helps or hurts our well-being. The film shows you the direct connection between food and health (or disease, depending on what you’re eating), as told through two of our favorite scientists and plant champions as well as other experts and people who have made the transition to a plant-based diet and seen their lives change for the better.

We chatted with Brian Wendel, Creator and Executive Producer of the film, and a passionate plant-based diet advocate. If we are what we eat,  and we’re dying of all sorts of preventable diseases, then we need to rethink what we’re eating, and this movie has all of the facts and figures to demonstrate exactly what it takes to be optimally healthy. Forks Over Knives  has partnered with Whole Foods, which is sponsoring advanced screenings of this landmark film, and we hope you take the time to see it and be entertained and informed about a crucial topic for you, your family, and the planet.

How would you describe the movie?
Forks Over Knives is a feature film that examines the question of whether or not our diseases of affluence – heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes – whether these diseases are fully preventable, and in many cases reversible, through diet alone. The major story line features two prominent doctors, Dr. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study and the top nutritional biochemist from Cornell University, and Dr. Esselstyn, who is a former top surgeon at the world renown Cleveland Clinic.

What motivated you to produce it?
A few years ago, the idea and evidence that diet was more powerful than we ever imagined became very clear to me, especially after reading The China Study. It was beyond I’d ever imagined, and I came to realize that there are really only two groups of people out there: People who are aware of this information and people who know very little about it. And I was just eternally frustrated, like many others, that the information wasn’t getting from one side to the other, it wasn’t really becoming mainstream, despite the fact that the scientific evidence was so powerful.

What do you hope people take away from the movie?
I hope it gets people to think – that’s really the intent of the film. I’m really not a person that likes to tell people what to do, or say what they should and shouldn’t do, but I feel like they haven’t been presented with this information – many people are just unaware of it – and I think, after they see this, if they go home and go “hm…” and begin to think about their diets and consider consuming more plant foods, that would be something I’d really like to see people get out of this movie. I hope to see the diet change in this country. We’ve tried the animal-based diet and it really hasn’t worked out for us, so I’m hoping to see us trend toward a more plant-based diet because I think it’ll be better for people’s health and for the planet.

How have you been personally affected by the information in the movie?
It didn’t really change the way I eat because I was already eating a whole foods, plant diet, but it was just amazing to me how quickly and seriously people were impacted by the information once it was presented to them. For instance, the people on my production crew were all omnivores when they started this film, and they’ve all changed their diet. And that goes for everybody – from the producer, the co-producer, the writer/director, even the person who wrote the music score changed his diet, and his family, to the lawyer, the accountant…everybody. I think that really validated what I thought could be true. But, it also really surprised me how fast and how impacting it could really be.

Where can people see it?
The film will be released on March 11th, 2011, in theaters across the country. In the meantime, we’re doing event-oriented advanced screenings from now until the release, which we believe will create awareness for the film. People can go to the website www.ForksOverKnives.com and find out where those screenings are taking place.

Our alkalinity article was an HLifer favorite, so we thought we’d go a step further and bring you the latest from the expert on the topic: Dr. Robert Young. The author of many research papers and several books, the most noted of which is The pH Miracle (translated into 17 languages and regarded as the bible of alkalinity), Dr. Young is a nutritional microbiologist who has performed live and dry blood analysis on thousands of individuals at his center in California, with astonishing results and revelations about what is healthy for our cells – and what is not.

In this interview, Dr. Young discusses the importance of alkalinity in the body,  answers some of our readers’ questions about limes, eggs and sugar, explains why he doesn’t recommend algae, mushrooms or cooked food, gives his take on blood types, and introduces us to a new exercise style called Younga Yoga.

How is a food’s alkalinity/acidity determined?
Traditionally, science has actually taken the food, extracted the water content, applied heat, and all that’s left is the minerals of that particular food. Scientists then analyzed the mineral content, determining whether the ash that was being analyzed was base or acidic. But that discounts the fact that, during the burn, many of the enzymes or acid are burned off – the citric acid is burned off – and so, many of the foods, particularly fruits like apples, oranges, pears, and bananas – show up as an alkaline fruit, but in reality, because of their high sugar content or their citric acid content, they are acid-forming to the body, and they are not alkaline or base forming in the body. So, I evaluate not just the mineral content, but also the other components of food, which would be the acid components which are often burned off during the traditional evaluation. That’s why my chart differs from other acid/alkaline charts, because I consider the whole of the food rather than just what’s left over the burn.

Why do you consider the citric acid and the sugars?
Because they do impact the overall condition of the fluids of the body. They don’t burn off – they have to be neutralized. So, any sugar that’s ingested from a fruit or any food, for that matter, would activate the cells in the stomach to produce sodium bicarbonate. So, they are reactive – the body is reactive to that particular toxin, so it has to be buffered or neutralized. Because of this, it has to be considered. It’s not being considered under the government analysis of food. But if it’s not being considered, then that is not a real reflection on whether a food is acid or alkaline. When you eat something, you’re gonna get the water of that food, the enzymes or acids, and other components as well as the acid or alkaline minerals.

Why are limes said to be so alkaline when they taste acidic?
It’s not that they’re alkaline, it’s that if you look at the mineral content, and you look at the acids in the lemon versus its alkaline mineral salts – such as potassium or sodium bicarbonate – these exceed any of the acids in lemon, therefore, even though an acid fruit like lemon or lime may have a pH between 3.5 to 4, the net result in the body is the release of the alkalinity of the mineral salts, and this actually exceeds the acid components. This is why lime is an alkalizing fruit, unlike, for example, an orange, which is an acidic fruit because its alkaline mineral salts do not exceed its actual concentrations of acids.

So, it’s the minerals in the lime that have the positive effect on our bodies.
Yeah, it’s the mineral salts in those particular fruits that are alkalizing to the body. Now, some of the acids in the lemon/lime can also help the body. Citric acid, which is part of the lemon/lime, helps to break down undigested proteins from the lining of the intestine, so the bowels are clear.

What does sugar do to the blood?
Sugar is a biological waste product of metabolism, it’s a breakdown product of cellular disorganization or degeneration. So, current medical science teaches that sugar is a source of fuel for metabolism, but I look at sugar, particularly glucose, which you find in the body, as a biological waste product of metabolism rather than a fuel for metabolism – so it’s just the reverse. Our bodies don’t run on sugar. Our bodies run on electrons. And those electrons become freed up once we bite into a food. So, the concentration of electrons is found in its highest form in raw foods, and foods which are alkalizing.

We’re electrochemical beings.
We’re primarily electrical beings and physicists say that energy can take on different forms. One of the byproducts of energy being utilized by the cells is a waste product called glucose. There are other acids that are produced in metabolism such as carbonic acid, but these waste products are not fuels, they’re just byproducts of the anatomical elements that make up the cells using the electrical potential from the foods that we eat or the foods that we absorb because we not only utilize or obtain electrical potential from the food that we eat, we also obtain it, just like trees and other plants, by the process of photosynthesis – we absorb it from the sun. We absorb that electrical potential, that light, and it is then transformed into electrical energy that then operates our cells, our organs.

Is this something that is accepted by the medical community?
Absolutely. We’ve done a bunch of blood plasma analysis of vitamin D, which is a component of what we can obtain through absorption of light. And we find that there’s a deficiency – very few of us are actually getting enough sunlight on a daily basis, so we find that deficiency in the blood. We not only see it quantitatively but also qualitatively, as I look at the structure of the red blood cells, and I look at the way the blood coagulates, I see deficiency there, in people who are not eating an electron-rich diet, which is one of raw alkaline food and who are also not getting enough sunlight. The Scandinavian countries tend to have deficiencies in vitamin D and also people who live in the northwest. Seems to be a common problem worldwide.

What can people in regions with less sunlight do to remedy that?
They can eat more plants. The way we get more light into our bodies is we eat more of the foods that can transfer their light and life force to us. So, raw green foods are the types of foods that I find to be perfectly suited to building healthy blood, which builds healthy bodies. You can also supplement vitamin D.

We’ve heard a lot about eating for your particular blood type. What’s your view on that?
Over the years that I have been looking at capillary blood and analyzing blood now close to 35 years, and what I find is that there’s only two blood types: healthy and unhealthy. And people that are healthy are people that are eating a green diet that is alkaline, that is rich in electrons, they’re getting good, liberal amounts of polyunsaturated oils, and they are ingesting a lot of mineral salts and a lot of alkaline water. Unhealthy blood types, regardless of whether you’re type A, B or O – I’m a type O and I’m also a vegan, been vegan for 30 plus years, haven’t eaten animal protein, eggs or dairy products in a very, very long time, and I base my die ton the blood quantitatively and qualitatively, so, what I see but also based on traditional medical tests like CBC (complete blood count) or chemistry, I am on the higher ranges of normal and have the blood of a teenager and basically the energy and health of a teenager. So, you keep yourself youthful by managing the health of the blood, and the health of the blood is really determined by what you eat and what you drink, and I found the best foods for building blood are all the green vegetables and all the green fruit, two fruits in particular – the avocado and the cucumber, very alkalizing fruit, with the avocado high in oils and potassium, so, probably one of the best foods we can eat. The blood type diet is a lot of hype. I don’t see any scientific basis in it, definitely don’t see people that are on these diets as healthy – they don’t have healthy blood quantitatively or qualitatively.

What is it about potassium that makes it so crucial for our health?
Our blood is salted with minerals and the number one for this is sodium. Sodium is a foundational element that gives rise to other elements. Potassium is another element, one of the electrolytes in our body fluids, and our body creates potassium, needs potassium. So, the diet that I recommend, The pH Miracle diet, is a high potassium diet. We’ve analyzed this diet chemically and isolated types of minerals. Potassium is the great buffer or alkalizer of the blood and tissues. So, a diet high in potassium is gonna reduce the amount of hydrogen ions, which are acids, in the fluids of the body, and that’s going to help maintain the alkaline side of the body. But I encourage people to increase their sodium intake, their magnesium intake, and their potassium intake. Add calcium in there as well. The body creates naturally these alkaline buffers to help maintain the alkalinity of our bodies – potassium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate, magnesium/calcium bicarbonates are manufactured by the gut, particularly the stomach, and it pulls its material from the blood. So it gets its necessary water and necessary sodium that it needs, also carbon dioxide, to make these alkaline buffers. So, you should have a diet that focuses more on mineral salts.

What do you eat on a typical day?
Today I had about 16 oz of fresh green juice, which is spinach, parsley, celery,  and cucumber with some fresh almond milk. And I’ve also had a green shake, which is a mixture of spinach, English cucumber, coconut, grapefruit, and sprouts all mixed up into a shake. Had about 24 oz of that. Then I drink a lot of green drinks throughout the day, with the primary ingredients of spinach and cucumber, or the green drink, the ph Miracle Greens, which is a concentration of wheatgrass, barley grass, oat grass and spinach, celery, cucumbers and avocado in a powder form that I add to water – I’ll drink several liters of that during the day too. For lunch I just had a Thai coconut. Also, I exercised for two hours, I ran about six miles and for an hour I did what I call Younga Yoga, which is a combination of breathing, stretching, aerobic, isotonic exercising. And I do that every day as well. I get about two hours of exercise a day, and a couple of times a week, I’ll have a lymphatic massage or some colon therapy, hydro therapy to help detox the liver. I also had a glass full of chlorophyl today. I drink pure alfalfa chlorophyl. I also eat about three or four avocados, add them to my shakes, so that provides oil as well.

I saw avocado shakes among The pH Miracle recipes. Is that a common breakfast for you?
Yeah, I’ll eat between four and six avocados a day. Because of my level of activity, I need the fats in the avocado, made up about 80% good, healthy fats. I like the fact that it tastes good and its an excellent creaming agent.

Is there such a thing as being too alkaline?
Well, our body is always producing acid because it’s always running, like a car is always producing carbon monoxide when it’s running. So, the body has to have the energy to release those toxins, and in a day you’re actually creating as much as 20 times more acid than base. And if every day you’re in the negative – more acid than base – then you’re gonna age. The aging process is a fermentation process, and it’s the body’s inability to keep up with the needs and demands of alkalinity because of the load of acid coming from diet and also from metabolism. We have to be conscious of this and  be actively focused on over-alkalizing the body to keep up with the constant production of metabolic and dietary acidic waste products. You wouldn’t get old if you could stay even with it – you’d stay the same age you are right now if you just start over-alkalizing, you would never age. That’s why, I think, I’m aging gracefully, because most people can’t imagine that I’m 60 years old – they look at my face, my skin and my body and the go, “wow, you look like you’re in your 30s.” I had somebody ask me if I was 29 the other day. That was quite a compliment but I think I look better than most people in their 40s and probably most people that are in their 30s. And I definitely can out-perform them – I can jump higher, run faster. It’s no contest for people in their 50s – most people at that age are sick and tired, but I’m as active in my 50s as and now going into my 60s as I was as a teenager and in my 20s.

When it comes to raw, what do you recommend – 80-20 rule or 100%?
I don’t think about it too much but when you ask me what I just got through eating, it’s green, it’s alkaline and it’s raw. And 99% of the food that I eat is raw. I like raw and I like pureed or juiced – I don’t eat a lot of solid food either. There’s only one instrument in your body that digests solid food and that’s your teeth. After that, food is digested from the inside out or it comes out whole. Pureed state or juiced state is a perfect state of food to be used by the body for the creation of stem cells. So, it puts less stress on the gut. So, I try to stay as close to 100% raw as possible, once in a while I’ll have a warmed or cooked soup, but other than that, I enjoy just raw green vegetables on a daily basis.

What do you think about cooked rice and beans?
You know, I don’t recommend rice and beans unless you want to be sick and constipated. They’re not staples of my diet. I basically have four food groups: chlorophyll, oil, water and salt. And rice and beans isn’t on it.

What about those people who say “oh, where do I get my protein then?”
They’re like parrots who don’t understand what they’re talking about and all they’re doing is repeating what they read in a book. But tell that to some of the strongest animals in the world – they’re not eating meat – they’re eating grass, they’re vegan, they’re raw. They’re getting their foods from those sources which are alkaline and electron-rich. The best way to shorten your life is to eat animal proteins and eat cooked food and eat foods that are high in carbohydrates. You want to avoid that kind of food and keep it as green as possible.

In The pH Miracle you say that algae is also not on the good food list.
We just had an algae breakout in our aquarium and it killed all the fish. You just don’t eat algae unless you want to die. I don’t know how else to say it: Algae will kill you, flat out. It is a degenerative form of matter that breaks down dead bodies. It’s as deadly as mushrooms.

What is it in the algae that is not good for us?
I think it comes down to its biological purpose, which is to break down dead bodies. It’s not like it doesn’t have chlorophyll in it, that’s not the point, there’s other chemicals within it and it is designed to consume and break down. I’ve seen this in people who ingest it, they just can’t build healthy blood and it deals havoc to the system of the body that is foundational for building stem cells and red blood cells. So, when we take that algae component out and start putting the grasses in, things then shift. I’ve always been a proponent for grasses and I’ve always discouraged people from eating algae because of what I see at the cellular level. There are probably a thousand compounds in algae that have never even been identified, so we really don’t know, other than we can find bacteria in algae that can potentially be harmful – I’m not sure that’s it. We’re not sure. All I know is, it does not build healthy blood.

You’ve seen this via live blood analysis?
We’re seeing it in qualitative and quantitative research, when we’re looking at red blood counts and using grass to build blood counts versus other components. We take algae in, you’re gonna bring the red blood count down. You take algae out and blood will normalize. As far as the health of the cell, structures of the cell, to bacteria loads or fungal loads – these all increase when you eat algae. I can’t say anything good about algae.

So what about studies that show that spirulina controls blood sugar and that chlorella helps build T-cells?
T-cells are only created in the presence of something that is toxic. Anything that increases white count is poisonous. You eat algae, you increase your white blood cell count, you affect the quality of the blood. You eat algae, you die. Mushrooms will do the same – they’ll increase the white count. The reason that it does is because it’s a poison. People that are healthy have low white counts. My white count is down in the 3s and 4s. My red count is up in the 5 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, my hemoglobin is up in the 17s and 18s. So, most people that are sick, they’re gonna have red counts and hemoglobin counts that are abnormal, red counts in the high 3s and low 4s and hemoglobin count down in the 11s and 12s, they’re not gonna be in the high counts because they’re eating food that is detrimental to their health.

Egg whites are said to be alkaline. What do you say to people who eat them?
Eggs are the menstruation of the chicken and I just don’t think it’s a good idea to eat the period of a chicken, that’s number one. Number two, egg whites or yolks contain 37,500,000 pathological microorganisms. So, if you wanna poison yourself, go for it, eat eggs, eat egg whites. It’s just not wise. It’s like “here’s your blood, here’s your blood on drugs.” Well, “here’s your blood, here’s your blood on eggs.” It’s hard to differentiate.

How are alkalinity and candida related?
Candida is just a form of yeast – there’s thousands of different types of yeast. They’re not the cause of disease, they’re just an expression of cellular transformation and the more that you have, the more cells are braking down. In order to stop that, you have to provide and alkaline environment. It’s about providing an environment that’s conducive for maintaining healthy states of the cell, and that can’t happen if you’re eating a lot of acidic foods, or if you have a lot of stress – which is acidic – or if you’re not exercising you’re gonna be more acidic and your organs of elimination are going to be more congested. To remove these acids, there’s gonna be break down of tissue, which is gonna give rise to more yeast. So yeast is just a marker for acidity.

What about exercise, which is a stressor on the body and generates lactic acid – how does it relate to pH?
Exercise is important to remove acids out of the connective tissue, out of the muscle tissue. When I exercise, I always say you need to sweat ‘til you’re wet – if you’re not sweating when you’re exercising, you’re not exercising. You gotta open up the pores of the skin to move acids, and the way to do that is to move your body, activate the lymphatic system to remove and to pull acids out of the tissues to get them out through the pores of the skin. And I like to do core exercises because you’re only as healthy as the core. I try to do 10 to 15 or 25 minutes of core exercises. Stretching is excellent for moving acids out of the connective tissue. You know, I read in the paper today that a 17 year old guy, a quarterback, died on the field. How does a healthy – so-called healthy – young man die on the field? It’s very simple: over-acid. Over-acid kills. Is it over-exercise? No, it’s probably over-acid food, congestion in the elimination organs that build up acid that causes the heart to fail. Metabolic acids can marinate a heart just like Heinz 57 can marinate a steak, and make the tissue soft and weak. And that’s what happens to these young kids. They don’t understand how sugar and carbohydrates and heavy proteins poison the body and set the stage for these types of things to happen.

So, exercise has to be done in an alkaline way.
Yes, it has to be done with the idea of moving acids out of the tissues out through the pores of the skin, with the idea that through breathing you’re removing toxins as well out through the lungs. Exercise is great for the diaphragm, which helps exercise the gut and the bowels, so the bowels are healthier when you exercise. That contraction and expansion of the cells when you’re flexing the muscles helps, it helps your heart, helps to remove acids and increase circulation, it helps to reduce your blood pressure – my pulse runs between 45-48 beats per minute, which is about half of what most hearts are beating at, it keeps you young, keeps your heart healthy so it doesn’t have to work as hard – so many benefits of exercise. But you have to understand how to exercise properly. It’s one of the reasons I’m coming out with a new form of exercise called Younga Yoga, to teach people these principles of exercise and how they can do it in a way that’s going to be effective, not only aerobically but for building strength as well.

For building muscle?
There are principles behind that as well – you don’t build muscle with protein, you build muscle with blood. You build blood with green foods, green drinks, healthy fats, and mineral salts. And when you understand that the blood becomes the muscle, then you get that the strength of that muscle is only in relationship to the blood and what you’re eating and what you’re drinking. So once you understand these basic principles that are outlined in my book, you realize that algae and mushrooms and fermented foods, like fermented soy, are not gonna work. Dr. Mercola is recommending fermented food, he’s not recommending alkaline water – he just doesn’t get it. There are a lot of people that just don’t get it, that don’t understand the basic tenants of physiology, the basic tenants of digestion, the importance of biochemistry and how important it is to maintain the alkaline design of the body, and that’s why The pH Miracle is a book that is literally a blueprint for health, energy, and vitality. When people read it and they open up their minds to understanding and putting the principles into place, they realize that what I’m saying works – and it works incredibly well.

When will the Younga Yoga DVDs be available?
October 11th, 2010.

]]> http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/09/htalk-interview-dr-robert-young/feed/ 14 http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/09/htalk-interview-john-reganold-on-organic-farming-and-sustainability/ http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/09/htalk-interview-john-reganold-on-organic-farming-and-sustainability/#comments Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:55:25 +0000 Maryl Celiz http://silvieandmaryl.com/?p=6316

John Reganold has been comparing organic and conventional agricultural systems since he noticed the drastic difference between them in a soil sample 25 years ago. He is an agro-ecologist who has always been interested in how land is used, and is the lead author of a study on the sustainability and nutritional benefits of organic farming, which was published in the journal PLoS ONE yesterday.

The demand for organic food continues to increase, and as we are huge fans of the benefits of organic produce here at HLife, we were thrilled to see such definitive information on a much-debated subject. While everyone knows that conventionally grown produce has more pesticide residue that the liver then has to discard, there wasn’t conclusive data regarding nutrition – until now. This study of strawberries grown on commercial farms is among the most comprehensive of its kind: A team of interdisciplinary researchers checked indicators like soil DNA, microbe diversity, fruit taste, antioxidant activity, and even appearance. Twenty-six strawberry fields were analyzed, and side-by-side comparisons found that the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier.

HLife chatted with Professor Reganold about the groundbreaking implications of this study, among which are the relationship between organic farming and better nutrition, a longer product shelf life, and quality soil.

Maryl Celiz: How was the study conducted?
John Reganold: Our research team was interested in looking at both the soil quality and also the strawberry quality, including the nutritional quality on real commercial farms. So it had to represent reality. The strawberry capital of the world is in Watsonville, California, so I made phone calls over a couple of weeks and visited Watsonville with growers to see if we could actually get these side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms where the soils were the same, and where the strawberry varieties were the same and planted at the same time. I found out that we could do this in certain locations, and that’s very critical – that is one of the most important things about this study is the methodology: the varieties are the same, they are planted at the same time, and the fields from these farms are directly adjacent – they are probably about 20 meters apart – and we tried to get a sample, not right on the edge but fairly close, so the soils would not have a differing effect on the berries.

MC: The soil was the same but the difference was on the process of farming and the seeds?
JR: The seeds were the same – there were no genetically modified seeds on either side. We didn’t deal with any GM crops, the varieties are classically bred by either University of California, or, in the case of the Driscoll growers, they have their own breeders. Those seedlings are brought out and put in the ground in November and they grow through winter and in the middle of March you have strawberry production. Then they harvest every three or four days all the way until November, so it’s a seven month production. Strawberries go through cycles so you’re gonna have periods of time when there is high production, but it may be that the organic berries have a little bit of a different cycle than the conventionally grown berries. So, to make sure we took that into account, we sample all three seasons over two years. We samples in spring, summer, and fall and we did that across 26 farms – 13 organic and 13 conventional farms, they were in pairs – same variety, same soil.

MC: You found farms that produce both organic and conventional?
JR: Absolutely. In fact, Driscoll’s is probably the biggest strawberry producer, or one of the biggest in the world, and they grow both organic and conventional berries. Pacific Gold Farms, they were the other big company. The setting was really made possible by the cooperation of these two companies. When we were out in the fields, we didn’t pick the berries because that wouldn’t represent reality. We would make sure that the berries were picked on our study fields when the rest were normally picked by the pickers. And we would have them pick from the spots on the field that we wanted, and they would put them in the clam shells and take them to Driscoll’s. They were very cooperative – they have a big refrigeration system and they would cool the berries down and then the berries would be on their trucks all the way up to Washington state. They were on trucks that were coming to Washington state anyway, but when the berries got up to Spokane, which is near us, we would then take our research berries off the truck. Our berries would go right into the taste test and the other berries would go right into the store, so every part of the process represented reality.

MC: The only difference then was the actual farming process.
JR: That’s correct, and that’s all we wanted. We wanted to be able to say you have two different management systems. If you have these two management systems producing strawberries, what are the effects on the soil, and the soil DNA, the genetics – and what are the effects on the berries, meaning, their shelf life (how fast do they rot), their nutrition (vitamins, antioxidants), and taste? People often will say, “well, these particular berries taste better than these berries,” or, “organic berries taste better than conventional.” But that’s anecdotal. You really need to have scientific evidence for that. So we actually tested that. Our hypothesis was that organic strawberries produce healthier berries from healthier soils, because those are some of the reasons why people buy organic berries. We didn’t know that was the case, so we decided to check it out. So we had to make sure that the methodology was strong enough and done correctly so that we could test the hypothesis.

MC: So taking the hypothesis one step further, since your findings support your hypothesis, would you add that these healthier berries from healthier soils support healthier people because of the benefits that you found?
JR: One thing about strawberries is that they are one of the higher foods in antioxidants and vitamin C, so our study found that with the organic berries tended to have significantly more dry weight. So, if you have more dry weight, that means you have “more strawberry” in the strawberry, which means you’re getting more strawberry when you eat an organic strawberry. We also found that organic berries have more antioxidants, more phenolics, and more vitamin C – all very important for the health of humans. And, organic berries – we didn’t test this, but we know this from other studies that have been done – have much lower residues or no residue of pesticides on the berries, so, in that sense, it’s healthier. If people are concerned about eating pesticides or if they want more vitamin C, it would be better to eat the organic berries.

MC: What did you find about taste?
JR: When we did the taste tests on the berries – these were blind taste tests done with untrained panelists, ranging all the way from 20 years old to folks in their 60s. They would go into a little tasting cubicle and it’s all professionally done, there’s even a red light on so they can’t see the color of the strawberry because that could affect their judgment. They have no idea they’re comparing organic and conventional berries – that would bias them. They just know they taste two berries, and they have to rank them, score them, and we evaluate the scores. We looked at the sweetness and the overall flavor and the firmness of the strawberry. Then the red light goes off and they can see the strawberry and they have to evaluate color. With two of the varieties there was no difference – but with one of the varieties, the organic berry was sweeter, more flavorful, it was even preferred aesthetically, it had better color to the tasters. There are very few taste tests done comparing organic to conventional foods, so, that was quite a finding right there.

MC: How significant was the antioxidant difference?
JR: About 10%. The organic had about 10% more total antioxidant activity than the conventional berries, and the numbers were similar for vitamin C and phenolics.

MC: What did you find about the health of the soil?
JR: When we looked at the soil, there are traditional properties that one can look at, chemical and biological, that give you and indication of soil health or soil quality, and we looked at about 31 properties. And if you were to say, summarize that, there were about 12-14 differences of the 31 properties. And it was with some of the major properties, like the amount of organic matter in the soil, the amount of nitrogen, or the amount of microbial activity in the soil. All those factors, every one, were higher in the organic. Then we took soil samples and inspect the DNA from the soil. You might say, “well, what do you mean DNA?” Soils are living – they have microorganisms in them, both soils that are farmed conventionally and organically. You can go in and kind of get a shot of what the gene pool is like in these systems. We know from doing this enough that certain organisms, or genes that we can see, carry out some important processes in the soil, such as nitrogen fixation or pesticide degradation. When we looked at what we call the signal intensity coming off the organic soils versus the conventional, the signal intensity was greater in all 11 of these processes, meaning, the gene pool, the microbial activity was greater in the organic in every case. There was also more diversity. We can basically say that the organically farmed soils were not only healthier and higher quality, but they were also more genetically diverse, and likely more resilient to stress that might come upon that soil system. Those were pretty significant findings too. We really got to look at soil as well as the berries themselves.

MC: How does the organic process differ from the conventional process?
JR: Both of these management systems are intense. They grow strawberries on mounds that they have to build with special equipment. They plant the strawberries and the mounds on both systems are covered with plastic tarp, which basically knocks out weeds, and it is interesting because the use of this tarp basically excluded the need for herbicide in both systems. The big difference is though, before they put on that tarp usually all the conventional growers use methyl bromide to fumigate the soil, which is basically a brief sterilization of the soil. A lot of the microbes come back, but during that time it helps cut down disease. The organic can’t do that because certification processes don’t like it. Other differences were that the conventional growers could use an arsenal of synthetic pesticides. The organic growers don’t have that, they can’t use synthetic pesticides, however, they can use organically certified pesticides but they are much more limiting. For example, sulfur, which is a more natural pesticide. Organic growers do use pesticides, it’s just that they have to be certified and they’re usually natural. Another thing is that the number of pesticides used is relatively small in the organic systems but in the conventional systems it’s relatively high. And then the conventional growers can also use synthetic fertilizers, but the organic not. So the organic had to use organically certified fertilizers, and they used compost. Now the interesting things is that both systems used compost – the conventional growers used compost to bring back some of the microbes lost during fumigation more quickly. But the organic used twice as much. I think that was one of the main reasons we found so much of a difference in soil quality – and probably not having the methyl bromide might have helped too. But that’s the difference: It comes down to pesticides and fertilizers. The harvesting and irrigation is similar.

MC: How much of a difference was there in shelf life?
JR: We basically took the strawberries and set them on the counter and did what we called the rotting test. You can, basically, watch them rot over a series of days. Most growers and stores that buy strawberries want them to have a long shelf life, maybe five days and not rot. We actually thought that the conventional berries would rot more slowly because they had this array of pesticides. But what happened was the opposite: The organic berries rotted significantly more slowly. So, after a five or six day period, you could have 25% more good organic berries than conventional, on average over the varieties. That’s a plus when you’re selling berries because you want the berries to be able to last longer. And be fresher. To me, that was a surprise.

MC: Any guess as to why that happened?
JR: We don’t really know. If you would have asked me before the study, “ok, which soils are gonna be healthier?” I would’ve probably said the organic. But if you would’ve said about the rotting test, I would’ve said that the conventional is gonna rot more slowly, which is why it was so amazing to me that it was the opposite.

MC: With so many benefits – nutritional, soil health, shelf life – to the organic system, what would be the advantage of farming conventionally?
JR: The advantage for a grower is yield. You get higher yields in general. The industry data from these two companies for these two years showed that the conventional strawberries were producing 25% more yield. Now, at the same time, organic berries were more than making up for that in price premium. The price that a grower can get for an organic berry will more than make up for that 25% yield difference. A grower may get about 40% more for growing an organic berry. Another advantage to conventional farming is that it’s easier to grow conventionally – you have an arsenal of pesticides to use which the organic farmer can’t use, and because there are more conventional farmers, there is more information out there to help you farm conventionally. Organic farming is more intensive and there is less information out there on how to do it.

MC: Did you measure pesticide residue?
JR: We didn’t look at pesticide residues because there’s already information out there on that. The Environmental Working Group has information on pesticide residue, and strawberries are usually in the top 5, they’re certainly in the dirty dozen. The three main reasons people buy organic are because they think it’s healthier, it tastes better, and they think it’s better for the environment. Now, we already know there are more pesticide residues on conventional strawberries. But where the jury is out is on the nutritional differences between the organic and conventional, so we wanted to look at the antioxidants, the vitamin C and the phenolics. Then there’s very little information on taste, so we ran some taste tests. And then as far as better for the environment, I’ve looked at other farming systems where we’ve looked at the effects of organic/conventional farming on, say, soil erosion. And while soil erosion wasn’t part of the study, what is better for the environment is what is better for the soil. People think that organic growers are doing a better job with the soil and we thought, if that’s the case, let’s look at these 31 soil properties and see if that is the case. And let’s look at the DNA, and from those two things, we should get an indication of soil health.

MC: Can you define what sustainability means from a soil studies perspective?
JR: Sustainability is kind of a Utopian concept. What it says is, if we meet sustainability guidelines, or if a particular farm is to be sustainable, it needs to be economically sustainable, environmentally sustainable, and socially sustainable. Then within those three there are all kinds of variables. How do you measure that? You have to test the farm. You can have a farm that is not profitable – that is not sustainable. Or a farm that is causing erosion or polluting a lake – that’s not sustainable. So, when we do studies, we look at different sustainability indicators. For example, soil quality, crop yield, crop quality – if it’s a strawberry, more vitamin C. The farm also has to make money. It has to be good for the environment. But it also has to be socially just – the people working there should get fair wages, benefits, and it should be good for the community. When you look at all of these things you say, wow, that’s a tough business to be in – and it is. But if you look at those variables in general, and you look at the studies that have been done, in general, organic systems are more sustainable than conventional systems.

]]> http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/09/htalk-interview-john-reganold-on-organic-farming-and-sustainability/feed/ 6 http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/05/htalk-interview-matthew-kenney/ http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/05/htalk-interview-matthew-kenney/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 09:04:02 +0000 Silvie Celiz And Maryl Celiz http://silvieandmaryl.com/?p=4947

Restaurateur Matthew Kenney is a renowned raw food chef and author, and the creator of the first licensed raw food academy. His groundbreaking restaurant/shop/school 105degrees incorporates communal dining, an open kitchen, the “glass box” 105degrees Shop where an array of products related to the raw/living foods lifestyle can be purchased, as well as the 105degrees Academy, with classes for the layperson and the professional interested in raw food techniques to learn from an innovative team.

We Skyped with Matthew while he was in New York, where he was opening yet another restaurant, Bar Paya, concentrating on Peruvian food this time. This is not a raw foods spot, but Matthew assured us that there are vegetarian dishes on the menu, inspired by traditional foods of our South American birthplace. We chatted with him about raw food and health (including what he eats on a typical day), the Academy, and his next book, Everyday Raw Express.

Silvie Celiz: How does Bar Paya fit into your work with raw food?
Matthew Kenney: Not everything I do is technically raw, but raw food sort of guides the way I cook and the way I prepare food. I sometimes get involved in other projects if they’re intriguing. And a friend of mine approached me and said he had a great space and wanted me to look at it, and he actually asked me if I wanted to do a raw restaurant there but I didn’t feel like it was the right thing. I wasn’t really interested in doing another raw project in New York. And one of the cuisines that interests me is the modern cuisine of Peru.

SC: You know we’re Peruvian, so we have to ask – what do you love about Peruvian cuisine?
MK: All the citrus, the clean flavors, the incorporation of some of the starches that I like, I love sweet potato and quinoa, and it’s really just all the ingredients that I love, and the fact that it’s very light. I’m not into the meat-based dishes but vegetables and ceviche and grains, I love.

Maryl Celiz: Do you eat fish?
MK: No, I go through phases. For two years I didn’t each fish at all and then I incorporated it and then last summer I didn’t eat it at all. I go through phases and I experiment. There have been periods where I bring fish into my diet – usually raw, or very lean white fish, simply prepared.

MC: Do you ever go back to meat?
MK: No, I never go back to meat or poultry.

SC: What does it depend on whether you eat one thing or another?
MK: To me it’s just about how I feel, how it digests. I’m only a chef, I don’t understand the nutrition side, except for I do understand my own body and how it reacts. Like a lot of people who do raw for extended periods of time, I know that myself and many of my friends who’ve done raw for many, many years become a little more flexible over time about what they’ll incorporate and what they won’t incorporate. If I were in a tropical climate mostly on the beach, I’d probably eat mostly fruit. If I’m in Maine in the winter, it’s sweet potatoes and things like that.

SC: Why did you open 105degrees, a raw restaurant, in Oklahoma and not a place like Los Angeles, a hub for raw foodies?
MK: Well, my partner Dara Prentice called me and had a vision for opening this business in Oklahoma, a place that is going through a lot of transformation, a lot more interest in health and nutrition and yoga, it’s just blossoming in that way. And when I looked at the project – and it happened to be in a beautiful facility and the architecture of the space is just phenomenal – it really made sense. And I think those secondary markets are where a lot of the future potential is for high-end raw business. I know you have a ton of great raw food in California, but oddly enough there is nothing like 105 in Los Angeles, at the moment, that I’ve been to. And I don’t know why, I think it would be great, but there are things you can do in a city like Oklahoma that would be hard in Los Angeles. For example, to get the kind of space that we have for an outdoor cafe, the costs are so high in the larger cities and we’re able to do something beautifully at a very high level for somewhat of a reasonable cost and it makes a lot of sense.

MC: Do you get a lot of people who travel in just to come see you guys?
MK: We do, actually. I’ve met so many raw food bloggers and writers that have just taken a detour – they’ve been in Dallas but they’ll go out of their way to come up and visit us. We’ve had quite a few people come by.

MC: Tell us a little bit about the Academy
MK: The Academy is based on two main courses. We have a one-month Fundamentals of Raw Cuisine, and then we have a three-month Advanced Raw Cuisine, or advanced techniques. The one month course is really four weeks and we focus on the general principles that we use to prepare the kind of raw cuisine that I’ve been doing and writing about for a few years now. And the three month course is much more advanced in terms of its professional focus on higher-end foods, very complicated or interesting and new techniques, actually understanding how a professional kitchen works and getting involved int he day-to-day operation of our cafe. Those two courses are really what it’s about. I would say a very high percentage of our people are coming for the one-month course and will either return or stay for the three-month course. A lot of people also try to do it back-to-back, which means they’re there for four months. It’s a pretty intensive, in-depth course and there are a lot of specific programs involved in that, from testing to something called Sunday Suppers, where our students prepare the meal for the restaurant on Sunday evenings, it’s a price fixed menu. They do shop projects where they created packaged foods to sell in our shop. They learn kitchen design too…there’s a lot to it. We have a great, beautiful facility.

SC: Is it the only living cuisine school that is state licensed?
MK: At the time we opened, we were. I don’t know if the other schools are state licensed now or not, but I know when we opened several months ago, we were the only one, and that’s the first step toward accreditation, but I don’t know for sure. We really do focus on our style of cuisine, which we’re always changing, we’re always looking for new techniques and ways to lighten the food. For example, last year the big thing was incorporating thermal immersion cooking, low temperature heating of foods under water, that gives you advantages because it retains all the moisture and flavor, so, it’s nice. It’s a  good alternative to dehydration. And now we’re working on other techniques. A lot of pastry without nuts, for example, using vegetable pulps. Continue to evolve – every time we change the menu, we try to take the food to the next level and we incorporate all of that into our academy.

SC: That’s wonderful because that’s one thing about raw foods and desserts, that they’re very nut-heavy. Sounds amazing. On that note, what is the average of dehydrated foods versus non-dehydrated foods at 105 degrees?
MK: I would say that the percentage of non-dehydrated is pretty high. Usually dehydration is for a component, like a cracker or a crisp or a crust, or something like that. We certainly use dehydrators, but if I had to guess, I’d say, 60%-80% of the foods are not dehydrated. That’s a guess, but it also depends on the menu. Like, in the spring menu, we’re incorporating a lot of salads and greens.

MC: How easy is it for you to find good living food in the many places that you travel to in order to find inspiration for new creations?
MK: Depends on where I travel. I was in Spain in the past few months and you can get some really good foods there, but it’s hard to get some of the dark leafy greens that we’re accustomed to finding everywhere, didn’t see any of the superfoods. So, I found Spain to be very difficult. And then I was in Singapore for business a few months ago, and I was told before I went by the person that I was visiting for business that I wouldn’t be able to find anything but the products were incredible. I mean, the sea vegetables, and the fruits, even the vegetables. So, Asia seems like an amazing market for it – that was great. In Mexico and Peru…there were some really good fruits in Peru, not great vegetables for eating raw. When I’m in Maine it’s very easy. I think in general, as long as you adjust your diet to fit where you are, there is always a way. If I’m traveling somewhere there aren’t a lot of great ingredients, I’ll probably be doing more blended drinks, more smoothies and things like that.

MC: How did you get into raw foods?
MK: Someone introduced me to raw food and I was a little bit skeptical but at the same time, I’d been leaning more and more toward a vegetarian diet in my personal life, so I tried it and a light bulb went off and something inside me said that this was a really interesting opportunity on a personal level, to embrace food on the health side of things. Also, on a business level, I thought, if somebody could do this in a very creative way, there’s a big market for it. So, I just dove into it.

MC: Do you find it difficult as a chef to cut this and that out of your diet or menu?
MK: No. I was never at a point with raw food where I felt “oh, I need to have this!” There are certain things that I’ll still occasionally eat, for example, I had a whole wheat baguette today, whatever. If I want something, I’ll have it. But raw food really is fully satisfying – I haven’t felt like I missed something. If anything, the flavors sometimes are too intense – that’s why I got into it. As a chef, I would only prepare food that I think is or can be great, and that is really good. That’s what some people, including traditional chefs, don’t understand, they say, “well, how can you not cook meat?” Well, it doesn’t really have any flavor to me. It’s not just about health – it is also about the flavor. I think raw food is some of the best tasting food in the world, when it’s done well.

MC: What about the health aspect of it all – is that something you care about?
MK: Very much. Even when I wasn’t into raw food or vegetarian, probably for 25 years already, I’ve been into health. For me, health is about balance and eating seasonally and incorporating the amount of different foods that you need in order to fit your lifestyle depending on how active you are or how tired you are. Everything I do, every move that I make with food in my life is about health. I’m not neurotic about it all, I enjoy food, but I enjoy food that also nourishes me.

SC: Take us on a day of Matthew’s food – what do you eat?
MK: These days with so much travel, it’s so different. If I’m in Maine, and I’m working on a book, the morning is pretty straight forward: a lot of smoothies, I love blueberries, so a lot of blended drinks. I don’t incorporate a lot of superfoods these days but just fruit, a little raw honey or touch of agave, some bee pollen and maybe almond milk. Perhaps hemp seed toast. I love salads, so for lunch it’s usually big salads, maybe some sea vegetables and avocado, hemp seeds. And dinner can be either a raw main course, not too elaborate, because I’m around elaborate food all the time at work, so, in my own life I eat very simply. If it’s cold weather, I might bake a sweet potato and have it with a lot of kale. I love kale – it’s my other favorite, sometimes raw, sometimes steamed.

SC: What recommendations can you give our readers for incorporating living foods into their daily routine in an easy way?
MK: That’s actually the subject of the next book that I’m writing. I haven’t started it yet, but Everyday Raw Express will be about raw foods that are gourmet but don’t require dehydrating and so forth. So, it’s for people who don’t have a lot of time. I think blended drinks – green smoothies – are one of the greatest things in the world, I still love green smoothies, have them every day if I can. Salads are great, just whole foods, fruits and vegetables and little things that a lot of people don’t think about like, you can take a sheet of nori and wrap greens and avocado and a little tahini and lemon and some sprouts and roll it up and eat it and it’s great, delicious. I think not thinking too hard about trying to recreate some complicated cooked food dish is the best way. Just look at the ingredients and think of what goes together. I’m really kind of a natural at that, I can just grab something together and roll it up or eat it like an avocado filled with sauerkraut, for example, is a great snack.

Motivational speaker, life coach and author Gabrielle Bernstein was in Los Angeles doing a lecture based on her book, Add More ~ing to Your Life, A hip guide to happiness – and we just had to sit down for a chat.

Gabrielle is the founder of Women’s Entrepreneurial Network as well as HerFuture.com, a mentoring network for women, and through her lectures helps a new generation of women to shift their search for happiness from the outside to the inside. Since HLife is all about the inside, we met with the multi-talented beauty and talked about the book and the personal journey that led her to discover herself as a messenger of the steps to a happier life.

Silvie Celiz: Tell us about the book.
Gabrielle Bernstein: It’s a self-help book for the next generation. A hip guide to happiness, so Add More ~ing To Your LIfe is the title. “Ing” stands for Inner Guidance and the whole book is about helping people release their negative patterns and create positive change. So, I use a lot of amazing metaphysical principles within the book that I have just translated for the next generation, and made them relevant for young women. There are 12 chapters, and forgiveness is a very important topic. Sometimes I use a topic called mirroring, which is recognizing what your part in the situation and how your thinking and your believing is affecting your outside experience. Everything is meditation and choosing a positive perspective, bringing in a physical experience. And throughout the book I do three steps: rethinking, moving and receiving – what I call the ~ing equation. Rethinking, moving and receiving x 30 days = changing. And it’s mental and physical reconditioning with positive affirmations. If you apply those three things for 30 days, you can create permanent change. That comes through in every chapter.

Maryl Celiz: What’s something you’ve always wanted to say that nobody’s asked you?
GB: Something that I was asked recently and I want to repeat the answer to is the thing about spirituality being packaged into this hippy woman with beads – she was asking what is my opinion on being cute and hip and spiritual. And I told her that that’s exactly everything I teach – being spiritual doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be all woo woo and out there, it means that you bring it into the body and you recognize what your purpose is, and what your body’s purpose is. And your body’s purpose is to be a messenger, to help carry the message. So if you want to broaden your audience to young women who are into shoes, into fashion, into nightclubs or whatever they’re into, why leave them out because they don’t look like you? You wanna make sure that you honor the body that you’ve been given and play the role of the messenger that you are.  I will never deny the fact that I choose to be cute and spiritual to keep my message as relevant as possible for the listeners. Young women today are very, very hungry for these conversations.

SC: How does diet play into it for you?
GB: In general, I know the difference when I am alkaline. And when I’m leaning in that direction as much as possible, I feel a tremendous difference.

MC: I read somewhere that you’re a self-help junkie, and that you love the Course In Miracles. What got you to that point?
GB: From age zero to 25 I was trying to figure it out, like most people, trying to get something to be happy, what I call the “when I have” – when I have that job, when I have that client, etc. So, when a lot of my when-I-haves became my haves, and still didn’t find myself happy. So at 25 years old I hit a very hard bottom, I became extremely saddened by this outside search, and I immediately chose to turn inward. I got sober, I became a metaphysics junkie, I started picking up my meditation practice like a full time job…I completely changed my life. And, as I went through that, I knew right away that it was my turn now to carry this message – it’s not just about teaching myself and directing my own line, but carrying that message too. I’d already been a motivational speaker since I was young, I started my first two businesses when I was 21, so I’d been speaking publicly for five years already and rather than speaking on vocational topics, I started speaking on health and wellness, manifestation and the steps you need to take for it. My lecture called Knowing Your Worth is about really knowing that you’re worthy of what  it is that you desire before you call on your desire, because so many of us get so hooked on what we want and how to manifest these things, but we’re not being clear about what is blocking us from receiving what we want. There is a voice inside each of us saying, “no, you’re not worthy of that,” or “no, you can’t have that,” and, so, why bother manifesting anything until you believe you can have it?

SC: What are the steps?
GB: The first step is really identifying what the limiting belief is, what that thinking is in saying, “you’re not good enough.” You know where it came from, it came from growing up, high school, mom and dad, some boyfriend who told you that you sucked – who cares, right? It came. And it’s like this tiny idea that began to germinate and became a virus and just sort of exploded in your thinking. And it created the reality that you live today, which is in this box that keeps you small and says, “you can’t go further than that.” The second step is to be willing to change that belief, because with the willingness, you’ll end up with a lecture like mine, you’ll read a post on this site, you’ll find that teacher that needed to be there – whatever it is that you need to spawn change will arrive. And the third step is really allowing yourself to experience the feeling of discomfort. So much of what we avoid is the feeling. We don’t allow ourselves to feel what we need to feel with regard to change. So, when we recognize that limiting belief come up, we want to honor the feeling – and then release it. Honor it and release it, rather than think over the feeling, work over the feeling, run over the feeling, eat over the feeling, drink over the feeling, whatever. By feeling the feeling, you actually start to create change. And the more often you feel it, the more you change.

MC: In the question and answer sessions of your lectures, what’s the one thing that keeps coming up?
GB: People always say things like, “I feel stuck.”  And that’s exactly where they are, they are stuck, because they’re stuck in a negative perspective. And they’re blocked. Fear is what is blocking them.  So, when they say that to me, I say, “of course you are. That’s why you’re here.” And most everyone is stuck in some way, ‘cause fear has taken over in some area of their life and they have to figure out how to get out of it. There’s a lot of work  – but the thinking and the believing is what primarily has to change for that.

Who did you write the book for?
GB: You guys. Young women 18-39, young women who are having an existential crisis – because all of us are. For any young woman who wants to get unstuck, who wants to connect back to spirit, who wants to find a better way to live – and learn how to release fear.

]]> http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/05/gabrielle-bernstein-htalk-interview/feed/ 0 http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/04/hlife-interview-will-tuttle-p2/ http://silvieandmaryl.com/2010/04/hlife-interview-will-tuttle-p2/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:01:19 +0000 Silvie Celiz And Maryl Celiz http://silvieandmaryl.com/?p=4598

This is the concluding Part Two of HLife’s interview with Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, continued from last week’s Part One.

MC: You mention that being vegan is a starting point. What do you mean by that?
WT: People think that that’s the end – you are vegan, that’s it, you made it. The only thing you can do higher than that is to go raw. I think that is not true. When someone goes vegan, that’s actually the very beginning of transformation. For example, I’ve been a vegan already for more than 20 years, and I would get into certain conflicts with Madeleine, my wife. I would not be that cold, but she wanted to turn on the heater, and I’d say, ‘Come on, it’s not that cold, we don’t need the heater.’ Then, I realized that when she would say, ‘but I’m cold,’ even though I’ve been a vegan for 20 years, the mentality of discounting the suffering of others was still there, sort of like what we do to pigs, chicken and cows. They’re in horrible conditions but we just discount their suffering, we minimize it in our own minds, ‘oh its not that bad, they are just cows.’ And we have to able to see these patterns that have been injected into us along with eating animal foods, and we have to do the difficult inner work of pulling them out of our consciousness and really treating everyone with respect. You are respecting them as a being with their own unique qualities, and I think that’s when we begin to see veganism as a path to nonviolence, and as a spiritual journey that never ends. Veganism is basically an ongoing spiritual journey that just goes to higher and higher levels, to ultimate enlightenment, eventually to ultimate wisdom, love, compassion and awakening. That’s really what it is, the actual outer behavior of not eating animal foods anymore is a wonderful leap, but its just a tiny step. We have a long way to go after that.

SC: There is also the judgment and intolerance.
WT: I’ve seen this in the vegan movement myself quite a bit, people say, ‘well I’m vegan now and those people are not.’ There is lot of judgment and lot of violence in the way they talk about other people. Again, someone eating meat is not their fault, they are just acting out the programming of our culture. So, I think the next step now is to create a learning context for non-vegans to become vegans and vegans to become more conscious of what the spiritual path is about. Sort of a de-culturalization or psychological growth, becoming emotionally healthy and becoming a real force for positive change. Because we can be a vegan and not really be much of a force for positive change if we are frustrated, if we are judgmental and so forth. It’s really important for people to take these steps as best we can.

MC: Are you talking about subconscious thoughts that affect our behavior negatively?
WT: Yes. A lot of times it is sort of subconscious. One doesn’t really realize it consciously, but I think that going down the street as a vegan is a challenge because when the average person goes down the street and sees Burger King and McDonald’s and KFC, they don’t have a lot of negativity coming up. They are more like ‘oh, good stuff, I gotta have it.’ And the average vegan going down the same street suddenly gets very negative like, ‘Dang! I hate that Burger King! Don’t people realize this is violent? What a bunch of stupid people we have in this culture, a bunch of jerks! I hate everyone!’ So, we get triggered. But it’s really important as vegans to recognize all this violence, yet to consciously see that and understand that it is a condition that we are inheriting.

MC: It’s not about cutting out some foods and thinking that you did your part, you’re done. There’s much more to it – to cut out negative behaviors and thoughts, especially our judgments of others who are on a different path.
WT: That’s really important. I say that in the World Peace Diet, that being vegan is nothing to be proud of, we are not better than anyone else. It’s just a certain aspect of coming home to our true nature, but it is just the beginning. In fact, we have much more responsibility than ever to be kind and compassionate to other human beings, and that’s really important if we become a vegan because, if we are really concerned about animals, future generations and hungry people, than we should be someone that others would like to emulate. We should attract.

SC: Give vegan a good name.
WT: Yes, instead of repel people. So, I think we have a lot of work to do in order to grow.  I also think that the media unfairly portraits vegans a lot. I think there is a tendency for people who eat animal foods, even if we do nothing but smile at them, for them to feel judged. So, they will project onto us, ‘you are violent.’ They will naturally do that, so we have to realize that that’s happening – especially me.

SC: How long have you been vegetarian/vegan?
WT: For 35 years, and vegan for 30. In 1975, I became a vegetarian, and by 1980 I was a vegan.

MC: And how’s your health?
WT: Good, it’s really good. That’s one of the benefits. It’s really important to feel great, feel comfortable, and to be able to run, have energy. I know I can go out here and run 10 miles if I want. And I hardly ever get sick – and if I do get sick, which is never, it’s only for a day or two. I’ll have a little cleansing, but even that I like it’s just a little while. I’m never in bed for days like I see all these people get, they lose days – that just doesn’t happen with us. For 20 years, and a lot of times with three or four events a week, I’ve only missed one event.

SC: Could you talk about the link between consciousness, materialism and veganism?
WT: Yes. We have a tendency in a culture that eats a lot of meat to look at beings as matter, as just things. If you look at a being and see consciousness manifesting in a creative way – as a cow, a bear, a dog, a human – that this is an expression of a life that is greater than just a material thing, then it will be pretty hard to just stab them and confine them. If you want to see them as just walking meat, a material thing, I’ve noticed that whatever we do to animals we do to ourselves. The more we start to think of ourselves as a material system, material things that were born and will die, then we tend to look at all of Nature as just a material thing. Physics was the first science to realize that there isn’t actually any matter – it’s energy. When you try to find matter, all I can find is probability that is, in many ways, a result of the consciousness of the observer. The observer is who determines what the matter will actually be. It’s the idea of the observer effect.

SC: What we see as matter, is really consciousness.
WT: Exactly. So, we have to understand that consciousness is all, so if we want to create a world of harmony, then we have to change the consciousness. Raising consciousness is a great idea but behavior, which is a material manifestation of consciousness, affects consciousness. Consciousness affects behavior, and behavior affects consciousness, so the consciousness will never go higher than the level of the behavior. That’s why so many people in the new age movement make progress in their spiritual path up to a certain point, and then they hit this plateau and don’t really get anywhere because they haven’t changed their behavior, the violence in their food, the violence in their relationships. They are still eating the same way and it kind of keeps them stuck. The more behavior evolves, the greater compassion. That’s the goal of spiritual life, to have them both developing at the same time.

As an academic and former Zen monk, Dr. Will Tuttle was convinced that someone, some day, would write a book that connected a vegan diet to the internal health of human beings and the planet, a concept that was so evident to him after years of experience and research. But nobody ever did. So, he wrote it himself.

The award-winning book The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony hit number one in Amazon.com shortly after being published, and it continues to spread the message of compassion, kindness and awareness that a plant-based diet implies. HLife sat down with Will for a conversation on this groundbreaking book, one that we believe has the power to transform the way you look at food and to open your eyes to the many ways – social, economic, spiritual, relational, and personal – that eating animals harms the planet and society as a whole.

Part One of the interview is being published today in honor of Earth Day, and we will publish Part Two on Monday.

Maryl Celiz: In The World Peace Diet you talk about the “sophia factor” and the domination of the feminine energy (the female) with relation to a vegan diet. Can you expand on that?
Will Tuttle: Basically, the domination of the feminine principle is the key thing in the whole discussion. It’s what underlies the whole thing and that’s what’s been invisible, and I’ve seen it in my own experience when I was going through academia at UC Berkley. There were so many people who were really into feminism and equality, and yet they would still eat meat and cheese and never think that that was in any way abusing the feminine principle. And back then, I hadn’t made those connections so clearly myself but I still remember that if I would bring it up, there was a sense of reluctance to look at it. I think that’s changing. The key idea is that, the revolution that happened 8,000-10,000 years ago when we started owning animals for food and started to dominate specifically the female animals so we could take their babies from them and try to manipulate their birthing patterns is what I think goes along with the change in the way men saw women. I think, up until that point – and this has been brought up by quite a few anthropologists – women were highly respected, because they did something that men could never do: They could bring forth new life from within themselves. So, there was always this sense of respect for women because of that power that they had. And when men started owning these animals and trying to make them have as many babies as possible and they began to see how they could manipulate the bloodlines and have certain ones that would have babies with more positive qualities, they began to look at women like they look at their goats and sheep. Basically, just as receptacles for the male principle. And, just as the sheep and cows lost respect, women began losing respect.

MC: This goes back to women being bought and sold like property, not being able to vote and all.
WT: And I think that if you look into the earlier mythic traditions – Joseph Campbell brings this up quite a bit -  it is very clear that the divine feminine was hugely powerful. Another point is that there are two kinds of agriculture, and we tend to forget that. We talk about anyone as a farmer – they could be growing corn or vegetables or cows, still a farmer. So, we deliberately kind of cover over that distinction, because plant agriculture, from the beginning, has been something really that’s been celebratory – there’s this sense of working with Nature, you’re working with the natural abundance of the Earth, where you plant a seed and it brings forth a plant that has thousands of seeds, and you plant those and you get ten thousand seeds. There’s this miraculous abundance that comes, and you’re working with cycles of Nature, and with the planets and the moon. This was always mainly women’s work, planting and harvesting, and the ceremonies were always positive ceremonies, giving thanks for the harvest, with this whole tradition of the fertility and abundance rituals. But when the male type of agriculture started kicking in, from the very beginning it was animal agriculture, and it was something that men did, not women. And the animals were always resisting; it was not something that they went along with at all. There was always this element of domination, especially of the females, and of dominating the way that they wanted to live. The female animals didn’t like it, they were always calling after their babies if they were taken to be killed. There was always a sense of going against Nature with animal agriculture.

Silvie Celiz: Is that the what you call the “mentality of domination versus spiritual breakthrough” in the book?
WT: Yeah. The mentality of domination is essential to eating animal foods, especially from animals that are herded. They’re herded, they’re not living wild; you have hunters and at least with that the animals are not living as property, which is a huge change. But the essence of the spiritual traditions always revolves around this idea of the interconnectedness of life, and of kindness, because the Universal spiritual breakthrough is always “what I am as a separate self is a part of something greater”. That’s the great “ah-hah!”, it’s that I’m not just a self that has to struggle against other selves and against the world in this sort of contracted, essentially manipulative kind of way, which is how the self usually feels. It’s realizing that what I am is integral to the whole unfolding of life and that my life is a celebration of something greater, and therefore, it’s just natural that the greatest joy that I ever get is in helping others to be happy as we all share this sense of community, of celebration, a sense of kindness. I mean, there’s never been sages that are selfish, that’s just the opposite, they’re giving because that’s their greatest joy. It’s not like they’re trying to be good – that’s just what they like to do!

SC: Being kind is sort of a given when we think of being good and doing what’s right.
WT: But being born in this culture, where we’re eating the mentality of violence and domination, that’s the mentality that might make right that you can somehow get something at the expense of others, because that’s what we’re doing every time we eat animal foods – we’re getting something at their expense. And the feminine wisdom understands this, it’s essentially sophia and prajna in the Buddhist tradition, this idea of an intuitive wisdom that we all have, that from the very core of our culture, from this herding mentality, has been repressed. Because we couldn’t do this to female animals, we couldn’t steal their babies, we couldn’t continually inject sperm into them. And we had to repress that and then we pass it onto our children. And now, we even do plant agriculture in the same way we do animal agriculture: it’s a domination, “we’re gonna take that Earth and we’re gonna get rid of everything and we’re gonna plant those seeds and if anything else comes up, we’re gonna kill it, and we’re gonna take those crops -”

MC: And we’re gonna manipulate their genetics so that we can make more for us.
WT: Right, chemicals and genetic engineering, all of this is just the continuation of that. So, the idea is that when sophia develops, then there’s a sense of the abundance of gardens. And there’s wonderful evidence coming out recently in Cuba and now Russia and some other places where they feed a lot more people with local gardens than you can with mass agriculture – that’s a great lie that’s been told to us, “oh, you couldn’t feed a starving world with these quaint ways, you have to have mass petroleum-based agriculture.” Well, yeah, maybe you do if you’re going to grow a huge amount of grain to feed animals and kill them. But if you’re wanting just to feed the people, local gardens where you get huge amount of food out of a much smaller area, and much better quality, are better in every way. So, I think the domination of the feminine is what’s creating the starvation that we’re experiencing, the inequality that we’re experiencing, the sense of violence that pervades in a way in a lot of the relationships in our culture, because there’s this sense underlying everything that, if I can just overpower someone or outsmart someone – because that’s what we do to animals a lot, outsmart them, by putting these things in the hook when we fish, putting fences around them, whatever it is – we can use some kind of superior capacity to harm others for our benefit. That’s what underlies our whole economic system in a lot of ways, that we can just manipulate people to buy things they don’t even want through advertising.

MC: But doesn’t the domination of the feminine also harm the masculine? You discuss in your book the emotional miseducation of boys. I tend to think that an imbalance in the feminine aspect – whether in Nature or ourselves – has a cost to the masculine. Can you talk about that?
WT: I have a whole chapter in The World Peace Diet that talks about the suffering that men go through growing up. And I remember growing up and there is a certain point where you’re now a “young man”, and then it’s like everything starts changing. And even back then I was into sports quite a bit, and there was this locker room mentality that I was never comfortable with but it was about boys talking about girls as totally sexual objects, pieces of meat, and judging them, ranking them one to ten, on the basis of their outer form. And if you don’t go along with it, you’re looked at as just a nobody. And so there’s this looking at beings as things, as meat, and I think that through this, boys just learn to disconnect from the natural sensitivity that they would have – it’s just not looked at as something valuable. It’s much more valuable to be tough and hard and able to kind of hurt other boys. There are a lot of miserable young boys because they have to disconnect from their natural sensitivity. There’s a book about that called Raising Cain, written by these two Harvard psychologists who spent their whole time working with boys and I quote them some in the book. But they don’t get it – the interesting things is, they go with these 13, 14 year old boys who are having these horrific suicidal thoughts, I mean, these boys suffer so badly. And to build rapport with them they’ll go to McDonald’s and have a burger together. They don’t get the connection at all, I mean, no one does, that it’s the eating of meat that is the driving underlying force behind this suffering. Their answers to the problem are so weak, they say, “well, what we should do is try to encourage boys to be in touch with their feelings.”

SC: But how do we do that?
WT: Exactly. All of these problems are insoluble by the experts, because they don’t, in a sense almost deliberately and almost explicitly, cannot see that it is this massive killing of animals and eating of those animals that is the underlying driving power that keeps this cowboy/John Wayne mentality in place, where boys have this role model – we’ve had it now for 10,000 years – of the tough, disconnected man who is capable of violence to get what he wants for himself and for his Lord, whoever he’s serving. That’s how it is. And women are seen as objects to be kept in line, just like you keep your cows in line. It’s this whole thing about being tough, it’s power, control, and somehow in our culture we are taught that this is natural. This is sort of normal. And it is normal in this culture, but the point I’m making is that this culture is really a perversion of our true human nature, that we’re forced at an early age to disconnect through very powerful indoctrination procedures that are mainly the rituals of eating. I mean, the rituals of eating are enormously powerful.

SC: So it’s evidence of a human mental distortion.
WT: It is. Our whole culture, in a way, has elements of being a satanic cult. They didn’t actually kill things in front of me but we had to eat this flesh, and it does something to us. I think, on a very deep level, it’s very harmful to a little boy, a child. I also learned that there are quite a few theories in moral development that agree that we are born and are totally bonded with the mother – we don’t have a self, we are just mom – and then we go through a stage in which we separate, there’s mom, and there I am. And at that stage we only care about ourselves. But then we begin to care about others, we begin to see that others have their interests and I have my interests and we get to start learning to respect them. But whether that stage is actually reached depends a lot on the role models, the parents around you, if they’re caring, if they teach you to care about their feelings and all that. It’s a social learning. But I think that in our culture, we all learn, on a very deep level and sort of non-verbally, not to care about a whole class of beings, by eating their flesh. So, I think that our natural moral development, which would develop into a Universal compassion for all life, gets short-circuited. And adults in our culture are very choosy about what we care about and feel compassionate for. It’s usually just certain ones and other ones we don’t care. And I think this all goes back to these kinds of rituals of eating animal flesh, because satanism is simply a concern for self and not others. I explored it just ‘cause I was curious and it is very interesting, if you read satanic books, all they say is “you can have what you want – just have it all!” It’s not necessarily horrible, it’s “get what you want.”  At the cost of…you just don’t really worry about anyone else, let them get what they want, you get what you want.

SC: There is no consequence, no cause and effect.
WT: Right. Not concerned about the consequences to others – you just want to get what you want.

MC: And ignore that we’re all connected and what happens to the other directly affects the self anyway.
WT: Exactly. So, there’s a hardening that has to take place, and I think that’s what eating animal foods does to us as a little kid, the hardening. You know, on the farm the little kids who are in Future Farmers of America at one point are given the job of taking care of a little sheep or a goat or a pig or something, and they fall in love with their animal, they love their animal and they raise this little animal and they show it and maybe their little animal even gets a prize for being the nicest looking animal. And then they’re told, “now, you will sell your animal to so-and-so and get paid.” And they have it set up nowadays where the kid gets more money than before, and the kid’s like, “wow, I get some money for this!” But the animal is killed, and a lot of times the kid is just devastated when he finds out that they’re just gonna kill this animal. And then the parents say, “this is the way life is, and if you don’t like it, you’re not my son anymore.”  That’s the typical line they get. And that’s what their father did to them and that’s what they do to their kids and so on through the generations. Now we’re more urban, so we don’t have that kind of thing so much, but it’s still the same thing – we’re involved indirectly and nobody’s talking about it, so it’s more just being oblivious to it.

MC: You mention that this is a cultural concept versus a truly natural one. Is this something that we just inherit?
WT: Yeah. I was talking to my mother when I was writing The World Peace Diet and I was saying how this is something that we are all just indoctrinated into, and she used the word ‘inheritance”: “we probably just all inherited it through our upbringing.” It’s not something one can ever blame their parents for – she never wanted anything but good things for me – she wanted to give us good food and good, healthy meat, dairy and eggs and, that’s what she thought was good. It’s that any culture has a powerful drive to replicate itself. And it will do so with the good and the bad things, the things that bring suffering and the things that bring harmony will both be replicated.

SC: If we inherit this, what can we do to modify it?
WT: I believe the spiritual path for any human being doesn’t really begin until that person starts to question the programming of their culture. And the programming of their culture may be good, but until we begin to sort of see that what I am is a being, not just a programmed entity or thing that is just reenacting whatever rituals the culture has given me to reenact, there won’t be any direct intuitive awareness of what is natural and what is true/authentic for me as a being. That’s what I think veganism is really about: Questioning the underlying assumptions of our culture and then connecting with what is really, authentically true for me as an expression of life. I think that when that is actually happening, we are naturally drawn toward a plant-based diet because we make these connections – we begin to see the violence that is caused, the suffering of the animals, of the people that have to do the killing, of the people that are starving because they can’t get grain that is being fed to the animals, of the ecosystem, of wild life – such a massive amount of suffering that results from choosing animal foods, that anyone who is beginning to awaken to their intuition, which sees the oneness and unity and connectedness of life, begins to spontaneously see that this is not behavior that is going to, in any way, help them in their life to further spiritual growth, to further their quest to contribute to the development of their culture.

MC: Which is what we all want to do, deep down inside, to grow and contribute.
WT: I think that the underlying drive for all of us, when we really get in touch authentically with what it is, is to find our unique way of blessing the world. And when we find that, our life is great. It may not be easy – we may have challenges and difficulties or whatever – but there’s an underlying sense of meaning. ‘My life is worthwhile and I respect myself because I’m making a contribution.’ And I think that’s the big problem with eating animal foods, that since we’re not respecting those animals, not respecting those beings – I mean, to hyper-confine, and steal and mutilate these animals and not care – it undermines our own self-respect. And people who don’t respect themselves are exactly what you want to have if you want to have a culture that you can control, where they will buy what you want them to buy, where they won’t question what you tell them is true. If people have low self-respect, they want to be fulfilled by consuming. So this is why eating meat is really the hidden, underlying driving force behind the real religion of this culture, which is consumerism. The religion of this culture, essentially is, “you will find happiness if you can find the perfect combination of products at Walmart.” And if you can add in the right spouse, and the right house, and the right whatever, the idea is that everything becomes an object to be somehow acquired. And that comes from low self-esteem. Because people who are in touch with their own self-respect aren’t trying to get a lot of stuff, they’re happy how they are, very happy just looking at the beauty of trees and birds, just having relationships that are rich in meaning, and they’re not gonna be craving to buy things.

SC: People who have a normal sense of esteem and respect don’t need to be defined by external things, and they also don’t stand for things that are wrong.
WT: When people tell lies, people with self-respect and esteem are gonna question that, they’re gonna say, “wait a minute, that’s ridiculous. What do you mean that we have to go to war to liberate those people who have never even tried to attack us?” I mean, they wouldn’t stand for it. They wouldn’t be so easily manipulated. That’s why I think veganism is really profoundly subversive to our culture, because it challenges this norm. But the beauty of it is that it’s not something that’s aggressive – there’s no violence involved. We’re not trying to hurt anybody, it’s basically just going in another direction and creating communities of connectedness and kindness. The beauty of veganism, I think, is that, deep down, we all know that it is our true nature. We’re not trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. No one, when they see a little squirrel, thinks, “oh man, I just wanna rip that thing apart!” That’s not how we are, that is so perverse! You have to really brutalize someone to get them to really think that way. We have this horrible war in Iraq and these other places, and people are getting traumatized and having nightmares and committing suicide after returning. The thing is, if we were naturally violent, and we enjoyed brutalizing other human beings, we wouldn’t be traumatized. But we are not that way. We have been given the gifts of bodies and consciousness that thrive on kindness, mercy, tenderness, creativity, love and caring, and that’s what we love. That’s it. Food is the place where it’s just twisted. I don’t know how it started, who’s behind the whole thing – that’s a whole other question – but there is definitely a wealthy elite that is able to maintain control over massive numbers of people because of this system. That’s a whole other dimension of this thing.

When we saw Professor Thomas J. Scheff teaching about emotions on UCTV, we knew we had to talk to him. A prolific author whose books include Microsociology, Emotions and Violence, Bloody Revenge, Emotions and the Social Bond, and Easy Rider, among others, Scheff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on emotions and social psychology. He is also a wonderful human being whose sense of humor permeates his teachings and resonates throughout this interview, where we discuss love, anger, and what he considers the master emotion: shame.

Maryl Celiz: What is the role of emotions in health?

Thomas Scheff: I think emotions are extremely important in every day life, in therapy, in politics – and much ignored, to say the least. That is, psychotherapists very seldom train to understand their own emotions and other people’s. But that’s absolutely essential. To connect with a person, you have to be in their emotional wavelength.  You have to understand what they’re feeling, because often they can’t explain it, they can’t put it in words. And, so you have to be sensitive, more sensitive than they are, oftentimes. So, it’s a big emptiness in modern societies that we’ve kind of shrugged off emotions as if they were not important and thought is everything. If you look at the major psychology departments in the world, I think there’s one that has section on emotions. I think it’s in England. Most psychology departments have large groups of cognitive psychologists, large groups of behavioral psychologists, courses on perception, on neurology – that’s very much a fad now, the neurology of the brain. But they seldom have even one person that deals with emotions. In our campus, the psychology department has one person, who deals with facial expression, or at least that’s one of his areas – but that’s the whole extent of it. In sociology, of course, I’m the only one in our department, and in social departments. So, emotions are neglected in the academy, and in medical school and so on. It’s a mess. And I’m protesting.

Silvie Celiz: Well, we’re very happy that you’re doing that. What actually prompted your own interest in the study of emotions and the role they play in all of this?

TS: I was a conventional sociologist until I was 40. I did a book, a famous one, on labeling mental illness, which takes a strictly sociological approach, no psychology (that’s what sociologists like, they don’t want anything to do with psychology). But at 40 I had some life experiences which unearthed a whole lot of emotions that I didn’t even know were there and then I got interested in studying emotions because of my own personal experience. I mean, it was a big help for me to start crying. I didn’t know how to cry – most men don’t. I learned how to cry, I cried a whole lot to catch up. And I experienced some fear that was really intense, to catch up, because men stuff fear. They pretend that they’re not afraid because they don’t want to be called ‘cowards’ – which is a total mistake because between fear and coward there is no relationship. Anyway, I learned how to deal with my anger better than I had. I was a very angry person until I was 40. And how to deal with shame, which is the hardest of all. Shame is very difficult. But I learned to laugh at myself, which is a big help, laugh at myself instead of at other people, which I’d been doing. And in laughing at myself I found that I was very laughable in a lot of ways – ha! So, I became very emotional and I felt much better and inspired to find out more about emotions in general, not just in my case – I started dealing with emotions in my classes, with my students. And they loved it – they couldn’t get enough. So, I became a student of especially shame and anger, which are very large continents and at the time that I started they were unexplored. And I’ve had a good time, and I’m still having a good time.

MC: How do we deal with negative emotions constructively?

TS: I’ve been teaching my students how to cry, for many years. The women cry but some find that it’s painful. And very few of the men cry. So, what I do is I have them make up a list of ‘best moments’, the best moments in their lives. You ever look at the Olympic winners? Here’s a man who won a mile run, and there are these men, standing up on these pedestals and they have their medals for winning – and all three are crying. What’s that about? Those men haven’t cried in years! They’re having a best moment, and they feel like nobody’s gonna call them a sissy because they just won the Olympics. It frees them up to feel their emotions and, of course, they’re crying all the losses they had to suffer to get to that point. They hadn’t been crying about them – they save them up for that moment.

SC: So crying is more about an overwhelming experience?

TS: Yes. Overwhelming grief or fear – or shame – is very painful. So, the best moments exercise teaches you how to be in the emotion without getting overwhelmed by it. Because in the best moments you’re also back in the past when you are feeling safe – and that’s the key to dealing with emotions in a healthy way. It turns out it’s not painful. A good cry when you’re in the theater and you’re watching a good film, it feels good. It’s a good cry. Sure, it may be due to a tragedy that’s happening to a person on the screen, but you’re not that person, it’s not happening to you, and that frees your up to feel your own neglected feelings because you know you’re safe. You can get up and leave the theater if you have to. I’ve done that. It’s that being able to quit if you want that allows people to feel their feelings in a pleasurable way. It’s happened to me many times.

MC: Is there ever a danger in being so in touch with emotions that you’re overly emotional and everyone sees you as an emotional wreck?

TS: (Laughs) I cry very easily. And my wife, who understands me very well, she’s still embarrassed if I cry in public. Even though she knows that it’s OK, and it’s OK with her, and it’s good for me. But she’s still embarrassed. My kids pretend that they don’t know me if I cry in public. But I want to do it, I feel I am revealing my true self: I am sad about something that’s going on and I cry. There’s a wonderful song by Iris Dement, it’s called “No Time To Cry”. That’s the story of our civilization – we don’t have time to cry. And that’s a metaphor for we don’t allow people to feel their emotions. Crying, shaking and shivering – that’s a fear response – laughing. I’m a big laugher, don’t get me laughing. My wife is worse than me, especially her own jokes, she loves her own jokes, she’ll be on the floor laughing about something that I don’t even know that it’s funny. But it doesn’t matter what you’re laughing at as long as you’re laughing at yourself or the Universe and not at other people. Laughing at other people is hostile, it’s rejection, you’re rejecting them. If you laugh at yourself, it’s OK, you’re just saying ‘silly me, what did I do, I’ve done it again’. And it’s acceptance of yourself and your feelings. And you’ll never guess what emotion laughter is tied to in my vocabulary. Maryl, you guess.

MC: Nervousness?

TS: That’s intimately connected with the emotion but emotions are states of bodily arousal. It’s a physical thing. And being recognized rather than rejected is deeply implicated in causing this reaction. Laughter is the catharsis of a very fundamental emotion, which we don’t like to mention in our society. Silvie, you get to guess.

SC: Would it be violence?

TS: No, that’s anger or fear. In my classes, I’d ask students to get up and tell about a mistake they made in public. And they would get up and start telling, and they would get convulsed in laughter, sometimes you couldn’t even understand what they were saying because the laughter was blocking out the language. So, you make a mistake and then you need to laugh about it. What emotion is connected with making a mistake?

SC: Shame!

TS: Ah-ha! (claps) Shame is my baby. I write and talk and research and on and on about shame and its connection with withdrawal, on the one hand, which is the most common reaction and to aggression, on the other hand, which is much less common but I argue that unacknowledged shame – shame that you stuff – is at the root of either withdrawal and aggression. So, anger by itself is nothing. It’s just a frustration. But when it is combined with unacknowledged shame, it goes round and round and gets you into deep water very quick. And I’ve written a lot about that. I call shame the ‘master emotion’, because it regulates the other emotions too. Why won’t people cry when they need to cry? Well, because they’re embarrassed about crying in public (except me).

SC: So what is a good technique to master an emotion?

TS: It is best to talk to someone else, because it gives you the ability to see yourself as the other person is seeing you – we do that automatically without knowing it, we get into their heads and look at ourselves. That’s how we understand conversation, because people are very unclear and unless we do that we can’t understand the simplest conversation. But it’s that split that gives you distance from an emotion. And it’s being able to be in and out of the feeling that allows you to feel it safely – if someone is listening to you, you feel even safer, you got someone on your side, someone sympathetic, and that’s very important.

MC: What if the person you’re talking to doesn’t really understand their own emotions?

TS: Well, it is a problem, but as long as the person is sympathetic and patient – that’s very important, that they don’t get impatient, that they’re willing to hear you out – it’s helpful to just have someone else hear you out when you’re struggling with some problem. I learned that from my wife. For many years, she was a mediator in a divorce court, and it’s a very messy business because she’s dealing with some very angry people all day long. So she’d come home feeling really tense and then she’d tell me about her day. And when we first got together I thought ‘how long is this gonna go on? How come she’s telling me the same story over and over again? Blah, blah, blah’. I had to be patient, patient, patient. But then I had a brilliant idea after three months: She seems to feel better after she does that! And if she doesn’t do it, she’s still tense. So then I thought about that a while, with my brilliant, fast-moving brain, and in another three months I had another idea: I can do that too! I can talk to her about MY day. And so I started to share my time with her, and I’d tell her about my day. It would take me about two minutes. And then she’d ask me questions about my day, and I got to expand it a little bit. And then she kept asking me questions, and I kept expanding. And then I’d come to an event during the day, and I felt it as I was telling her, ‘oh! I didn’t deal with that at the time, I was too busy.’ And then I’d talk about that situation and get into the feeling that I had swallowed at the time. That was a big revelation for me and I found out that some of my days were very intense. And I was hiding a lot of the feelings that came up during the day and I could only feel them when I told my wife. And so we got off on a good start that way, because we were helping each other with difficult jobs that we both had.

SC: If I do or don’t have someone, what are some basic guidelines to help ourselves out with our emotions?

TS: When you come home from your job, you need to review your day. It’s better to review it to a sympathetic listener, but if you don’t have it, review it to yourself. Looking for best moments, that’s the way to start. That’ll encourage you to be able to deal with the bad moments. I love this conversation, I never quite put it that way before, you two are inspiring me. Can I join your team?

MC/SC: We would love that.

TS: Three persons against the world.

SC: We need more of these types of conversations and insights on how to handle our emotions.

MC: These basic understandings of our own emotions and how to communicate them to someone else are crucial for relationships too, which is something that everyone wants.

TS: When my wife and I I first got together, we used to quarrel long and hard, nasty quarrels, would go on for hours. And she was in graduate school at the time and she said to me, ‘I’m gonna study marital quarrels, because you and I are both experts’ (laughs). And I said, ‘well, how are you gonna do that?’ And she said ‘I’m gonna set up a video camera in the kitchen and i’m gonna video tape our quarrels.’ And I said, ‘that’ll never work, why don’t you do something else?’ She said, ‘like what’. I told her some harebrained idea and she rejected it. So she put a camera in our kitchen and every time we would start to quarrel she would say ‘hold on’ and she would turn on the thing, and then we would argue for about an hour or two or more. And I thought I was being very wonderful, until she showed me one of the tapes. And I said ‘Oh my God! That’s not me up there – that’s my dad!’ I used to hate it when he quarreled like that, pointing his finger and so sure of himself and acting like this, and I said ‘we can’t live like this’. And so we went to a marriage counselor and he introduced us to the idea of communicating with each other. And started us on that route, and it was a good thing because if we hadn’t done it, we would’ve split up. So, it was very personal, my experiences with emotions and with relationships. I flunked the first two marriages but I’m not gonna flunk this one.

SC: You said shame is the master emotion – is that the only one?

TS: Well, it’s a little bit of an exaggeration but what I mean is that it’s shame that keeps people feeling their other emotions, and shame itself. People are ashamed of being ashamed. They’re ashamed of being angry, even the screamers are ashamed of it. They’re ashamed of being afraid, especially men. Women aren’t as ashamed of being afraid, they’re more realistic about it. And they’re ashamed of crying, of grief. So, it helps with all your emotions if you start dealing with your shame a little, and embarrassment, humiliation. The way you do that is a little different then the others. You have to talk about it a lot at first, how you were humiliated and how you felt. And if you talk about it enough – sometimes it can take a long time – you come to see it in a humorous way. And when you see it like that, you laugh about yourself. And that takes it out of the cellar, it brings it out into the light. And most laughter at ourselves is very healthy. We need to do that in order to deal with the physical parts of shame, embarrassment and humiliation. So, what I say to people is that shame, embarrassment and humiliation are bodily preparation to laugh. You had a lot of tension in your body, which can be released by laughing. Anger – you ready for this or you want to talk shame some more?

MC: I’ve been waiting for anger.

TS: Okay. Anger is bodily preparation, well, Darwin thought it was bodily preparation to fight, and it is – you get a big shot of adrenaline in your system, which prepares you for some sort of exertion. And when I was young enough, I knew that if I ran six miles fast enough, I would burn off some of that adrenaline, and it would help me sleep at night. You ever go to bed angry and you can’t go to sleep? That’s the adrenaline pulsating, it’s a very powerful upper, as my students would say. Well, how can you metabolize all that adrenaline in 30 seconds? I’ve discovered that I can get rid of that energy in less than a minute, if I play it just right: Your body has to feel the anger, you have to feel the heat, instead of hiding it. Your anger is just an internal state, so I’m not talking about acting out anger. Animals, they have to act it out. Human beings don’t. I just say ‘I’m angry at you because’. And if they don’t understand, I say it again a little differently, because human beings don’t like to be told the same thing to an adult twice – they get mad. And if they still don’t get it, I say it again. They can’t tell I’m angry because I’m won’t look like it but I am. And as I am doing that routine, sometimes my body gets hot, and after that, I feel fine – I can take a nap right there.

SC: So what about those people who raise their voice and start screaming?

TS: They’re acting out the anger. But that doesn’t work. Experimental psychologists, one of the few things they’ve demonstrated is that acting out anger doesn’t help – it makes things worse, usually. So, it’s not a good idea. It makes the other person angry and that’s not good either. So, what you want to do is keep your voice down and say courteously but relentlessly why you’re angry. And sooner or later they’ll get that you’re angry, and they’ll apologize. They’re a little surprised that you’re angry and not showing it, but you’re showing it verbally. And that gets your body into the right place to metabolize the adrenaline. You don’t have to run the six miles. But it doesn’t work every time. I’m supposed to be an expert on this and wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anyone is. If my wife is yelling at me, I have a strong tendency to yell back, and then we’re in it. And she’s over it in five minutes, but I’m not. So, I wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anybody is. Sometimes I manage better. One time she yelled at me and I said ‘ouch’. And she said, ‘what?’ And I said ‘ouch’. And she said ‘what does that mean?’ And I said, ‘it means what you said hurt me. It hurts. Ouch.’ And she laughed. And I laughed. And it was over. So that’s the ‘ouch’ technique – there are thousands of more out there that I don’t know about but try it out sometime: ouch.

SC: My husband does that.

TS: He does ‘ouch’?

SC: Yes.

TS: Do you laugh?

SC: Yes!

TS: Perfect. You’re probably better at it than I am, I’m good at explaining it but I’m not that great at doing it. I’m a B- student, you’re an A+ student.

MC: If acting out anger doesn’t work, then why do we keep doing it?

TS: Well, why do we keep invading Afghanistan? Our system of government is broken. And our society is very broken with respect to these crucial matters, it’s been broken for a very long time. In the 19th Century it wasn’t as bad, people could talk about shame openly. But they don’t anymore. Shame is the ‘s’ word. You have to be very careful. When I introduce this to my students, I take a very long time to get there. First we talk about embarrassment, then humiliation – and humiliation is still safe, because people see that as coming from the outside, something is being done to you, so they’re not as spooked by it as the ‘s’ word. You can’t talk about shame openly in public, not directly. You can say ‘oh, what a shame.’ But that’s different. Shame is something that people see as internal – it’s your fault: You’re ignorant, you’re stupid, etc..we have thousands of ways of putting ourselves down, which our society teaches us to do. When we are in grammar school, we get put down a lot. teachers don’t mean to put you down – they’re trying to teach you something – but they put you down anyway. You think you’re stupid, ‘cause you can’t get the right answers.  Most teachers don’t realize they’re putting students down, they think they’re giving them the right answers.

MC: Are embarrassment and shame related to low self-esteem?

TS: Low self-esteem is a hidden way of talking about shame. Instead of ‘I’m much more ashamed than I am proud of myself’, you say, ‘I’ve low self-esteem’. We have all sorts of dodges away from the truth of what we’re actually feeling. We say ‘that was an awkward moment’ – it wasn’t me that was embarrassed, it was the moment that was awkward. We have thousands of ways of saying of overlaying what’s going on.

SC: What about love?

TS: I think of love as giving just as much value to the other person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors as you do to your own. Here’s the hard part: no more, no less. You don’t value them more than yourself, and you don’t value yourself more than them. And that’s very, very tricky. You connect with them, and you honor the beloved, but you’re not engulfed with them. I have a book coming out about love and the balance of connecting. The key to understanding shame is relation. Shame is a relational phenomenon. Helen Lewis said that shame is a signal of threat to the bond. And pride, genuine pride, is a signal of a secure bond, of connectedness, that you’re connected with another person or persons. Shame, embarrassment and humiliation are signals of disconnect. Shame is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one. It’s about connect and disconnect. When we make a mistake, we feel disconnected. We’ve done something wrong, which disconnects you from people that are watching.

MC: How do men and women differ when it comes to emotions?

TS: I have an article about the machismo and Madonna system, about how men and women share in the repression of emotions. I put it this way: Men repress shame, grief and fear, and act out anger. A man is more likely to act out anger than a woman. Whereas a Madonna, which is the feminine equivalent of machismo, they repress anger and acts out fear. And that makes a fit, because a Madonna wants a strong man to protect her so she’ll be less afraid. And the man wants a woman who won’t get angry at him, so he can enjoy life. So it’s a repressive arrangement on both sides. And I think women are slightly less repressed than men, because the men repress fear completely. But the women are more repressed in modern society, especially with anger. Anger is a natural, organic reaction to frustration – of course they have it. And you need to know that and the other people need to know that. Women who smile too much and who say they don’t get angry, that’s repression. And any repression of emotions is going to do damage to your psyche and to your body and to your relationships. So I say, let’s get the men and the women together and get into the emotional relational world, into social emotion.

Recently, author, lecturer and healer Annie Padden Jubb opened up the wonderful LifeFood Organic restaurant/shop on the corner of Sunset and Cahuenga in Hollywood. Having read her enlightening book Secrets of an Alkaline Body: The New Science of Colloidal Biology and sampled her and chef Laurel’s wonderful creations (they have an incredible raw lasagna made of zuccini noodles marinated in olive oil, sea salt, black pepper and oregano, with a cashew, Irish moss basil mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, pesto, marinara, and basil leaves) we had to sit down for a chat.

Annie is known as an authority in detoxification and cellular regeneration, and a pioneer in bio-based nutrition that focuses on raw, life foods.  In addition to LifeFood Organic, she has owned and operated The Raw Experience Restaurant in San Francisco, hosted and produced the Universe Inside Your Mind TV show, and opened Jubb’s Longevity, Inc, a store in Manhattan that retails LifeFood products of her own creation that aid in detoxification and cellular nutrition. She has also been trained in neurolinguistic programming, taught clinical hypnosis, and is sought after worldwide for her engaging lectures and result-driven health consultations.

Silvie Celiz: How did you start your path on nutritional healing?

Annie Padden Jubb: I was doing neurolinguistic programming, leading fire walks, sweat lodges, teaching clinical hypnosis. And all my clients started coming to me in the 1980s with all these cancers, there was also obesity, diabetes suddenly everywhere – adult onset diabetes was beginning to show up in kids under 18. I did some research and realized that, in 1985, there was a political decision to change all of the sugar from cane to high fructose corn syrup. And that’s what I think is really a turning point here. They’ve also eroded the food supply incredibly during this time – genetic modification, taking all the nutrients out of the soil and not replenishing it. That’s why I got into nutrition. I work on the premise that the body is a perfect self-correcting mechanism, and if this is the case, then any kind of disease is too many toxins and not enough nutrients. So, I developed a pretty comprehensive detox program, my liver and gall bladder flush. They’re amazing, they get people to stuff out all these amazing gall stones – everybody has them it’s amazing. It’s also amazing once you empty that vessel how much more functional the liver is. First of all, your digestion improves. So, the liver is the most important organ of the body, it’s what I always treat first – I don’t care if somebody’s got a brain tumor, or gout in their toe or whatever, the first thing to do is clean out the liver, open up the bile ducts, get everything moving, all the organs of elimination activated – and the system recovers.

Maryl Celiz: You mention in your book that disease is either due to toxicity or enervation. Can you define those?

APJ: Toxicity is anything that you’re storing or that is causing some kind of damage, some kind of stopping in your immune system. So, chemicals, flavoring, seasonings, additives, excitotoxins – all of this stuff they’re adding to food that isn’t really tasty, doesn’t have any nutritive value, so they have to override your natural senses to find food. So, these flavorings and stuff excite the salivary glands to death. So then people eat this and have all of these “flavors” exploding in their mouth…and then you give them an apple and they’re like “boring”. And they really can’t taste much, it takes them a while for their taste buds to recover, and then they go “oh..it’s an apple..it smells good” and then lean into it. That’s my philosophy, so toxicity is that, and then enervation is a lack of  nerve-to-nerve communication, a lack of communication on a cellular level. Enervation is like disempowerment. And when you’re disempowered, you can see it in people’s posture – they’re like a question mark.

SC: In all of your years of lectures and consultation, what have you found to be the most common problem on a non-physical level?

APJ: On a purely psychosomatic level, people are constantly programming disease for themselves, or irritabilities or discomforts. And they use organ language. So, here’s something you’ll hear a lot of people say: “That person is just a pain in my butt.” And I want to say “don’t put it there! Put it somewhere else, like over there! A pain in my wall.” And then you’ll notice that they will have a pain in their butt – it’s either hemorrhoids or irritable bowel syndrome – and there is always an emotional component to any of this, so that’s why I always check what someone’s language is telling me. All of our emotions override the physical – they actually come first and then the physical follows behind. So, for example, I have a friend who called me and she said “I have a little bit of cancer.” And I asked her where, and she said “in the left breast”. The left breast is the heart. So immediately I knew there was a heartfelt condition going on, otherwise it could’ve been the other breast. Something is coming into her as a heartfelt message that is messing her up. So I asked her, “how’s your relationship going?” Long silence. So, there you go.

MC: What is a cancer cell?

APJ: A cancer cell is a cell that’s gotten very fat and stupid. But it’s reversible. It’s just obese and dumb and kind of like knocked out on bad food and it doesn’t remember that it is actually a stem cell and it can be any cell in the body if it really wanted to be, because that is the true nature of any cell. So, it’s this big dopey cell that thinks it can’t move, wants to be on the couch, and says “I just wanna stay here and maybe others will join me and I’ll be a tumor someday. I’ll just hang out.” That’s what a tumor is, it’s just the body’s really creative way to kind of sweep up all the crap into one little spot. The body says “alright, we’re not eliminating and we’re eating too many things that we’re storing and we need a garbage, basically, to get rid of this material.” That’s how tumors are reversed effectively the way they are built, they get built slowly and they can be reversed slowly. And sometimes really fast. We’re emotional, physical and spiritual creatures, and what I’ve found is that, for spontaneous remission to occur, you need to dramatically affect two of those three systems.

SC: What exactly is a colloid?

APJ: It’s a mineral that is so small it has what is called Brownian Movement. And BM is a dance.

MC: How is the mind connected to the body?

APJ: Every thought that we have either has an alkaline or an acidic response in the body. The liver is where we hold anger. We even have sayings for this, language like “made my blood boil”. “Broke my heart” is another thing people say. If somebody comes up and says something lovely to you, you want to take a deep breath, feel lovely. When someone says something negative and you attach yourself to it, you’ll start to protect the heart, shut down the lungs, start to cover and protect your internal organs, maybe cover your face, protect yourself from that. And then there’s adrenaline, or cortisol, which is a stress hormone. It’s pretty available, when there’s emotion. I tell my cancer patients all the time to do their castor patch, coffee enemas, six green juices a day, and you need to watch a funny movie with somebody you love. Have a belly laugh, ‘cause it helps you produce a lot more endogenous opiates and they are the best in the pharmacy, they make you happy.

SC: How do we command our body to release certain things?

APJ: The trigger is usually emotion, how you feel about things. It’s very interesting to do things with hypnosis, for example, my husband used to put someone in a very light hypnosis and would take a little needle and run it down both of the person’s arms. And he would tell the person, “your left arm is invincible. And your right arm is a little weak. And I wonder how you’re going to react to this external stimulation.” So, what happens is the strong side, you see the little mark and it’s gone in a few seconds. But the arm with the suggestion that it’s weak, the mark will be there for a while. Might even form a little scab.

MC: What part does belief play in all this?

APB: Huge. But belief is different than understanding. Belief is really be-love…we actually want to be loved. So, we will do anything if we believe in it. There’s all kinds of cases about this. The placebo effect, for example. Doctors say that it’s not statistically significant because it only affects 17% of us. But then you ask them what their success rate at curing cancer is, and they’ll say 17%. So, basically, you’re only getting people that really believe in the chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. And that is statistically significant. They don’t broadcast any statistics that have to do with chemotherapy because it is very ineffective, highly toxic.

SC: Tell us about the 12 stage life cycle.

APB: This is a life cycle that underlies the foundations of health and disease. Once you get this down, nobody can pull the wool over your eyes about disease anymore. Basically, the first three stages are somatids, spores, and double spores. The first three stages are in every healthy body, with very healthy blood that has a lot of space and is very slippery. Now, the next stages are mold, fungus, yeast, bacteria, parasites, worm, and then it goes into the putrification stages. Mold, fungus, yeast and bacteria are the beginning stages of any disease – that’s aging, that’s working your way toward decomposing. When you get to the end of it, you’ll hardly find any somatids, spores or double spores in there. When you look into the blood, what you will find are a lot of artifacts. They don’t even know what they are, they just call them “artifacts”, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what they are: They’re mold, fungus, yeast, bacteria, and then we get into worms. So when somebody says they have parasites, I already know at what stage of the disease game they are. Because they can’t be there at the beginning. You know, if you had plenty of somatids, spores, and double spores in there, you could drink a whole bottle of cholera, and it wouldn’t even be a problem at all. Also, whenever you’re carrying around a lot of extra flesh, people always have a bunch of extra amoebas – freeloaders I always call them – so, getting rid of this stuff makes you lose a lot of weight. They also nest and breed in gall stones, so it’s a good idea to get rid of your gall stones.

MC: So, what are gall stones?

APJ: Gall stones are made out of cholesterol and calcium and insipid pus, so, mostly from eating starches. If you eat a lot of starches, stuff made from hybridized wheat flour, for example. This country was actually founded on millet, a very high integrity grain. If we went back to eating millet, a lot of the problems we see today would disappear – all of the irritable bowel syndromes, cancer – cancer is a sugar-addict cell, basically. If you look under a microscope, our cells have a little mouth and a little butt-hole: They eat and they poop, eat and poop. If you kept this cycle clear of waste and working perfectly, our cells would live forever.

SC: How important is lifestyle in health?

APJ: Very important. There were some studies of two islands in which populations lived to be very old. And what they found is that, basically, there are conditions of longevity that need to be met. One of them is laughter and community, that they recognize you for your contribution. The other is partnership with family. Also, dancing. Some sort of purpose, whatever it may be, even if it’s “I grow grains, that’s what I do and do it well,”. And a couple of other factors. The other thing in both of these two little islands is that the water  was very highly alkaline. And that’s the basis of Secrets of an Alkaline Body, is that if we create a perfect pH balance – 80% alkaline, 20% acidic – you can live very long lives. Anything from pH 7 and above is alkaline and actually rinses the cells clean of acid. So, what is cancer. Cancer can only be met with two conditions: It has to be an extremely acidic environment – about 4 something – and there has to be an anaerobic environment as well, not much oxygen, the body has to be very viscous, very slowly moving through the body, lots of artifacts, red blood cells that are really weird shapes (they should be really round and bright). But all of it is completely reversible. I’ve seen people with the worst blood and couple months or a year later, beautiful blood.

MC: So, alkaline water plays a huge part in this.

APJ: Yes. You can buy systems for that, and definitely stay away from water bottles, because the plastic leaches all sorts of carcinogenic chemicals into the water. I also have these drops that you can put in the water to make it more alkaline. You can get good filters that pull out all the chemicals, too.  By the way, did you know that fluoride was something that the Nazis would put in the water supply of the jews because they found that it made them more docile? It’s a toxic chemical.

SC: What’s the importance of electricity in all of this?

APJ: Well, the electrics are what animate us. What is that harmonizing influence that keeps everything pulled together into a single entity? Electricity. We’re vastly electrical beings, we have an amazing response to the electricity inside and also outside of us. How information is channeled between people has to do with our electrical fields. And food has a life force, different foods have different energy.

MC: What is the percentage of raw foods that you recommend to eat?

APJ: Well, it depends where you are emotionally, because the raw foods are very yin. They are yin-forming in the body. If you need yang energy, go for the cooked, the grains, rice and beans. Average ball park, if you live in a moderate climate, I would say 80% raw food and 20% cooked food for the average situation. When you don’t have any cravings, your body calls for exactly what you need.