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Interview with Dave Klein by Michael Snyder

July 27, 2005

Mike Snyder: I’m very please to welcome you to this tele-seminar with Dave Klein and Mike Snyder. This is Mike Snyder speaking. Today we’re going to be discussing a few topics with you. Dave is a healthful living educator, certified nutrition educator and diet counselor. He’s been on a raw foods diet for 21 years and his life was saved by the practice of natural hygiene.

He’s the author of many books including Your Natural Diet, Self-Healing Power and Living Nutrition magazine. He’s organizing Raw-stock III, the world’s premiere raw food lifestyle festival which is taking place in California August 26th thru the 29th. So, welcome, Dave.

Dave Kline: Thanks, Mike. That’s a pretty good build up.

Mike: Thanks. I think we should start out talking about the Rawstock festival. What inspired you and Dr. Doug Graham to put on the first Rawstock?

Dave: Well, I wanted to put a bit of fun into my life and some may know that we put on two Raw Passion jamborees at my friend’s farm, Macdonald’s Farm where I used to actually live for a couple of years and it was very informal, out in the apple orchard and just in the heat of the summer and had a lot of great educational talks by all the great educators that I know.

I don’t think we had any music back then but it was just great to put on your own festival and to have all your best friends there performing and to see all the people come from all over the West Coast and a few from other parts of the world just show up and commune together, you know, break bread so to speak and get to meet new friends and just have a place to hang out in nature and eat cold, ripe fruit and vegetables.

So, I think it was 3 years ago that Doug and I were sitting on the ground listening to someone speak at the last jamboree and he whispered this little word into my ear. He whispered the word “Rawstock”.

My eyes rolled back and it sort of blew my mind and I said, “Doug, we’re not ready to do Rawstock next year.” I had envisioned 10,000 people and this huge, fabulous festival. He just planted the seed and I said, “No, we’re not ready to do that.”

But after the festival, a week or 10 days went by and I couldn’t stop thinking about doing a Rawstock. Then one morning, I e-mailed Doug and I said, “Doug, we’re going to do Rawstock next year.”

And we did it, we did it at Ocean Song and we lost several thousand dollars but we enjoyed every moment of it and then we went back to the farm last year and just had an absolutely wonderful event. Two hundred people showed up, two tents and we had about 30 speakers and a staff of about 30 people and everybody just was absolutely glowing. I think we just did an absolutely awesome job, the logistics there was just fantastic.

And this year, we’re going way beyond. We just have the most amazing musical acts showing up. So what inspired me to do Rawstock was just to have fun and provide a stage for what I believe are the best raw food health educators in the world and so everybody could gather together and just have a really healthy time and get fresh figs, we just supply, you know, the raw fooders dream at Rawstock.

Mike: What’s unique about this festival in comparison to other raw food festivals?

Dave: Well, we teach only Natural Hygiene. All of our speakers are congruent. You won’t hear people giving different messages, there’s no conflicting information, and we’re all on the same page. We’re all academically trained, very well schooled in science and the health sciences and have a background, a lot of us, a clinical background in fasting.

We have four fasting doctors in our event and I believe that everybody who speaks at our event and presents at our event is an authentic example of true health. We are people who have detoxified and are following a close-to or totally 100% raw food diet and been sharing our hearts and our talents with people for many years and we all get along in harmony and it’s just absolutely wonderful, this energy that evolves from putting together an event with all these great souls.

So Rawstock is different from the other festivals. I’ve been to the Portland one a few times; that was just big and fabulous. Doug and I just pretty much designed it the way we wanted to do it so we can enjoy not only the education and the people but a lot of great music.

Doug and I are sort of amateur guitarists and we formed our own band, the Raw Passion band. My little secret is that’s my favorite part of the year when we all get together and we practice and play our favorite tunes from the 60’s and 70’s. I guess we haven’t grown up from that era and we just have a blast expressing our talent.

Mike: Some people have mentioned that it might be a little too expensive. What would you say to them?

Dave: Yes, we’ve heard that for years. I grew up in the health food movement in the 80’s and 90’s and a lot of us are not working corporate jobs and don’t have a lot of money left over but we want good education and we want to gather together. Doug and I are pretty driven, type A kind of people who want to put on the best educational event possible.

So we have all these amazing educators, about 15 of them, giving all these amazing talks and I think it’s the highest quality education in one weekend that you can get anywhere in the world about health and life, really.

So we’re pretty much the most top notch, high quality educational seminar for that part of the Rawstock festival and providing a setting where people can actually see what a healthy lifestyle is about, eating just whole, unprocessed fruits and veggies in their natural state.

Plus we go way out of the way to provide all kinds of comforts and features from fitness, games, volley ball, Tai Chi, yoga, massage, all kinds of great features which makes for a magical experience where you just don’t get any place else. So there’s lots of magic in the air at the Rawstock festival and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow.

We need to find a new site for next year because the farm is not going to be available for us to do it there and hopefully we can find a new, bigger site and maybe even extend it to 3 or 4 days of full activities and maybe see 5 or 10 thousand people show up some day.

Mike: Do you have plans for the next one? Do you know when or where it will be held?

Dave: Well, it will probably be in July or August of next year. We started the search around here in Sonoma County, I want it to be within a few minutes drive of where I live because I have all the supplies and materials and I have to shuttle back and forth a lot during the week preparing up to the event.

So we’ve looked at a lot of camps and other sites around here and haven’t found any yet. So I’m going to be exploring, connecting with some sustainable farmers in the county here and see if they have some land and are open to the idea or keen to the idea so we can have it out in a farm kind of setting surrounded by trees.

Mike: Do you have anything new in store for Rawstock III?

Dave: Yeah, we have a lot of stuff. We obviously know that people don’t want the same presenters and acts every year saying the same thing and there is obviously just a wealth of really talented people in the raw health world. And it’s just totally neat to connect with all of these special spirits with all kinds of awesome talents in the field of music and acting and physical culture and education.

We’ve brought in a few really fantastic people with different talents and I’ll be glad to tell you about a few of them. So far, one of my favorites is Dr. Henry Anderson. You’ll read about him in the next issue of Living Nutrition, not the next one actually but the one that is coming out in the winter.

Henry is the founder and chancellor of City University Los Angeles. He’s an amazing man. I’m not going to give away his age but you would not believe, well, this man is beyond being a senior citizen. He’s dynamic.

He’s been a fruitarian ever since he heard about T. C. Frye about 15 or 20 years ago and he’s just absolutely brilliant man whose mission in life is to empower people who show high promise to go on to great things in life through his university and other programs. He’s a really hilarious speaker.

He’s one of the finest educators you’ll ever meet and he just came back from Oxford, England where he was in a round table of 40 university leaders from around the world who were invited to discuss the topic of higher education.

He is going to discuss how he laid on this entire panel the natural hygiene trip and it’s just amazing the courage he has to actually present this information and challenge everybody there, just blind side them and tell them they need to rethink the way they’re thinking about disease and health.

And after he did it, he sent me an e-mail from England and said, “They were actually a bit interested.” So Henry is just a delight to be around.

We’re also bringing Dr. Samuel Mielcarski from Georgia. He just got his doctorate in physical therapy and he’ll be teaching about physical posture, movement, hygiene and those sorts of things.

We also have our local friend here, Luke Snyder, who is a teacher and also a permaculture expert. And he’ll be teaching us how to make a better worm box and he’ll be teaching about ecological design and gardening. He’s just a really charming and earthy fellow.

There’s Charlie Abel. If you saw, I think, a couple of Living Nutrition’s back then you’ve seen the amazing physique on Charlie Abel. He’s raw fitness trainer. He made the transition to a 100% raw food diet very quickly about 2 years ago and he has a local gym here which he is actually selling and he and his wife are moving to Hawaii.

But he’s been a fitness trainer and he’s been doing it on 100% raw food and he just placed 3rd in a body building competition in San Francisco. He’s got the most, I think he’s there; I’ve never seen or heard of anybody that’s got a better, more muscular physique for a raw fooder. He just absolutely has a wonderful body and it’s just a great testimonial to the assertion that you can build as much muscle as you want on this diet.

For some, it’s not easy, like myself, for some it takes a long time. But between Doug Graham and Charlie Abel and Kenny Lauher coming, you’ll see some really strong, muscular bodies on 100% raw fooders.

Let’s see, who else is coming? Ashenon is a really lively, earthy, reggae, tribal, funky kind of band from New York State. They played at the two other festivals, at least the one that was in New York State. And they’re bringing their 35 foot, solar-powered bus out here and they are really going to liven the place up with some really great dance music. They’re going to play every single night.

We’re going to have Cecilia Benjumea who’s a fantastic young raw food chef who makes really healthy and beautiful cuisine and will do the raw food demo on the second day. She was featured in the last Living Nutrition and also should be in the new one, too.

And also, about two weeks ago, I was really excited. I got an e-mail from out of the blue from a lady I had never heard from before. She was in Bali and on her way to Italy and she said she was coming to Rawstock and wanted to know if she could play crystal bowls. Her name is AwaHoshi Kavan and she’s pretty well renowned. If you look at her website, there’s a link from the Rawstock site.

You’ll see that she’s an elegant lady who plays the crystal bowls and I think she has an advanced degree in education and she’s a healing kind of performer and I’m really looking forward to that because we’re going to have her play in the orchard like after 8 pm where dusk is creeping in and it’s just absolutely wonderful to be out there in the orchard as the moon is rising and we’re under the stars. It will be a really beautiful hearing experience that I’m really looking forward to.

And just one more and we’ll move on to the next question. Maybe some callers would like to ask some questions. We are also bringing in Hiep Trinh who’s a fantastic Tai Chi teacher. He’s originally from Viet Nam, I believe. I experienced one of his classes at our natural hygiene symposium last year back in Florida and he’s just a marvelous Tai Chi teacher.

So we’ve got a lot of really awesome people coming in. Oh, Bryan Yamamoto is going to teach yoga. He’s an absolutely wonderful model of poise and just really magnificent health. He’s from the East Bay out here in California.

So that’s about it, Mike. I guess I could go on a bit more but...

Mike: Thank you, Dave. That’s a great lineup. Amazing. Very exciting. Would you like to open up the line for questions right now?

Dave: Yeah, why don’t we take a few questions and then I know you’ve got a few more questions you want to ask.

Mike: Okay, if you have any background noise on your line, you can hit *6 to mute. And *6 will bring you back in or mute.

All right, I’ll open the lines and just say your name and ask your question. If you have any questions, go ahead and ask them.

Michelle: Has anybody ever had an issue with having black tongue? After eating, I’ve been eating raw for about 3 months.

Dave: What is your name?

Michelle: Michelle from New York.

Dave: Hi, Michelle. A black tongue. Are you detoxing heavily? Is there mucus and junk coming out of your system or is the flesh just black?

Michelle: Not really. It’s not really; the only thing is that it’s dark. You know, it’s not even like thrush. But it does seem to be coming from within; it doesn’t seem to be like a staining because I eat raw cacao, you know, so I thought that could be part of it but it’s just like really dry and black almost, brownish-black.

Dave: I haven’t eaten hardly any raw cacao so I don’t know if that could be an effect. I don’t really have an answer to your question but I refer people that have questions that I don’t have a clue to my friends, Dr. Doug Graham and Tim Trader. So one of them will definitely answer your question pretty soon so if you want to e-mail me at dave@, I will connect you with them and I’m sure they will help figure this thing out.

Michelle: Okay.

Ron: This is Ron in Portland and I have a question. I’m having some bad issues with detox. And when I started out doing raw food, I was doing 100% and I felt great and then after a couple of weeks, I was real hard to get out of bed. Actually, my back from my neck to my waist jammed up, I would say.

I was having a ton of problems that way and after about 4 days of absolutely feeling miserable, I ate some raw food, because I had no idea what was going on, I couldn’t believe it was going on like in the way that it was, I ate some raw food and the next day I started feeling better.

So I’ve been trying to figure out, trying to analyze what I was eating to see how I could have done things better. Right now I’m on mixed raw and cooked, (We have a lot of background.) and I’m having a lot of skin breaking out including into my mouth. What do I do?

Dave: Well, as a health counselor, I’m...

Ron: What would you do? How about that?

Dave: Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do. As a health counselor, what I do is go through a questionnaire; it’s about 4 pages where you tell me your health background, your past diet, your current diet and a lot of other little things or major things like “Are you working full time? How many hours of sleep do you get? What has your diet been like?”

I mean, some people eat 100% raw food diet but they’re way overboard on some kind of foods, say nuts and seeds or nut butter or avocado or something like that and it’s really affecting their health in a negative way.

So I would need to know a lot more information about what you were eating before, what are your height, weight and age? Some people, you know, actually need to lose 50 pounds. Some people are working a stressful 9 to 5 job which is actually taking up 90% of their day and their body doesn’t even have the energy to keep itself balanced when they start on a raw food diet which triggers a total housecleaning.

So for some people who have had compromised health by eating a pretty bad diet which may be high in fried foods or a lot of meat and dairy and other mucus forming foods, a good portion of those people have a really difficult detox. It really can be impossible to do if you’re working a full time job.

My case is really unique. I was sick for 8 years and the last 6 months, I was just home resting. I got fired from my engineering job and I was such an absolute physical wreck, going to the toilet non-stop and just being all stressed out and nervous because of malnutrition and being on medication and going to the toilet all the time.

So once I started this diet, I knew I was going to lose weight even though I was already very thin because I had 8 years also of colitis and I was lucky in regards that I didn’t have a family to take care of, I had money saved up from disability and whatever and I was able to do the full detox and be at home and not have any responsibility other than take care of myself.

So I gave myself a gift, I gave myself a year and a half off to detox, to educate myself, to enjoy life a bit, taking a trip to Europe, hiking the Appalachian Trail a bit and just trying to integrate this whole new way of being, a totally new mind, body and spiritual way of being on this planet, trying to integrate all that and to get myself together so I can get back out into the world.

So when we’re detoxing and it’s rough and we’re tired, what’s going on is the tissues, the cells are all floating toxins into the blood stream and it circulates around, goes to the brain and it makes us tired, it makes us spacey and we basically need lots of extra rest and sleep.

So when this is happening, the best thing to do is get total rest and sleep and just mitigate or completely stop all unnecessary activities. You don’t want to be working out. You don’t want to be doing anything other than walk. If you have a job and you’re really not feeling good, the best thing to do is take a sabbatical. If you can’t do that, ask if you can work part time because your body is doing the most amazing rebuilding.

It’s doing the most amazing task it’s been asked to do since you were an infant so it needs a lot of extra time and rest to accomplish all of this. When we’re awake during the day and active, energy’s being extended for things other than healing and rebalancing.

So if we conserve our energy and rest which is what natural hygiene teaches and learn the finer points of say food combining and read Dr. Shelton’s book on fasting and understand better how the body works, the self healing power where I put in a lot of T. G. Frye’s and Shelton’s writings and some of my best ones. You understand how your body works to create health and establish a new level of heath and you understand the process and you’ll give your body the requisites of health and mainly, I’ll say it again, it just takes a lot of extra rest and sleep and a ton of patience. So it’s a matter of time and patience and rest and sleep.

Mike: Okay, thanks. Which fasting book did you recommend?

Dave: There’s two that he wrote that I know of, I sell the two biggest ones I know of that’s Fasting Can Save Your Life, that’s the classic, and then the other one I have here on my shelf is Fasting for Renewal of Life.

Mike: Dr. Herbert Shelton?

Dave: Right. And he had a fasting clinic, it’s something you don’t know, it was called the Shelton Health School, he ran it for about 40 years, Dr. Vetrano actually ran it for him, where he conducted maybe 50,000 fasts and helped most of those people recover a higher level of health than they had before.

Mike: Shall we move to the next question?

Dave: Yeah, is there a conversation going on?

Oceana: Hi, Dave.

Dave: Hi there.

Oceana: This is Oceana. I wondered...

Dave: Is this my old friend Oceana from Illinois?

Oceana: Yeah, yeah.

Dave: How are you doing, my dear?

Oceana: Fine, thank you, dear.

Dave: It’s been a couple of years since I saw you.

Oceana: Yeah, five or six. I was at the first Rawstock.

Dave: Yes, you were.

Oceana: I’m just curious. The fruit was so delicious and there was so much of it and the next year, the new arrangement was the people each brought a, I think it was, a 5 pound sack of fruit to share for the day?

Dave: Yes.

Oceana: And I’m just wondering how that worked out?

Dave: Fabulously.

Oceana: And I would say, of course being spoiled after the first and possibly that was the area where the financial loss occurred.

Dave: Yes.

Oceana: That was so beautiful. The food was fabulous. I hope you’ve recouped some of that by now and please tell me how that worked out, bringing the fruit, especially for people who are camping and didn’t have transportation. I think you also had the option to make it a monetary payment if you couldn’t bring the fruit, is that right?

Dave: Well, it actually worked out perfectly and not any exaggerating so to put the event together plus to order you know, a couple of tons of ripe fruit was an amazing effort which Jasmine did, Jasmine Clower, and I did it the past two ones and it’s absolutely the most stressful thing because we show up at farmers’ markets to get the fruit from the farmers and half of it is usually as hard as a rock even though we pleaded with them just to bring really soft fruit.

So it’s an incredibly difficult thing to bring in 10 or 15 different kinds of fruit and have it all right. For us to truck it all here and coordinate it all is just way too much stress. So Doug came up with a solution. He knew that Rob Miller a couple of years ago did an event up in Oregon where everybody brought some food and that worked out well so we tried it.

So, we didn’t know what was going to happen last year but it was absolutely fabulous. People brought all kinds of special fruits from their gardens, fruits from the vine, fruits from the trees and there were 6 organic food stores right here within a 15 minute drive. There’s Andy’s Codis right down the street just 3 miles away.

People just brought a really amazing variety, this really stunned me, of fruit and everybody just was satisfied. There was some really neat stuff there that I’d never even seen before. So that worked out beautifully so instead of losing several thousand dollars, we were only in the hole about a thousand this year so we’re getting pretty close to being up to level and the food definitely did work out, Oceana.

Do you have another question with that?

Oceana: No and I missed out on and what I might miss, probably missing out on this year too but I still like to somehow show up like I did the first time.

Dave: Yeah, well if you can, we’re going to do it every year so just cross your fingers that we can find a nice site and do it again next year.

Oceana: Keep up the good work.

Dave: Thanks, Oceana.

Oceana: I’m going to mute out here.

Dave: Okay. Say hi to Larry.

Oceana: Thank you, I will.

Jenny: Hi, this is Jenny from Ohio and I have 3 quick questions. One, I have been diagnosed with a nodule on my thyroid and low thyroid and I was wondering, like the, what’s your take, you know, what you would recommend for someone in that situation?

Dave: I would talk to a hygienic physician, Dr. Greg and Tosca Haag in Texas, runs The Rest of Your Life Retreat, a natural hygiene retreat there. We can go on staff. There’s Dr. Virginia Vetrano who’s Dr. Tosca Haag’s mom. There’s Dr. Timothy Trader here in San Jose who’s available for consultations.

Doug Graham is on the move all the time. He’s on his way from Florida to California so I don’t think it’s a good time to contact him.

I would definitely get in touch with either Tim Trader or Tosca Haag in Texas. If you do e-mail, I guess you do if you got the note about this, I can connect you, I can give you their phone numbers. I’m sure they can help you.

Jenny: Okay, great. And there’s another question, changing the subject a little bit. With these green smoothies, there’s a pre-digested protein powder on the market and I was just curious if that would be okay to mix in some of that with a green smoothie because I know with food combining, you don’t want to have a protein and a fruit.

Dave: What is in the green smoothie?

Jenny: A green smoothie is vegetables and fruit and water.

Dave: Which kind of fruit?

Jenny: Well, different kinds of fruit. About any kind of fruit I think sounds good with my green vegetables. I use mangos with parsley and apples with kale and different things.

Dave: I would not mix high protein, concentrated protein powders with sweet fruit. You can test it out and prove it to yourself. So my experience is, the first couple of months when I was healing, I was reading all the natural hygiene books, newsletters and magazines I could find and I studied the food combine chart really well because my digestive system was so weak and impaired, I need to follow food combining perfectly otherwise I had gas and mucus and toxic bowel.

So I tested all the rules and I found that they were all true and I delved into food combining, the physiology behind it, the chemistry and I found it all to be absolutely correct and right on even though some people say there’s nothing to it.

Jenny: Even with a pre-digested protein?

Dave: Well, let’s keep on exploring this question because it’s a really great one. So I found that if I had a fruit smoothie with a lot of spirulina in it which is high in protein, it made my head spacey because I’m pretty sure the protein, well something was not digesting and it also made my bowels foul. The protein was going through my stomach too quickly and warming up in the bowel and putrefying and making me yucky.

So I never would ever mix nuts, seeds with the sweet fruits except for the citrus fruits because that’s high in acid and high in water and doesn’t seem to produce that effect to much of a degree. I say bananas, mangoes, dates; I would never mix with a high protein source.

Now as far as that being pre-digested, we need to take a look at that and see what is the source of protein and what is the process to digest it? Do you know those things?

Jenny: The protein is a goat’s milk protein and I’m not exactly sure of the process, it’s supposed to be like a low heat.

Dave: Yeah, so the thing is, I don’t trust any products or any product salesmen. They may be wonderful people but I’ve never heard a truthful sales pitch for a product in my life. And the best products the Provider already invented and they grow on trees and they grow in the ground in your garden.

So what is an extra protein fix going to do for us? I don’t think we crave protein; I think we crave carbohydrates, sugar, we crave fatty foods but animal protein is coming from animal milk. We have to understand that these proteins, they also have hormones in them which actually, what hormones are, is proteins which are designed to make a baby calf grow.

So you’re getting these messages which are affecting our hormonal balance and our metabolism our equanimity it’s just really inappropriate for our system. And, like I said, it has growth hormones in it which are designed to make a baby calf grow rapidly so people have allergy problems historically to animal protein so I don’t see any need or use for animal protein in the diet because all the proteins, amino acids, fatty acids that we need are available from fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, including avocado.

Jenny: Okay, thank you. I have one last question and it is about fruit. I’ve been raw, by the way, 100% for a couple of years, little over 2 years and I have a problem with eating fruit. I can eat it like maybe in the morning, it gives me energy but then it seems like in the afternoon when I’m starting to run out of energy, if I have fruit, it makes me tired. Why does fruit make me tired?

Dave: Well, if we were doing a consultation, I’d get a bit more information and I’d be able to pinpoint it but in general because I’ve been through this myself and with hundreds of clients, we have to take a look at your physical condition and whether or not you’re keeping your bloodstream clean by eating in a good manner where you following food combining, you’re not overloading your bloodstream say with these protein powders.

If your bloodstream constantly has a lot of nutrients in it, it doesn’t get a chance to move it along and purify itself because you’re eating just too many concentrated food then all these nutrients will start reacting and you can have the healthiest meal in the world and your body just can’t accept it. It just all ends up fermenting and giving us brain fogs.

Jenny: Okay, I see. That makes sense to me.

Dave: If I can give an example, say if I have a meal of nuts or say nut butter with vegetables, like greens say in the middle of the afternoon, say cucumbers, then I try to have some bananas or dates or mangoes like 3 or 4 or 5 hours later, it’s still probably not going to work because the heavy, fatty food is still in my intestinal tract and still in my bloodstream and it hasn’t cleared out of the way so my bloodstream and the cells which are going to accept the sugar can’t actually accept that sugar so the sugar is going to get backed up, it’s going to ferment or go into candida because the sugar doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Jenny: Because of the heavy foods, yeah.

Dave: We need to eat carefully and make the fatty meals the last meal of the day and not try to eat other foods after it, especially not cooked food because that stuff still hasn’t moved through your digestive tract and it’s all reacting and making us toxic and tired. Also physical condition is important, and sleep; so it really helps to stay in really good aerobic shape, space out your meals; maybe you need to drink a lot of water between your meals to help clean out your system so that it can digest food better.

Jenny: Yes, that sounds like my problem then. I’m having too much heavy stuff even though I’m eating raw; I’m eating nuts and avocados and fattening things.

Dave: So we came from eating a diet of hamburgers and hot dogs and pizza, all this heavy, fatty foods 2 or 3 or 4 times a day and once we lighten up our diet and start cleaning out the body just can’t handle that. So it’s really tough to make a transition to a lower fat diet but it’s something we absolutely have to do if we want have high vitality so give yourself time...

Jenny: So would the meat from the coconut, would that be considered high fat.

Dave: I consider it. I love the taste of it but I really can’t have it in my diet because it really makes me tired and slows me down. Even though it tastes great, I sense that it can really wreck my metabolism. I really can’t eat anything else the rest of the day after having it other than neutral greens. A lot of us had chronic fatigue.

If you’re tired and your skin doesn’t look good, if you bowels are not, you know, pretty clean, then you’re probably eating too much fat and that one of the two most common problems on a raw food diet, two or three kinds of problems. So if you can learn to take some days during the week where you eat no fat...

Jenny: So the coconut would be considered fat?

Dave: Yes, olives, coconuts, nuts, seeds, avocado, that’s...

Jenny: Durian?

Dave: Durian is sort of, it’s only about 8% fat or so and it’s a lot less than nuts which are like 50 or 60%, avocados are like 30% by weight.

Jenny: So is durian less fat than coconut meat?

Dave: I believe so. I don’t know what the actual percentage of the young, immature coconut meat is but the bottom line is your body. If we have body odors, if our bowels are toxic, if we’re tired and groggy; if we wake up tired and groggy then it’s because in most cases it’s because there’s too much fat in your system. It’s just like overwhelming you.

So I only eat a fatty food once or twice a week, if I do it more than that, I just become really clogged up. I don’t feel like a healthy, vibrant raw fooder, I don’t like the way I look. If I just keep on doing it, I can get acid reflux, my gut can start hurting, I can get scratchy skin, dandruff, blemishes, so that’s yucky. I try to keep my fat intake to a minimum but not to the point where I’m starving myself for that nutrient.

Because when I notice after, say, 10 days of having no fat, my natural energy starts waning and I can’t think and function the way that I want to. So then I have a meal with some avocado and some blended up nuts or seeds and then my mental alertness, my natural energy comes right back and I usually just feel fantastic.

Jenny: What’s your typical diet the rest of the time when you don’t have the fatty foods in it?

Dave: I have about 4 or 5 not big meals, I wouldn’t say mini meals but I just have, after years I just learned to not overeat on sweet fruit and just have a satisfying portion. I have some lettuce with it or in between it and/or cucumbers and so after years of doing this, you get into a groove eventually and you learn to become more adept at not overeating and you learn how to space out your meals and follow the fruit combine where you don’t end up with gas or constipation or whatever.

So I love to have orange juice in the morning so I usually squeeze some Valencia’s and one blood orange and it makes an absolutely delicious drink. And then about an hour or two later, I’ll have some sweet fruit, maybe with a few handfuls of lettuce I just tear off of the head or some peeled cucumber.

So I may have a couple of bananas or a small bowl of dates followed by or with some cucumber, celery or lettuce. And then maybe two or three hours will pass because dates and bananas are really sustaining, they’ll sustain me for about 3 hours or more and then I’ll just see what my senses are going for.

I know that if I don’t have 3 good meals of fruit during the day, then around dinner time, I’m going to be really hungry and I’m going to want to have something that will make my blood sugar go up.

So if I eat the 3 or 4 medium sized meals throughout the day and I can have like cucumbers or lettuce in between it; that’s what I found that keeps my energy sustained and balanced. I don’t want to have swings in my blood sugar. I used to have awful swings which lasted for years. And then I solved this by sticking with a diet by my body eventually re-mineralizing and by getting more sleep and learning how to handle my emotions better and staying in good shape.

Then for dinner, I used to mix salads years ago but I don’t mix salads any more. I may just go out to the garden and eat a bunch of tomatoes out of the garden or if I’m getting them from the store, just cut up a bunch of tomatoes. Right now I’ve got corn in my garden; I might have that with greens and/or cucumber. If I haven’t had anything like corn or nuts or seeds for dinner, then I might just have some more fruit or oranges.

In the winter when it’s colder, my body craves the fatty food more so I may fill up a bowl with two heads of lettuce shredded up or just torn up, maybe some slices of cucumber and then in the blender, I’ll blend about 3 or 4 ounces of raw macadamia nuts or soaked almonds and I learned this from Doug Graham, I blend, I put also the juice from say 1 or 2 oranges in the blender with the water and the nuts and seeds and I make it into a dressing.

So I pour the dressing over the big salad and it makes a really filling meal which is relatively easy to digest. I found if I just eat hard nuts and seeds, it just doesn’t work. I wind up overeating on them and it can make my gut achy. So I coach everybody to explore different styles.

My model for healthful eating is you have 3 or 4 meals of fruit throughout, with or without neutral green vegetables, which is lettuce, celery, cucumber, kale, keep in good shape, don’t make food the central thing in your life and then plan your dinner.

So then late in the day or late in the afternoon when dinner time is coming around, I encourage people to tune up their senses and see what their bodies want. Are you craving something fatty? Are you craving something salty like tomatoes?

You can actually blend up avocado with tomato or nuts or seed, if you soak them a couple of hours, it makes them much easier to digest. If you blend them up with say some celery and parsley, tomato, you’ll get a nice fatty and salty kind of dressing for a salad and that may do it for you.

Jenny: Well I’ll tell you, it’s making me hungry just listening to you. It sounds so wonderful.

Dave: Yeah, it’s like stepping into the Garden of Eden when we get this raw food message and we feel like kids. I’ve been through and seen a lot of my friends the first 3 years; they can’t stop eating raw food.

Jenny: Have you ever had a problem with cavities since eating so many fruits?

Dave: Yeah. See, my illness was really devastating my body, I became severely de-mineralized because I was going to the toilet 10 times a day and bleeding for 8 years. So that’s not a pretty scene and I’m happy to say I got over that.

So my body and my bones were severely de-mineralized and I saw x-rays of my skeleton when I went to a chiropractor about a year after I started healing up and he said, “Dave, I don’t know how to tell you this but half of the calcium in your bones is gone.” He showed me my bones and instead of being all white, it was pretty shadowy. So I didn’t flip out. I knew I was doing natural hygiene and my body was rebuilding itself and it was going to re-mineralize.

He said I should start taking supplements. I told him, “No, I’m doing the right thing” and I just stuck with what I was doing. And eventually, I’m sure that my body re-mineralized but anyway, so the teeth don’t really heal like the bones do. So my teeth, I had a few cavities, I had the metal fillings in them and I had them taken out the first year of starting this 21 years ago, but them I continued to have little cavities.

Every year I had like one or two and anyway, to make a long story short, I’m not proud or happy to say but I have about 14 crowns. Luckily, I had good dental work so I don’t feel any problems with my mouth but I just had another little cavity about a month ago.

So, I’m the one in the family who didn’t get the right nutrition and my teeth, even though my gums are strong and everything is feeling good, I just have had all these cavities.

So we really need to take good care of our teeth, not overeat on the acid forming foods, namely nuts and seeds, not eat citrus fruits which are harshly acidic, let me see, well ripened and as sweet as possible. We certainly shouldn’t do lemon or lime if we have compromised teeth.

Dr. Tom Stone has written for Living Nutrition magazine and he’s pretty much a raw fooder and he’s taught us that we need to get the minerals in our diet through some algae like sea vegetables. He’s also into the micro algae like spirulina and whatever powders I believe. It’s really important to get minerals in your system if you don’t have really strong teeth, I believe.

Janet: Hello.

Dave: Hi.

Janet: This is Janet from New Jersey.

Dave: What city are you in?

Janet: I’m from Lambertville, New Jersey near Princeton.

Dave: Well, I don’t know if you can tell but I grew up about 50 miles away from there.

Janet: Oh, really? Where’s this at?

Dave: I grew up in North Caldwell and Cedar Grove.

Janet: Okay, I don’t really know it. It’s a small state but we somehow don’t know it. I have a couple of questions. One of them is about dealing with asthma and working with raw food and fasting for asthma. I had it as an adult and I’m 60 and I’ve had it since I was 20.

Dave: Fasting is really the only thing that heals a really severe case of asthma. And Dr. Tim Trader overcame almost 30 years of asthma and almost losing his life and now he can breathe beautifully and the same with Roe Gallo; the first 25 years of her life, sickness and asthma and she almost died in the hospital once.

As far as I know when the tissue is so low and you become congested with all kinds of toxic matter and mucus, the lungs obviously can’t function well and sometimes people grew up eating cheese, especially cooked cheese, picking up really thick, hard mucus in the lungs and the body just can’t get rid of that when we’re eating all the time. Because the body doesn’t have enough energy left over to do that because it’s processing all the food that we’re eating.

So when we do a fast, the body will take over and correct any problems in most cases. So the body definitely overcomes asthma when we do a fast on water. As far as to how long, it helps if you can’t go to a fasting center now to do a short fast at home, probably about no longer than 3 days.

But it’s good to read the books by Dr. Herbert Shelton, the ones on fasting, and to drink a lot of fluids and go over the diet with a diet coach like myself if you’re not confident and get all of the mucus forming foods out of your diet and just eat the lightest diet possible to give your body the chance to clear out the tissues.

Roe Gallo’s book “Perfect Body”, I don’t know if the current edition, maybe the first edition talked about her fasting experience and she also has a tape. So she’s incredibly inspiring. I just saw her in San Francisco for durian a couple of weeks ago and her health is absolutely magnificent after being sick the first 25 years of her life and she’s a fantastic communicator and writer so maybe you’ll find her book inspiring and know that she overcame asthma by fasting.

Janet: Could you say the name again, please?

Dave: Roe Gallo, R-o-e. Her website is . She’s written for my magazine and she... I don’t know if she’s doing consultations these days but definitely Dr. Tim Trader could help you.

Janet: And the other question had to do with the blood sugar and the eating fruits because I recently got a report saying that I had become more insulin resistant.

Participant: Insulin, what was that? I’m sorry, insulin what?

Janet: Insulin resistant.

Participant: How high was the count?

Janet: It wasn’t that high. I think he gave me a number of 60 in the fasting blood work that he did and he said, “You’re kind of on the border here of being, not diabetic, but you could go that way if you’re not careful.”

Dave: Right. The proper way to approach this is to take a look at the root cause of the problem. The approach of solving the problem of treating the problem without understanding the cause of it and getting rid of the cause doesn’t work. So why the cells to your liver and other cells are insulin resistant, that’s the question.

And as far as I know, I’m not the expert in this but I’ve learned, I’ve heard it from the other hygienic doctors and physiologists, as far as I understand, they can correct me if I don’t say this perfectly, the cells become insulin resistant because they’re congested, they’re clogged up with fat and other nutrients and the sugar can’t get into the cells.

So if you see the scenario, we eat sugar, we eat fruit and the sugar gets into our bloodstream. We need sugar in our bloodstream. Without sugar in our bloodstream, we’d have no energy and we’d actually die. So we need sugar in our bloodstream and the insulin carries the sugar into our cells; it’s like a carrier, it ships it along, it takes it to the receptor sites on our cells and then they get transported in through the membrane into the cells and then the body uses the sugar.

Insulin resistant means the cells can’t take in the sugar so the sugar gets all backed up in the bloodstream. So if we have more than one yield of starchy foods and sugary foods and the starch gets all converted into sugar, then the sugar keeps on building up and up and up in the bloodstream and we end up with metabolic havoc. Then the body senses that it has too much sugar and the pancreas just keeps on cranking out more and more insulin to try to get rid of the sugar but it can’t go anywhere and the pancreas gets burnt out and the bloodstream gets overloaded with sugar and we end up with an overgrowth of Candida and triglycerides start happening and it just ruins our system.

So the thing to do is to give your system a rest. Stop eating sugary foods and fatty foods for a while until you start feeling better. And what will happen 10 times out of 10, your body will clear out the fat that’s clogging up your cells in your liver and it will clean up your bloodstream and then your pancreas will get a chance to rest and rejuvenate itself.

So obviously, your pancreas is burnt out beyond the point of producing insulin and that’s a bit of a different case. But most people with onset diabetes, they can overcome the insulin resistance and blood sugar problems pretty efficiently, within a week or two, I would guess but I would talk to the fasting doctors like Dr. Doug Graham and Tim Trader, Doctors Greg and Tosca Haag and they will tell you what will actually happen.

Janet: Right. So, it sounds to me like it’s not so much that I should not be eating sweet fruits, I should not be eating any fats.

Dave: Right, sweet fruit is important for everybody. I don’t know what percentage is right for everybody. I would say maybe 75-95% but fruit is not going to work if the body is overloaded with fat and the bloodstream and the cells are overloaded with fat.

Once the body clears that out, then you‘ll be able to process sugar beautifully, Candida will get sloughed off and eliminated and you won’t get any backup of the sugar. Now if you’re eating dried fruit, some people gorge on dates which is pretty common in the raw food movement, then yeah, you’ll get an overload of sugar and you’ll feel real unbalanced.

The key is to eat a lot of juicy fruit, have it with lettuce, celery or cucumber or kale, the neutral greens because it helps slow down the absorption and gives us more fiber and minerals. Those green foods just make us feel balanced. I think everybody has experienced that and then your body will clean out if you get enough rest and sleep and stay fit.

Then your metabolism will improve and become strong and, hopefully like me, you will go from having really difficult blood sugar problems to having it stable all the time. And believe me, it took me a couple of years to get to this point but now life is much, much better.

Janet: Good, good. So there’s not a food combining problem with mixing the juicy fruits with the greens?

Dave: I don’t think that’s a problem as long as you chew the greens well because if we don’t chew the greens well, we get chunks of it coming out. So if it’s chewed really well or you just process it in the food processor or make a green smoothie out of it which I’m not really into, then the greens won’t pass through the stomach undigested and be passing out into the toilet undigested.

Janet: Right, then it won’t do you much good. Okay, great. Thanks.

Diane: I have a question. This is Diane in New York.

Dave: Hi.

Diane: Hi. I am a type II diabetic and the fruit makes my blood sugar spike. Should I still be eating it on a raw food diet or try to eat only vegetables which leaves me very unsatisfied and then I get into the fatty foods at night?

Dave: Well, I understand that diabetes is a serious condition and it’s not my field of expertise so I recommend you to one of hygienic physicians I talked about because they’d know exactly how to handle it. They know the procedure and how to phase the different foods and give yourself the right rest so that your body can correct itself.

Diane: Right. And they do phone consultations?

Dave: Ah, yes. I’m not sure about Dr. Greg and Tosca Haag but I know Tim Trader does quite regularly.

Diane: And his name is Tim Trader? Can I get his e-mail address?

Dave: He does not do e-mail because he gets too many of them but he’s got a voice mail number. So if you send me an e-mail, I’ll send you his voice mail number and he’ll get back to you.

Diane: That would be great. Thank you. Okay and one other question. What do you think about eating Nori and, you know, the sea weeds as long as they’re air dried or not processed.

Dave: That’s a good question about Nori. I’ve got to see if there’s information on that. If it is air dried, chances are they haven’t washed all the sea salt off of it so the crystalline sea salt on the outside of sea vegetables is not good for out health. And this is a huge subject which a lot of people absolutely believe are great. I just totally disagree. But we need mineral salt.

We need maybe 50 or 60, maybe all 90+ minerals in organic form for our food. So the plants synthesize organic molecules and nutrients inside of their cells with minerals. So the minerals are bound to, they’re attached to the organic carbon based molecules which are in the nutrients so those are the ones that are never toxic to the body. The body knows how to work with them and utilize them.

So those things, there’s a world of difference between those organic naturally chelated minerals versus crystalline sea salt which wrecks havoc in the body in many, many ways. We have an article in the last Living Nutrition and we’re going to be doing a bigger one soon.

So, the salt that’s on the outside of sea vegetables, I’ve experimented with this for years and some people really sensitive to the salt and some people don’t notice it, they probably just excrete the excess salt really well. But I don’t think anybody needs sea salt and I’ve seen people thrive without it so I don’t really believe in its therapeutic use.

So when we get sea vegetables, we need to soak them in water for a good 5 minutes or more and stick our fingers in there and swish it around and make sure all the crystalline salt on the outside has been liquefied. Then what I do, I put it in a strainer, a fine mesh strainer and I run water over it from my faucet, it must be un-chlorinated water, and I stick my fingers in there and make sure I’m getting all the salt off the outside for 5 minutes, not just 1 minute or a few seconds.

So I want to get all the salt off or as much as I can, there might be some saturated into the skin but I want to get that salt off because the good news is that with sea vegetables, inside of the cells, 30% of sea vegetables is minerals. That’s like 3 or more times higher than a regular vegetable like lettuce, celery or whatever, so we’re going to get all the minerals we need from inside of the plant.

So as far as the sea vegetables, I don’t believe in the Nori sheets but I heard several years ago and I don’t even know if this is still true but all the Nori coming to the U. S. are radiated. I’ve done some raw food classes where my chef made Nori rolls and I ate that stuff and the next day, I had a really bad salt reaction. My chest felt really awful and I just felt lousy.

That told me that the Nori was never rinsed. They never rinsed the salt off, they don’t believe in doing that. That’s just their approach because they want it to have good flavor. People love their salt. So the Nori sheets, I really don’t think are good food, a lot of them are toasted.

So if you’re doing the sea veggies get the whole leaf sea veggie. I’d get it from Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, When I pinch it off, the skin of the Dulse is a lot softer than the others that I know of. Nori I think is too tough and leathery, I don’t know if we digest it that well, maybe we do. But Dulse is definitely a lot softer and easier to digest and assimilate, I believe.

Diane: Thank you very much.

Mike: Do you think it’s important to include the sea vegetables and algae in the diet?

Dave: That’s a good question. It depends where your health has come from. If you ate a really poor diet like I did and you got into all kinds of health problems and saw your bones and teeth deteriorate because of lack of minerals, then I think once you get on this program, the raw food diet program, you’re obviously not going to have great health for the first few years. You’re going to have improving health, steadily improving health, hopefully.

But I didn’t know about sea vegetables and the algae back then and for the first 6 years, my health continually improved. I healed up very quickly after starting this diet, in only about 4 weeks, but I had chronic fatigue and severe de-mineralization and deterioration of my body so it took about 6 years of really working at it to rise to a high level of health.

But after 6 or 7 years, I noticed that I still didn’t have really vibrant, dynamic, go, go, go energy like I wanted to and like I saw some other raw fooders had who had never really been sick before. So I experimented with some spirulina and some liquid trace minerals and I just thought about them and noticed how I felt and I thought, “This is not making me feel like my regular self. They’re stimulating; I just didn’t have the right energy.” They’re addictive and stimulating so then I was reading something that T. C. Fry wrote. He wrote about how he added a bit of Dulse to his diet to get the extra trace minerals which some of us just need.

Well anyway, after doing these several different forms of algae, my mental energy, my physical energy, just every aspect of my health and being rose up to a more solid, healthy, sustained energy kind of level, which was wonderful. By doing the sea vegetables, I was not getting what I call a phony high; I was not getting a stimulating high like I got with spirulina which probably has some toxic stuff in it plus a bit of salt in it.

So I wanted really good energy but I didn’t want to get this artificial high which gave me a false sense of well being. So after I added the Dulse, I would have that maybe a couple of times a month for a few years. I just felt like my body finally had its level of minerals satisfied and I felt like my health was just really fine. It’s not just a bit on the edge so if I didn’t take perfect care of myself, I was just going to collapse in a short amount of time.

So some people, I think, really will benefit from getting extra minerals in their bodies from vegetable juices and from sea veggies the first few years.

As far as the micro algae, the green powders, you have to take a look at how they’re all processed. I looked a lot into this, actually worked for one of the big spirulina manufactures for 4 hectic weeks, Earthrise, and I sat right down with President of the company and he told me how they process this stuff.

So if people are interested, I guess I can talk about that. Any takers?

Participants: Yeah. Go ahead. Great.

Dave: So, I haven’t found out about how every spirulina manufacturer makes their algae but I just deduced because I have a background in science being an engineer and studying all this health science and talking to tons of people who are raw food educators and really knowledgeable people. I think this pretty much holds for the way all spirulina is manufactured.

So, for example, Earthrise and probably also the one that’s in Hawaii, I think what they have is they have concrete tanks, at least Earthrise does. Picture a concrete pool and they get ground up mineral powder from deposits say in Utah or wherever. They pour in these huge amounts of these minerals into water in these tanks and what you end up with is virtually like sea water. Then they put in the spirulina seeds and then whatever that looks like and that’s how they grow the spirulina.

And then, here’s the interesting part. How do they get this really thick, green, slurry of spirulina into powdered form? Well, what Earthrise does is they have filters and they pump the spirulina into a tank and they wash it with a fine mesh and that gets off most of the salty minerals but not all of it. And I’ll tell you later on how I realized there was still a lot of salt on it.

Then from there, they pump this washed slurry through pipes up a 40 foot or so column, a pipe. And then from this pipe that’s 40 feet up in the air, the liquid green slurry which is like green soup, it drops down to a big tank, a big, collar-like tank.

So inside of this tank is piping with flames shooting out of it. So as the slurry is falling the 40 feet down, it gets flash dried. So at the top, it’s liquid slurry; at the bottom, it’s powder. And so for like 2 seconds, it’s getting a blast of like 400 degree temperature so that the temperature of spirulina rose up to, I think he said 400 degrees.

So of course this is ruining most, if not all, of the enzymes. It’s changing the chemistry of it but there’s no other economical way to make powder out of this huge amount of spirulina slurry. So that’s how they turn the slurry into a powder and then they have to cool it off quickly to, you know, preserve the nutrients.

Now it’s interesting, Spirulina Pacifica, on their website and their literature, they say that their process involves using ocean air. They have a pipe that goes way down into the ocean in Hawaii and cool water, obviously, comes out of there and they use that coolness, they blow the air off of the water and they use that cool air to, they say they use that to dry their spirulina.

But I think they’re fibbing because there’s no way that you can have this wet slurry and all of a sudden make powder out of it by blowing cold air on it. It’s not going to happen.

So I think what they’re not telling us is they’re actually heat flash drying it with the flames like Earthrise and I think every other manufacturer must be doing this, then they’re just cooling with the ocean air but they’re saying they’re creating powder just by using the ocean air. So they’re not actually telling you how they’re turning it into a powder.

So another thing I want to relate about the spirulina is about 4 or 5 years ago, I was experimenting with spirulina and Jameth Dina, or Jamie Dina, now know as Jameth Sheridan who is president of Healthforce and created Vita-Mineral Green, had this new spirulina which came from, I think, Chile, South America and I tried it and it was the most delicious stuff I had tasted in a long time. It tasted sort of like a mixture of carrot juice with spirulina. And it tasted exotic and it was very addictive.

So I got this stuff and I started putting it on my salads and I was not in a balanced lifestyle at that time, I would say. And I ended up going through an entire jar, I don’t know how many ounces that is, 12 to 16, in a month. So that was way overboard. That was really obsessive.

And so what happened was after about a month, one day my face swelled up and I looked like a monster and I called up Jamie and he calculated the amount of salt or sodium that got into my diet all of a sudden in four weeks and he thought it was just the sodium. I think it was actually the sodium chloride and other mineral salts that was just left over and wasn’t completely washed off the outside of the spirulina.

So anyways, my face puffed up and I looked like a hideous monster because of the salt. I fasted for a day or two and it went right down. So I think that is another pitfall of having spirulina.

Another one is it is really high in protein which is a bit stimulating and obviously it turns our feces really green. And there have been some reports, I heard this about 10 years ago, about some people who ate way too much spirulina and it just really caked up their bowels, their small intestine. It just like cemented up their small intestine so no nutrients could get into their system.

So we have to watch with really exotic, high protein foods that can be really unbalancing. I mean, you can feel great and get this sense of great well being but it’s really just an artificial stimulation and some of these things you can argue that the algae has the cocaine analog, and other issues are an toxin A. Dr. Vetrano has spoken and written about these issues.

So if you’re going to use a green powder, you can experiment with the micro algae’s, with barley grass, and with wheat grass, but the bottom line is take a spoonful, put it on your tongue and taste it, and close your eyes and say, “Is this really food?” My senses always tell me, “No, this is not really food. This is not what my body is designed to eat and it just doesn’t lead to eating it in a sensible way.”

Now I do agree with some people who use green powder in their juices and whatever and it does definitely help them. I mean the minerals help me tremendously. It really made my mind more vibrant and helped me to function a lot better but then I stopped using them and the effect lasted.

So another thing to watch out for and then we can change the subject, if you’re adding spirulina powder to your fruit smoothie, I guess we touched on this before, the protein is not going to digest. It’s going to go right through your stomach and there will be no digestive juices acting on it.

And it just led me to feeling really strange like my blood sugar had been polluted. My mind was a bit spacey and I just didn’t feel balanced and my bowels became putrid, toxic which means the protein is warming up in the bowel because it didn’t get a chance to digest. It made my bowels yucky and that affects your overall health.

So you can observe how it makes your energy, also your mental clarity and also your bowels and your body odor. So if the protein is not digesting, it’s going to make us smell toxic. I’ll take another question.

Mike: We have about 10 minutes left. Do you have any more questions?

Norma: I have a question about kale.

Dave: Okay, who?

Norma: This is Norma from Columbia. I know kale is supposed to be really good for you and you mentioned it just in the conversation tonight about putting it in something. How do you eat it? Do you eat it raw because I’m trying to eat it raw and I just gag on it?

Dave: Yeah, that’s a good question. There are several different kinds of kale, the dinosaur kale and the green, dark green kale. To me, from my senses, it’s like my senses reject it. It can be really tough and fibrous and like the only way I could enjoy it would be to maybe put a couple of leaves in with my carrot juice.

I chop up kale and toss it in my food processor and mash it with my cats’ turkey every morning, they get ground turkey with kale and they love it because it is high in chlorophyll and minerals and great nutrients. But a lot of raw fooders, let’s see, they’ll make like a nut or seed pate and put it into their dinosaur kale and make a little boat out of it so usually they’re adding something to it to make it more palatable. Just to eat it straight can be really difficult.

I have had some really good kale; the red Russian kale is about the only one I like to eat. I once was lucky and I got some really good seeds and I planted them in my greenhouse and it had this really nice, sweet soft red Russian kale for an entire winter and spring. It was nice and soft and didn’t have really hard veins in it so then I planted some more seeds the next year and they were the wrong seeds and it was just really tough and bitter and just tasted terrible.

So if the kale or any food you’re eating doesn’t taste good, it’s not going to be nourishing for us and there’s no point in trying to force something that doesn’t appeal to our senses. The whole key to mastering the raw food diet is to follow your senses and only eat what tastes delicious.

So, I would, hopefully you’ll go to some health food stores and some farmers’ markets and find different kinds of kale. And you certainly can grow kale. I would throw the seeds in the ground in a plot of soil if you’re able to garden and it will come up in about 4 months and you’ll have a really good stand of kale. And if you have an apartment, you can make a cold box and that should go through the winter. Out here in northern California, kale grows year round in my greenhouse.

Participant: Can I give a recipe for kale juice that’s really good?

Dave: Okay.

Participant: It’s a bunch of kale and 8 stalks of celery and a peeled lemon juice. Go with a half a lemon at first and if that’s not enough, put the other half in but it’s just those 3 items. Eight stalks of celery, organic of course, and your kale and your lemon. Make sure your lemon is peeled though.

Dave: Okay.

Participant: And that takes the bad taste away from your kale. It’s really good. You have the salty from your celery and then your lemon.

Participant: I have a question.

Dave: Okay.

Participant: I was just in an accident yesterday and I have a broken wrist.

Dave: Ooh, I’m sorry.

Participant: Yes, well trust me, it could have been worse. I’m thankful and a bunch of cuts and bruises and I’m noticing my appetite is like next to nothing.

Dave: Good recognition. Your body wants to fast and heal.

Participant: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Dave: That’s the best thing to do is to just get complete rest. We only have a couple of minutes but I’ll tell you a story. I jumped off a fence about 5 years ago and I misjudged where I was landing and I jammed my knee and I could feel all the tendons in my knee just stretch like maybe an eighth or a quarter of an inch. That was an awful feeling, thank God it didn’t tear.

But my knee swelled up like a balloon and all I did was rest for 3 days. I couldn’t walk because it swelled up and made its own soft cast. I fasted on water for a little over 3 days and on the 3rd day, the swelling went down and I was back to normal.

Participant: The only thing I’ve been in the mood for is just watermelon. So I’ve just been eating watermelon.

Dave: Yeah, do mono diet or do as much water fasting for the next week that you can because it will just let your body heal things much faster.

Participant: Comfrey is known as the bone knitter.

Dave: What is?

Participant: The herb comfrey, c-o-m-f-r-e-y.

Dave: Yeah, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that any food has any ability to heal our bones. I believe that the God within or the life code within does all the healing and it goes fastest when we just step out of the way and just let the body do it. I don’t think any specific food acts on the body and knows how to take care of it. That’s the hygienic philosophy and which is based on a lot of good science.

That was an interesting sound.

Participant: I have been putting comfrey on the cuts where I have some stitches and some abrasions and stuff like that to help the flesh heal.

Dave: Yeah, the question is, and you have to delve into it, how is this herb, this plant, making your body heal because our mind sort of interferes trying to fool us into thinking we have to do something to make our body heal whereas life would not be possible if the body didn’t already know how to self heal.

And what the hygienic physicians have found that run these fasting centers and what I’ve proved on myself and what anybody listening can prove is when you step out of the way and get rest and sleep and just live on your water, your body has, instead of maybe 50% daily energy potential to heal itself, it all of a sudden has 95%.

You’ll heal rapidly and your learn this incredible lesson, the most important lesson that I think anybody will ever learn is that the body has incredible self healing powers and we can only liberate that if we step out of the way and stop eating and being active. When we rest and we conserve energy, the body directs virtually all this energy to the place where it’s got to correct any problems.

So Natural Hygiene is about seeking the solution with our God given ability from within as opposed to looking for something external to heal us. And there are a million external things that people have used and can use but mostly they just interfere with the body’s own intelligent healing mechanism. And you can experience yourself and then you’ll know because it’s only something you have to, to get it, you have to experience it by fasting.

David: This is David in Lambertville, New Jersey. I have a question. Do you consider juicing just a tool to use during transition because it’s not a whole food or is it okay to use on a permanent basis?

Dave: That’s a good question. I think we’re all used to drinking juices and nobody’s ready to become a perfect, whole, mono, raw fooder so I’d say, enjoy your juices. If you’ve had really severe digestive trouble and your gut just can’t handle a lot of roughage and fiber like people who have had severe colitis like I did then juicing…, my juice was my best friend my first 3 years. So enjoy your juices and follow good food combining.

Participant: Dave, what kind of water do you drink?

Dave: Only distilled. I think we’ve got one minute left so on my website you can get an article on distilled water, and I’m a representative and distributor for a really great distiller called the Durastill.

David: I have another question. This is David in Lambertville again. A number of people who were Natural Hygienists like Dr. Stanley Bass. Were they getting too much fat or doing the diet wrong or what.

Dave: The phone is really cutting out and I couldn’t hear the whole thing. I want to say a couple of things. I think we only have about 1 more minute.

Mike, could you give me a phone call after this? It’ll be fun to chat about it.

Mike: Yes.

Dave: I don’t think we have more than a few seconds but I couldn’t hear your entire question. Maybe you can e-mail it to me, dave@ And maybe, I’ve got a forum, at there’s a forum if you want to ask questions there. And then Mike and I are going to set up a series of seminars maybe starting in October. It’s just a pleasure to speak. I guess I could go on for hours and hours. I love relating information to help people learn how to become healthier. And I thank you all for listening and wish you all good health and hope to meet you all some day, maybe at a Rawstock.

Mike: Thank you very much, Dave. I’d like to thank you all for joining us. It was a very fun time. I’ll open up the lines one more time and say goodbye.

Participants: Thanks, Mike. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mike. Thanks so much.

Dave: Goodnight everyone.

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