Successful Veganism

[Guest guest]

This article by Gabriel Cousens directly responds to some of the issues

raised by Nazariah in an interview which was recently discussed on this

list. Mark

 

-

" Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center " <healing

" List Member " <mark

Wednesday, June 23, 2004 12:02 PM

Successful Veganism - June Ewellness Letter

 

 

This eWellness letter is an article discussing the safety and importance of

vegan live foods. It is unique in that it is an honest discussion of some of

the potential individual issues of fear, ignorance and rigidity unscientific

idealism in the live foods movement today, that potentially get in the way

of being really healthy on the vegan live food diet lifestyle. It is an

article of support to help people become successful and face the fear-based

arguments that one may come up against on a vegan live food diet.

 

 

Many of these issues arise because of lack of education on live foods and

listening to proclaimed experts who often have a few years in living the

live food lifestyle or lack much of a medical background, or are ego fixated

to a particular idealistic theory rather than being open to scientific

inquiry.

 

From this mess arises the legitimate skeptic who because of his or her

failure on the live food diet and lifestyle begins to focus primarily on the

problems and not the solutions. My work in the past thirty five years is to

constantly see the issues and look for the solutions so people can be

successful. My books Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet, Conscious

Eating, Depression Free for Life and Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine plus

the work on B12 insufficiency, as well as my forth coming book Spiritual

Nutrition - the six foundations for spiritual life and the awakening of

kundalini - have given my clients practically a 100% success rate on an

organic, vegan, individualized to your constitution, high mineral, low

glycemic, well hydrated diet and balanced lifestyle. It is from this context

that this article is a reply to the fear filled, but valid concerns of the

skeptic.

 

The skeptics have touched on some important issues in the raw food movement.

I acknowledge the skeptics courage to speak up and challenge the trend of

unscientific idealism and ignorance that has led to a certain amount of

difficulty in the success of the live food movement. The skeptics position

also reflects the issues of fear and ignorance. Over the last thirty-five

years of clinical experience, seeing thousands of people on vegan and lives

food diets, my work has been to figure out specifically how to make a live

food diet safe and successful.

 

We must understand that the main reason for eating live food for small

spiritually advanced groups has been a focus on divine union, not longevity.

Examples of these groups are the Essenes, the ancient Rishis in India,

advanced Taoists, and the Mormons whose inner circle and spiritual leader

Joseph Smith were live foodists. For these people their healthy diet and

longevity is really by-product of a spiritual path. At this point, I've

established basic successful live food approaches in Conscious Eating, The

Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine and Spiritual nutrition and the rainbow

diet, that support spiritual life and general physical and mental well

being. It is my experience with thousands of people, not just a few

anecdotes, that we can be essentially 100% successful on a live food vegan

diet, which is the most spiritually powerful and healing for the planet.

 

The key principle to the live food vegan life style is individualizing the

diet. To be successful one must individualize the diet according to one's

constitution: some people need a higher protein source input, some need a

lower protein source input, some need higher fat, and some need lower fat.

Everyone needs a certain amount of short, medium and long chain Omega 3

fatty acids, in the form of purslane, hempseed, alpanizon flos algae and

golden yellow algae, which are now clearly attainable on a live food diet.

The second principle is that a live, vegan, highly mineralized, high

hydration, low-glycemic, organic, diet with B12 supplementation is

successful for 99-100% of the population. Those two principles cover the

whole thing.

 

The physical and mental suffering that skeptics unfortunately experienced

are classic symptoms of B12 deficiency. Based on my research, B12 deficiency

is the main problem facing vegans, in general, as well as live fooders. A

B12 deficiency can lead to a number of chronic diseases and difficulties

including heart, nervous system, brain, as well as chronic fatigue, anxiety

and depression. One aspect is that B12 raises the homocysteine, a lack of

which makes one more susceptible to heart attacks and nervous system

disorders. I have pointed out these issues in my last two e-wellness

letters. This is the final key of knowledge that makes a live food diet very

workable and safe.

 

Unfortunately in our live food movement and in the vegan movement we have

unscientific idealists who believe you shouldn't have supplementation. They

are the ones the skeptics are complaining about. The ones who would rather

die than give up their theories of how it should be. The symptoms that the

skeptics had and that other people have suffered in the live food movement

are classical B12 deficiency symptoms. One of the most famous B12 deficiency

cases is seen with Johnny Lovewisdom. He was on a hard-core fruitarian

diet and created a fruitarian community in South America. It was a total

disaster. Johnny Lovewisdom suffered many of the same symptoms that the

skeptics did. I examined this B12 issue in many articles and I explore it

in greater detail in my new book " Spiritual Nutrition. " Even though I have

been bitterly attacked by vegan and Natural Hygiene idealists for suggesting

that we should do something as " unholy " as take a supplement, it is clear to

me that that is the solution to being vegan at this time in history if we do

not want to be lacto-vegetarians.

 

However, while I agree with the skeptic on the points mentioned, I object to

his comments when he is associating live foods with death. This is a classic

media fear technique. For example, there was a recent news report about the

deaths of three high school wrestlers who died after putting on rubber suits

and riding stationary bikes in a sauna to lose weight. Their deaths were

linked to creatine, which has an amazing safety record, rather than to

dehydration. This kind of logic results in false conclusions and unrealistic

fear. Paavo Airola, a lacto-vegetarian died at age 69. Can we, with

integrity, say he died because he was a lacto-vegetarian and took

supplements?

 

People on any diet can bring imbalance to their bodies such as the deaths

from the high protein diets reported in the news a few years ago. People die

from B12 deficiency (pernicious anemia), acute viral myocarditis, the flu,

etc. It is also definitely possible to activate " food trips " and anorexia on

any sort of diet. This is not the fault of the diet. It is the

responsibility of the individual and of those who create fear and simplified

conclusions. Making unsubstantiated guilt by associations amplifies

ignorance and fear. Even meat-eaters die from anorexia. My one contact

(although I never saw him in person) with such a death was a hard-core

macrobiotic advocate who refused to change his diet. These unfortunate and

inexcusable deaths should be associated with idealists and extremists, not

with a thoughtful, common sense live food diet. It is the extremists who

have created an ego-self-righteous environment where people hurt themselves

and suppress reality as the skeptics point out.

 

The issue of supplementation is very interesting. As far back as 1936 the

U.S. Congress said that 99% of the population are deficient in minerals. In

my extensive clinical experience, I have not seen anyone, meat-eater or

vegan, who does not have some deficiency in minerals and doesn't need some

supplementation. There is no diet in the world that doesn't have

deficiencies because of the excess environmental and emotional stresses

people face today beyond anything we have known in history. My solution is

the same as other healthy leaders in the live food movement such as David

Wolfe and Viktoras Kulvinskas. The answer is the use of super nutrition and

of some supplementation.

 

The skeptic focuses exclusively on the unhealthy extremist spectrum of the

live food movement. We can instead acknowledge the thousands of healthy

people like myself (I have been on live foods for 25 years), David Wolfe.

David and I compiled a list over-forty, incredibly healthy people who have

been on a live food for twenty years or more. Why has the skeptic chosen to

ignore Dr. Gerson's work of fifty cured cases of cancer written in the 1950s

and Dr. Szekeley report of 123,000 people healed on live foods in his Mexico

clinic from 1940-1970? Why has the skeptic focused on the so-called live

food " experts " who neither " walk their talk " nor even know how to " walk

their talk " while ignoring the legitimate information from people who are

successful? My books Conscious Eating and Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine

and the " Conscious Eating " courses at the Tree of Life make practical

success at live foods realistic and attainable over time if one puts in the

appropriate self-effort. Obviously I agree with the important issues

Nazariah has raised of fear, ignorance, false idealism, extremism, and

confusing a health crisis with a passing healing or detox crisis, but am

offering more life affirming and sustaining solutions.

 

The issue of protein that the skeptics bring up is a theory that was

developed by Frances Moore Lappé who developed the concept of protein

combining. This concept the skeptic recites is physiologically unsound and

inaccurate. I believe that as early as 1981 Frances Moore Lappé herself

agreed that her concept of protein combining was totally inaccurate. Paavo

Airola in his book Are You Confused points out and cites ten studies where

people are able to live for extended periods of time on 20 grams of protein

per day - that is less than two tablespoons of spirulina. Vegans and live

fooders are able to get inordinate amounts of healthy protein from protein

concentrated food, besides nuts and seeds, from sources such as spirulina,

chlorella, bee pollen and hemp seed protein concentrates. There are people

who need very high amounts of protein according to their constitution. These

people do quite successfully when they use these concentrated protein foods.

They absolutely do not need dairy, fish or chicken for protein. In fact,

recent research has shown that vegetarian protein is superior to flesh-based

protein because vegetarian protein has certain elements that seem to

decrease insulin resistance.

 

This is new research I find fascinating. Up until now, such famous

institutes such as the Max Planck Institute in Germany, as well as the

various nutritional organizations and journals in the United States have all

agreed that vegetarian protein is equal to a meat-based protein. The

American Dietetic Association says that pure vegetarian diet contains twice

the protein required for daily need. The well-known British journal Lancet

says that vegetarian protein is no longer considered second class. The Max

Planck Institute reports that vegetarian proteins are superior, if not equal

to meat protein. The Journal of Clinical Nutrition says we only need 2.5% of

our total calories as protein. When even the conventional journals honor

vegetarian protein as complete, why suggest fish which is filled with

mercury, PCBs, etc., which have been associated with a variety of problems

as I point out in detail in Conscious Eating and Rainbow Green Live Food

Cuisine? The other area to discuss is milk and dairy. It is clearly true

that the Essenes, as far as I and other researchers can tell, were live food

lacto-vegetarians. However in the context of the issues we face today 2000

years later this fact is not relevant. The issue of environmental pollution

makes it unwise to have dairy in any form. The use of dairy and fish - dairy

for B12 supplementation and fish and meat for protein supplementation - is

unnecessary, risky, and highly detrimental. In Conscious Eating and Rainbow

Green Live Food Cuisine, I discuss the neurotoxin and cancer dangers from

pesticides and herbicides, and genetically engineered food.

 

Why is this? Cooked dairy available in stores is unhealthy because of

hormones, antibiotics, genetically engineered BgH, pesticides, herbicides

and it is pasteurized and homogenized. The issue of pollution is intense.

Cows concentrate pollution and carry 5.5 times higher pollutants than

vegetables. The breast milk of mothers who are vegan has 1% the pesticides

and herbicides of non-vegans. The Chernobyl disaster points to the dangers

of eating dairy which no amount of fermenting can remove. Three months after

Chernobyl, peri-natal mortality in the Boston area increased 900%. This was

traced to the fact that concerned pregnant mothers were drinking a lot of

milk (this includes goats and organic cows as well). These animals were

eating a lot of grass, which they do obviously. Unfortunately the grass

contained fallout from Chernobyl. This radioactive I131 was poisoning the

fetuses and children. This dairy came from animals whose bodies had

concentrated the radioactive toxins from the environment.

Studies from Denmark show that milk from leukemic cows increased the rate of

children with leukemia. Another study showed that 100% of monkeys who drank

milk from leukemic cows got leukemia after one year. The cows were passing

on disease vectors in their milk. According to Robert Cohen at

www.notmilk.com, milk ranges from 633 million pus cells per liter in Florida

to 236 million pus cells per liter in Montana.

 

Now we have to look at the most important disease from ingesting animals and

animal products. We call it Mad Cow Disease. It is both hidden and not so

hidden. According to the Friends of the Earth Journal and also personal

communications, several autopsy studies in the U.S. show, that between 3 and

13% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's are actually suffering from

Creutzfeldt Jakobs Disease (CJD). This is the human form of Mad Cow

Disease. This is a pretty serious statement. We deny that it actually

exists in the U.S. and the government is doing very little to stop it except

to avoid reporting it. The danger is alarming. It only takes one gram of

diseased cow tissue--we're not talking about the nervous system or brain,

which has the highest amount of the prions--but just one gram of diseased

tissue to infect a cow. Just one gram! And there are many loopholes to the

controls in the present system. For example, farmers are allowed to feed

calves cattle blood as a substitute for milk despite the finding that blood

can transmit the disease.

 

How can we continue to believe that U.S. beef is safe when more than forty

countries have banned import of American beef. This is significant. There

is an implication, according to the Friends of the Earth, that as many as

120,000 cases of Creutzfeldt Jakobs Disease (CJD), Mad Cow Disease, in the

U.S. that are excluded from the statistics. Getting accurate statistics is

difficult because the U.S. Center for Disease Control still refuses to make

CJD a reportable disease. It is a fact that our fish, deer and elk now have

Mad Cow Disease. It is spreading throughout the United States and our

organic cows are not even safe from it. This is what we do know: Anyone who

consumes dairy is at high-risk.

 

As if this danger of Mad Cow Disease were not enough, there are many other

problems involved with dairy. Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine, research in

the Fungal/Mycotoxin Etiology of Human Disease vol. 2, 1994 cites milk as

having 5 million pathogenic organisms per cup, eggs 37 million per egg, and

fish and chicken 337 million ounce. The average American diet is 750 million

to 1 billion pathogenic organisms per meal while the average vegan diet is

500 pathogenic organisms per meal. This is a difference of up to 2 million

times more per meal. Ignorance and fear does not do well with facts, but

here they are. One interesting anecdote is that two of my live food clients

who had perfect blood on the dark field test showed up with blood filled

with many pathogenic microorganisms. I asked them both what they were doing

that was different. Both said they were drinking organic goat's milk from a

range fed goat. To complete the spontaneous experiment I asked them to stop

the goats milk. Three weeks later, both of their blood on the dark field was

perfect.

 

There are so many problems with dairy that Indian yogis that come from India

will not even drink the milk of the United States because they get sick from

it. Ayurveda recognizes that poorly prepared dairy products from badly

treated cows increases mucus and toxins in the system, clogs the nadis and

turns milk into a poison. In ancient times milk was rasa and was very

healthy but today's milk is ama or toxin. Cows are generally mistreated;

cows are given estrogens and antibiotics that come into the system. Mentally

the dairy industry has turned the cow into a machine. It used to be that the

cow was allowed to give milk to its calf first - only the leftover milk was

taken for humans. The dairy industry removes calves from their mothers and

slaughters the calf. The cow suffers because she knows that her calf is

going to be killed and the stress causes toxins to be secreted in their

milk. Cows are mistreated in many ways: confined to pens, milked by

machines, produced through artificial insemination and genetically

redesigned to produce more milk that is healthy for them. They swallow

hormones, antibiotics, fish and sheep parts and who knows what else. Most of

the milk today then, besides being pasteurized and homogenized, which

further weakens its life force, is a degenerated food filled with fear, the

pain of death and enslavement, with very little energy in it, very little

love and very little nourishment. Milk taken from an organically treated

cow is still going to have concentrated pesticides and herbicides and has

the risk to being exposed to the mad cow disease because it is a

cross-species disease.

 

The last question that comes up is the question of longevity. Studies vary.

I am not familiar with the studies that the skeptics cite. However, I am

familiar with the fact that there are two principles here that are very

important. One is that we need to have different diets for different

constitutions. For example, a life-expectancy study done on 5000 people

showed that people with blood type A who regularly ate flesh, dairy or eggs

usually died at the age of 61 of heart disease or cancer. People with blood

type A who lived on a basic vegan diet usually lived about sixteen years

longer. Longevity and constitution create a significant variable.

 

Although human longevity studies are very difficult we know one thing for

certain the less you eat the longer you live. This second principle, which

is far more important, is seen in cross-cultural studies and recent studies

since 1930 on all levels of life including mammals. This is the only thing

we can actually say about general longevity principles with any accuracy.

It has been established in all species, that when calories are cut in half,

the longevity of that species significantly increases. Why is this one point

important? Because when you eat live foods you naturally, easily, and

without a sense of restriction, achieve what now the top researchers of

longevity are talking about: calorie restriction. Why is this? When you cook

food, you destroy 50% of the protein and 70-80% of the vitamins and

minerals, and close to 100% of the phytonutrients. The result is that you

need to eat at least twice as much cooked food to get the equal amount of

nourishment as on live foods. When you are on live foods and you are eating

adequately you naturally eat half as much to get equivalent nutrition from

food. You therefore achieve the concept of calorie-restriction that the

leading researchers are talking about today. I repeat: calorie restriction

is the only thing in the last eighty years that has been consistently able

to make any difference in longevity. It is irrelevant whether you are a

meat-eater or a vegan. This is the only thing we know. I discuss this in

detail in Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine.

 

In closing I want to sincerely thank the skeptics for their courage to speak

out. I pray that people will let go of ideologies and start to look at what

is the most effective diet. After more than 35 years of research, looking

for the best diet for spiritual life and general well being, I conclude that

the most appropriate diet for survival, well being, and spiritual life in a

highly toxic world is a personalized live food organic vegan diet, that is

low-glycemic, highly mineralized, and well hydrated. This conclusion is

based on thousands upon thousands who have lived successfully on a live food

diet. It is also the diet that creates the least amount of pain and

suffering to the animal kingdom, the least amount of chronic disease, and

least ecological damage.

 

My work has been to not only find the best diet, but also to support people

to achieve this diet successfully. People need to take responsibility and

follow a more scientific way, rather than in an ideological way. The live

foods way is like a powerful horse, if you don't bother to learn how to

ride, you can fall off. My message is " pay attention. " It is possible to be

fully successful on a live food diet for almost everyone. At the Tree of

Life we have a variety of Conscious Eating courses, apprenticeships in live

food preparation and vegan farming and a master's program in live food vegan

nutrition. Education is the best antidote to fear and ignorance. As I wrote

in Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet back in 1986, the art and

science of spiritual nutrition requires the process of self-study (trial and

error) and artful intelligence. I encourage all of you to become conscious

and successful live food practitioners and not succumb to ignorance and

fear. I do not feel that the live food diet was the historical diet of the

masses. It was the diet of the inner spiritual circles of the Essenes, the

Taoists, the Mormons, and yogis. In these times, however, it is the diet for

the healing and transformation of the planet! It is the diet that can save

the ecology! And it is the most powerful spiritually transforming and

awakening diet on the planet for everyone. Because of our advanced food

technologies, transportation abilities, and consciousness, this is the first

time in history that the vegan Divine guidance of Genesis 1:29 can be put

into practice for the world community. Live food veganism is the diet of the

Now.

 

Sincerely, Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), Diplomat Ayurveda