In spring of 2001 nine clients of Aajonus were speaking about their experience with his primal diet. At the end Aajonus talks about bacteria and high meat.
Woman 1: But I've only been doing this 100% raw diet from Aajonus' information, Aajonus Vonderplanitz from We Want to Live, for about a year and four and a half months. I did, over the course of ten years, I did a lot of colon cleansing because I found myself to be needing to do that to detoxify. I studied iridology, I used to teach iridology, which is analyzing the eyes, and I very much wanted to experiment, you know, how I could get myself to the pinnacle of health. So detoxifying with bentonite clay and doing colon cleansing was a big part of what I did for myself. And I studied a lot about parasitology, I did a lot of cleansing of parasites. And I thought that that would be a pinnacle, you know, to just take it to the nth degree, doing all the herbs, doing all the cleansing. And in the meantime, I was on a mostly raw diet, about 60 to 70% raw diet, but I was doing mostly vegetarian. You know, I would do a little bit of eggs, but I would soft boil my eggs, things like that. And finally, I realized that the path I was on was not really giving me all the strength and all the health that I believed was possible for me. And I started watching some of my friends eating this raw diet and watched them change right before my very eyes in a matter of six months. And I was absolutely amazed at how quickly they youthed, the way they looked. They looked younger, they were happier, they were healthier. And so I jumped in, even though I had a phobia about the parasite thing. And since then, I've been, you know, reading and studying and learning. And I realized I just had a few things switched around backwards. Now, my individual constitution is one in Ayurveda called Vata. Because of all the cleansing, I really did cleanse a lot of fat out of my body that I needed, healthy fat. So that's been a big healing for me. And in the beginning of doing the all-raw diet, especially with all the raw fat, the wonderful raw milk and raw cream, my liver went through a huge healing. I no longer craved alcohol and chocolate. And I feel very satisfied with everything that I'm eating. And I've learned ways to prepare everything, and it tastes really good to me. And because I've been educating myself, I've been really not worried about the bacteria and the parasites. I know that those things can be a healer in the body. And I believe that the parasites really are just in the body because they're cleaning up. That would be one role. I believe there could be other roles that the parasites have in the body. Certainly, I do believe now that the bacteria is a healer. It's a part of who I am because I'm alive. And I'm really glad that I found this path. I feel really good. And another main point for me is that I was born with a genetically weak pancreas. So everything that I was eating from the moment I was born, I couldn't digest it. And my body adapted over time, but ultimately, I have not been able to digest easily unless the food is all raw because then it has the enzymes. So now when I eat, I don't have indigestion, which is really wonderful. I mean, I find it allows me to be much happier and just, you know, relax a lot more. Okay. Thanks.
Melissa: Hi. I'm Melissa, and I've been learning and involved with Eating This Way for about five, six months. I did not have a life-threatening illness, but I had minor health concerns that can grow into something major later, like hypoglycemia, weak pancreas, low thyroid function, uterine fibroids. My lymphatic system was really compromised, which I could tell because I don't sweat very much, and I would get, like, swollen lymph glands a lot, and I'd always be taking vitamins because I felt like I was going to catch a cold all the time. And ever since I started incorporating these foods into my diet, I never ate very much carbohydrates because of the hypoglycemia, and also I always felt like I needed a lot of protein. I was always craving protein. Ever since I've been eating raw meat and raw unpasteurized milk and raw honey, my blood sugar is balanced, and I don't get swollen lymph glands anymore. I was having some feminine bleeding that just totally stopped, which also the green vegetable juice, which is the vitamin and nutritional supplement on this program has helped with that also. And overall, my health has been, I've been feeling a little bit different, just like a little bit more kind of well-being, more kind of even keel, that kind of thing. So I'm just still just learning a lot and experimenting like everybody.
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Brian: ...Bible at the time, freaked out, went on brown rice, and became a vegetarian. I was pretty obnoxious too, because I would tell everybody else that they should only eat brown rice. Like many of us, I've not only been a nutritional seeker, and a spiritual seeker at times, it seems like the two kind of went together. And I've just been on so many different paths that every single system that I had worked with ultimately was somewhat of, every system that I had worked with was ultimately came to be some kind of dead end for me, where I didn't really get where I was hoping I would get to. I was always struggling, and I'd worked with so many practitioners and so many herbalists and homeopathists and acupuncturists and rolfers and reiki people, and I was still just didn't have good energy, could never gain any weight at all, bad allergies, hypoglycemic, hypothyroid. So a breakthrough for me was three years ago when I met Aajonus, Aajonus is the author of the book We Want to Live, which is the book about the system that we're talking about, the system of health and nutrition. And when I saw him he said, dude, you are starved for protein and you're starved for fat, and I said, how could that be, because I'm eating protein and fat all day long, and he said, yes, but you need raw, you have to have, your body is not metabolizing cooked proteins and cooked fats. And he said, I want you to start having raw milk, raw cream, raw cheese, and raw butter, and I said, you're nuts, because that's just going to make me sick. Because I was one of those, as probably some of you are or have been, one of those non-dairy people, like dairy is evil, dairy is mucus and it's going to make you sick and screw you up, and if I ever saw anybody who had a cold or a flu, I'd say, oh, you've probably been eating cheese, haven't you? And so, so I said, I don't know how I'm going to do this, I will try it, I will try it, but I don't know how it's going to work for me, he said, just take it, you know, a little bit at a time, but within a month, I was eating all the butter and cheese and cream and milk that I could have and it was fantastic, it was like getting liberated, it was like getting out of prison, it was like, gosh, I can have this creamy stuff, and it started, I mean, as thin as I still am, I actually started gaining weight and I've gained about 13 pounds and I hope to gain another several pounds. We'll see what happens. But just for me to gain one pound at all was just a godsend, unbelievable, amazing feat. Because I would do, prior to this, I was trying everything, every pill, protein powder, program, scientific this, that, gain weight, carnitine, whatever. Nothing was working. I even would, yes, and besides that, I would also, oh, I even tried eating a pint of Haagen-Dazs every night before I went to bed for two months. And nothing, not a pound, nothing. So there was some wisdom here that just made a difference and it was so fascinating to me that it could be so near and yet so far. It's like all these experts that I've been consulting and been paying a lot of money to just never got it. Something that Aajonus told me was the key and they just, all these other people missed it somehow.
And I just find it almost, in retrospect, I find it almost irresponsible of them in that they have studied and now people are paying them money for nutritional advice and they're missing this fundamental, this absolutely fundamental principle of health that our bodies need raw protein and raw fat. I'll also share with you that people talk about the issues of parasites and they'll say, oh, you eat raw eggs, you eat raw meat. I mean, every single time I mention to anyone who's not initiated into this teaching in any way, they just flip out and they're like, oh my God, you must be getting sick all the time. But I will tell you, I am a guy who's, I do have a very sensitive digestive system. If I, I'll go on a trip to Mexico with 10 people and nobody gets sick except me because I ate a taco or whatever in Mexico. So, or I went on, I remember going on a hike three years ago, I think it was, with a group of several people and we finally made it to the top of the mountain and there was this natural spring there and everybody was like, oh my God, this is this clear and as pure as water can possibly be. Let's, oh, you know, let's, this is so wonderful. So everybody drank of that spring and I was the only guy that got sick. I got some parasite or some giardia, some frigging thing. So, I'm just, I'm sharing that with you to demonstrate that, you know, I have a very sensitive digestive system and I have been on this diet for three years and I have never, ever once gotten sick from eating raw meat or raw chicken or raw fish. So, that's saying a lot. And I will say that I am, I am tremendously grateful to, you know, Price, Pottenger, Aajonus, Owanza, all the people who've contributed to this system of understanding the human body and nutrition. And I encourage anyone who hasn't checked it out to go for it, you know, don't, you don't have to jump in with both feet right away, but definitely check it out. It is well worth your while. And I think if you're a seeker of health and you're not experiencing the health that you'd like to experience, you're a damn fool if you don't. Thank you.
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Nicole: ...this diet like three months ago or something.
Woman 2: Well, 100%.
Nicole: Oh yeah, yeah. And I have Crohn's disease, which is kind of like a stomach thing where you get like really, really, really bad stomach aches and like, I don't know, all the side effects and stuff. And I was on like a really high amount of prednisone, which is like steroids and like Imuran and stuff. And so like then, like I met Aajonus through Erika and like my mom was so like happy about it. And so we tried it out. And at first I was like really into it and stuff, but then I started to get like really sick of it. And I was like, I felt a lot better and everything, but I was like, all my friends were eating like McDonald's and stuff and I was like really sad. And so then I just like saw that, you know, I was like losing weight and gaining weight and losing weight and all this really weird stuff. And so, but I just felt a hundred percent better. And I was planning on like getting off my pills like this week, right? And like, I didn't tell my parents or anything, but like I stopped taking them like three weeks ago. And like, I've been fine and stuff. And I didn't, like, they didn't even like know. And they would always be like, oh, my dad, who isn't like all great with the diet. He was like, oh, you're just fine because of the pills and stuff. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just like think I feel way better. And I think it's a really good diet for any of you who aren't on it. Okay, that's all.
[applause]
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Eric: ...years now, I'm 38 years old. My history is chronic fatigue. And it dates back to when I was a child. I was before the age of 10. I had migraines, very low energy. I was always sick. As far back as I can remember, I was your basic asthma hound chihuahua for the most part. And have been searching, I had searched for 25 years for something that would help me. So I've tried pretty much everything, including going to Mexico for treatments down there. Also, the gamut of diets. Tried just about everything, including vegetarian diet, a modified macrobiotic diet that I was on for about a year. And actually went down to about 120 pounds. When I met Aajonus, I was about 135 pounds. As I sit here today, I'm 175 pounds from this diet. And it's mostly muscle mass. The physiological transformation on this diet, for me, is nothing short of astounding. When I started the diet, I was up in San Jose. And I came down to visit my family after about five, six months. And I'll never... I remember my brother said, he goes, hey, you're working out. And I go, no, I'm not. He goes, yeah, you are. And I go, no, I'm not. And he goes, yeah, you are. That's how you look when you work out. My arms were much bigger and I'd filled in so well. So again, the transformation has just been incredible. And it's been three years. I've eaten all of my animal protein raw and have had no side effects from that. And I have a level of health now that I have never enjoyed in my entire life. It's just worked very well for me. And I encourage you, if you are thinking about this diet, to give it a try. And like Brian said, it's not anything you have to jump into. But there definitely is something behind this. So I would encourage you to explore it and check out and see if it's something that will work for you. And I can't sing the praises enough. It's just really made an incredible difference in my life. Thank you.
[applause]
Erika: Hi. My name is Erika Schmitz. And I, like everyone else here, had various health problems for many years. When I was 21 years old, I'm 38 now, when I was 21 years old, I was diagnosed with a type of arthritis that was so rare at the time that the doctor that diagnosed it had to look it up in some book. It was called Reiter's syndrome. And it's an autoimmune deficiency. And it involves inflammation of your iris, inflammation that travels into various parts of your body, and one other thing that I can't remember. And I asked my doctor at that time whether my diet had anything to do with what I was experiencing. And of course, he said no, which I knew right then and there that I didn't want to go back and see him because I wasn't really that into medical doctors anyway at that point. When I was 17 years old, I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian because I just wasn't feeling good anyway. I had problems probably my whole life as well, as Eric. Headaches when I was a child, never, ever able to digest any kind of dairy or any kind of carbs, really. And so I lived with this for about 17 years, the arthritis. And at first, they had me on steroids and antibiotics and all that. And I only took them for a few months because I realized that wasn't the road that I wanted to go. And so I tried all the other things, herbs and everything, colonics, everything that's out there, I tried it. And nothing really made that much difference except maybe temporarily. And then I met a girl named Megan and Ramen. And I was at a party. And Ramen was eating his raw meat. And I found it to be really interesting because I actually grew up eating a little raw meat because my parents are Europeans. So they eat steak tartare. And then we were talking a little bit about the book and Aajonus. Then Megan told me she ate raw chicken. And I thought she was crazy. I was like, oh my god. And she just kept telling me, you know what? I can't explain it. You just have to read the book. And I'd ask her more questions. And then she would just say, you have to read the book. I can't really explain it because the whole bacteria thing and all that freaked me out. And at that point, I wasn't a vegetarian any longer. So eating the meats didn't bother me. It was just the raw chicken. It's mostly the raw chicken. I ate a lot of sushi anyway. And the meat wasn't that big a deal. But the best thing for me was the raw dairy products. I was in heaven. I drank like three smoothies a day for like eight months because I was so happy that I could have cheese and milk and all that stuff that my body just could not digest. And it's interesting how the whole world is lactose intolerant, but no one will try raw milk. It's like, duh. And so I've been on it now for about a year and a half. And in the very beginning, I noticed that... I wasn't doing 100% raw foods. I was kind of like 50%. And I noticed that whenever I did eat even starches, which I couldn't digest at all, I was having an easier time digesting really pretty much anything, which leads me to believe that my digestive tract was probably just a wreck. And I think that the dairy products really helped heal whatever was going on in there that was causing the inflammation and probably everything that was going on.
So that was really nice to see that happening. And that was probably why I decided to continue on this path. I wasn't like James and jumped right in and ate everything raw. I did a little at a time. And socially, it's very difficult. So I would go out with my friends and eat regular food and feel awful after doing it for too long and then go back. And then just kind of took my time. And I'm pretty much raw now, like 100%, except for I still use a little soy sauce on my fish sometimes with my wasabi. But I'm working on that.
Eric: OK. Out.
Dan: Later, we're going to go into more about the content of their diet. So we'll address that later.
Erika: And that's pretty much it. So now here I am and still learning. I feel marvelous.
Man 1: Better question is, how many people know nothing about this and have not been to do a raw food diet at all? Can you raise your hand? One, two... Thank you. Three. I came to the diet. I was very ill back then. I'd been a healthy child as much as I knew. And in 1996, I started losing a tremendous amount of weight. I became chronically fatigued. I started to seek out all the best medical doctors in New York City. I saw the best tropical medicine doctor and yeast doctors. And they were trying to tell me what the problem was, and they really didn't know. They took blood tests. They said, well, your white cell count's low, and your red cell count's low, and we really don't know what's wrong. And it was not long after that that I kind of left that path and started searching elsewhere. Intuitively, I always had an idea that there had to be a way to eat that could actually heal the body without having to take supplements and other kinds of things. But I hadn't come across that yet, and I guess I didn't look deep enough. But I also didn't feel very well. So at that time, I weighed about 130 pounds. Actually, I was around 128. My lowest was 123. It was a rough go during that time. I'm really not sure, actually, how I made it all the way to this point. I was only so fortunate that a friend, who I was taking classes with, I'm studying Chinese medicine acupuncture right now, he put a book on my desk. We didn't really even know each other. More of an acquaintance than anything. And he just turned around, and he just put it there. He didn't even say anything. And I started reading it. And it made tremendous sense to me. You know, I'm really grateful for that, actually. Because that day, I went out to the store, and I got myself some meat and some cheese. And I ate it. And for the first time, I didn't have any gas. I didn't have any bloating. An hour later, I felt warm in my hands. I had lymph cancer. I had bone cancer. Tumors in my liver and my lung. I was very anemic. So the diet seems to do something. It really works. It's amazing in what it can do. I put on 15 pounds in the first two weeks. My body was just craving some nutrition. And I've continued to do very well. And much happier, I was very depressed as a child. I don't experience that anymore. And it's just one of the many different things that have happened to me. Basically, my liver, I couldn't even digest fats and proteins properly when they were cooked. And when I had them in a raw form, I had no trouble digesting them. As a matter of fact, it was very simple. And it's been pretty miraculous to me to watch the quick turnaround. I've been on the diet now about 15 months, starting November of 1999. And I feel very fortunate to have found it. Thank you.
Woman 2: I guess if you asked any of my friends, they would all say that I was always really healthy. Pretty much no fat, no dairy. I was really thin when I got pregnant. And I hardly ate any fats. And I have no idea if that has anything to do with her Crohn's or not. There's no Crohn's in my family or my ex's family. But to see what this kid went through, she started with stomach aches. She started getting inflammation in her knee. No one really thought anything. And then we went to Mexico. And that's typically where, if you do have a weak spot for Crohn's, you pick up Trichus, and you come back, and you vomit, or you have diarrhea, and you feel your stomach's a mess. So this kid went from 105 to 90. And I'm calling the doctors. And they're like, rheumatology. They had no clue. So I got her into Children's Hospital. And for 10 days, they have her on an IV. Nobody really knows what's going on with her. And one doctor who was really young walked in, and in a cocky way, just looks at her, and he goes, oh, she's got Crohn's. And I'm just sitting there like, you know, it was horrible. But in retrospect, at least he knew. Whereas everyone else was dancing around, didn't want to commit, could have been rheumatoid arthritis, like childhood arthritis, they had to do upper and lower GI and do biopsies. And I mean, the thing is, it was such a long, painstaking thing. She's suffering. She's in pain. And at the end of it all, they throw her on massive amounts of drugs. And I look to the doctor in his right hand, who basically is a nurse that I'm in contact with the majority of the time after that, and I say, well, what is she going to eat? And they said, oh, she can eat whatever she wants. She can eat anything. And I just looked. And I knew from how hard I'd been trying to be healthy all my life and not doing it probably properly anyway, I couldn't believe that. And they knew I wanted to hear something. And they said, well, maybe no soda or very little soda. And stay away from fried foods. And I just was baffled. I was dumbfounded. I already wanted to hate them. And they were the sweetest people. I mean, the doctor's name was Danny Thomas. And his partner was Frank Sinatra. They were very, very nice people and senior gastroenterologists. And all I could think to myself was, what is this kid's life going to be like? And so after that, I started looking around. And Erika introduced me to the book. And the odd thing is my background is European as well. And I grew up always being attracted to oysters, steak tartare, sashimi. That was the food that I wanted, oddly enough. But the thing that I was really missing was the dairy. And that's how I started. I started doing the shakes. And I think the biggest thing for me, since I really didn't have any big health problems, was that my mood, my emotional stability kind of changed, where I was edgy. And if people said something wrong to me, I would always get defensive. And I can't tell you how just by having fat in your system, it just totally mellows you out. And you can even ask my daughter. She likes it a lot better, too. So it was really hard to convince her dad that this was going to be an option.
And that, god, you know, the best thing would be to throw all the drugs away today and have her eat all this raw meat. And of course, that was not going to happen. So she continued with the drugs. And we did it kind of half, maybe 60% of the time. Then we went to Paris for Christmas for two weeks and ate chocolate and coffee and all this food. And all of her symptoms started to come up. And I'm sorry, before that, she had some symptoms. And we'd switched to another doctor who was some big guy at Cedars. And he said, I'm going to get her off prednisone. So I'm like, great. But he keeps kicking up this other drug, Imuran, to like 200 milligrams, and it's really hard. But right before we went on the trip, her knee got really swollen. And I went in to see him. And he's a young guy trained by Danny Thomas. But he's surpassed him now. And I said, OK, well, her knee's swollen. We're going on this 13-hour trip. What do I do? I know they say symptoms pop up when you go in a pressurized plane. And he said, I mean, the deer in the headlights, look. You could just see. And she was down to five milligrams of prednisone a day. And he said, I want you to give her 40 milligrams a day. And it was like somebody kicked me in the stomach. I just thought... And I could see he was shaken up too. So I think I went to 30 for a week, 25, and then dropped her as fast as I could. And the day that we got back, we went to see Aajonus. I think it was January 5. And he looked at her. And it was pretty scary to hear what it looked like to him. So immediately, I think that was January 6. And we've been on it... She's been on it 100% since then. And I mean, the change in her is amazing. And since she dropped, we felt comfortable enough to get rid of the drugs. Everything has changed. So I can't tell you how amazing it's been for us. And if anybody has any questions, please ask me. Thanks.
[applause]
Kathy: I've been on Agnes' diet now for three years and a few months. I met him at the place called Mogan David. It's a temple and singles group. I was nine people... I was one of the nine people that happened to buy his book. He sold it to me for $25. So I just want to brief in that I was, before the diet, I was in my 40s. I had severe pain in my neck. I was diagnosed as arthritis, that the bones was rubbing against each other. So I didn't know what to do at the time. I was just, I didn't take the doctor's medicine, he wanted to give me medicine. So I said, I just did some exercising, that didn't help. So and then as well as I had a, that was five years before when I had the surgery, where part of my ovary was removed. And as well as I couldn't talk very well, I couldn't form the thoughts. You know, the thoughts would form, but I couldn't speak at the thoughts. You know, I would be, you know, my voice would, I mean, I couldn't form the words and if I wanted to communicate with somebody, now it's gradually picking up and I'm able to communicate better. And last time I saw him in September, he said all new tissue was coming in for where I had my surgery. That was in 1995. Since I've been on the diet, it's been three years. I've been also using glandular tissues, the raw glands from the buffalo. I've been doing that and since then I've noticed also my dark circles under my eyes have gotten less. My varicose veins is fading away and my hair is getting into a dark, it's turning almost black, it's getting black instead of gray, I would have been near white by now. It's showing you what vitamins and minerals and nutrients are in the raw meats and such. I'm just learning continuously from Aajonus and I'm also grateful for what I've learned from him.
Dan: My health was pretty good as a kid except I was always hyperactive and had a lot of, I had probably pneumonia four or five times as a child. In 1991, I started getting chronic fatigue and food allergies. By 1994, the chronic fatigue was real bad. The food allergies were to the extent that my friends didn't want to go out and eat with me because I'd have to ask the waitress, is there onion powder in this? Is there garlic powder? Is there black pepper? Is there onion? I mean, it just went on. I had a whole list of things I had to ask them if it was in the food because I'd have bad reactions. I'd either get stomach cramps or my eyes would get bloodshot or actually some of the foods my allergic reaction was I'd get very angry. I had tried many different things. I went to see some of the best homeopathics, herbalists, energy healers, and you know, all of it seemed to take me an increment higher, but when I came to the diet, I weighed 134 pounds and I'm about six feet tall and at that time I was very, I had hypertension and the chronic fatigue was still kind of bad. My hair was falling out along the sides of my forehead. What else? I had insomnia. I had deep lines in my face.
Q: I know five years ago when he was kind of skinny and nervous.
Dan: Skinny and nervous, a year ago. When I, I heard about the diet at a vegetarian potluck. I met a woman, everybody was going around the table you know, talking about what diet they were on and there were vegans and vegetarians and Chinese diet and this and that and this woman looks around the table and kind of whispers to me, I eat raw meat. And half of me was disgusted and the other half was fascinated so she referred me to Aajonus and I went to his place to buy his book when it was in manuscript form and I kept asking him, you mean eat raw meat? And he said yes and I said you mean just go to the store and get a steak and put it in your mouth and eat it? He's like, yes. So I drove to Mrs. Gooch's that night on Centinella, bought a New York steak, took it home, cut it up, ate it. I had the deepest sleep I'd had in years. When I woke up in the morning at 6 a.m. I went and grabbed the rest of the steak, shoved it in my mouth and ate it and that was the first day I didn't get dizzy spells in a couple years. So for about six weeks I experimented, well maybe it was mind over matter, so I'd have one or two meals I'd eat raw meat and then I'd go back to cooked. And after six weeks I said no more cooked meat because there was so much of a difference in the way I felt. So after about six weeks I started eating the diet and then I was allergic to dairy, so I started drinking raw goat's milk which was available at the time.And after about a year of drinking raw goat's milk, I could drink cow's milk and it's been totally different. My family is blown away. My mother's a nurse, my sister's a nurse, my aunt worked for OSHA for 20 years. They all freaked. My sister one night wanted to take me to a psychiatrist. Seriously. So after about three months they saw my disposition change, my temper go away, my hypertension go away, and color come back in my face. And I had cold hands and feet all the time and my cold hands and feet went away after about one week of eating raw beef and never came back. And so it's been almost six years now and all my symptoms are pretty much gone. After about the second year on the diet, I started getting lots of chest colds but I never got pneumonia and I haven't had a chest cold now in years. And I believe that the chest colds were my body with all the raw fats and raw eggs expelling toxins. What else? My weight's gone from 134 to 185 to 155 to 170 and now I'm at about 165. I've gotten sick twice I think, once. I'm pretty sure that it was toxicity coming out of my body. Adrenaline, I had a very high adrenaline flow which gave me the deep lines in my face and gave me the hypertension and made me very irritable and temperamental. What else? Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, in terms of my career, it's gone much better also. I have much more energy. My mental focus is very strong and I think that because I'm a lot much healthier when I'm in business meetings, I'm very present and can read people and that's another thing. I've become much more intuitive on the diet too, in terms of what foods I need to eat to stay healthy and for a while I seem to be very... I became kind of psychic. I can look at people and see their health problems. So, I think that's it now. We'll move into the next section.
Woman 1: I want to mention that when I first started eating this diet, I weighed about 125 pounds. I now weigh a shocking 152 pounds. And I'm surprised because I really haven't gained any inches. I mean, I do look fuller, but it's just the density from the raw fat. I love the raw dairy. I do a lot of the raw milk throughout the day whenever I feel like it. My favorite thing is what Agenis calls a lubricating formula, which is lemon juice and raw butter blended with a couple of raw eggs and some raw honey. And to me, it tastes like lemon meringue. And I find that's the easiest way for me to consume a lot of the heavy fat, like from the butter. Occasionally, I do whipped cream with strawberries, organic. And as far as meat goes, I do, I love raw oysters and raw fish. Raw chicken, I really love the raw chicken. And I probably need to eat more of the red meat. I enjoy it also, but I just find it easier to marinate and flavor the fish and the chicken. I do a lot of the raw cheese. I do the green juice anywhere from 3 to 4 to 5 times a day, which is a parsley celery juice. And, I don't know, sometimes, you know, I do like tomatoes and green peppers and different things, but mostly I'm just doing meat and dairy.
Q: Where do you get the raw butter?
Melissa: We're going to talk about sources for all those foods.
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Melissa: And my friends were helping me get some raw milk, which was really great for me. I was craving ice cream all the time. And I guess I just, you know, I was needing the sugar and the calcium I wasn't getting and the protein. So when I started drinking the raw milk, all of a sudden my craving just totally went away. So that was really great. And so I was just kind of haphazardly trying to follow it, and I felt like I needed a program. So I went and had a consultation with Aajonus, and I really learned a lot there. And he gave me a program, which I have not yet been able to follow completely. I'm supposed to have vegetable juice, raw meat, and eggs, kind of in a cycle throughout the day. Every time you get hungry, you eat. I work full-time, plus I have rehearsals several nights a week for other things that I'm doing, and I'm trying to study some other things, and I have a very active social life. I get through about two glasses of vegetable juice a day right now. So I'm trying to work up to the recommendations, but I'm experimenting and having a hard time with it a little bit. But overall, I think I'm eating probably 95% of what I'm supposed to be. So I'm supposed to have four glasses of vegetable juice a day, and I have two. And I'm supposed to have probably maybe up to a pound of meat a day. I probably have a quarter pound. I eat... For snacks, the raw cheese is really delicious. There's this really great raw honey that you can put on all kinds of things, raw goat yogurt. I really love all the dairy.
Q: So you put the honey on what kinds of things?
Melissa: I put the honey on yogurt, cheese. You can put it on meat. I put it in the vegetable juice to make it sweeter and preserve it. Shakes, smoothies, by itself, if you have a craving for sweet. Sometimes I'll have plain starches. It's not compliant with the diet. But if I'm really feeling like I'm going to eat something that's going to be bad for me, it's like a less evil. I'll have like some plain rice or something and maybe put milk and honey and have like a rice pudding. You didn't hear that, but a lot of us do that. I think previously we were eating plain white bread and maybe eating your butter with that, but that's not really part of it anymore either. So fruit. I'm eating more fruit than what was recommended, but I kind of feel like I need it right now. So like what Dan was saying about instinct, I'm just trying to learn more about, I'm trying to not eat out of habit anymore, because that's my main thing I think is social pressures. People are always bringing in junk at work. I work in an office where it's like comfort food central. We have an entire cube full of junk food and people are always bringing stuff in. And when it's going to have a lunch, somebody's bringing in hot dogs and chili, and everybody's going to go out and have this big, I don't know, junk food bonanza. And I was doing it too. I was actually the one having everybody go out every week, although I would try and go to healthy places, what I knew to be healthy for. I ended up with parents who tried every diet and knew a lot about health, although not this particular regime. So it's hard. It was really hard around the holidays. I gained weight because I was starting to lose weight when I started on the diet, and then I was eating the raw food, and then in addition I was eating at holiday parties some of the foods, and I really gained some weight. So now I'm trying to lose that again, and eating the raw meat actually helps you lose weight by itself. I don't gain weight with the raw fat, and I gain weight really easily. So that's a really great revelation for me. I don't know. So can you kind of understand how hard it is? Because I think that probably a lot of people have that situation at work, and that's one reason why we wanted to come here today, I think, and talk about it. But I'm starting to not want to have the things that make me feel bad anymore. I think if I really want to feel healthy, I don't want those things anymore. If I'm feeling stressed, I have to look inside myself.
Q: So did it take you a while before you could tell that the old way of eating you didn't feel was good? When you started eating raw foods and you started eating cooked foods, did you notice a difference right away?
Melissa: Yeah, you can tell immediately. One thing I think is less mucus production. All of a sudden, my daily bodily production of mucus went to zero when I would have a lot, actually, like coughing and other things that women have. So that's one thing. Feeling lethargic kind of after you eat, like while you're trying to digest. I find that's lessened a lot. I get full a lot quicker because I would overeat. When I eat cooked food, I overeat. I even still do now. If I go and eat something cooked, I eat too much because I'm not getting full as easily. Sleeping better. Since I wasn't really ill, those are probably the basic things that I found for myself on a regular day-to-day basis. Sometimes I need more sleep because I'm not taking these vitamins supplements that I used to that would over-amp my system, and my body's trying to repair itself, and then I go through other phases where I just feel steady flow of energy all day.
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Brian: Every week or so, and every time I'd eat a steak, I'd get really bad body odor. But now, it just seemed like, I don't know what it was, uric acid or whatever that was.
Melissa: I was eating that buffalo glandular meat and I smelled like beef. Not anymore, it went away.
Brian: Okay, yeah, well... Then I noticed that whenever I'm eating raw beef every other day, I do not get that body odor that I did with the cooked meat. So I guess the cooked meat, when you cook it, it does something bad to it, I think. That's what I'm trying to say. What else? I'm so happy not to have to be taking supplements. Every different practitioner that I would see would always give me a whole new set of stuff to take and it was just a pain in the ass. I would always have great hopes that it would enhance my well-being somehow, but all these things really didn't do anything positive that I could see in retrospect. So I'm so happy to be free of that. I had a consciousness around not eating salt from working with Dr. Beeler in the past. When I first got on this diet, I was having a lot of that real salt stuff. I don't have any salt now and I feel so weird if I do have some salt. Like if I go to have sushi but then I have some miso soup or something, it just wigs me out. I can feel, I would say that indeed you do become kind of sensitized when you're on this system. What else can I tell you? So I'm eating about a pound of meat a day, I'm eating six or seven or eight raw eggs a day, mixed in with raw cream and a whole orange and some raw honey, and it just tastes like heaven. It's like orange Julius's or something. So there's absolutely no sense of deprivation on this diet, whereas with other programs that I was into it was like, there's always this yearning, craving, like feeling deprived, not happy about it somehow. I remember seeing a psychic nutritionist person who many of us might have heard of, I won't mention her name, but she had told me, you're a sugar addict, you're a sugar addict, and you can't even have fruit, and now I can have raw honey all day long, and it's just so fulfilling and settling and kind of calming and just not having that deprived feeling. And what else? Let me think now.
Q: Lunch and dinner.
Brian: So I'm just having raw chicken, fish, or beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner basically.
Q: What percentage would you call the diet?
Brian: I'm 95-98% on it. There's no reason not to. I just don't have a feeling like there's anything I'm missing, so why do something that would make me feel less good? I guess that's the thing.
Q: I'm just wondering, do you balance when you eat, though? Do you balance your raw meat with vegetables and fruits?
Brian: On this program, the balancing would be in that you would have vegetable juice before your meat meal, like a half hour before, and then maybe 45 minutes to an hour afterwards, and that's your balancing. You're creating an alkaline environment to digest the meat. The juice. The juice is creating, let's say that together. The juice creates more alkalinity, which enables you to digest the beef, the protein, so that's how it works.
Woman 1: You don't want to eat the meat at the same time that you're drinking the juice, because the meat doesn't want an alkaline environment.
Melissa: But lots of meat any time you want, almost, except for when you're having juice, right?
Woman 1: Yeah, you just don't want to have the two right at the same moment.
Melissa: Eat as much as you can.
Brian: Also, though, interesting to note that you're not having salads. Everybody, we're not having... Very few salads. I guess the idea is that the juices give you the nutrition and the vitamins and the minerals from the vegetables, but the cellulose is superfluous somehow. What is the idea that it's a little bit taxing on the...
Melissa: It's hard to digest.
Brian: It's hard to digest.
Q: What I remember I was saying was that the roughage in all the raw salads takes away from your stomach's ability to digest the roughage of the raw meat. So you're cutting down the amount of work that your stomach needs to do, but saving it for the raw meat.
Brian: I intuitively have always kind of been in that place because I still, to this day, I can't handle a lot of salads. I can feel how it's kind of rough on me. The roughage is rough on me, you might say. So beyond... Yes, sir?
Q: Do you take things straight out of the fridge? Or do you let them cool off for a while?
Brian: We let them warm up, is the idea. The milk, the meat, it's always going to digest better if it's warm or if it's room temperature. And when it's cold, it's more taxing to the system somehow. Yes?
Q: What do you do for... I mean, do you have... Does it make it hard to eliminate? Fibers?
Brian: Not at all. Not at all. You digest.
Melissa: Sometimes it's like one hour later, it's all digested.
Nicole: Like, everyone pulls out their, like, you know, chocolate cake or whatever. And I don't know, I just watch them eating it, and I, like, crave it so bad. So, like, I'll wake up in the morning. My school starts at 8, so I have to, like, get up early to drink the juice and stuff. And I'll drink it, like, I'll try to do it half an hour before. Sometimes it's like 20 minutes, but, you know, it's good enough. And so then I eat. I usually eat the red, like, raw meat. And once in a while I'll have ground and fish. And I'm really, like, not that great with the chicken. It just tastes kind of weird to me. And so I've been really on, like, the red meat and stuff. And then at school, I don't know, I don't really – I haven't tried bringing meat to school. So I bring two shakes and – or smoothies and one green juice. And then I'll have, like, the green juice at nutrition and two smoothies at lunch or something. Or I'll switch it around and stuff. And then I'll come home and have another shake. And then towards, like, the time I go to bed, that's when I'll have my drink and meat. But, like, when I first started the diet, I was like – I was like – I really, like, thought it was fine. I'd be okay doing this. And now that I've been doing it for not even like two or three months, I've just been like, oh my gosh, all this food. But the guy that lives in our back house, he's a chef, and he's been making me whipped cream with the stuff. And it was like, I couldn't believe that it was good for me. It was so good and stuff. And so I'm going to try and make like this barbecue sauce and like an island sauce and all this stuff. And one time my mom made this strawberry like cream thing to put on it. And I was like, no, no, not strawberry, tomato, cherry tomato. And I don't know, I just kind of was like, whoa, but I don't know. So I'm still like getting on 100 percent, but I'm pretty much on the whole thing right now.
Q: Do your classmates know you're on this diet?
Nicole: Yeah, they do. And like at lunch, if I like sneak a chip, you know, they'll be like, no, no, you're going to get sick. And then they'll be like, you know, oh my gosh, no, you're going to die, you're going to get sick. So my classmates know and they're always like on top of me and stuff. Okay, back off.
Brian: I was just going to say one more thing about eating out. And I think that most of us on this diet wind up, you know, when we eat out, we're pretty much going to sushi bars a lot of the time, which I never minded. I mean, I always loved sushi anyway.
Woman 1: Just order sashimi.
Q: You're eating a lot of food.
Eric: Yes, I was slamming groceries. And I was eating anywhere from a pound to two pounds of raw meat a day. I'd have two raw meat meals a day. I was having a quarter pound to a half a pound of butter up to a quart of milk, raw milk. I was eating six meals a day. It was just incredible. That's where a lot of the weight gain took place. And the juice, of course, and all the other things that everyone has mentioned. What I wanted to talk about, though, is doing this diet in the real world because I'm in sales and I entertain a lot. And as Brian mentioned, it is possible to go out to a restaurant and still stay on this diet. So what I do is I take clients to sushi bars and to Italian restaurants where they do serve carpaccio and tartare. And it's interesting to me that if you do order carpaccio at a restaurant and your customer notices what you're eating, they say, what is that? And I go, well, it's carpaccio. And they go, well, what's that? And it's raw meat. Oh, really? And they think it's interesting. Oh, yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah, tartare, they may have heard about that. But yet, if you're at the cafeteria at your work and you whip out a Tupperware with some raw meat, they run out screaming at the top of their lungs. It's amazing. But that's how I've managed it, is I do take my clients to restaurants where I know I can get the foods that I am going to eat. I would say at this point I'm eating maybe 60% to 70% raw. It still is difficult. Just by virtue of my schedule, I'm on the road a lot, and so it is difficult to bring the foods that I need with me. But luckily there are stores throughout the Southern California area that have all the items that we need, so I can just go and buy them even at the last minute if I don't have the time to plan. So it is manageable, but it can be a little difficult. I do notice that I'm getting a little more brazen about eating in public these types of foods, and I have Daniel to thank for that. He'll go right up to the counter and say, give me a piece of that, and he'll just start chewing on it.
Dan: I forgot to ask the other people, but we'll start here and we can talk about it later more if we want. Do you eat any of the, we'll call it high meat, do you eat any of the rotten meat?
Eric: Yes, I do.
Woman 1: The aged meat. It's aged meat.
Eric: So we should describe that? It's meat that's basically aged.
Erika: Cultured.
Dan: Maybe later in the questionnaire.
Erika: Cultured. I don't know what this says about my personality, but I have to have my meal look pretty. I have my little meat area on my plate, and then I'll have like cut red peppers, and then my slices of cheese, and then maybe an egg. I find it really hard to just have meat by itself. I am a sauce girl, so my food processor is my life right now. I make sauces with cheese and cream, and then I'll put either a red pepper in it or an onion, or I put wasabi in it to make a wasabi cream sauce, or any number of things. That makes it easier for me to eat the meat. It was great when it was like you could choose to do so, but now that I have to do it all the time, I'm finding it a little bit more difficult, because in the world of eating out there, there's so much variety. We have Thai food and Japanese food and this food and that food, and now it seems like you're eating the same thing all the time, which you pretty much are. So I guess the sauces help me to feel like I'm getting variety.
Dan: What percentage do you follow the diet? Follow the diet, 100%, 75%.
Erika: I'm like 98%, my wasabi and my soy sauce are my...
Q: What's the major significance of being on it 100% or if you say you just did it 75%?
Erika: From what I understand, if you're not on it 100%, your body is not detoxing, which is the whole point of this diet. From what I understand, if you still have cooked foods in your system, your body isn't pushed into that detox mode, and so you're still just kind of staying health-wise where you are.
Q: And once you get past the detox mode, then can you revert back to eating other foods or no?
Erika: No.
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Erika: To eat less, I used to go out to eat a lot, and I actually used to... I'm a hairstylist, and hairstylists are known for eating out, because... ordering out, because we... You know, our schedules are so crazy. I don't sit at a desk. You know, I don't have a break during the day. I mean, I'm standing on my feet with a client eight to ten hours a day. And so, you know, for us, we would just, like, order food in, and then you go in the back, and you're, like, shoveling in while you're mixing your color, and that's your lunch. And so it's hard. It's very difficult for me during the day. I actually have decided today that in order for me to really do what I need to do for my body, I'm going to have to take probably, you know, at least two appointments out of my day and just not have clients there so that I can stop and eat and do everything, you know, the right way. And that's a very difficult thing for me because I'm actually building a business right now, and the more haircuts you do, the more money you make. And that's just, you know, money is so difficult in life, period. And I think it's just like 20 years of also brainwashing from working for salon owners that, you know, make you do that. I mean, that's the way they make a lot of money. So it's been a struggle for me, but I'm realizing that the health of my body is much more important to me than, you know, money. And I really, yeah, it's been a struggle. And socially, as far as eating out, no, I mean, restaurants, it's hard because, like, I want to be 100%. And when you do eat out, it is difficult. Like, even the carpaccio, I've heard that they freeze the meat so that they can slice it really thin. And that bothers me now, you know. Like, before, I didn't really care. But now it's like, no, you know.
Dan: [unintelligible] don't freeze it tonight.
Erika: So, yeah, it's difficult. But I don't know. I'm enjoying eating out less and all of that.
Dan: Great, thanks.
Man 1: Put your water in it. The juices have, I drink a quart of vegetable juice a day. I drink usually between one to two quarts of milk a day. There's plenty of water in that. Actually, if you look at water in nature, when it, you know, like on a waterfall, you notice the rocks by that area become very white. Well, what that water is doing is pulling out the minerals in the rock itself. It has a similar effect in the body. So I haven't had any water... You know, sometimes I'll have a small amount of mineral water whenever I feel the need for that. But I don't have much water.
Q: And then [unintelligible] mentioned green juices. What about beet and carrot, the green juices?
Man 1: It all depends on a person's own conditions and stuff. Sometimes a person may need small amounts of that for whatever they're dealing with. But oftentimes those particular juices are very high in sugar content. Which, yeah, yeah. So if, oftentimes what I've learned so far is if you have those kinds of juices, and you have them with a lot of fat, have them with cheese or with butter or with cream, with it, so it, you know, more evenly spreads out in the body when you have that kind of thing.
Erika: We're having questions now.
Q: [unintelligible]
Erika: But it doesn't enter your system the same way because it's not processed. It enters gradually.
Man 1: It's probably that honey that wasn't unheated. And it often made my blood pressure go up, and I felt panicky at times.
Q: The carrot is also not processed.
Man 1: That's true, but carrot, but if you juice a carrot, their sugar content is very high. The same with beets. Not that you wouldn't want to have those. You know, I actually have about 15% carrot juice in my own juice combination.
Q: [unintelligible]
Man 1: No, I have it for its medicinal properties, actually. It helps to bind with bile. So for me, that's one of the things I need. But a lot of my friends will actually say I'm one of the more hardcore raw fooders. I am 100%, I haven't had anything cooked since I first started the diet. I have a quart of vegetable juice a day. I eat a pound and a half of raw meat a day. A quart and a half, a quart to two quarts of raw milk a day. I have nine to a dozen eggs a day. So the system seems to work. So I was given a program and said, these are some things that probably would benefit you best. And so I just do those. And I've seen the results already from that.
Dan: Okay, two more.
Kathy: My mother's also said my posture is getting better. She admitted to that. And it's hard to admit it when you're not on raw foods. I am also 100% raw food, as I'm speaking now. And now I'm on the weight loss. I've been on it. Tomorrow is going to be five weeks, which is Thursday I started. So my diet is a little bit different from those that are wanting to put on the weight. So I start off my day with the green juice, which only consists of parsley, which is about 20 ounces and about 80 ounces of celery. And I put about five tablespoons of honey in that to preserve it and to sweeten it. And I also wait two hours until I'm hungry. And I have a golf ball size of the fish and beef. I particularly like now it's the buffalo meat. I can get buffalo meat. It's much tastier than the beef for some reason. It's a real nice taste to it. And then I wait another two hours, and I have again the green juice. And then I wait another two hours, and I have my one egg. And then another two hours, the juice. And then another two hours, I'll have again the golf ball size of fish and chicken. I use chicken legs instead of the chicken breast. The chicken legs have the tendons in them, so it has more value to it. And I'm not supposed to have on the diet, on the weight loss. I'm not supposed to have... I was 145, and I gained 25, and I go down 25. So it's a cycle. You go up and down. And I'm almost reaching my point of [unintelligible] pounds, which may take me 7, 8 weeks. Other people, it may take 2, 3 weeks. It depends on the person's metabolism. Let's see. Then I'll be going back up, and I'll be eating. I'm not supposed to eat any fats or no honey, anything that will put weight on me. But I'm allowed to have cherry tomatoes. I believe a few of them, on the weight loss diet. And that's about it right now.
Woman 2: I eat a ton of food. I probably can eat a pound of ground beef in a day. I'll go to the fish store, and if stuff's really fresh, I'll buy a ton of different kinds of fish. Escalar tuna, yellowtail. I mean, I love to eat, and I was really into cooking before. And the weird thing is I don't miss any of that stuff anymore. I don't have cravings. I wouldn't eat a bowl of pasta if you put it in front of me right now.
Erika: And she was pasta queen. Every night she's making pasta dishes.
Woman 2: Yeah, exactly, because I used to crave pasta. The sugar, I was hooked on it. I was, like, addicted to it. So I would crave a bowl of pasta. And I do pretty much what Nicole does, except, I mean, I'm hardcore. I'm the opposite of Erika. I could go to Whole Foods and eat it out of the paper, the raw beef. I could get raw chicken, throw it in a bowl. Before I went to Aajonus is when I used to get, like, the organic salsa. And I'd just throw, like, a pound of ground chicken in the salsa and stir it up. And everybody would be like, oh, this is delicious. What is it, raw chicken? It was great. So I go out to dinner all the time. I go out to eat all the time. Oysters, seared steak. I try to go to places that have sashimi or tuna tartare or steak tartare.
Dan: Let me ask you a question.
Woman 2: It's really easy.
Dan: What about bacteria scare?
Woman 2: What bacteria scare? It doesn't bother me at all. I have not gotten sick once.
Dan: Before you started the diet, when you opposed the raw diet, were you afraid of bacteria?
Woman 2: I always liked, since I was a little kid, I'd order my steak black and blue. So I'd order steak tartare. I don't know. I don't know. It was just, I always liked it. And I don't know if that's my, just from traveling as a kid and eating differently. And I like it room temperature. When I make Nicole's shakes in the morning, she doesn't, they're not cold. By the time she drinks them, they're room temperature. You know, her dad would go, isn't she going to get sick? And, you know, you have to just, it's really hard. I had a mom kind of go ballistic on me the other day because she cares about Nicole so much. And because when she looks at it, you know, she's looking at chopped meat and avocado and tomato. It doesn't look that good sometimes, you know. She just looked at me and she was just like, that's disgusting. I wouldn't give that to my dog. And I just, you know, I got defensive and I was like, you know, I can't really educate you on this. You have to educate yourself, but all I know is my kid's better. And she's like, I want to help, but I'm sorry I said it. But, you know, people are going to react. And you, you know, when you're on this diet, your emotions, like I was saying, I feel much stronger and easier. It's easier to deal with some of the reactions. But, my God, I mean, you know, you're going to get the reactions, absolutely.
Q: Well, of course people are going to react because things like salmonella and people getting sick from eating raw meat is something that exists. It's real.
Woman 2: Because they're so full of preservatives, I guess. The people.
Q: I don't know the reason why. I'm just saying those things do exist. They're not things that people are making up.
Melissa: Well, I've gotten like a little bit sick symptoms. But I can tell the difference when it's a detoxification. Or, you know, it's like when you get, some people might think they're getting food poisoning. But really, if they rode it out and had a healthy diet while they got sick from that bacteria, they would be a lot healthier afterwards. Because what happened was the toxins came up in their body and they felt them all at once. Like when you have a hangover, I know that's what I tell people. They're like, why do you get sick? Because sometimes I come to work and I'm like detoxing a little bit. You know, sometimes that will happen from the meat. And they'll be like, oh, you know, all scared. And I'm like, you know, it's just like having a hangover. All of a sudden, the next day, your body is trying to get rid of this toxic stuff that you put in it once you've stopped. And then once it's out, you feel healthy again. Sorry, I just wanted to throw that in.
Dan: I wanted to ask a few of the panel members about bacteria, because that's something that's always on the back of people's minds.
Erika: The bacteria, the E. coli and the chicken stuff, that thing, yeah. From what I understand, that happens to the point where it could, I guess, make certain people ill when the meats have been frozen and then thawed and then mishandled, meaning like sitting out too long or whatever, because what happens when you freeze meats, you throw off the natural bacterial balance. So then you do have more maybe salmonella and E. coli. So when you go to restaurants and all that, most of the food poisoning you hear about is from people that went to restaurants, and they're eating meats that have been frozen. We never eat frozen meats or chicken. They're always fresh.
Melissa: Where the bacteria gets heated and it multiplies to too high of a level where it's been sitting.
Erika: Right.
Dan: When you first started the diet, what was the bacteria?
Erika: I have still a mental block about the chicken. Even though I like the chicken, it's still like I have this kind of feeling of, I'm eating it raw, like I'm going to get whatever, sick. Or even like we're supposed to leave our meats out and eat them at room temperature. It's hard for me to do that. Not because I don't like the way it tastes. I like it better at room temperature. But I still have this brainwashing like we all do in my head, saying that I'm going to get something.
Dan: So you have that thought, but you haven't gotten food poisoning on the diet.
Erika: No, not at all. So I just override that thing in my head and just have it anyway. Because I know from what I've read and learned from Aajonus that that whole philosophy I don't believe is true, the whole Pasteur thing. So yes and no.
Dan: What have you heard? You probably haven't read much, but what have you heard?
Nicole: Well, I've heard pretty bad stuff. Whenever I tell anyone, they're always like, oh my God, you're probably going to get some nasty disease and end up in the hospital or something. I'm like, yeah, but it's organic. That's like nice. So that's all I really know to say, you know.
Erika: You should tell them you already had a nasty disease and were in the hospital. It doesn't seem to be happening again.
Nicole: I don't really think about that because I trust, since there's all these people who've had cancer and stuff and they're fine now because they've done this. So if they just put this diet in front of me and they had no proof of anything, then I'd probably be kind of worried. But since there's other people that have had really bad things happen and then they ate some raw food and they're fine, then that kind of is what turned me on to this.
Dan: We'll now take questions from the audience.
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Aajonus: Most people probably aren't technically very savvy when it comes to scientific terms about what a phagocyte is when a virus enters the cell and then the cell becomes a phagocyte, which means it becomes a cannibal and it eats its own kind. That's a virus. Bacterias like Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli, and numerous others, they all feed on degenerative tissue. If anything can make the body or any body, any organism, deteriorate, it's chemicals and byproducts from cooked foods. You have heterocyclic amines that form from protein. You have lipid peroxides that form from cooked fats. And there's quite a few varieties of each. And they will deteriorate cells. That initiates Campylobacter, E. coli, Salmonella, any of them to feed on these. Now I'm an individual who had a vagotomy pyloroplasty when I was 20 years old. That means that they severed all of the vagus nerves to my stomach. I was, at that moment, at 20 years old, put into the category of octogenarians who are in danger of death, so called by the medical and scientific community, from bacterial and parasitical invasion. I went on to a totally raw food, vegan diet for six and a half years and deteriorated even more. I had cancer of the stomach, cancer of the bones and blood, and lymph system. Plus I had diabetes, psoriasis, angina pectoris, and bursitis, all incurable. After many years of doing better on a raw food, vegetarian diet, I began to deteriorate more, because I was mainly a fruitarian, and it broke my system down, it decalcified my system, my bones were deteriorating, and I went down to 118 pounds. About 172 right now. And then I began eating raw meat, thinking that it was going to kill me and I'd get it over with quicker. It didn't work. I got better. I still was in fear. I came back to Los Angeles in 1976 to spread the word. I had found the answer. Five months by eating raw meat and raw eggs and raw milk, I gained 50 pounds, and I was back to feeling great. In fact, the only time I felt great in my life. And everybody said, oh, but the bacteria, the E. coli, the parasites, you're going to get a brain fluke, and you'll be an idiot all of your life. I said, well, I've already been that, so what's the problem? Because I had been autistic until I was 22. I didn't learn to read until I was 22. And when I started drinking carrot juice, it just seemed to change something in my brain. And when I stopped drinking the carrot juice, dyslexia and autism returned. So I had a lot of problems. I went 13 years in fear that this was the time I was going to get a brain fluke, and I'd become the idiot again. It never happened. So... And like I say, the doctors put me in the category of octogenarians who are in danger of death from parasitical and bacterial invasion. I have eaten meat undulating with parasites, with pinworms, everything, to make a point. I had my feces and blood checked for 10 weeks each time afterwards, did not get one. I've been eating raw meat since 1976, have not gotten sick one time. And I am in the dangerous category. So when you take a look at this, you have to wonder what the scientific and medical community are hiding. So what I did was I went to the Jack in the Box incident, and I got as many death certificates as I could from those people who were infected. And guess what I found? The symptoms before death were anaphylaxis, anaphylactic shock. You get anaphylactic shock from medication or something that you're terribly allergic to, which even could be food.
So here I found in every one of those 132 death certificates that I found, in their medical records, was all of the symptoms of anaphylaxis and not bacterial food poisoning. When people die of bacterial food poisoning, they die of bleeding to death from either vomiting or diarrhea. These people did not die from that. They died from anaphylaxis. If the food industry had to face the contamination of food and the mutant bacterias that are formed from the processing, then they would have the whole door closed on them. And that's the problem. They are protecting themselves. I spoke with an 80-year-old man in Oklahoma in the mid-70s when I was bicycling around the country looking for the answers who had worked for General Mills and Purina throughout the 20s and 30s. They had lab tests where they were experimenting with about four different types of animal on the difference between raw and cooked food. They were going to prove that cooking and processing eliminated the bacterial poisoning because, of course, everybody's accepted that the Pasteur theory of, you know, bacteria and virus and Hulda-Clark are responsible for everything. However, when they finished these tests after 20 years, every test showed that the animals who were fed raw food had no disease. Those who ate cooked food had all kinds of disease, every disease that man has. So they destroyed every bit of the evidence. Now, Price and Pottenger did his work. Edward Howell did his work, not connected with any particular organization or food company. So there still exists the rats that have no disease, the cats that have no disease, the mice that have no disease, as long as they ate raw food. When they ate cooked food, they had all the diseases of man. And then you have to take a look at the Howell experiments. When he did the experiments with rats, he found that they lived the same amount of time, which didn't make any sense. They had all these diseases, yet they lived three years like the healthy ones. And he looked over all of his notes and finally figured out they were eating their faecal matter. All of the rats that were eating the cooked foods ate their faecal matter and extended their lives. So he did experiments and found it was bacteria. So he put a screen the next time. They couldn't eat their faecal matter, and they lived two years instead of three years. So then he realized that bacteria is so important. Every animal on this planet eats faecal matter, but man. You have to take a look at that. Then you have to say, what is science and medicine so afraid of bacteria for? Because if they don't have something else to blame, who do you blame? Medication? Chemicals? I think so. Anyway, this is not my evening. I just wanted to clear that up on the bacteria issues. Thank you.
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Aajonus: When you do freeze something or cook something, the quickest thing that happens is that it starts deteriorating, degenerative tissue. Bacteria is important for that. That's part of the ecological process inside or outside the body. People can eat frozen meat and not be a big problem. Cooked meat is a little bit worse, but you might get a little intestinal detoxification if you're eating frozen meat that's been thawed for a while. Because it will have a higher bacterial content. Jan Moore did the research that I used to validate the use of high bacteria meat, which you've heard some people talk about. I probably don't think that that's something that should have been talked about at all right away. But in my experiments, even working with a psychologist, we found that eating high meat, which means cultured meat, increasing bacteria, not drying it out as aged beef would be, but actually encourage bacteria growth so it would be stinky and rotten, so-called rotten, increases positivity and well-being. Some of the worst clients that the psychologist and I had who had been depressed for anywhere from 22 to 27 years and been on all types of diet, all types of pills, Prozac, and you name it, we were able to eliminate their use of these drugs and became very happy and very positive in a matter of one eating of these high meats within 20 minutes. Some of them only had to take it once a week. Others had to take it twice a week, about every three to four days. And they were happy. I mean, one of these women that was on it for 27 years, here's how she would say hi. Hi. I'm fine. And this is the way the poor woman talked. And then after she had the high meat, and it took her a year and a half to come to the point where she would try it, then after she did it, she called and she was whistling and happy and singing, and it was amazing. And you can ask this fellow here. Now this fellow, a year ago, a little over a year ago when he came to me, he was as skinny as a rail. He was about 132 pounds. I love to imitate him. He walked like this. He had to throw his arms because he was so chronically fatigued to get him to move forward. And he was a person that his mother, you know, when he called his mother and said, Hi, Mom. After he ate the high meat, it was "Hi!". And his mother even commented about it. It makes a big difference. This whole bacteria scare is such a sad thing because it keeps everybody ignorant and totally stupid, basically, because you're working on a wrong premise, a wrong formula. The high meat is a very good thing, especially if you experience depression. But there's a way that you have to cure it and all of that, and we're not going to go into that tonight. That's for another time. Thank you.