5th Annual International Festival of Raw and Living Food

[Water running] Welcome to the KBOO lecture series of August 4th 2004. This is Mel Reslor your host for this show and the next hour we will be addressing the subject of raw foods and the upcoming raw living foods festival which is occurring at the Washington county fairgrounds in Hillsborough starting Wednesday August eighteenth this is the fifth annual in Oregon and features free and paid events throughout the weekend starting off we take you to last year's raw festival where I spoke with attendees at a site called camp Tadmore which is east of sweet home Oregon Susie had a few words - she's from Southeast Portland.

So do you eat a lot of raw foods? Which ones are your favorite? My favorite, my body wants uh greens mostly, and juices and uh fruits and nuts of course, yeah. What got you interested in raw foods? My health. My health, I was ummm at the end of the rope a couple of years ago and uh I was introduced to the raw food but not in a hundred percent because I didn't know much about it. So I was in the raw uh in and out and out uh for about um year and a half, and then I started full time job raw and uh what I got is uh cutting my - I-I have diabetes and a heart condition and high blood pressure, all the the things that come with uh with

Oriental medication and ah Western medication you know, full of medication and nothing uh getting better. So finally ah when I went eh eh raw 100%, I could see the results. I could see the results, I cut my insulin in half, and I don't get any more medication for high blood pressure, and everything is coming to normal, so I'm really uh blessed, I'm really blessed, and uh I I had set some vacations apart for March and then I I took them to come here, because I want to enjoy the whole thing. There's so much to learn and so much to uh to enjoy in the program. Oh gee how'd you hear about the first festival that you went to, what -- where'd you hear about it? Through a friend who is a raw foodist, yeah. Well, thanks for your time, Susie. Thank you very much, goodbye. Megan and

and Rebecca had these comments. Megan flew in from Portland, Maine. So how'd you hear of this festival? Uh, I went to last year's festival. Okay. So I knew it was occurring. In Milwaukee. Uh yes, in Milwaukee. And I knew it was taking place this year so I just looked it up online to find out where it was when it was and planned to go. Do you live close by? Maine, Portland, Maine. Yup. Oh! Portland Maine, the other Portland. The other Portland, yeah. Right. Did you find anything interesting or unusual at this festival this year? Ah, well.. There's a lake, I know that. Yeah I like that aspect, because last year the it was on the river that was sort of fluted, you couldn't get in.. Right, the Willamette River. So that was nice, the speakers there were always very informational I always learn something new, the food is amazing.. Delicious! I can't... amazing... so Do you have any favorite chef or vendor here? Oh yeah the Smart Monkey! That was our favorite vendor. Out of Portland. Yeah. Yeah, out of Portland, and we wish that was Portland Maine, that would be good, but...Yeah, gourmet. So are you a consumer of raw foods, too? Yes. What got you started?

Uh, I worked in a health food store and learned about it from various people that work there, and it -- just something about it just, it seemed right to me and so I just started trying it and I felt amazing so I stuck with it. Is there any um, I guess uh speaker you would recommend here? Right there, David Wolf. David Wolf, mostly he he's incredible, and uh Bijohn, he's a great speaker. Bobbie Guilder? Yes he's very inspirational. yeah but I think all the speaker are great. Last year went to almost all the lectures but this year I've been more couple and then mostly just doing the social thing, and eating. OK. ...and hanging out. From a raw foods company in Portland called Smart Monkey Foods, Annie Pio. OK it's Sunday the twenty fourth, and who am I with? Annie Pio from Smart Monkey Foods. OK and uh can you tell me what got you interested in raw foods. Oh, I grew up

on a lot of raw foods actually. My dad was into raw foods for health reasons so growing up I ate ate a lot of um whole fruits and vegetables and a lot of um salads and a lot of of uh like juices, a lot of vegetable juices which I hated back then, but but then, uh but now i love, and then as I became a teenager and started hanging out you know with more you know my friends and they started going to McDonald's and things like that I started getting more into junk food and by the time I got to college I was fully eating the standard American diet. The sad standard American diet of of dairy and you know all that pizza and all that kind of stuff, and um I gained a lot of weight, and I developed allergies, and I would get sick all the time. I would get you know I'd get like that flu where you're out with a fever for like um a week to ten days at least once or twice a year, and um, yeah. And so that's sort of how i got into it. And then the way I've gotten, gone back into it was that I moved to LA, which is a city of all this like, you know, shiny

stuff, you know, and everything is really expensive, and we'd go out to restaurants thinking 'oh this restaurant's going to be really good' and we'd spend a lot of money, and be really expensive, I wouldn't feel good, the food food wouldn't taste good and the service would be really awful. And luckily I ran into Juliano in Santa Monica, and I was so happy to see him cause I knew him from um his raw restaurant in San Francisco, and when I saw him I said "Did you open a restaurant?" And so that's when I got to hang out with him and actually apprentice with him, um, and that's when I started and you know working with him and helping him with began with his catering and his farmers markets and events and things, and then we started Smart Monkey Foods which has been around since two thousand, so it's been about three years, and um and that's what we do, we teach classes and uh then do catering, we speak a lot at expos and festivals and um and we're working on a cookbook which hopefully will come out soon, and we do like consulting and um we do a roaming restaurant experience where we rent out existing restaurants and operate as a restaurant

like on the night that they're closed, and some of the restaurants that we've worked out of love our concept of our of our food and love our food so much that they actually will close their restaurant on a Saturday night to have, to let us come in, and the restaurant will be Smart Monkey Foods rather than their own restaurant. And so that's what we do up in Portland. Is that a pretty new thing, where where they'll stop their regular affair and then have you come in? Yah, it's pretty new, yah but I think it's because, you know, for the past several months, you know, they see like the crowd we bring and the vibrance and excitement and stuff, so it's just sort of creating a community, and they really like that 'cause we cause we bring in like DJ's and music and performers and you know it's actually like an event and an experience i wanted to go back to when you first saw this raw foods restaurant. How far back was that? Huh, I guess that was like in a maybe '96? And actually back then I used to work in technology so I used to work really crazy long hours, and I noticed that when I would go to Juliano's restaurant in the evenings

I mean yeah, in the evening I'd eat dinner, I wouldn't be able to sleep all night. Suddenly I'd go home and I'd be laying there and I'd feel like I drank coffee, I'd have this energy flowing through my body that would keep me up until almost dawn. And so I finally started correlating that to his food, and it got to a point where whenever I needed i needed to stay up to pull and all nighter, or work really late and needed clarity, I'd purposely go to his restaurant to eat his food to give me energy to stay up all night and be clear and get my work done. So I knew then the energy aspect of it 'cause it would make me feel really good and help me think really clearly. What kind of work did you do before? What kind of technology? Oh I'm an interaction designer. I also have a book out called "Return on Design" from New Writers, it's a "new writers' voices that matter" series book it just came out like a few months ago, available in all the bookstores. (Laughs) But it's funny, yah, that's ?ago?, that was a long project, but I'm hoping that...yah, that book actually, 'cause I'm already an author, is helping me, you know, find new, other publishers for our raw cookbook which is complete

but you know we are just sort of going through some negotiations and figuring out which publisher we want to publish with. So that so that should be out soon. Outside of the energy, have you felt anything different on raw from which you were eating before? Oh yeah there's like a...it's a whole life style change. So it's like a spiritual connection, because besides the health aspect of, you know, eating this way, health for your body, but it's also it's a help for the planet, right? So it's like you feel good about eating good food that's good for your body, but then also, you know, treading lightly on the earth, knowing that the food you eat is creating the best organic compost: no garbage, no trash, no toxins, you know, it's being turned back around to create, you know, organic earth. So, and then also because it's all vegan, you know, it's all full of living energy, live food for living bodies, you know, you're not killing anything or eating any animals and any animal products, so it's like a it's a whole life change. Okay can you describe once again what's your ah company does and your contact numbers? Sure, Smart Monkey Foods, organic living

cuisine, we do catering, special events, classes, we do a roaming restaurant experience, um, all over Portland, and um we speak at festivals and expos and conferences and that's what we do. We also do packaged foods, that's right, we do packaged foods, and our products can be found in Whole Foods Markets. And your contact numbers? I should know this, and I don't. Well, ok our...um...we actually have a info line which can be found on our web site our website is www.smartmonkeyfoods.com (spells it out) s m a r t m o n k e y f o o d s dot dot com and our email is smartmonkeyfoods at yahoo dot com. OK, well thanks a lot for coming and uh giving us your knowledge and your tips. You're welcome, thank you.

Another chef at the raw festival - they're called chefs because there is no cooking with raw foods is Cherie Soria from the 2003 event. We're here at the International Raw and Living Foods Festival, the fourth annual, we're here just outside of Lebanon, Oregon in a site called Camp Tadmore, and I am with uh Cherie Soria, and you may want to mention un the uh the uh outlet that you are with, the ?culinary? arts and uh if you could mention that a bit? Yeah, my name is Cherie Soria and i'm the founder and director of Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, we're located at Harbin Hot Springs in northern California, and we train individuals, chefs, and instructors in the art of creating gourmet living foods. And

the kinds of foods that we teach people to make are really wonderful transition foods because we find that a lot of people are just not ready to go from a normal diet or even a vegetarian or vegan cooked food diet right into eating just plain romaine lettuce and avocado, they want to have foods that are familiar, that are delicious, enticing, seductive foods that uh are familiar to them, the kinds of foods that they are used to eating and that they can get in beautiful restaurants. So we act as a bridge, really, for the public, to bring them into the raw food movement. And I think we do that really well. We've trained many of the top chefs that are out there now, and the top instructors, authors, and people who are opening restaurants um such as Roxanne Klein who is a graduate of our school and uh chef Chad Sarno is also a graduate of our school, the ?Botanko? children are graduates of the school, many other authors have taken workshops with us like Nomi Shannon, Rose Lee Calibro, um

they're Elaina Love is actually one of our instructors as is Matt Samuelson, both very well known, internationally well known chefs, and um we just enjoy sharing the magic of culinary arts with everyone, including people who are all thumbs in the kitchen, who think they don't even like to cook, because this isn't cooking; there's no scrubbing hot um pots and pans, greasy pots and pans or anything like that it's uh it's fun and it's understanding what goes into food so that people aren't dependent upon recipes and in fact can make up their own recipes depending on what ingredients are available and just understanding what goes into making foods taste great. Flavor dynamics and um the building blocks of food creation. So my journey started out actually when I was twelve years old and I entered a cookie contest and won first place, and found out that people love others uh people who make cookies!

and um I liked getting that love and that attention and and also felt like I had something special that other people didn't necessarily have, at least not people my age, so I got interested in making food, and when I was in my early twenties about twenty one years old I guess, twenty two, um I discovered vegetarian foods because I had a long line of people in my family who had died or were ill with cancer and heart disease, and I read a lot of books at that time that led me to believe that there might be a...some kind of a connection between diet and health, so I tried becoming a vegetarian even though I didn't know what that meant, I didn't know anybody else who was a vegetarian, I just stopped eating meat, kept eating all the rest of my you know, bread and peanut butter and eggs and cheese and everything else for many years I ate that way, but shortly after I started I started becoming a vegetarian I realized that my friends all thought I was crazy, and I

wanted to make some new friends, and because I was a natural chef and could you know make up foods - there really weren't any cookbooks at that time other than Ten Talents - so I just started making things like mushroom stroganoff and things like that that you know you could easily translate from cooked meat foods to vegetarian, cooked vegetarian food, and people loved my food and so I started teaching. I was in my early twenties still, and started teaching vegetarian cooking classes through community colleges and um in my own home and health clubs and that sort of thing and people were interested and enjoyed it and the more I read the more I cleaned up my own diet, and as my diet cleaned up my my classes of course changed and the types of recipes that I was showing people how to make changed, so they became less fried and more light and soon after I cut out a dairy products because I started recognizing also the connection, the ecology

and the plight of the animals and so forth and there were a few things that I felt were really missing in the vegan diet, and one of the most important was cheese (laughs) because I was always a cheese lover, and the other thing was binders and thickeners that were healthy. So when I, um later on when I started exploring raw foods then I started finding other things that i could use in place of those in using raw ingredients which was great. The way i got into raw foods was I read a book because i was an insatiable reader about health, I read a book by Dr. Ann Wigmore, and Dr. Ann Wigmore's book says, I read several of them actually before I finally went, I was inspired to go and check her out in Puerto Rico, and I learned so much about healing with raw foods and I saw so many what I would have thought were miracles and now I understand that, you know, it's just the way it is, it's easy to cure some of these

so called terminal illnesses if you just get rid of the cooked food give the body a break, and um, and heal with with life foods. And I did not expect when i went to visit Dr. Ann Wigmore that i would ever stop teaching cooking classes because at, by that point in my career I ...I was pretty well known as a vegetarian chef and I was teaching all over the world, and if I had thought that I was going stop doing that I might not have gone to see her, but it's changed my life in a very positive way. I immediately started teaching only raw classes and I came back knowing that the principles that I was using in teaching gourmet cuisine could be transferred to raw, to create a raw cuisine, because at that time that there really wasn't such a thing as really gourmet raw foods. It was just Dr. Ann Wigmore's, just sprouts and energy soup you know and smoothies, and that was about it! Now wheatgrass juice.

And um so I came back and I started playing with making um um white cheeses - we had made sunflower cheese at Dr. Ann's but I really didn't care for the bite of it, so I started playing with other kinds of nuts, macadamias and almonds to make white cheeses, and playing with making things like lasagnas and stroganoffs, and the kind of things I used to teach for vegetarian, but turning them into raw. And and I'm going to my same venues where I had been teaching before, the international vegetarian associations, and teaching the same kind of cuisine but now using raw ingredients and I had ... it was so much fun and um my students loved it, and they even started to help me teach and soon Victora ?Scolvinska? approached me and said you need to start teaching chefs because this is the kind of cuisine that we need to have in the finest restaurants and that gave birth to uh Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, because Dr. Ann had also said to me when I was with her that

i would be a beacon of light for her teachings. So the combination of the two, my two mentors, telling me that really made me feel it was an important thing and I started up the school, and that was over almost seven years ago now and I've never looked back, and it's been a labor of love; I work a lot, but I get a lot of love in return, and feel very gratified and really see a huge shift happening now in the raw movement, because uh it's not just roots and shoots anymore, it's a kind of food that anybody can appreciate and no matter who they are or how they've been eating, if they taste the kind of food that we prepare at our school and all of these teachers and authors that we have out there now, that kind of food is the kind of food that anyone can appreciate and love and know that they can be successful on a raw food diet. So I'm very happy that I've had...been able to have a part to play in this movement.

That was Cherie Soria, who heads the Living Light Culinary Arts Institute. Next is a lecture from last year's Raw Festival. Dr. Fred ?Beachy?, an athlete and health consultant, has been on raw foods for thirty years, and has been a keynote speaker since the first of the raw festivals. (applause) Thank you very much everybody. I'd like to know, I guess everybody heard me speak before, because, did everybody everybody hear me speak before? No? Okay, what I'd like to do is to uh again, what I'll do is to give you a bit of background information about myself and how I really ended up in this spot today. Personally I ... I have been eating raw foods for about fifty years and uh a little over thirty years a hundred percent raw, but in my practice

in New York City, I have a clinical nutritional practice in New York City, and in the beginning when I first uh started my practice, I realized I had to diversify my approach in order to help people, because a good deal of the people that were coming to me were referred by doctors or right out in mainstream society and there was no way in the world that I was going to be able to take them into something that was um beyond their scope of understanding or beyond their reach. And most of the people I see are really sick people. They're coming to me out of the standard American diet and they either on...they're on insulin, or they have Type 2 insulin resistant diabetes, or they have cancer, and I do see a lot of people have stage 4 cancers, and the frustrating thing for me, years ago, was that...it was like trying to um i felt like somebody was...that was going to climb into a ring with a

guy like Mike Tyson and you had your hands tied, because it wasn't easy to get people to understand what they really hadda do and how far they really hadda go to accomplish what they were coming to see me for. But years ago, thirty five forty years ago, there was...there was a lot of confusion about what was really going on, there was many difference of opinions about how really to approach a raw food lifestyle, and uh what I did, I come to find out that, and I saw that some of the people that were really the leaders in the movement and kind of like the teachers, as I come to see they were struggling themselves, they were having problems themselves, They were having problems sticking to the raw food type of a diet. They had their own issues that they were dealing with that was actually um kinda dilluting the situation so I could really get into what was going on. And I was more interested

in the science of what was going on rather than the philosophy. Or some kind of a dogma. I want to really get into the science, so I decided to really start from the beginning myself and to go through all the different protocols go through the different experiences and monitor myself to see what- so I could come to my own conclusions about things as I applied this to people who were coming to see me. I didn't want to take anybody out into deep water when they were really sick unless I was a 100% sure of what I was doing. And before I got 'em taught 'em to do something, got him to do something I wanted to be reasonably sure what the outcome was gonna be 'cause when you're dealing with sick people, especially people that have cancer who years ago added a raw food movement. It was the latest stage of toxemia, the latest stage of disease and through

metastasized cancers, not primary cancers were considered to be incurable so I wanted to really explore this myself and what I did is I, I experimented with different attributes of uh a of the raw food diet by eating more of certain foods and less of other foods and I went through the whole spectrum of uh what I thought was the way to approach is to see what the reaction would be on my own body now I certainly have taken into consideration that there's a thousand variables in human chemistry and everybody's um has a minor difference for one degree or another So I mean we all have two kidneys, one heart, two lungs and and so on so basically the human animal is the same, but when you dealing with the nature of disease if I can convince anybody of anything here today. Reactions are not always the same

and a lot of people are under the impression that reactions are always the same. It's just not the case. So I'm not going to encourage anybody to think the reaction, the outcome for five people doing the same thing are always going to have the same outcome. There's a lot of controversies about certain issues and I just don't go there. I'm not into controversy. I never go there, but where I do go is I try to go to science. I try to go to helping a person that's really sick and if I find out that yodeling and barking at the moon is going to get ten out of ten people better from cancer. I'm going to start advocating yodeling and barking at the moon even though there is no explanation why it would work so what I did I did a lot of long-term fasting myself [clears throat] I did a couple of um short fasts then I did a couple fifteen day fasts and then I did I started doing

some long fasting because I wanted to see I wanted to have a total understanding of um what happens biochemically when you're fasting. Fasting has been around for thousands of years. I mean it's biblical There's um some people have a little different opinion of fasting [clears throat] I have found fasting to be a great modality of helping people. But I certainly don't believe it's a panacea. I don't believe there's any panaceas personally. I believe that there are no matter what you do. No matter how you apply it. We're all mortal, but I als- I do believe that our potential as I stated the other day and that's kind of been what the last twenty years of my life where I've been putting my focus of course I had noticed that the years went on I became a very keen observer of the fact that people that were eating a raw diet definately were not in the latest stages of their life

definately were not doing much better than anybodyelse. They started out in a much better position when they started to leave out all of the, basically the things that are detrimental in our lifestyle there was like an immediate dramatic in some cases almost miraculous response. But I also noticed as the years went on that gap between people that were eating a standard american diet and people were doing the more highly evolved diets as time went on then the gaps started to close about 15 years later, 15, 20, 25 years that gap started to narrow to the point where all the all my friends all the people I knew from years ago that kinda started on this journey with me every single one of them is gone. They're not here and they was as dedicated

as everybody else just as dedicated as the people that are here were. So I sensed that there was something amiss here. I also have become firmly convinced that the uh as most people here know that the mean lifespan is a 120 years. I also have become firmly convinced that if you do this correctly-- now this might sound bizarre. Maybe you think I'm loosing some of my faculties, but I I believe we have the uh I'm firmly convinced we have the potential to go beyond the mean lifespan in fact I really have no doubt about it and as I stated the other day I did an eight year experiment in my life, my daughter's she's had some awareness of it of what I done and it firmly convinced me that um that we have the information available today and

that if we unite if the people in the raw food community unite and we kind of put our personal agendas aside to kind of put our egos to rest that we could uh unite and really make this even better than it is right now. And really it's really it's fantastic right now, but I believe the our potential is just absolutely tremendous. [Host]: Appearing for the first time at the Raw festivals is Dr. Rusa Bogdonovich who spoke at the 2003 festival and states that there is no incurable disease. [Dr. Bogdonovich]: The biggest thing about this raw movement is relearning what we have learned and believed then passed our tests and got our A's and B's that we're saying now well they did not know any better. They just didn't, but how can they not know when this is nature's first law- law of cause and effect. How could we

how could we have been so blinded not to know that? We must have had some kind of feeling inside that we kinda shoulda of held on to and now that it's coming back and people are talking about it. Now we feel like yes there's some need to that. And today and yesterday and all this weekend long many people are- I have met some folks here that been robbed for 17, 18 months and when I asked them what was the miracle in your life and they say well I read the study on [unintelligable] cats and what happens to the 3 generations of cats that eat cooked food. what happens to them after the 3 generations. Well the same thing that happens to the 3 generations of cooked food- with cats happens to us-- Nothing different, in fact, many many people come to see me because they no longer can reproduce and have children because they've been so processed for so long and it's time to wake up

because you know even in the Bible it says,"The meek shall inherit the earth." We have to think about that. I spent alot of time studying with Dr. Jensen. He was one of my favorite mentors and I learned so much stuff from him that all the years that I went to college don't even count because when I studied with Dr. Jensen I learned from the horse's mouth. I learned the truth of the experiences that he had with his people and his illnesses and how he dealt with it. He was very interesting the last few years of Dr. Jenson's life and I keep pushing him to eat more raw raw food because he was about 85-95% raw and he says "but you forgot that I'm Danish [laughs] and I like to have my little fruit role in the morning" and stuff but he really believed that this raw moment will come forth and that we will be more into that kinda stuff when the maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago when Dr. Jensen when he weighs his patients we were not so bad degenerating

like we are today. We don't have time to mess around with things like we had 50 years ago. We we have to wake up and say now is the time to do it now because time is getting critical. Time is of the essence. We have to do something about it. So learning from him and taking it a little further and you learning from me and taking it a little further and helping your family. You are gonna be these folks. Like Victoria said that will be leading the future. That is needed so bad that heed to this movement of producing things for the raw movement. So that you can even make business and money out of it. But not until people in internal medicine, Dr. Jensen always used to say "I don't want I don't want to benefit from somebody's illness. I don't want that" when people need help you give it to them now. And I think this is one thing about raw food that there's no money in telling somebody go raw and you don't have any disease.

Good luck. It just is, so here's an opportunity for everyone to be healthy knowing that fact because it is, it is the truth and the reason that it is the truth and that I did not invent is because it's nature's law It's nature's law that cannot be broken. It's the law of cause an effect and it's the law that we have to oblige and we don't have a choice anymore because now our genes are not what our genes used to be were more degenerated now than we were before.So now we have to really get serious about this because our kids are at stake and you know of all the creatures in this planet only humans and pets had degenerative diseases no other creatures have degenerative diseases and cancer other than animals that are wild out there they're being sprayed and polluted with water and chemicals no other creatures do. monkeys that are eating bananas in hanging on the trees any other animal none of them had

degenerative diseases only humans and pets and when you ask yourself why that is you realize that humans and pets are the only ones that eat degenerated food and if you put your pet on a living food diet than that pet will no longer be sick and all the problems will go away and i had many cases in fact before I tell people about living food and eating raw many people used to bring their pets to me cause i did when i have a license i was certified (unintelligible) doctor that i didn't wanna have a license because if i have a license i would have to lie to you i wanted to tell you the truth because if i had a license and I told you something they would take my license away because the pharmaceuticals are controlling the medical establishment and you're not supposed to say how to cure anything there's no such thing as a war that you tell somebody patting yourself it's against the medical establishment and they will take the license away so I said I do not want to have a license

I wanna be certified natural that the doctor with a lot of background and knowledge and wisdom but I did not want to have a license so because of that I realized that the only way that I could help people even though I was seeing people was to tell them right up front right away on the first visit what they need to do to get better and the first time i told them what to do and they did what they are supposed to do they got better so I never had to see them again other than a nice thank you card or letter and that felt really good so you can tell people how to get better, they're not gonna listen to you and the only reason they were listening to me is because i got my doctorate degree and i have to get that otherwise they wouldn't even listen to me! But I realize that whole process of getting it was that I was disagreeing with the establishment and getting my certificate because i did not believe what they're teaching even in the natruralpathic medicine because everybody is treating the symptoms

nobody wants to treat the cure, and the cure is in the cause so i'm going to talk a little bit about the causes of all degenerative diseases of problems today and that will take some questions and i have a night nice young gentleman here that I'm going to introduce actually right now before I start and his name is greg lathan, he is going to tell you how he cured himself of a liver condition that was on a liver transplant list and his father being a doctor telling him that he has to have that surgery he decided not to so Greg... (applause) (unintelligible) He's looking so good. You know, when I first met Greg, his color wasn't so good. When he told about his liver I said, "Oh my gosh,whatever you do, don't have that surgery. There's a natural way

to do it." And today a couple days I seen him and his color looks so good, it just makes my heart sing. -That...there were few days when I was told by the squares people on earth by the green yellow orange and people who never do anything out of the ordinary is changing colors for a long time so did anybody hear what i just said? -No. -What I said was for several days to multiple months actually about two years ago the squarest is people i've ever known told me i was changing colors you know it's like when you know someone you know that that's never done anything out of the ordinary and always got straight a's in school comes up to you and says you look kind of green, you know, you look really green today and then you go to someone who sees horas and they tell you the same thing that was happening to me on a regular basis because i had a liver condition so about two years ago right before i graduated college i was on an airplane from Reno, Nevada to Arizona and my palms started itching

an infamous case of itchy palms, or something else but I began to pitch more and more over the next couple weeks in i started seeing doctors and for two weeks, no one could tell me what was wrong with me and I began to itch so bad that I would scratch tell I bled, I couldn't sleep I couldn't eat and they told me i had Hep-C and then i got hep c test and I was negative so i kept getting tests, cat scans sonograms, nothing. Finally, I went to phoenix, AZ and saw a doctor and they found a stricture in my common duct which flows from the liver to the gallbladder. It was about two centimeters long and it was closed and there was a bunch of sludge and stones backed up in this thing and i was basically choking waste and I was totally yellow and I was itching so bad that you was like having fire ants crawling twenty four hours a day with no rest. So, they wanted to take my gallbladder

out and you know they didn't really know what was wrong with me but in the meantime they put a stent in, they went into my mouth and a procedure called ERCP and put a little tube in to hold my duct open. Two weeks later I was twice as sick I was bloody and scabbed all over my body and I thought I was going to die and I thought my life is over and still no one knew what was wrong with me so my father put me on an airplane and went to ucla medical center and i saw the chief liver cancer surgeon at ucla liver cancer center and they took one look at me and said come back tomorrow morning 8am saturday and we're going to go and look in your liver because something is real wrong. The next day they fished the stent that had been placed in phoenix out of my emppadic ducts where it's had slipped because it was too small, so at this point my billy ruebn which is which is the yellow pigment that your liver produces was about twenty nine. It's normally one point six to one point two. Mine was twenty nine

and my hair was cracking and falling off and you know my skin was just flaking off from my body and it was it was quite miserable. Anyhow the fished it out of my liver and told me that what i probably had was a disease called primary sclurosis (unintelligible) The football player Walter Payton had it. lost his life to it it's an autoimmune disease that afflicts young men for no apparent reason so people all over are being told they have PSC which is where your liver sclerosis scars like multiple sclerosis bit by bit over about ten years and you get a liver transplant so i'm twenty four years old and sitting in this doctor's office in a high rise in los angeles california and they're telling me you know it sits in about ninety percent that you have PSC. Go home. Get married. Have kids. live your life and come back in ten years and we'll give you a new liver. And I said 'No thanks.' so i went home and out of the blue a friend of mine brought me a tray of wheat grass

and regress book in three days later i was on an airplane two parties health institute in west Palm Beach Florida because there was a list of institutes in the back of the book and two years years hence, my blood levels are perfect, uh, liver biopsy are totally perfect on everything is perfect in my body there's no sign of any scarring in my liver and the physicians at UCLA don't have too much to say, which is why im going to try and go back there and get Get on a table and let them kind of have at me, uh, to see what the deal is, [giggle] but anyhow all I have done in my life has changed my diet, and with my diet my mind and my outlook on things but my life has completely changed, uh, since that day, uh, so there is no limit to what can happen, uh, with your body when you start to feed it what it needs to do its thing so.. So how long have you been raw now? About two years and I've on, I've gone a period of months being a hundred percent raw but I've hovered about, you know nintey - nintey five percent five percent raw. I've never been perfect, there is no such thing in my mind

but uh, it was enough, by far enough so here you are. Hear I am, and its a pleasure to speak to you all (claps & cheering) so thank you! (claps) oh! So why don't you tell me now what you do now because of it? Chef and I travel all over helping people learn how to do what i did, and I'm here with Kelly Servonich, who's the executive chef at Hippocrates in West Palm Beach, Florida, and we have a booth right outside and, um, I actually lost my mother to cancer when I was seventeen years old so exactly sevent- seven years after I lost my mom, I got so sick that I had to learn exactly what I would have done, had I known, to help my mother because the radiol- you know, the oncolologist told her the same thing, you know, "sorry there's nothing we can" do. You just kind of live your life, eat your ice cream, and your saltine crackers, uh, deal with radiation as best you can and hopefully you'll make it. Um, so it's been a very strange sequence of events now that I know exactly what

to do for someone that has cancer. Um, so I've embarked on, on a journey of..of working with people one on one to teach them what to do for their bodies to..to overcome disease and..and reclaim their health. So that's what I'm doing..um and [Woman] And what is you father saying, being a doctor...what is he saying about all this raw food? [Laughs] [Man] Well, well, my dad was kind of my dad is an anesthesiologist. He runs an outpatient surgery center. Uh, he does forty operations a day in his, his place. There's five operating rooms. I've been in there, seen people cut cut open on the tables, worked in operating rooms. He's...he's a..he has a good palate, so he got he..he got raw food when I made him dinner one day. I made him some raw sushi and he flipped flipped out and loved it. But, for someone like, like a medical doctor in general, uh there's a wall in front of their eyes, and, and to get to them with nutrition is..is a long road. But the one thing that works is when you show up every day with your, your, vibrant, clear eyes and you're alive...that that's kind of a statement in itself

but, uh, the palate often works to get to doctors and actually have a nice plug from a surgeon in Reno who had a dinner of mine and absolutely loved it. Too bad the guy's 300 pounds [giggling], but you know, but what can you do? I'm trying to work with my dad, and actually one of my goals is to bridge the gap between you know raw food nutrition and the medical doctor allopathic world. I think that's why I'm on Earth is to somehow bring that together. [applause] Very good... Very good. Thank you sweetie. anything else you want to say? No, if anybody has any questions I'm happy to answer them here or at my booth [guest] thank you very much Dr. Pujo(sp?)... [Host] You're welcome...my pleasure...my pleasure [Host] you can you just put that out.. it's funny thing, but we've got a few people coming around telling us how they cured themselves of disease that was not curable "quote" and they are curable. And, like Greg said, when I saw him and his power I was

just very, very uh, disturbed thinking that they gonna put through all these processes and they're not gonna accomplish anything. And he realized that something was the mike and he didn't themselves so when we build yourself a doctor doesn't cure the body does the cure, and before the body does, the mind sends the signal that says this makes sense or it doesn't make sense and you digest that and you work it through and you meditate on them and next thing you know every little step counts and he brings that healing to yourself or anybody that is willing to listen to that but more than anything, I'm more than convinced that there is no such a thing as incurable disease there are however some curable patients and these are the people that are not willing to hear the truth. They're not ready; they would even rather die than hear the true and these people we cannot help. We can only help those that want to help themselves. And how many people want to help themselves?

Apparently I was very saddened to hear from my mentor Dr. Jensen that one out of a hundred people would actually here the truth and would want to help themselves And when I heard that statistic, I said to myself oh my gosh that means I have to see a hundred people before one would do what needs to be done. And that's when I decided that I'm not gonna be seeing one-on-one anymore but I'm gonna be seeing a whole group of people so that one can hear what I have to say and that maybe do something about it because for some strange reason people will not- not want to hear it even if they heard it before until they're ready and the old saying goes that the teacher will appear when the student is ready so I hope many of you are read today and this weekend and just sleep on it, digest a bit and you'll see that something will lead you to something like this again and again and all of a sudden you'll be totally free, enlightened

person. So now we're gonna talk a little about some of these degenerative diseases that are totally man made diseases. There are totally man made. Even what Greg had was man made. So now that the man made it, the man should remo- shall remove it and the cure will will appear. It's that simple. So whether it is diabetes or cancer or heart condition or anything, it doesn't even matter the name. A lot of times people tell me and come up with this fancy name that I haven't heard when I was going to school and I said, Can you cure that? And when I asked him to explain what it is they don't even know so we got lots and lots of names of the diseases that are totally unnecessary because if you wanna find a cure, you can use the same approach that Greg did and it will happen to you too but because were so addicted and we know that some of the stuff tastes so good

and thought it has been passed through the generations we are now willing to give them up. We just plainly kind of accept it only got through with it I really firmly believe that there are no such a thing as inherited diseases and genetically transmitted diseases. I believe that with all my heart and I'm not saying everything but eighty, ninety percent of these things that we call inherited diseases like diabetes is not inherited. What is inherited is the habit that you inherit from your parents and grandparents and grandmas and grandpas. That's what is inherited because when you have a child that has a juvenile diabetes that is born with diabetes, that child didn't inherit the genes to have diabetes. It had the mother what was eating during the process while she was pregnant and the child ended up with juvenile diabetes but when you

remove the mothers diet once the child is born and you put him on a natural diet that the diabetes will go away and I've seen it happen and you've probably heard it this weekend all the way through how easy it is to take care of that. So now how do you know where the cure is and what is the cure for certain things? We know that the cure is in the cause but what are real causes and the culprits are what is happening? Well if you look at our lifestyle you will soon realize that drinking gallon of milk a day and eating doughnuts and hamburgers and french fries and all that stuff will definitely bring you closer to juvenile diabetes even if nobody in your family had it. So by removing that and going back to nature and eating more food they will be helping the pancreas versus putting a detriment on it will actually help you achieve that perfect health whatever it was that you were suffering from. So does that making sense?

It is. Oh that's nice to hear. So now you're not afraid of anything no matter what it was that you have to worry about. It is all curable. It is all curable with nature. Nature does the healing and nature does the cure Another culprit that I always try to bring up is the sodas and the sugars and the high protein diets that I heard it a thousand times and would do you do for your protein and what do you protein? Protein seems to be the biggest thing. Like we cannot think straight if we don't have a steak a day and if we don't eat french fries a day and a hamburger stuff or ham or whatever. So the protein fad brought by the farmers that grow that stuff has made us all believe that if we don't eat protein we will not be able to think what is really the reality is that if we eat too much protein we will not be able to think

not if we don't have enough because if you don't have enough of something the body will compensate but you have too much of something then the body will congest as and the liver will enlarge and they will try to push through the things that it cannot ordinarily do and it will just keep the things will start getting worse and worse. So less is more and less is better like Juliana Wilsaine and David Wolfe all of us know, the less is more. Because if you have less protein your body can adjust to that but if you have too much protein then your liver has to enlarge and your pancreas has to work so much harder and put such a big burden on them that you're not gonna be able to succeed and because doctors say that food has nothing to do with what we eat and you go to see a doctor and they say, "Oh you're a vegetarian. Oh you're not getting enough protein. This is where all the problems start." But that is not true at all because the less protein you have, the easier and longer you will live and easier on your system it will be. And not only that but clear- and more clearly you

will be thinking. So if you don't believe me, try it. That was Dr. Ruza Bogdanovich. One of the organizers of this year's event that begins August 18th is Linda Fromm. The festival itself starts Friday August 20th and it goes through Sunday August 22nd and that's all- early in the morning we start exercising and do yoga and things like that but the speakers start at nine o'clock in the morning and they go till about five o'clock at night and then in the evenings are other speakers- main speakers and major music kinds of things going on, so it's all day you could come out and just not go home. There's food on the grounds. We have a food court, we have a farmers market. We have a lot of vendors with food and other products that are raw related, are health related or environmental related going on. If you wanna just come out and find out what's going on the uh vendor court for their products and the food and some of the entertainment is all free

you don't have to pay anything to come in there especially if you wanna go to the farmer's market. That's so fun to have a farmers market on a day other than their regular days. Umm if you wanna go in and hear the main event, speakers, of course then there's a charge for that. But you can come out and do a whole lot with just coming and seeing what's going on. [Audience member]: Are there going to be any new speaker's um this year? [Host]: Yes, we've got some great new speakers coming in and my favorite this year is a lady named Elizabeth Baker. She's 91 years old. She's been a raw foodist for over forty years. This lady has more energy than I have and I'm in my mid 50s. Umm I'm really excited about her. She is just an amazing lady. We also have Josh Steinhauser who is the person who use to be the gatekeeper for all the organics in New York City and so getting to hear Josh, he doesn't go out to things, he's the one that goes out to countries to tell them how to do organic farming and he's gonna come and speak one of our evenings. Uh we just have a lot of amazing new speakers this year. [Host 1:] For details on the 5th

annual raw and living foods festival the contact info is voice phone: 503 area code 246-1684. The web site is rawfestival.com [transcript ends]