Which Vegan Diet Is Best?

following both of you for decades actually this is my first time having you in the same room so when I listen to you and it’s it all raw which I love when I listen to you then the next time I’m saying you you have to eat cook your mushrooms and your beans so the question I have every time is how do I decide which to do I go to all these doctors who treat say vegan but different ways of doing it
I think we’re all saying the same thing I don’t think that dr. Fuhrman would ever disagree that if you sprouted it becomes a plant you could eat it but I do agree that if you took a bean the way I ate beans my whole life cook them you’ve got to break the that fibrous structure down so it’s true and by the way occasionally I eat cooked beans you know I don’t walk on water yet

I don’t think there’s we know that cooked beans products extend human lifespan allow us to live 100 years old they’re excellent foods I don’t think you should be fearful of them yeah you know we can eat cooked foods moderately we still recommend a tremendous value to eating raw foods and having an eating a lot of raw foods each day

and I think that you’re gonna be super healthy and it’s a sustainable diet that you can live with the rest of your life you can stay with it consistently you maintain a stable weight you can maintain your muscle strength you’ll be excited about your life and leaves you a unbelievable amount of recipes you can create that tastes delicious and still sustain a sustainable diet that could be that can be really fun and enjoyable your whole life but if you eat a lot of cooked beans you may not have a lot of friends

[Laughter] that you can improve you know going from American sad standard diet anything you improve is gonna get your healthy or any little baby step that you take is great

and and I think I’ll add one thing I think that that we need to remember that there’s a sort of a spectrum of plant-based diets at one end of the spectrum you have a you know the the pure hundred percent raw food diet at the other the more conventional vegan diet that includes cooked and processed foods and all sorts of things

and at the at the one end the the you know so it’s completely raw vegan diet this is a potentially highly therapeutic diet it’s very clean there are no processed foods included but the risk of some nutritional deficiencies will be a little bit higher because you’re not including some of the foods that may have added nutrients and so forth

at the other end your risk of having a potentially a diet that can contribute to disease is a little bit higher and so where you fit on the spectrum depends on a number of things what your state of health is what your age is what your physical activity is like

and so for some for young children for example including more of the foods that will fill their stomach with less volume can be very valuable in helping to ensure that they grow and develop properly for someone with serious disease you want to get closer to eating a really clean diet

so for most really healthy people who are exercising and having a balance of foods where you’re eating plenty of raw foods but including the healthiest of cooked foods like the legumes and the mushrooms and perhaps some greens where they’re you’re not exposing them to really high temperatures cooking them in healthy ways that can be a an excellent diet for long-term health maintenance

so I think we just need to remember that it really depends on individual factors what diet will best suit you and your family at whatever stage you’re at

well I think the first thing I ever heard Brenda say that I disagree with is that this end of the diet there’s possibilities of things that lack I would disagree with that I think that we have the least possibility of lacking anything on it on a Hippocrates type of diet

now what I do agree is by the way we tell people who are well they can eat cook food and by the way the same cook foods that you’re talking about how you cook food and reads good food and you know it’s but when you’re fighting cancer when you’re fighting some catastrophic disease our 62 years of experience and clinical research on people show that that’s what it requires

and frankly it may not require a hundred percent of the people to do that you have somebody sitting in front of you that had stage four cancer Sloane gave him up to die yet colitis his entire life he’s from here he’s from Long Island he got completely well because he was 100% wrong

now there are some people within that group and we don’t know who these people are nor am I going to experiment that may have been okay and may have been perfectly fine if they ate a 70% raw food diet but what we’ve seen and what we know from what we’ve watched now since 1956 is when you’re a hundred percent the likelihood you’re going to get well from these dramatically increase

does everyone get well no not everyone gets well because your psychological factors there’s a million other factors and let me qualify the statement so what I’m basing it up on is the studies that have compared raw food vegans versus other vegans and for example b12 status it tends to be at least from the studies that I’ve seen the lowest in the raw vegans the opposite is true

Oh No absolutely I’ll show you dozens of studies the lowest levels and I I I’ll just pull them out there I’ve got them listed in my book but raw vegans because and maybe not those that are following your program but often they just ignore b12

look and so they’re not they’re not including something whereas a person eating a conventional vegan diet for example in the Adventist Health Study – what we see in the in the Adventists is their b12 status is excellent whereas the people in Europe the vegans they’re their b12 status is much lower because they don’t eat as many fortified b12 fortified foods

and so in the raw community because they’re not consuming the fortified foods we see iodine being a problem in some we see b12 and vitamin D whereas in people that consume these fortified foods we see higher levels when we look at the studies comparing these different populations

it’s not saying that you can’t ensure adequate amounts of these things on a raw food diet absolutely you can but just in general population studies that’s what we generally you’ve clarified let’s explain it to you that the raw food title encompasses many recreational food people for instance one of the hardest things I have to do is it’s a leader in raw food is go to a raw food restaurants and act like I like to eat that food I don’t like to eat the food it’s it’s nasty it’s loaded with sugar it’s mostly fruit

and why you have a b12 deficiency in that group is because on ripened fruit will rape the body of any B vitamins and certainly the bacteria b12 on the other hand iodine deficiencies aren’t a problem with us because algie’s part of the program okay

on the other hand when you look at b12 look at the dr. Fontana study and this should be really the most relevant thing to this conversation why we have less b12 deficiencies and vegans because vegans cook their food when you cook a bacteria b12 is not a B vitamin it’s a soil based microorganism

we don’t cook our food I cook some but you know 70 80 % of my diet 85% is we get that bacteria so look at the Fontana study universe Washington’s University and but it was they looked at us they didn’t look at people eating high fruit diet recreational diets

and most vegans as you pointed out earlier they’re eating recreational diets my original vegan diet so I had no money was I get 5 loaves of white bread this is not a joke for a dollar I got pretzels for 19 cents and I forget what it costs you know that horrible yellow color mustard for 12 cents a bottle and I put mustard I put pretzels and I had pretzel sandwiches

what a vegan diet was to me is don’t eat meat and don’t eat dirty food now if I continued on that I wouldn’t be here today look I just want to clarify a couple things that people take cautious first of all I don’t think that’s the main issue which diet has more b12 or not anyway because we have to make sure nobody’s deficient in b12 take b12 so either take b12 take your blood test make sure you not to the fish and b12

we’re all a little different we all the utilize b12 differently and whether you know whether you’d have fortified foods or not I don’t need any fortified foods if I’m gonna make sure I take enough b12 and the other way shorts a lot of raw foodists are on fruitarian raw food diets and I’ve taken care of this population for many many years and seen them to lose their hair and lose their teeth so that we can increase with infection die and have pneumonias and things like that to the poor immune system function and are all fruit diet

you know and also I want to just to mention that the inclusion of some cooked foods in the diet low increased your defenses against cancer and I’ve had that just as I’ve got patients who recovered from cancer and you know just like we talked about for example using my cooked mushrooms in the diet the lack of that mushrooms have tremendous power against cancer and you have to eat them cool you should eat them cooked

oh you’re bringing in pizza for us that’s what we need glogg up our head vegan pizza I don’t eat cook I don’t eat cooked flour pradhan pizza junk food never a lot of these people in the first face that would have been the best people I ate at one point is that me that’s you know anyway

but that the point is is that a vegan diet has the potential to be deficient in certain nutrients and it’s your responsibility to make sure that you’re not deficient in anything don’t rely on your nutritional guru to take care of you it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re covered in getting all the nutrients you need

there are those nutrients that are somewhat marginal based on how you eat and what you eat or it could be vitamin D and b12 and DHA in iodine and zinc and maybe maybe k2 those are may be the marginal nutrients that are not high in a vegan diet but it’s your responsibility to know that and to make sure it’s particularly vitamin D b12 and DHA are the nutrients that most vegans develop problems with

and I’ve taken care of this vegan community for decades and Noda and seed people develop problems on a vegan diet because of these mostly because of fatty acid deficiencies in DHA deficiencies on a vegan diet

so let’s preface this when we say you’ve got to be cautious on the big of it you’ve got to be much more cautious on the American diet on the macrobiotic diet I mean sure yeah we’re just giving the science that we see on this is called spectra self test and that is actually a nutrition deficiency test and you’ll be amazed how many meat eaters are lacking b12 thinking that they actually have it

we’ve tested a lot of life food Wiggins with no deficiency but we as a rule we put everybody on b12 that’s the only supplement I’ll tell you I want you all on yeah so let me let me ask let me let me ask I sell some of your insurance is paid for this just don’t let the average holistic doctor interpret it because they’re gonna tell you to eat salmon or something like this

I tried to use spectra cell for years and I tried to correlate it with regular blood test to see it was accurate and I found it to be grossly inaccurate and not not to be I couldn’t rely on it consistently because you get a b12 live on the spectra cell there’s one the regular blood tests they wouldn’t concur a vitamin D level would concur a b6 of time and one concur I’d I just felt it was not an accurate enough test to me to be dependent on its results

but if you look at the Framingham people they tell us that mainstream that we do both right you do both everyone does vitro the mainstream blood test for b12 is not accurate let’s we do an MMA yeah well then it’s different then we get to cost factors with this yeah but still I mean it’s you gotta be careful so it comes up with people who are deficient or reading perfectly healthy sometimes it’s gonna tell them in they need more b1 or thiamine oh that’s just not true