David Wolfe, Raw Foodist Extraordinaire!
David Wolfe is a raw foodist, superfoodist, and a natural health and beauty expert extraordinaire. His accomplishments are jaw-dropping and we were thrilled with the knowledge we gained through our personal interview. We are so grateful that David took an hour out of his insanely busy schedule to chat with us. In case you haven’t heard of raw foodist David Wolfe, here are a few snippets from his impressive bio: “With a masters degree in nutrition, and a background in science and mechanical engineering, David Wolfe is considered one of the world’s top authorities on natural health, beauty nutrition, herbalism, chocolate, and organic superfoods. ...As the author of the best-selling books, Eating for Beauty (4th Edition), The Sunfood Diet Success System (8th Edition), Naked Chocolate (2nd Edition), David Wolfe on Raw Foods, Superfoods, and Superherbs, Amazing Grace (3rd Edition), Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future (2009), and The LongevityNOW Program, David Wolfe empowers and inspires people to take charge of their health even up against all the modern-day demands...
...David privately consults and inspires the ordinary into the extraordinary and the extraordinary into “peak states of flow.” His celebrity fan base includes Woody Harrelson, Bryce Dallas Howard, John Assaraf, Anthony Robbins, Steve Jobs, Angela Bassett, and many others. ...A highly sought after health and personal success speaker, David has given over 1700 live lecture events in the past 15 years..." And now for our raw foodist extraordinaire interview with David Wolfe! WBDD: You’re most well known as a raw foodist and raw food lifestyle promoter. Tell us briefly why you eat raw and why you recommend for others to eat raw food? David Wolfe: I got into raw food originally because it just made sense to me. In the dietary chaos of our Western world, there are so many competing ideas that we are really left with only one possible way of sorting it out. And that is trusting our instincts and our intuition. So when I heard of raw foods, I thought, “Well that makes sense.” We weren’t born on the planet with a stove - didn’t have microwaves or kitchens. It certainly isn’t the kitchen of Eden, so I thought that’s a lot easier to deal with – raw food. I was a really awful, horrible chef - maybe the worst chef ever! So it just rolled into my lap and I thought “yea, I could do this.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea what I should be eating every day – I just made it up as I went. I did very extreme things like eat 8 avocados in a single day, drink 100 ounces of vegetable juice a day, did a lot of fasting – both juice fasting, water fasting, dry fasting. I ate an entire case of oranges in one day. I believe my record was 180 dates in a day - I went to a date farm and ate an entire box in a single day. Now I would never recommend that anyone do any of those things in the way that I did, but luckily I was young enough and naïve enough, that I survived it and learned along the way what’s essential, what’s not, what’s important, what’s not.
WBDD: Tell us about your personal daily routine of food activity etc. What do you eat and do to stay healthy as a raw foodist? David Wolfe: Well it’s always different – I’m the type of a person that is the antithesis of the regimented lifestyle. I do something different every single day, I’m moving around constantly, I haven’t been in one place for more than 4 weeks in 16 years. With that kind of a thing, I like random, I like topsy-turvy, I like having to starve occasionally, I like having to hunt down my own food or water. Therefore the answer you are looking for isn’t an easy one for me because it changes daily. For example, today I didn’t have any food until about 3:00 in the afternoon and before that I had a smoothie early around noon or so. I blended up a bunch of things and slowly sipped on that. But I didn’t actually have a meal until around 3 and I probably will have maybe another little meal this evening and that’s my day. When I say a meal, I’m talking about raw foods like sprouts, seeds, nuts, seaweeds, a little bit of fruit and a little bit of vegetables and some superfoods as well. WBDD: How can the concepts you teach be applied to the life of the average person? Is there a more accessible version of the raw foodist path?
Right now, I’m currently in Montreal and fortunately there is a cool little raw food restaurant and I know the owner so he’s hooking me up with special little goodies here and there. But if I was living here it would be totally easy because they’d just deliver to me – so I just get whatever I wanted delivered. Now I have to call up and special order juices. The more regimented your life is, I believe the easier it is to eat healthy, and to eat raw foods because you find out where the sources are, boom, you’re done. You don’t have to refigure it out every week like I do. WBDD: It’s difficult for the average person to make big changes from the average diet... do you have advice you give to people that is maybe a little more accessible than 100 percent raw foodist? David Wolfe: Well I don’t really advocate 100% raw food diet for most people because it’s just irrational from where we are coming from… we are literally survivors of a dietary holocaust. I’m talking about Pez, I’m talking about Cheetos, fast food, Nerds candy – I mean we have eaten stuff that is so toxic that it is literally almost radioactive. In fact, the chemical tobacco that people are smoking is actually radioactive. It does actually contain radioactive atomic elements in it. So we are all coming from this kind of complete unconsciousness… we have eaten stuff that literally shouldn’t even be put into the landfills - it’s too dangerous, too toxic.
Going beyond that, we’ve got to get step by step into it. We start where we really have leverage. I start people on superfoods and vegetable juice most of the time - which is really where the rubber hits the road. If you can get a vegetable juice, a fresh one, into your diet every single day and a superfood smoothie or at least a little snack bag, like a trail mix, of superfoods, then you are really ahead of the curve. What that is doing is giving you a little bit of an insurance policy, helping you move forward, detoxing you a bit. But really, beyond all that, it’s actually giving you a type of nutrition, namely protein, and this is such a paradox, protein that is actually absorbable. Because most of the stuff like bologna - well bologna is bologna - but most of the meat doesn’t have enough protein in it. Most of the meat is all cooked and we lose 50 % of the protein, the tryptophan is lost, the phenylalanine is broken down and it’s not even really useable. So when we are looking at these high meat diets what we see often is protein deficiency which manifests itself as neurological disorders first - not wimpy little muscles - but actually neurological disorders.
WBDD: Many people look at the superfoods and think “yikes, these are expensive!” and they may not be able to buy 10 or 15 of them to start out with. If you had to choose only 1-2 superfoods for the average person to add to their diets what would they be? And why? David Wolfe: Well first of all, I have to dispel the whole “expensive myth”. Because here’s what’s expensive - your rent, your mortgage, your car payment – what are those things doing for you? They’re not doing anything for you… your health is where you need to put your money. We have this phrase in our language which is, “Put your money where your mouth is.” What a powerful phrase! That is really strong… Why is it that way? Because our values are all disturbed – we think that having a new car is more important than the food we are buying. What’s happened with this economic downturn is a really important transformation of our values. It has gotten people to focus on what is actually important to spend money on. We’ve seen that the organic food industry has been essentially immune to the economic downturn that we’ve been going through the last couple of years. This is really a shocking discovery! Every other industry has fallen apart, broken down- bankruptcies left, right and center - but the natural foods industry has actually experienced growth. That’s phenomenal!
I’ve done the research on goji berries, the scientific research, and we know for sure that it’s a complete protein source. We know for sure that it’s one of the best sources of antioxidants, we know for sure that it is THE best source of zeaxanthin, which is the number one carotenoid, a type of beta-carotene, or similar to it, that is the most important antioxidant for eye sight. So that’s a good place to start and then we can build it up from there. WBDD: What role does detoxification play in your teachings as a raw foodist? And what role do you think it needs to play in what’s going on in our modern diet?
Having said that, the second piece is we’re not just dealing with that simple situation. We are dealing with a much more serious situation, which is the carcinogens, the plastics, the petrochemicals, the pesticides, the fungicides, the depleted uranium, just all manner of crazy things…the additives and coloring dyes and all this kind of stuff. I believe that, fortunately, always with the problem is created the solution. So no matter how toxic we are - let’s say we worked in a hair salon and we breathed in those chemicals for 15 years - we are not doomed. We can get that stuff out of our bodies, but we have to work at it. And the best way to do that is to sort our diet out so we naturally “outgas” - and I use that word with pun intended - we naturally outgas a bunch of the stuff that our body has never had the energy to get rid of. Because step by step, using the power of the phrase, “you are what you eat” we start to get our energy level up, through these a raw food detox diet, to the point where our body can finally detoxify very harmful waste products or artificial products that it didn’t have the energy to dispel before. And it does literally have to do with that… our literal energy level, our core vitality and energy level, is going to determine how much we can detoxify and what compounds we can detoxify… and raw foods and superfoods help a lot…and so does water. WBDD: Do you think it necessary to treat organic raw vegetables to remove micro-organisms? If so, what would you treat with? David Wolfe: That’s an excellent question. If I buy food from a store, I would recommend if your health is poor and you’re concerned about microbes or dirt - and there is a lot of dirt by the way on nuts and seeds that you buy out of a bulk bin at a store, you’d be surprised. I would recommend putting a thimble full of 35 % food grade hydrogen peroxide into a large bowl of water and then washing your vegetables and/or your bulk-bin-bought nuts and seeds in that. Soak them, wash them, triturate them in that with your fingers, then take them out and let them dry, and then refrigerate them. Or let’s say you’ve soaked your nuts and seeds and they won’t dry that easily, then you dehydrate them after that, with a simple dehydrator, then you’ve completely cleaned them off. The great healing centers in America, like The Tree of Life down in Patagonia, Arizona, do this because they are dealing with people who are very ill and they can’t have dirt or microbes on their food. Now I personally don’t eat a lot out of health food stores. I grow my own food or eat wild food. So in that environment, no problem, you don’t need to wash anything. In fact, just to put a little perspective on that, and this is an interesting statement I’m about to make… the water is dirtier than the food. So when you wash food coming from your garden, you’re likely contaminating it with substances that you don’t even want to put in your body, because tap water is other then excellent in North America today. WBDD: I’ve heard Paul Pitchford say that eating strictly raw foods over a long period can be dangerous. The Eastern nutritional philosophies of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Macrobiotics and Ayurveda all acknowledge a weakening and cooling effect that too much raw food can have on the system. What are your thoughts on this concept? And are there ways in which you balance the effects of the raw foodist diet? David Wolfe: Okay, excellent question. I have always deferred to the infinite wisdom of the way that Mother Nature’s system of nutrition works… which is raw food nutrition. That is the only thing available to all the creatures on this earth. Now that has always been a very strong position that I’ve held. When you look out in nature what in the world is a chipmunk eating? What is a squirrel eating? What is a bird eating? They are raw foodist eaters by nature because that’s what’s available.
Let’s simplify that. We can take a raw food core diet and then balance out the person using what we call tonic herbalism, and really tonic herbs are just wild foods under a different name. Then those tonic herbs can help create balance in a person where they would have normally gone out of balance on raw foods without those tonic herbs. WBDD: How has your physical practice/raw foodist lifestyle influenced your spiritual connection/practice? David Wolfe: I’m so glad you asked that question, that’s a great question. It’s radical. It really is radical. Because if we deduce logically where we are with diet, obviously we are eating things that probably were never meant to be eaten and could hardly even be called food if we really look at it honestly. You know, Nerds candy, as I mentioned earlier, or Pez. I mean, that’s not food, what in the heck is that stuff? What does that do to our connection to the earth? And the answer is – A LOT. It distorts and disturbs our connection to the natural environment. It distorts and disturbs our connection to all plants and all life forms on the planet. It distorts and disturbs our connection to what is real, what will last, and what is sustainable. All of those things have spiritual implications. And therefore my feeling and my experience definitely has been that being a raw foodist deeply and radically enhances the spiritual connection that we all have to everything that is. And it actually eliminates isolation consciousness. And when I say isolation consciousness I’m talking about ideas like… “Are we alone in the universe?” “How come we’re the most intelligent species on the plane?” …just all this other nonsense that is out there and it’s like, are you kidding me, people are still debating this stuff? And the reason why people are still debating this stuff is because our diets are so disturbed that we actually don’t even understand that we’re not the only tenants in this building. WBDD: Is there a conversation in the raw food movement around spirituality? Is this being spoken about within the raw foodist community? David Wolfe: It gets spoken about, but it gets categorized into different areas. I wish it was a little bit more broad spectrum and wish it was more at the center of what actually motivates people to look into a raw food diet. Generally, because our civilization is so materialistic, it’s almost never what causes someone to explore raw food diet. Usually they explore raw foods because their either very ill or really need a transformation in diet because their digestion is so poor or just because they can’t digest anything else except for raw foods and even in most cases not even vegetables but other raw foods.
WBDD: You’ve accomplished so much and been so successful in education, health, and business. What do you see as your purpose in all of this? What is the mission that drives you? David Wolfe: My mission is to make raw and living foods, superfoods, super herbs and living spring water a choice for every single person on the whole planet. What they do with that choice is totally up to the individual, but, wow, what a great thing to have that choice. So ultimately that’s my mission is to make that a choice for every single human being in the world so at least it is known about.
WBDD: What do you think people really need and want in our modern world and how can we, as health educators and advocates, give it to them? David Wolfe: Great question – I think we get back to farming… I’m really into farming for that reason. I think it’s the most important hobby. I think it’s possibly THE most significant thing in terms of the human enterprise. It’s significantly affecting the human enterprise and it may be the most significant thing we do on earth. When you fly on a plane over the United States for example, you look down and you see the whole thing is cut up into farms. So if we get people to go organic, for example, this has a radical effect on our landscape. If we go beyond that and say, “Hey let’s get off this wheat, corn, soy, potato stuff… let’s get onto growing superfoods for the masses”, then, whoa, we have then radically upgraded our idea of farming. We’ve actually increased the crop value. We’ve given farmers hope that things can improve and we might be able to do a lot more with farming in America or wherever this occurs, than we were able to do with wheat, corn, soy or potato. The overall impact has got to be beginning with and upgrading our operating system. That’s how I talk to people who are brand new. Nobody in their right mind is using a Commodore 64 computer anymore, that would be insane, or the Apple II Plus computer…or remember the original PC? Just the idea of looking at a screen that entirely consists of text would drive the common computer user insane at this point, because we’ve gotten the graphical/user interface - we’ve upgraded. This is what we can all do in nutrition, just upgrade to where the technology is. And actually, it doesn’t even require us to change our diet. Let’s say somebody’s a meat and potatoes guy, no problem, just go to organic meat, go to organic potatoes, go to organic milk, go to RAW milk, go to unpasteurized cheese, go to raw vegetables instead of those wilted lettuces and kraut that they put on the sides of those dishes or the pesticide sprayed parsley on the side of the Denny’s dish. WBDD: Thank you so much for that perspective on farming. We completely agree and it was really well put… David Wolfe: Thank you for that. I want to say something else on that and this is a shocker to me… This is kind of where the human race is. You would have thought that by now the human race would have come to the place of taking the best foods ever and growing them in the best ways ever. That’s about the most obvious idea possible in human consciousness. But that, for some reason, has just completely evaded us. We’re launching these rockets into outer space, and satellites, and we’ve got cell phones, and we have never taken the best foods ever identified on earth and grown them in the best ways ever identified on earth!
WBDD: That’s great! Oh yeah…It’s the best thing ever! WBDD: We live in a high altitude Colorado mountain town where it gets really cold for a long time every winter. We’ve found that the cold can be tricky for a raw foodist. What would you add to your raw food diet if you lived consistently in a wintery cold climate like this? David Wolfe: Well I would definitely recommend that herbal tea become a part of somebody’s diet, especially wild herbs. Now, I live a lot of the year in Ontario, Canada and we’re in Central Ontario. So central Ontario isn’t exactly Miami… it’s pretty full on. And we spend our summer days hiking through the forest and picking wild herbs, in particular the tree mushrooms, the medicinal mushrooms, as well as horsetail, nettles, wild cherry, and things of that nature. Then we dry them and save them for the winter. We have a wood burning stove and we make spring water tea for everybody - and I basically live on that in the winter - out of herbs that are wildly picked from the forest behind the house. So, that’s really a good way to balance your diet and balance the hot-cold energies during the cold months of the year. WBDD: Are there certain herbs that have those properties more than others? Are there a handful of herbs you could recommend? David Wolfe: Well, I can hardly get through a conversation like this without bringing up my favorites, because these herbs are really abundant, nobody knows about them, you can harvest so much so fast that you can easily nourish yourself with them all through the winter without any trouble at all… I’ll name a few: Horsetail is an ancient plant, Equisetum Arvense, that is very rich in silica. It has a high concentration of unique minerals in it that have an affinity for our joints. Very good for cleansing the kidneys and it’s the best bone density herb in the world. Right there that’s pretty good. Nettles, wild nettles, is another. It’s a great herb to have. An amazing source of iron for our blood, excellent also in silica, excellent bone builder, a blood purifier, overall a tonic adaptogen – it helps us adapt to stress- and it’s very widely available. The nettle, of course, it’s energy is counter frequency to arthritis, so if we have a tendency in the cold to get arthritic, nettles is what we can use in the winter to help get that arthritis under control and bring the pain down. Now beyond that, the medicinal mushrooms really should be named and the two big ones that I want to talk about are Chaga mushrooms and Reishi mushrooms.
Now I personally feel that chaga is more powerful than ginseng, it’s definitely the most powerful anti-cancer herb that I know of in the world. If somebody said, “I have cancer. What should I do?” that would be the first recommendation I would make. It tastes delicious. It tastes like vanilla. Once you’ve been making teas out of it, it makes your tea rich and makes it look like maple syrup. And it’s very easy to pick. This is all you have to do- you knock if off the tree, it just comes out of the side of a birch tree (you can Google it or get some books out on chaga, to see what it looks like). You break it off the tree, take it home, dry it in the sun if you can. If you can’t dry it in your home, dry it in your oven, or your dehydrator or even on a wood burning stove. Let it completely get all the water out of it and it will last for years! You can just set it on your counter and it will sit there for years. When you’re ready to use it, just take a mortal and pestle and crush it to a powder, you don’t even have to do that. You can just literally take the whole darn thing, throw it in a pot of water and make a tea out of it and it will keep making tea again and again. With nettles, after about 5 teas, it’s done. There’s no more nettles coming out of it. But with chaga you can make up to 30 teas out of it before it’s finally done. So it will keep pulling out all of the amazing polysaccharides, all of the amazing anti-cancer triterpenes, and all of the stuff that’s in there. It’s just unbelievable. Just Googling chaga and seeing what that’s about is really just a whole experience in itself.
Miatake & Shiitake are other mushrooms in your ecosystem there as well that I should probably get into briefly. These are wild mushrooms. Or if you can’t get them in the wild environment, if you don’t know where they are, you can just get logs and insert those mushrooms into the logs using what we call “plug spawns.” You can pick them up on Fungi.com. They’re wooden dowels that have been contaminated with a wood eating fungus like Miatake or Shiitake and you just pound them into an old log. In 6-9 months that thing will just burst and you’ll have all these mushrooms coming out of that log and you can pick your own Shiitake and Maitake mushrooms or whatever mushrooms you want to grow. The tree mushrooms, by the way are very different from the ground mushrooms and I should differentiate between them. Tree mushrooms are all medicine. Ground mushrooms are “anything goes”. Some might be medicinal, some might be food, some might be toxic, some might be deadly poison. There is only one toxic tree mushroom called the Jack-o-Lantern. It glows in the dark and it’s very waxy and it’s almost impossible to find so it’s very unlikely anyone will even ever see it in their lifetime. WBDD: Wow, thank you! That is really valuable information. That’s something we haven’t been doing yet. Growing mushrooms is such a good idea. David Wolfe: Yeah! When you get into mushrooms and that side of the equation, what we’re dealing with there are the alchemists in the biosphere. The mushrooms are taking dead matter and making it available to living matter. And they’re taking living matter and they’re restoring it back into the earth into dead matter. The mushrooms are in the zero Karma zone, the Karma free zone where they are enhancing life but they’re not taking life. And, in particular, I’m talking about the tree mushrooms. Now, the tree mushrooms also have a very powerful detoxification effect. Very powerful. Other than just straight up green juices and their flushing capacity, I would put mushrooms second in their ability to detoxify us. But they always detoxify us a little bit cleverly. Like for example, they’ll detoxify us of body odor or petrochemical debris in our bodies. They’ll detoxify us of BPA, and things of that nature, things that are little bit trickier to get out of our bodies. WBDD: You’ve got yourself into a position in life in which you are very famous, highly educated and have your fingers in a bunch of different fascinating projects. We want to know what you consider to be the best part of this unique experience? David Wolfe: Obviously, it’s the knowledge and the ability to act on that knowledge. Because really why we suffer is due to ignorance - we just don’t know. Being at the forefront of the industry I am aware of so much and because I’ve had so much momentum, I’m able to act on it. If something new comes down the pipe I know exactly how to integrate it into my lifestyle and get going on it. So that’s the real benefit that I’ve been able to pick up on. WBDD: Wow, Thank you so much. This is a beautiful interview and we can’t wait to share it with our readers. There is so much powerful, useful, clear information here that we know will help them out a lot!
|
I was mentored by giants, you know titans, in raw food – people who had been a raw foodist for 10, 20, 30 years and learned from them pretty quickly what I was doing wrong, how to get it right and step by step got my diet sorted out. Then I began to realize that I didn’t want to be eating big bowls of salad or juicing 100 ounces of juice every day and that’s how I navigated into superfoods and super herbs. Tuning into my instincts about water, eventually led me to Viktor Schauberger's research which turned me on to living spring water and that is where I’m at today which is what I focus on – living foods, raw foods, super foods, super herbs and living spring water.
David Wolfe: It’s easier if you have a more regimented schedule because you know where you’re foods coming from, you know where the health food store is. It’s a little easier. The way I live actually makes it much more difficult to do the raw foodist lifestyle that I do because I’m always moving around.
Coming from that perspective, we have got to be gentle on ourselves. We don’t know what kind of accumulation of toxins we have in our body. We don’t know the dangers we have exposed ourselves too in terms of carcinogens. We don’t know how many plastics we‘ve gotten into our bodies. So we’ve got to go slow and gentle. We start by, first of all, beginning to shop in health food stores instead of other places, so at least we have organic foods in front of us and there is a different conversation around us. There is a very different type of suggestive environment when we’re in a health food store that is much more conducive to supporting vigorous health than say a conversation going on in Wal-Mart.
When we get deeper into that research, we find out that superfoods -
I was just watching a program last night on YouTube about feral children. These are children raised by baboons or wild wolves or animals in nature. And one of the things that came up was that when these children were re-introduced back into society they shunned cooked foods. They couldn’t eat cooked foods, which is a very interesting idea. Now, having said that, our idea or Paul Pitchfords’ perception or generally most eastern philosophies perception of raw food, is not the overall picture. It is really a picture of what we call raw food in our civilization, for example fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and perhaps maybe seaweeds.
Now, I’ve been working with probably Los Angeles’ top Chinese Medical practitioners, real tonic herbalists - Ron Teeguarden, Rick Ramony, Dean Thomas, George Lamoureux of Jing Herbs, Truth Calkins. These guys are really adept herbalists and raw food enthusiasts. So where we are now is the understanding of how nature works, which is fascinating. So if your studying, say, a chimpanzee - and I did a lot of studying primate diets when I first got into raw foods - one of the things you’ll find out is that, yes, they eat fruits and vegetables but they eat LOTS and lots of wild herbs, wild roots, different insects and that’s what balances out some of those yin imbalances that we hear about through Chinese medicine, like weak damp spleen syndrome.
I’d like to see it brought more to the center of why people should eat raw food. I see it categorized into yoga, like people get into a yogic path and then there’s the ‘yogic diet’ and the ‘raw foodist yogic diet.’ I see it get categorized into Taoist tonic herbalism and the systems that come from China and the real core teachings there which are really interesting because Taoist are not into cooked foods. They’re not into rice, which is fascinating because that’s the Asian civilization. They brought us tonic herbalism from China, the great herbs that we’ve all heard about and yet here they are saying, “Hey, we don’t actually believe in eating rice” or a bunch of this stuff that we often believe are part and parcel to Asian civilization. Of course in Taoism, by the way, there’s a really strong spiritual component between food and diet and us – there’s a strong connection maintained.
So, I’m personally knee deep, actually neck deep, into that enterprise. That is a super inspiring area for me, and that’s really one of the fundamental reasons why I love farming, because that is such a great concept. If we can take the best foods ever like the goji berry, or chocolate…like we’re growing chocolate on our farm in Hawaii, from seed - the chocolate tree, from seed - in the best ways that we know how - biodynamic farming, organic farming method, ocean water agriculture, ormis agriculture, playing music to the plants, putting the seed in your mouth and meditating on it for 9 minutes before you plant it, using rock dust, I mean the whole nine yards.
