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Author Susan Schenck On Raw Food, Animal Products & The Ideal Diet For Humans
2024-02-04
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[include file=get-in-itunes.html] Susan Schenck dropped in from Ecuador via Skype to talk about her journey from being a raw food vegan to being a primal diet advocate by eating small amounts of raw meat. She really took a financial hit by taking a leap of faith and changing her diet even after her first book The Live Food Factor (affiliate link to Amazon) was such a hit in the raw vegan community.It takes courage and guts to change your ideas and opinions about what you thought was right, even when your financial livelihood depends on it. I applaud Susan for being true to herself. If you are considering adding small amounts of high quality animal foods into your diet, you should definitely listen to this show!
After you listen, comment below and tell us what you think!
We discuss the following and so much more:
- Problems with the paleo/primal diet
- What essential nutrients are lacking in a vegan diet
- Should a woman be a vegan during pregnancy?
- The healthiest ways to consume meat
- The Westbrook family & long term veganism
- Does blending destroy nutrients?
- How often should we eat animal products
- And much more!
Is raising a child to be vegan or vegetarian the smartest thing to do? – Click to tweet this!
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Is raising a child to be vegan or vegetarian the smartest thing to do? extremehealthradio.com/8
— Extreme Health Radio (@ehrshow) September 13, 2012
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Podcast Transcript:
Justin: Thank you so much everybody for joining us on extremehealthradio.com I hope you’re having a good day out there, whatever you’re doing, and again, thank you for joining us for this show. I think you’re going to learn a lot. I’ve got a great guest with us here today. Today’s date, for reference, is September 13, 2012 and this is episode #8, and you can find it at extremehealthradio.com/8. Just so that you know, all of our shows are transcribed. We have some family members transcribing our shows for us. What that means, is anything a guest says during a show, or anything that I say, is searchable, so you will be able to do searches on our website for any number of subjects or products.
It also great as well, because if you’re driving and the guest mentions a website or a book, it will be in the show notes, so there is no need to write it down, just visit us at extremehealthradio.com/8. If you have any questions for me or the guest, send them to justin@extremehealthradio.com or you can call our voice mail line, leave a voice mail and we will play your voice mail on the air.
It’s (949) 391-7363 and, just to let you know, this show is brought to you by the Excalibur Dehydrator. This is the dehydrator that my wife and I use all the time. We make our raw beef jerky’s in there and our macaroons and all that good stuff. If you’re ever going to buy one of these, purchase it through us and we will make a little commission. You can find it at extremehealthradio.com/excalibur.
Before we introduce our guest today, I want to just talk a little bit about our upcoming show schedule. We try to do shows on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so please visit our ‘show schedule’ page, as we have lots of great guests coming up. Next week we have Lucas Rockwood, who is going to be talking about the benefits of yoga, sweating and detoxification.
We have Don and Carol Croft, who talk a lot about energy medicine and things like zappers and frequency technology. We have Sean Croxton coming up next week as well. He is the owner of undergroundwellness.com We have Dr. Bruce Shelton, who is a homeopathic and naturopathic doctor in Arizona, curing the incurables with all kinds of crazy things like chelation therapy, ozone therapy and all that good stuff.
We have Barry Carter, Dr. Gerald Smith and lots of great guests coming up. So, visit our show schedule page to find out more about that.
I’m excited about today’s guest and I will read a quick bio of her. Her name is Susan Schenck and she is a licensed acupuncturist, with a Master’s in traditional oriental medicine from Pacific College of Oriental Medicine. She also has a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and a Bachelor’s in Education from Indiana University. She has taught all levels of education, from Preschool to University. Her world travels inspired her to find the ideal diet that could feed the planet. Having tried dozens of diets herself and always in search of peek health, her search was over when she discovered the simple secret of not cooking.
She is the author of The Live Food Factor and Beyond Broccoli and she currently promotes the raw food diet through lectures, workshops and coaching.
So, thanks for joining us today, Susan.
Susan: Hi Justin, how are you doing?
Justin: I’m doing excellent. Again, thanks for joining us today.
Susan: My pleasure.
Justin: Great, so you are based out of Ecuador?
Susan: Yes, I live in Quanka,Ecuador, paradise, heaven on earth.
Justin: Wow, that’s awesome. Are you familiar with Dr. Bob Dowling. He’s based out of Ecuador as well.
Susan: No, but there are a lot of great doctors here though.
Justin: He is a really great doctor, doing some great work with cancer and root canals, he is a dentist I think. I know Mike Adams, the natural news guy, who used to live down there. It’s kind of a haven for natural doctors.
Susan: Yes, Matt Monarch and Angela Stokes are here. Greg Canton, who spent three years in prison for curing cancer.
Justin: Yes, that’s a horrible thing to do, isn’t it!!
Susan: Yeah.
Justin: So why is Ecuador such a good place for people who are doing this kind of work?
Susan: Traditionally there is 3 Cs. Cost of living is 20% of the cost of living I had in California, and Climate, which is ideal, just perfect. You get the four seasons in one day. And the Culture, we have a lot of classical and jazz bands and art museums and everything. There is every kind of ethnic restaurant you can think of almost, and I added the 4th C, community. There are 4000 Americans here, up from 400 Americans four years ago.
Justin: That’s interesting. It sounds like somewhere you are planning on staying for a long time.
Susan: Yes, this is paradise, why would I ever leave it? I’d have to go back and be a slave in the U.S.
Justin: Oh I know, it’s amazing, it’s such a different life there, isn’t it?
Susan: Yes, if you’re a baby boomer, there is no way you’re going to be able to retire in the U.S. unless you’ve got a million dollars per person. Here, I can retire with the same lifestyle I had in San Diego. I have a very small pension, like $1300 a month.
Justin: Wow! That is so cool. I’ve got to make it down there. I’ve been to Costa Rica and Brazil but I’ve never made it over to Ecuador.
Susan: This is the best place. I’ve to both those other places. Brazil is too expensive, so is Costa Rica. And here it’s clean, friendly, and very cheap and great climate.
Justin: So how do the Ecuadorian people adapt to your teachings and how are they responding to your teachings down there?
Susan: Well, I haven’t really branched out enough. I’m fluent in Spanish and that’s a project I’m going to work on when I get back from my first visit to the USA in two years and I’m heartbroken to find out that my favorite bookstore has shut down, it was a Borders a huge Borders bookstore, but I am going to work on that. The few Ecuadorians that I’ve worked with though are very, very receptive.
Justin: So what is their traditional diet down there, is it much different than in the states?
Susan: It’s a lot healthier. It’s more of a whole foods diet with totally free range grass feed beef. Somewhere between the factory farm chicken and the free range chicken. But there are free range chickens here so we’re thinking Omega 3 instead of Omega 6 which is much, much healthier in terms of heart disease and weight loss and overall health. So I can eat guilt free meat here. Virtually guilt free. Turkey is very expensive because they don’t really factory farm the turkey. Other than that everything else is pretty much traditionally raised and slaughtered and everything. The meat is traditionally fed it’s natural diet.
Justin: You know what I liked about your bio? It says in here that you always in search of peak health and I know that you caught a lot of flak for some of your dietary changes that you’ve made and I’m kind of on the same path you are and it’s interesting that when you have an open mind towards diet and you’re always in search of being healthy and not having ego involved in any of this it’s very freeing and open to be able to just change your diet as you see fit, right? I mean it’s such a great thing because there’s a lot of dogma these days right?
Susan: You know what, the key work you said was ego. What happens is people go on to this rampage, they’ve just discovered the vegan diet or whatever and yes, a vegan diet the first three months to one year is going to give you really great health because it makes a great cleanse. And then suddenly you realize you’re getting all these deficiencies but you’re making all this money from your books and your website that’s all vegan and you don’t to publicly change your mind, right. Well I didn’t do anything like that. I never had a lot of money invested except for my book. As soon as I switched over to non-vegan I dropped my sales in my books 30 to 50 percent any given month. And yes, it was a big hit for me because I was making $3000 a month on my book, The Live Food Factor which promoted a raw, vegan diet. And as soon as I changed my mind about the vegan part, not the raw part, I totally believe raw is law be as high raw as you can, but as soon as I changed my mind about the vegan part, wow, my book sales dropped dramatically.
But I had to speak the truth, I had to be a truth warrior, which I am at heart, the main reason I can out with this book was to warm people about the children because I saw these vegan babies whose mothers were vegans and they couldn’t breast feeds because they weren’t getting the right nutrients so they were feeding their babies hemp seed milk. How are they going the Vitamin K2 to grow from hemp seed. Great food for adults but not for growing babies. Where are they going to get the brain food, where are they going to get the DHA the EPA for their growing brains I had to speak out for the sake of the babies and the children.
Justin: Yes, I think it’s great because what you’ve done is kind of blaze the trail for a lot of the raw vegans. And a lot of raw vegans are coming out and expanding their diets and just think it’s a good thing. I don’t think that you necessarily have to throw the baby out with the bath water because you want to support factory farming but you can solve that problem with grass fed, ethically raised beef, right?
Susan: Yes. And like I say in Beyond Broccoli, I say okay, you’re going to spend twice for meat but you need half as much. You buy less, you pay more but it comes out the same. The average American eats nine ounces or meat every day but it’s been prove you only need about half that. You’ve got protein from your eggs and I don’t recommend dairy, very few people can handle it, but you’ve got protein from eggs and a little bit seeds like quinoa, which is actually a seed, people think it’s a grain but it’s a grain like seed and you’ve got your superior protein sources, chia seeds which is the only seed which is about 50 percent protein. So you really don’t need that much meat and it does help sustain the planet if we all, if Americans would just eat meat once a day instead of two or three times a day.
Justin: Yes, I think there’s this excess of people eating too much meat, especially the factory farm stuff that’s causing havoc, isn’t it?
Susan: And another factor, meat always gets this bad rap. Well, guess what, if you heat any food above 300 degrees Fahrenheit, you’re going to get toxic by-products, which is what I really discussed in both the Live Food Factor and Beyond Broccoli, that you get all toxic carcinogenic by-products. Now, meat, if you barbecue it or grill it, I’ve got news for you, you may as well go out and smoke two packs of cigarettes today. That’s
how many toxic by-products are created heterocyclic amines and there are tons of studies of this.
Justin: I was going to ask you, on my list of questions to ask you, was can you give a little breakdown of the healthiest ways to cook meat? Some people do a marinade, like a ceviche, or broiling. What are the the healthiest ways to cook meat?
Susan: All societies have a tradition of eating raw meat. In Latin America you’ve got ceviche, then you’ve also got sushi from Asia. Then you’ve got steak from Europe. So we all have these traditions of eating raw meat. When I was writing Beyond Broccoli, I was in a car with a bunch of friends and I told them, ‘hey I’m writing this book that advocates eating raw meat’, and they were all utterly disgusted. And then I reminded them, I said ‘excuse me, do you realize that half an hour ago, you guys all paid $2 each for one slice of speared tuna’. Now, seared meat is when it’s heated on both sides, and the inside is raw, but the outside is cooked. That’s one way it’s popularly eaten in America. Ceviche is marinated in lemon or lime juice for at least 4-8 hours so that the parasites are killed. And then you’ve got sushi. Everybody knows what sushi is, a traditional Japanese fish that’s raw. Every tradition has this raw meat. Now, according to a USA Agricultural website, to eat raw meat safely and be totally safe from parasites, you have to freeze it for two weeks. Freeze it at the lowest temperature possible, and then, if you really want to be safe, marinade it for 8 hours before or after freezing it, in lemon or lime juice, some kind of heavy duty citrus juice.
Now, I want to warn you, freezing it will not destroy the bacteria. If you’ve got e-coli in that food, even after you freeze it, the e-coli is still going to be there. It’s just hibernating in the freezer, right? So, freezing it and marinading it is a way to be really safe. The ultimate way to be safe is to be on a 100% raw diet for a couple of years. Get really really cleaned out. I actually personally know people who have been 100% raw, and eating raw meat for years and they can eat any kind of meat and the parasite will just go right through them. Studies have proven this, the parasite has nothing to feed on. There is no debris there and they are so cleaned out. There are no toxins in their intestines or anything for the parasites to feed on, so the parasites just go right through them.
Justin: Wow, what is interesting about that is, a while back my wife and I were collecting our spring water in Lake Hemet and we ran into a guy who told us about, you probably know of him, Aajonus Vonderplanitz.
Susan: Yes, exactly that’s the future of the raw animal food diet.
Justin: It was interesting because he was telling us, I told him that I was doing raw eggs, and I think I had gotten a bad egg at one time, so I took a few months off of it. That was the time we ran into him, and this guy was telling me that he can now eat rotten eggs, he eats that high meat where they ferment the meat. It’s unbelievable what you can get your body used to, isn’t it?
Susan: Yes, I have eaten thousands, literally thousands, of raw eggs. Out of those probably 5000 raw eggs, there was only one time that I got mildly sick. What happened was, I went to a Farmers Market and I got some eggs from an unknown source. Most of them didn’t make me sick at all, but there was one or two bad eggs in the dozen that I got, that made me really bloated with cramps. Well, I called into work sick that day, thinking oh, my gosh, I’ve got salmonella poisoning, gotta call in sick. I knew I wasn’t going to die, I knew I just had to ride it out. I called in sick and then I thought, wait a minute, I have some charcoal pills, activated charcoal, so I’ll just take a handful of those pills, maybe 5-6. Ten minutes later, all the bloating and all the cramps were gone, and I thought, wow, I feel great and I’ve got the day off now.
Justin: Charcoal is a miracle, isn’t it?
Susan: Yeah, it can get rid of any food poisoning and you’ve always got to have it on hand though. I’ve heard horror stories about people who have gotten food poisoning from shrimp. Shellfish is probably one of the more dangerous types of thing, and personally, I would never eat shrimp or any shellfish raw. That’s how dangerous the bacteria can be. But I’ve heard about people who got infected and they just took charcoal and they felt great.
Justin: I’ve done the same thing with charcoal, as well as some clay tablets that I took, and they just worked a miracle. Am I right by saying that most of the bacteria or problems with the meat is on the outside?
Susan: Yes, exactly, Because of factory farming. Now, here in Ecuador, we don’t have this e-coli outbreak, but in the United States factory farming is so unsanitary that yes, you do have to watch out for e-coli, unless you get non-factory farmed meat. If you go to Whole Foods and pay top price for the organic meat, you are less likely to get e-coli. Now, here is the issue. If you buy some steak at a healthy source, like Whole Foods or wherever, grass fed, free-range beef, then you can sear it and you will get rid of any e-coli that might be there. Sear it on the top and the bottom so that it’s raw in the middle. But, if you get hamburger, it’s all ground up, so you’re kind of playing Russian Roulette, because if there is any e-coli, it could be anywhere, outside, middle or underside.
Justin: Yes, I see, I see. That makes sense. We have to take a quick break right here, but when we come back, I want to ask you a couple of questions about the Paleo Diet and I want to ask you also about the Ancestral Diet. I lot of people are talking about those kind of things. So, let me run this quick break and we’ll be right back to talk with Susan Schenck.
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Justin: Okay, today we have Susan Schenck with us, who is the author of The Live Food Factor and Beyond Broccoli and you can find access to her website on the show page at extremehealthradio.com/8
I wanted to ask you Susan, for quite some time, about the Ancestral Diet and whether you can help shed some light on this?
Susan: Certainly. For 2.6 million years, man and his predecessors have been eating meat. A lot of people will say, ‘oh my gosh’ and a lot of vegetarians will say ‘we haven’t adapted to meat’. No, sorry, it’s the opposite.
We haven’t adapted to a vegetarian diet, and, especially, a vegan diet, which omit eggs, dairy and even gelatin capsules. So, it’s the opposite. I dispel all these myths in Beyond Broccoli, and I’m the person to do it, because I was a strict vegan for six years. And then a strict raw vegetarian for another two years, so for eight years I didn’t eat any meat. So, you know, we really were meat eaters, but meat was scarce, it wasn’t like we ate meat every single day. We would eat it a few times whenever we killed an animal or whatever, but it wasn’t like the typical American diet where you eat 9 oz per day, 2-3 meals a day. We would often go without meat for weeks at a time, or whatever, and that’s what really great. Don’t eat meat every single day is what I’m trying to say. Especially the meat that’s heavy and purine like shellfish and eggs, which are not a meat of course, but if you overeat those things you can get gouty arthritis, which is one of the arguments in favor of the vegetarian diet. Our ancestors sometimes got this gouty arthritis from over eating those meats and foods that are rich in purine.
Another thing about the paleo diet is that it was very high in greens. Now greens are very alkalizing. Protein seems to be very acidic , just about every protein. So, to balance that, you’re supposed to eat 20% of your calories acidic and the other 80% alkaline. So, our ancestors, just like our primate cousins, ate a lot of greens. The way we can do that today is by eating a lot of green smoothies. You have to get a heavy duty blender, like a Vita-Mix or a Blendtec, formerly a K-teck machine, and you blend the greens with either fruit or, if you’re really sensitive to fruit or too much sweets, what you do is put a packet of Stevia, blend the greens with some lemon or lime juice, a packet of Stevia and some ginger and that will cut out the bitterness from the greens. The greens can be spinach, collard greens, lettuce or kale.
Any kind of greens that you can find in your grocery store, which, nowadays is limited to about 20 different varieties, but our ancestors ate a thousand different varieties of greens. You want to make sure that greens are a big part of your diet, even though they’re very low in calories. They are not going to make up a big part of your caloric percentage of the pie, but you want to really balance out that meat with a lot of greens. Our ancestors were easy on the fruit and they didn’t eat a lot of nuts and seeds either. Now, the problem with most nuts and seeds is that they are high in the Omega-6 factor, and they had one Omega-6 to one Omega-3. The average American now has about 20-40 Omega-6’s to one Omega-3, which is a recipe for obesity, heart disease and a lot of other really detriments to our health. So, the only seeds that are high in Omega-3 are Chia and Flax seeds.
If you look on the internet, sunflower seeds, are so geared to Omega-6, it’s ridiculous. It’s something like 40,0000 to 1. So sunflower and sesame should all be used in moderation. Walnuts are the nut that is heavier on the Omega-3, so they should be your nuts of choice. But even then, seeds and nuts should just be a handful per day, and that’s the biggest mistake that raw food vegans make. They think that they’re going to get ample protein from nuts and seeds. Guess what? They are really really wrong, and I know, because as soon as I got off that diet I lost 30 lbs. It was the recipe for obesity. If you look up how many calories are in seeds, it’s ridiculous. A cup has about 1000 calories, that’s two-thirds of my daily calories.
Justin: That’s a lot.
Susan: I could eat a cup of those in 10 minutes.
Justin: I wanted to ask you about , I wrote some things down about the Paleo diet, that I see could be missing. I guy like Aajonus he really promotes raw dairy and raw goat dairy and all that kind of stuff.
But with the Paleo diet, I see there is not a lot of emphasis on wild food and there is not a lot of emphasis on herbs. I may be mistaken, Or things like green juices, super foods and these kind of exotic foods that we have access to today, that our ancestors probably would have eaten, but they just didn’t have access to them.
Susan: Let me interject here. Our Paleo ancestors had a range of thousands of different varieties that we don’t have anymore, so they had that big advantage. They also had much more mineralized soil that we have today. So, to compensate for that, we can get super foods. Now, super foods come from all over the world. A lot of them are from South America, you know Maca, Cacao, Cat Claw and different things like that, from the jungle. You’ve got Goji berries that grow almost anywhere, and your know, Acai berries and all those things. The point is, our ancestors did not eat a high glycemic diet.
Berries are very low glycemic and berries are good. So, any time you can eat berries, that’s a good thing, as long as they’re organic. You don’t want to eat conventional strawberries, which are heavily sprayed, only organic blueberries, strawberries and so forth. Yeah, our ancestors ate a very high in greens, low glycemic fruit and meat diet, they did not eat, two things they absolutely did not eat, and I discussed this at length in The Live Food Factor. They did not eat grains or dairy. Grains and dairy have been introduced only with agriculture, which began 10,000 -20,000 years ago, depending on the geographical part of the earth. Very few people can adapt to dairy. Now Aajonus happens to be one, because of his ancestry from Northern Europe.
I personally have friends with a lot of Swedish and Norwegian blood, they can handle dairy. If you’re going to eat dairy, try to eat it raw, which I understand now is almost impossible, even in California, because the food Mafia, or whatever, has gone after them. If you try to eat goat’s dairy, because it’s much more similar to human milk, but the issue is that most people lack the enzymes to be able to digest dairy after they are about three years old. If I eat dairy, I don’t care if it’s raw goat’s milk, I get constipated and get mild sinus plugged up, or whatever. I can’t even eat yogurt without getting these symptoms, and yogurt is probably the most healthful pick of the bunch from all the dairy products.
Grains are the worst, let me tell you, wheat has been so hybrid lately in the last 100 years, and the body doesn’t even recognize it as food. There are some people who are in mental institutions because of eating wheat. My husband’s grandfather was one of these statistics. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in a mental institution. When he somehow figured it out, I don’t know how, but somehow he figured it out that if he didn’t eat wheat, he didn’t have all of these hallucinogenic psychotic outbreaks. So, he got out of that and went on to lead a normal and functional life. Nowadays, that wouldn’t happen, as they would just drug you up and keep you on drugs. Wheat causes constipation, and let me tell you, all my life I was eating wheat because that was the American way, pasta, bread, doughnuts, cookies and crackers, wheat is in everything, all the processed food. It’s hidden in everything, even ketchup. I constantly had
brain fog and people would say to me earth to Susan, earth to Susan, it’s a miracle I got through acupuncture school, it’s a miracle and it was with great effort. As soon as I got off wheat, ten years ago, it was like I was born again. It was like waking up from a nightmare. My mind was clear, I was focused and I was present with everybody I was talking to. It was like a whole new life.
Justin: That’s the same kind of experience I’ve had. I’ve been off wheat since 2003 and there’s no way I could go back on eating that stuff.
Susan: Yes, and have you noticed that even if you cheat a little bit, I mean, here in Ecuador, the wheat is supposedly less hybrid and is better, but even if I go to a potluck dinner, I’d better have a bite of this pasta or this whole wheat integral bread, and I pay for it the next morning. The more I eat, the more constipated I am.
Justin: It’s funny, because you really can’t get to that level of knowledge until you experience it and go for a while without it. You realize then what it does to you,
Susan: Realize, oh my gosh, I had been eating this stuff all of my life. What if I had never eaten it, how great my health would be, if I had never eaten it. Disease begins in the colon, they say, in the intestines. So think how much our colon is plugged up by wheat and dairy.
Justin: Right. I wanted to ask you too, a little bit about, I think it was in the Beyond Broccoli book, where you talked about the Westbrook family and the studies they’ve done with veganism over long periods of time. Am I correct in referencing that study from your book?
Susan: Yes, I mentioned that in Beyond Broccoli and how this family had all of these deficiencies, B12, it’s the same with me. After being a vegan, I had all these B12 deficiencies, to the point where I was getting nervous twitches, I mean really bad. I consulted with Dr. Bass who is now 94 years old, a natural hygienist, who experimented with every kind of diet imaginable and he has concluded the same as me, a high raw, high paleo diet is superior, and he told me, well, you have to at least eat eggs. So I tried eating eggs for two years and my B12 still didn’t go up. Then I even had B12 shots and my B12 didn’t go up. It was like, after not eating meat for 8 years, I thought ‘oh my gosh’ I’ve got to eat meat.
When you’ve gone 8 years without eating meat, you feel like you’re a cannibal or a vampire when you go back to eating it. I went back to eating it, and as soon as I did, my B12 went through the roof. And, I also found, like the Westbrook family stated, that when I ate red meat, that’s when I got tons of energy, and that’s because of the carnitine in it. Carnitine feeds the mitochondrial, which gives you energy. Red meat has gotten a lot of bad rap from the press. The key is that you only need it a few times a week. But, when I started eating red meat, I also noticed that my sleep was so much better and that was because of the amino acid, Taurine, in it. That really helps calm the mind and helps you sleep.
Justin: Wow, that’s amazing and it’s also got Vitamin-K2 doesn’t it, or is that in eggs?
Susan: You know, I’m not sure, but I think it is in animal meats and a little bit in eggs. The only plant food that I found that had K2 was this bizarre food that we’d never heard of in the US, natto, like some Japanese fermented plant food, that smells so horrifically that anybody who eats it in a restaurant in Japan has to be sitting in a separate room.
A separate sitting room. And you know what, K1 can convert to K2 but not efficiently. It doesn’t happen efficiently. K1 is important for certain things like blood clotting. I used to have chronic bloody noses everyday because when I was growing up as a kid we didn’t eat greens and then as soon as I discovered that greens were low calorie and really good for my weight loss thing when I was a teenager, mysteriously the bloody noses went away. Well now I know it was the K1 in those creams but K2, which is really, really important for the bones and K1 does not efficiently convert in the vast majority of people into K2 so that where we’ve to get our animal product.
Justin: Okay. And so some of the foods that are high in K2 that are animal products would be?
Susan: The goose, if I can remember from my book Beyond Broccoli I go into detail about that but the goose fat is, really one of the highest ones.
Justin: I’ve heard some people talk about, I think it was Dr. Brian Clement out of the Hippocrates, I remember him saying one time blending raw greens, because what I do is I’ll blend all my greens in just water and then I’ll add fruit to it or an avocado to it or something, but he was saying that I think blending the greens actually destroys some of the nutrients and things like that. Have you heard of that or do you know much about that?
Susan: Anytime you chop, blend, cut anything like that, yes you do destroy some of the nutrients. If you want to get the most potent nutrient value from your food the best thing to do is pick it fresh from the tree or the ground and cut it up with your teeth. Anytime you get something that’s not freshly picked some of the nutrients are destroyed. Anytime that you cut, blend, chop yes some of the nutrients are destroyed. If you do cut, blend, chop you’ve got to eat it right away for the maximum nutrient content.
Justin: I think a lot of people you know, get on to just a certain diet like a paleo diet or a raw food diet but there’s all kinds of other things to consider, like the freshness of foods, if the foods been hybridized, if it’s wild.
Susan: The thing like picking a mango right from the mango tree, anybody will tell you that it tastes much better than getting it from whole foods.
Justin: Exactly. And I wanted to ask you too, what are your thoughts about, I had a thought going back to the ancestral diet. Let’s say we were designed to eat meat but we ate, let’s say our ancestors for 10 thousand years ate plants. Isn’t the ancestral, the people that are talking about the paleo stuff, isn’t a greater question, wouldn’t it be what are we designed to eat? Because if we’ve eating, let’s say we’ve been eating meat the last 10 thousand years, if we’re not designed for it, sure we could’ve adapted to it but isn’t the greater question, what are we designed to eat?
Susan: Oh, okay, it’s more like what have we evolved eating. There is no design as such, it’s more like what have we evolved eating and all of my research, and I have an entire chapter about this, which has been reviewed by nutritional anthropologist experts and we’ve all eaten meat 2.6 million years. There’s no question about it. We’ve evolved eating meat. And vegetarians will say, “Oh, oh no. We just got by eating meat for 2 million years.” Excuse me! You got by eating meat? Don’t you think if that was a faulty food for us we would have died out by 2.6 million years? It’s more like okay, I have a whole chapter on the spiritual question of eating meat, I answer every bodies objectives.
Why?
Because I had those objectives myself as a vegetarian, spiritual, moral, ecological, all of these questions I have answered them in Beyond Broccoli and the issue is that we truly evolved eating meat, now maybe perhaps it’s not the most ecological thing for us to do right now and that’s why India developed the whole spiritual paradigm of it’s better to not eat meat because they had to develop that to convince the masses not to kill their cows, not to slaughter their cows because there was a huge overpopulation issue.
So what I’m saying now in Beyond Broccoli is that it’s impossible for most of us, unless you’re really, really filthy rich to go back to the hunter diet because we just simply don’t have enough land for all of us to eat wild meat. But we just do the best we can. And, you know, we just try to do the best we can and we really can get by with a lot less meat than what we think.
Justin: Interesting. When we come back, we’ve got to run a quick ad here, but when come back I want to ask you about a book, I haven’t read
it myself but I’m sure you probably know about it, it’s called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Susan: Yes. I critiqued that book in Beyond Broccoli.
Justin: Oh, good. I want to ask about that. And also want to talk to you about pregnancy, and a lot of people doing a raw vegan pregnancy and a lot of people having issues with that. So we’ll talk to you about that in one second.
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Okay, we are with Susan Schenck and her website is livefoodfactor.com and it will be linked to this show page. I want to ask you about a book Susan, that you mentioned in your book Beyond Broccoli, called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. The premise, from what I’ve understood is, that the cooking process is what helps man I guess evolve a larger brain.
Susan: Oh, listen Justin. I spent two pages blasting this guy, and if you look on Amazon, I even wrote a review blasting his whole theory. I mean, do you want me to read some highlights from Beyond Broccoli about how I argue about this?
Justin: Yes, I would love that.
Susan: He says, for those of you who want to lose weight, it has been proven that eating raw actually makes you lose weight, even if you eat the same number of calories, cooked or raw. Why is that? Because cooking increases the glycemic index so that your body releases more insulin, and insulin, one of it’s main messages as a hormone is to store fat, store fat, store fat. So, if you eat it raw, you’re not going to get that insulin release telling your body to store fat. He claims that this is an evolutionary advantage to have all of these extra calories, that it helps grow the brain. I say, absolutely not. It has been proven, in my favorite book.
I read all of these nutritional anthropology books and my favorite one was Survival Of The Fattest. The author of that book, who has a Ph.D argues that it was the fat that evolved our brain. Yes, it was the DHA, which is a fat, that increased our brain, DHA. Now, if you increase the calories by cooking the food, you don’t increase the DHA. If anything, you’d destroy it. So that argument is totally wrong. You know, cooking may have allowed us to gain more calories to over-populate the planet, but the evolution of the individual is not concerned with the longevity of the individual, only the survival of the species. And he also claims that studies show that cooking produces toxins need not alarm us, because these toxins will effect only animals since humans have adapted to them.
That is ridiculous, I have found hundreds of studies, many of which I cite in The Live Food Factor, which prove that cooking creates toxic byproducts that absolutely are carcinogenic and create disease. If you cook fats too high, you get lipid peroxides. If you cook proteins too high, especially barbecuing or grilling, you create heterocyclic amines, with starches it’s acrylamides. And cooking is so chaotic, the chemicals created by cooking have been proven to be so chaotic that the body will never adapt to them.
Even if we evolve another 2 million years, we will never adapt to cooking, because the chemicals are too chaotic and predictable. So, there is a lot of arguing that I go into. I also mention in Beyond Broccoli, that blood tests have proven that, and I mention this in The Live Food Factor as well, that those who cook food, show in their blood tests, intestinal leukocyte, and aggregation of white blood cells. This has been shown, not to occur, with people who eat raw food.
Justin: Is this something where I have heard recently that if you eat 50% of your meal cooked and if you’re able to eat a salad with it, and make 50% of your meal raw, does that kind of cuts down the (inaudible).
Susan: Yes, it helps reduce that. If you eat the rough part, especially if you eat it first, you know. It’s always better. Edward Howell, M.D spent his whole life proving that, and he wrote two books about it, which I cite at length in The Live Food Factor, but his bottom line is the more cooked food you eat, the sooner you’re going to die. That’s part of the reason that all these calorie restrictions diets prove to prolong the life. It’s partly because most of the food used in these experiments is cooked.
Justin: And, he did a lot of work with enzymes, didn’t he?
Susan: Yes, Edward Howell, spent his whole life studying enzymes. He’s like one of the backbones of the raw food diet. If you go to any M.D., they are going to say, ‘oh, you don’t need to eat raw food, your pancreas will crank out the digestive enzymes’ , but Edward Howell proved that your pancreas has a limited ability to do that. It has a very limited capacity, and when you hit the end of that, you’re going to die. Whereas, people who eat raw foods get those food enzymes, you know, so they don’t need the pancreas to compensate by cranking out digestive enzymes, and they live longer. A high raw diet definitely keeps you more youthful, energetic and younger, and very likely living longer.
Justin: It just makes a lot of sense that we probably didn’t eat any cooked foods for many, many years.
Susan: Yes, and when you think about it, yes sure, fire was thought to have been discovered 400,000 years ago, so very likely we did start cooking a little bit of the food we ate at that time, but really, until 100 years ago, we ate at least 50% raw. I remember my grandmother, from her dying bed, craving strawberries. What are the people nowadays on their dying beds craving? Pop Tarts, Kellogg cereal. I mean, you know, the average American eats 95% cooked. A lot of Americans, the only raw food they get, is iceberg lettuce, tomato and onions on their McDonald’s cheeseburger. I mean, it’s really pathetic.
Justin: That’s the only thing that’s keeping them alive, right?
Susan: They are definitely not being kept in good health because of that. It’s like, when you think about it, it’s only been in the last 50-75 years that we’ve had all these cooking gadgets, microwaves, deep fat broilers. Even the traditional Thanksgiving turkey was baked and now you can deep fry it. You know, there are all of these cooking gadgets that our grandparents didn’t have. They were forced to eat at least 50% raw, you know.
Justin: Right, what do you think about some of the foods that people should be eating for pregnancy and things like that?
Susan: Definitely, they need to be eating a certain amount of foods with DHA. In fact, even Stephen Cunnane, who is the author of that textbook that I love, Survival of the Fattest, makes the most common sense. I studied all of these different theories of the evolution of the human brain and this one makes the most sense of all, eating the DHA from the shellfish, the fish and the eggs, that created our brains to grow. He says there is just one critical period to get brain development correct. So human brains need to develop in the womb, and very quickly, the first year of life post-natal, and if you’re a pregnant vegan woman and you’re not giving that kid the intellectual advantage, well, guess what, during his whole life he will never reach his potential of intellect. The same thing is that when you have a kid, his brain is growing through his teenage and young adult years. If you’ve got him on a strict vegan diet, he might be smart, but he’s not going to reach the potential.
Justin: We just don’t know what he could be, right?
Susan: You’ve got that critical period, that one chance, to get the brain development to reach it’s potential. And, you know of course, pregnant women should not each fish, but they can eat the small fish, like sardines, small fatty oily fish. Sardines, herring and mackerel, and shrimp. They can eat those, minimize their mercury and toxins. They can eat that and get the great grass-fed beef too, omega-3 eggs that are from a really good healthy source. You can eat that and get your brain food. You have to get those minerals and the DHA in there to feed your baby’s brain.
Justin: What are some of those foods that you like and include in your diet, whether they be super foods, herbs or animal foods. What are your favorite foods?
Susan: Well, I don’t like the taste of sardines and mackerel, but I’m working on some recipes to make them better. Studies have shown, and I cite these studies in Beyond Broccoli, that the happiest people in the world are the ones that eat fish, and probably the smartest people too. Look at
Japan, they are the smartest people probably on the planet. They are probably the only country that has a surplus, instead of debt problems, and it’s all the fish they eat and all the seafood.
But you want to get it low in mercury, so it’s got to be the small ones, not the big ones like tuna and swordfish. Those are out, we can’t eat those anymore. So, I try to eat those and I like the super foods, goji berries and cacao. Coconut butter has been proven to reverse Alzheimer’s. It’s also great, I cite studies in The Live Food Factor, for weight loss, keeping your weight down, great for antibacterial, great for the skin, if you want to use it externally. And then there’s acai berries, which are good for getting rid of belly fat.
Eggs, I believe, are a great super food, as long as they’re from chickens that are truly free-range, not the free-range label used in the US, where they get 5 minutes to roam around, and that’s it. We want ones that are fed not grains, as that’s when they get sick, we want the omega-3 fed natural diet, flax seed , insects and worms and that kind of thing. Those are definitely a super food. Grass fed beef, which is very common place in Ecuador, but a real luxury in the U.S.
Justin: Right. Now are those very expensive, like the grass-fed beef, like they are here?
Susan: Very cheap here, probably half what you pay in the U.S. They don’t even have the factory farmed beef here. You can see the cattle for yourself. They are out in the park. They are tied up, but they are out there eating grass all day.
Justin: You know what we have to do, is to get the farmers to water their grass with ocean minerals.
Susan: Yes, that would definitely be great. Ocean minerals will mineralize things. When I was in California, one of the super foods that I highly recommend is wheatgrass juice. Grow it yourself, as it’s too expensive to pay $1 or $2 a shot in a juice bar. Just grow it yourself, get a juicer, juice it yourself and water it with ocean water if you happen to live near the ocean, so that you can get all of the minerals.
Justin: I believe that grass is the only plant that picks up all 92 minerals. Is that correct?
Susan: I really don’t know. I do know that the ocean has all of the minerals. You can water anything with the ocean water, and that’s where you’re going to get the best results.
Justin: Wow, that’s amazing. Now, wrapping up, what are some of the things you’re going to be working on, and are you doing any lectures in the United States ever, or what kind of things are you going to be doing in the future.
Susan: Right now, I’m traveling to the U.S, but it’s more for shopping and visiting friends and family, but I do lectures and classes here in Quanka. I’m just kind of going more inward spiritually than I am doing research on nutrition right now.
Justin: Great. Are you planning on writing anymore books or just promoting the books you’ve got.
Susan: I’m planning to write a spiritual book, and you know how everybody says it’s almost impossible to get enlightened. It’s so hard, blah blah blah. Well, one day I woke up and realized I had four friends who are enlightened, so I’m interviewing them for my next book.
Justin: Great, Susan’s website for those who haven’t written it down, is thelivefoodfactor.com, so you can always visit her website and find out what she’s up to. You can pick up her books, The Live Food Factor and Beyond Broccoli on Amazon, which will also be linked up on our show page here, and we will get a little commission.
That’s about it. Thanks so much Susan for joining us today. I really appreciate your time and energy here.
Susan: Thank you so much for having me Justin.
Justin: Would you mind staying on after I close out the show?
Susan: Sure, go ahead.
Justin: Thank you so much everybody for joining us today. We really, really appreciate it. If you found any value from this show and learned a lot from it, please click the like button and follow us on Facebook, and visit our store as well. We have lots of great products in there too. If you would like to donate, please feel free to do that. You can donate as little as $1 or anything you’d like. That’s how we thrive and that’s how we keep the engines running here at extremehealthradio.com Thanks so much for listening today and we’ll catch you on the next broadcast.
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