The RAVE Diet

The book goes off on the details of the diet. For now, how ‘bout a quick look at the main points?

No Refined Foods: If it came in a box or in a package, you probably don’t want it in your body. We want to eat whole foods as close to their natural state as possible! ESPECIALLY if you’re suffering from a chronic disease (and/or are committed to preventing one!). Think about it. Our bodies have evolved over *millions* of years. We weren’t made to eat wacky stuff made in a factory!

No Animal Products: We’re gonna focus on this one quite a bit in the Note. In short: If you want cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other not-so-fun health issues, eat a lot of animal products. If you don’t, don’t.

No Vegetable Oils: We eat WAY too much fat. And vegetable oils are essentially liquid fat. Again, if you want to reverse chronic disease, cut this out. As Anderson says: “Imagine what an oil spill in the ocean does to the marine life it encounters. Most are killed, some are maimed. Birds covered with oil cannot fly. This is what happens when high amounts of fat hit your blood stream. Immune system cells die off, those that survive cannot “swim” in your blood stream, they become blinded and as a result cannot recognize and kill cancer cells. Now imagine eating three high-fat meals a day. Americans have created a constant oil slick in their blood streams, which is caused by breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

No Exceptions: This diet is serious. And, if you want to recover your health or maintain your optimal health, you need to be serious as well. Is it extreme? Depends on how you look at it. Which is more extreme: Modifying your diet to align with nature’s laws or cutting open your breastplate to inflate an artery? :)

+ Exercise: We’re made to move!!! Not exercising is like taking a depressant and writing an invitation to the Obesity Fairy to come pay you a visit. Not a good idea. Exercise!! :)

There ya go. RAVE = No Refined Foods, No Animal Products, No Vegetable Oils and No Exceptions + Exercise!! :)

How amazing is THAT?

To recap: Before World War II, about *75%* of Belgians had heart disease. Then the Germans came in and took the meat out. Heart disease rates plummeted BECAUSE THEY HAD NO MEAT. Then the farm animals came back. And, so did the heart disease.

It seriously makes me scratch my head how stuff like this isn’t commonly known and plain common sense.

Exercise. Exercise. Exercise.

Are you noticing a theme here? EXERCISE IS HUGE!! It’s our first line of defense against everything from obesity to depression. Fact is VERY simple: We were engineered to move. When we don’t we suffer the consequences.

Walter Bortz puts it this way in Dare to Be 100 (see Notes): “The tremendous value that physical exercise provides to your body is established beyond any reasonable doubt. Dr. Bob Butler said, “If there was a drug that provided all the benefits that exercise does, the whole world would be taking it.” Of course, there is no such drug; the value of exercise must come from an activity program of your own devising and accomplishment. You cannot delegate exercise, and you can’t get something for nothing.”

So… Are you moving?

It’s pretty amazing how thoroughly conditioned we are to believe that we MUST get our protein from animal sources. It’s as if we’ll fall over and die if we don’t eat an adequate amount of meat every day. Huh?

Chalk that one up to some pretty sweet lobbying by the good ol’ meat and dairy industries. Plus some pretty awesome marketing by swell snake oil salesmen like Atkins.

So, what percentage of protein do you think we really need? 5%? 10%? 20%? 30%? More? Less?

Depends on who you ask, of course, but the World Health Organization pegs the number at about 4 1/2 percent for both men and women. Surprising, eh?

Here’s another pop quiz: Take broccoli. What percent of calories do you think are protein? 1%? 5%? 10%? 25%?

How about 45%? Yep. BROCCOLI is 45% protein. Really? Yah. There’s a lot more protein in those veggies than you’d guess. And it comes without all the ick that makes us sick.

Unfortunately, the marketing spend for animal foods to plant foods is approximately $1,000,000,000 to $1. The fact is simple: As long as you’re getting enough calories, it’s almost impossible to be protein deficient.

Did you know that humans beings are the only animal to a) drink milk beyond its development phase; and, b ) drink milk from another animal? Yep.

Couple things here. First, if you’re going to drink milk as an adult you might as well drink it from your OWN mother, eh? Oh, wait. That’s kind of gross. MUCH cooler to drink milk from a COW. Or a goat. Yah, that’s awesome.

Fact is, we’re so removed from the actual process of acquiring milk that we fail to see its absurdity. Here’s one way to solve it: Set up a rule such that every tenth time you drink milk you need to tug on a cow’s teet and take it straight up. That should curtail the unnatural and unhealthy behavior, eh? ;)

Seriously though. Think about it. A cow’s milk is engineered by The Big Guy in the Sky to help a ~50 pound newborn calf become a 300 pound (!) cow within a year. Do you think that’s what WE need in our bodies?

Despite the enormous amount of marketing dollars spent trying to convince us otherwise (and the countless clueless celebrities promoting the cause), Milk DOES NOT DO a body good. At all. So quit drinking it.

P.S. When I was growing up, I was sick quite a bit. Ear infections. Tonsils yanked out. Allergy shots every week. Constant mucus. Fun. When I cut dairy out of my diet, my allergies pretty much went away. If you have allergies, cut dairy (milk, cheese, ice cream, etc.) out of your diet for a month. I GUARANTEE you you’ll feel better than ever.

* waves pom poms *

Try it!

Antacids. This one fires me up as well. Let’s think about it for a moment: We have so much acidity in our system that we’re essentially throwing up in our mouths (ick) and we think a PILL is the solution? Really?

Riiiiight.

Or, maybe we can spend 10 seconds thinking about what we might be EATING that could be contributing to the problem. But, of course, that would require taking some responsibility for our poor habits and that’s a lot more work than taking a pill, eh? And, unfortunately, the last thing most sheeple, er, people, want to do is THINK. Much easier to just mindlessly follow the nonsense being advertised to us.

Gah! Come on.

We’re acidic because we’re eating refined foods, animal products and other *crap.* Cut that out and you can throw away your antacids forever.

One day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, the idea that increasing dairy products to solve osteoporosis will be seen as the “swindle” it is today.

There has never been a SINGLE case of calcium deficiency ever documented. And, as Anderson says, there’s a correlation between calcium consumption and osteoporosis such that the MORE calcium a culture consumes, the HIGHER its rates of osteoporosis. Fact is, best way to get strong bones is to exercise and eat a plant-based diet.

As Anderson says: “Bones are just like muscles. The single best thing you can do to prevent (and reverse) osteoporosis is to start exercising your bones, because a lack of physical exercise is the primary cause of osteoporosis.”

We talked about this Idea in the Note on The China Study.

To recap: Campbell was able to turn cancer on and off by adjusting the levels of animal protein consumed.

That’s huge. And, of course, these patterns of high cancer rates associated with higher consumption of animal products were confirmed in his “China Study”—the largest epidemiological study ever conducted.

I’m repeating myself here but why this stuff isn’t common knowledge and common sense is baffling. More: “Dr. Campbell did his studies using dairy protein (casein), but he also investigated whether nutrients other than dairy protein might promote or reverse cancers. With stunning consistency, nutrients from all animal foods grew tumors, while nutrients from all plant foods shrank tumors. In yet further tests, it was found that casein, the primary protein in all dairy products, was the most aggressive cancer promoter of all.”

If you needed to quit smoking would you switch to light cigarettes or would you simply quit?

Right. You’d just quit. T. Colin Campbell puts it this way in The China Study: “If your friend had been a smoker all of his or her life and looked to you for advice, would you tell them to cut down to only two cigarettes a day, or would you tell them to quit smoking all together? It’s in this way that I’m telling you that moderation, even with the best intentions, sometimes makes it more difficult for you to succeed in this.”

One more question for you: Would you ever buy your little kids cigarettes? Didn’t think so. But, think about this thought B.A. Stoll: “Most people don’t let their children smoke, yet they regularly take them to fast-food restaurants and that’s just as risky, in terms of cancer, as if they had bought them a pack of Marlborough cigarettes.”

That pretty much sums it up. The answer to our health challenges is NOT in a pill. It’s in our lifestyle choices.