Ex-Vegan (11 Years): Please, Don't Force Your Children to Go Vegan

Watch on YouTube · 2021-02-16 · 44 min

[video] 0:00 I went vegan, I actually kind of went vegan twice. I went vegan first in 2007 because I had really bad acne. I was 23 at the time and I was put on Accutane twice and I had a doctor saying you know I'll put you on again because it just wasn't going away. So and obviously I was just on like a standard whatever American diet and I So that's when I started kind of looking into, you know, I need to find a way to fix this. Because I didn't want to be on Accutane again. It's a horrible medication. It gives you, like, depression and dry everything and joint pain, night vision problems. Like, it's just bad. So I started looking into, I guess, alternative stuff. And first I came across the Skinny Bitch books.

[video] 1:00 Um, so those are obviously like a vegan book. And I did that for maybe like a day or so until I came across David Wolf's book. It's nature's first law. It's like this funny book where they're hanging out of a tree and, um, on every end of every chapter it's cooked food is poison. You know, it's, it's a very, uh, yeah. So I read that book and I was like, you know, this makes sense. This is the one thing I've never tried, right? Like a raw food diet, but of course it's raw food as in like fruit and leaves and nuts and seeds and stuff. So, so, but I was hooked and I was like, okay, I'm going to try this. So the first thing I remember doing is I went to the fridge and I'm like, okay, what's raw in my fridge, my parents' fridge. And I found like a head of cauliflower and I just took the head of cauliflower and I just ate a whole head of cauliflower. Like that was my interpretation of the raw food diet.

[video] 2:00 And then, um, of course I kept on reading and I kept, I discovered Doug Graham, who's 80, 10, 10. And that to me made more sense. You know, the fruits, at least that's what like, you know, chimpanzees eat or whatever, and we must be like them. So, uh, so yeah, so that made more sense to me. And I started doing 80, 10, 10 very seriously and got into all the like, forums, like 30 bananas a day, like really hardcore into that kind of stuff. And I think soon after that, I went traveling. I was in New Zealand. And the first thing I kind of remember is the bloating. Like I was just really bloated all the time. Uh, and I, I remember one time, like it just got, my stomach was just so big and I was hanging out with someone and they were like shocked at just how big my stomach was and worried that like, you know, I had this issue. And of course, like it passed, like it was fine.

[video] 3:00 But then, um, And I was like, you know, it must be my food combining, like I'm not food combining properly. So then I started, you know, really making sure like I food combine and everything. And it did help with the bloating and stuff. But I had lost a lot of weight right away. Like I went down, I think, probably 20 pounds right away. And I lost my period pretty much right away for the next year, I would say.

[video] 3:30 And I also had like those little candida bumps on my forehead, but I didn't really realize it until one time I was taking like a nutrition course at like a naturopathic college in New Zealand. And I never finished the course because my nutrition knowledge was not so good at the time. But a naturopath looked at me and she was like, you're eating too much sugar. And I was like, no, I can't be eating too much sugar. It's natural sugar. You know, it's fruit sugar. It's I'm doing the best diet I possibly could. Anyway, but she knew right off the bat, you know, I'm eating too much sugar.

[video] 4:09 I ended up going to Harley and Freely's like first ever raw retreat. And, you know, I met a lot of people there and...

[video] 4:20 And I ended up doing some traveling on my own in Australia and stuff. And when I was in Australia, I was doing like a permaculture course and we were camping and stuff. And I remember I was like, you know, I'm on the most natural diet. Like I shouldn't really have to be brushing my teeth, right? Because, you know. it shouldn't harm your teeth like monkeys in the wild don't brush their teeth so I kind of stopped brushing like not I would still kind of like pick the stuff off and if there was something I would kind of brush it off but I kind of stopped kind of brushing my teeth in a way and and they didn't feel so good so I kind of started again just with water but when I came home from that trip I went to the dentist and I had like erosion on my two front teeth and I My back teeth were really bad. I still have my wisdom teeth from childhood. And they were just all decayed.

[video] 5:19 And him and the hygienist were looking at me and they were like, what are you doing? Because they've known me since a kid. And they're like, what is wrong? They're like, are you sucking on candies all day or drinking pop? And I was like, no, I was just eating fruit. And they couldn't figure it out. They thought I was lying. My teeth couldn't be that bad, right? So I ended up getting... four fillings here and then one of my front teeth filled and later on I had to get the other front tooth filled as well um So, yeah, and then I ended up going to, I joined, Doug Graham had this community in Hawaii. He didn't start it, but he put his name on it, kind of. Someone else was running it. And I actually went there and I was like, I want to join this community. It sounds amazing. They had like 500 fruiting trees and, yeah. Yeah, and you get your own hut.

[video] 6:19 You had to put in money, and then you get your own hut, and, like, you get access to all the trees and stuff. Anyway, so I ended up doing that, and it was, like, I don't know. It was an interesting experience. It ended up totally falling apart because there was so much infighting, and everyone lost all their money, and it was a pretty bad experience. Doug Graham never once showed up to the community. Like, he just kind of put his name on it and... got his share of whatever. But I remember having mad cravings for fats because I was on like a low fat diet of mostly fruit. And I was trying so hard not to eat these giant avocados that were there. And they were just like falling on the ground. No one was eating them because we're all like low fat vegans or whatever. And I had these like crazy cravings. And I actually remember coming home from the community at one point and getting my blood tested.

[video] 7:18 And I was low in B12 and D, which was kind of weird because I was out in the sun all the time, like gardening and doing all this stuff. Oh, and something I forgot is when I was in the community, I got a really bad staph infection. Like I just had like a little mosquito bite and I scratched it. And then it just became this big hole in the side of my leg. And I could not heal from it. I was trying to like do a fast to heal it and it just wasn't, I don't know, wasn't healing. So I ended up coming home and it kind of just cleared up, I think, because like Hawaii, it's just a better environment for staff and here it's just not, it's cold. And yeah, so yeah. It ended up healing, but I went septic twice because I just refused to go see a doctor. Probably because my diet was so bad, I just had a lot of trouble fighting it.

[video] 8:17 But anyway, I ended up somehow miraculously recovering from that.

8:21 I have one question about the teeth. You said vitamin D. Could it be also that you were mineral deficient and the fat-soluble vitamins are missing? That's why you had the teeth problems also, not only the sugar?

[video] 8:33 I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, there's probably a host of things like I've read K2 before and definitely like we were eating fruit, we were eating a bit of greens, but in Hawaii like greens don't grow very well. Like you get the tropical spinach and stuff, but like to get greens and stuff, you have to go to the market and buy it. It's just, it doesn't grow. I don't know. So yeah, we were definitely just eating mostly fruit there. So definitely wasn't getting minerals and just depleting myself of everything. When I came home, though, I actually started trying to eat like sashimi and stuff like that because I still wanted to be raw. But but I knew like intuitively like this.

[video] 9:20 isn't really working so I started eating a bit of sashimi and the cravings were so crazy I remember one time I was at my parents house while I was living there and I just went to their fridge and I had this kind of almost out of body experience where I just started eating whatever was in their fridge like I didn't care if it was vegan I didn't care if it was like it was those tubs of potatoes you know like potato salad like terrible from the grocery store and like chicken and uh coleslaw like whatever they had I just gorged on it and then I was like you know okay I gotta get back to back to normal again and I'd try to you know be raw again and it was just that was kind of um a big turning point for me was like I can't handle these cravings anymore like I would smell food and just go crazy and but it wasn't until I got pregnant with my first son so I was 28 then

[video] 10:17 that I actually decided that I'm not going to be vegan anymore. Because I started reading Weston A. Price, actually, like stuff from the foundation, and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to damage my baby. I had the insight, at least at that time, to say, okay, I might damage my baby. It's my first time being pregnant, and I'm going to do Weston A. Price. So I ended up doing kind of like... high fruits with meat version of it and that didn't work out so well because he ended up being really small he had like IUGR I think it's called where like he's trying to spare energy like his head was growing but the rest of his body wasn't growing so then I just added in like a ton of I probably wasn't eating enough either I added in a ton of like fats and just more like milks and stuff and then he ended up growing and he was fine

[video] 11:14 Uh, so yeah, so I did that for a while and I stayed on Weston A. Price and he was raised basically Weston A. Price until he was about one. And then I got pregnant with my daughter. So she's my second. And when I was pregnant with her, I had all these cravings for fruit because, you know, you have cravings when you're pregnant. pregnant and I tend to want like juicy watery things when I'm pregnant and so my mind for some reason went what must mean we're fruitarians because I have all these cravings for fruit like it must be that um and so I decided to go back to my raw food diet again um what was I going to say about that Yeah. Oh, and I think it was also like a bit like I missed the kind of community.

[video] 12:13 I missed the kind of image of being a raw foodist or something like there was something about it that was very like not about the food. It was kind of more like that identity or something that I missed. So so, yeah, I went back to that and yeah. through the pregnancy I was mostly raw but then eventually I ended up adding back in some cooked food so it was kind of like raw till four and then it transitioned eventually to kind of being green smoothies every day in the morning and then cooked food the rest of the day but during that time I wrote down all the things that I experienced so the first thing was like these seasonal allergies like

[video] 12:55 I'd never had seasonal allergies before in my life and then all of a sudden every whatever spring I was getting hay fever and it was really bad to the point where like I could not breathe and I refused to take medication but like it was really bad like I was very much suffering during that time and I kind of realized cutting out bananas and I think it was mangoes actually made it better like my hay fever better. Another thing I started getting were these hives on my face. Like my face would just be so itchy. And again, I think that was bananas. Like I think I was getting like a really bad banana allergy because I would buy these boxes of bananas and just go through like a whole box or two boxes sometimes a week and just eat so many bananas. So yeah, hives on my face. And one time I just broke up completely in hives. I was really afraid I was going to like, you know, my throat would seize up, but it didn't.

[video] 13:54 When I gave birth to my daughter, I got like a whole bunch of gray hairs, which was interesting, like probably the mineral thing that you're saying. And also like I lost a ton of hair, which I don't remember happening with my son. I think like a lot of women lose hair after pregnancy, but like it didn't happen the first time to me. So I'm thinking, you know, it's a bit unusual for me to be losing that much hair.

[video] 14:22 And I was getting, I think that's kind of the timeline when I started like really getting regular migraines. I had done, before I moved to the community and everything, I did a fast, a long water fast with Loren Lockman in his, yeah, he was in Panama at the time and I did one there. And I remember getting my very first migraine during that fast. Like it was just the worst pain I've ever had in my life. But they hadn't really been regular. And I think it was kind of after I gave birth to my daughter that the migraines started coming more regularly. So she was kind of okay. Like she looked kind of chubby and stuff and still okay up until she was about a year old because she was breastfed. I breastfed her for two years. And I breastfed my son the same way for two and a half years.

[video] 15:16 But for her, once she turned one, she started getting decay in her four front teeth, mainly like the two outer front four, but then the two middle two. And she was still like very much on breast milk.

[video] 15:34 but she was eating a lot of fruit too. And I would sometimes give her dried fruit, but I really was careful about that because I knew the dried fruit sticks and stuff. And I knew I had teeth problems.

[video] 15:45 So, and she was also very small at that point. My doctor was like, she must not be getting enough iron. I never had her tested because I didn't want to poke her with, I don't know, stuff and drying blood from like a one-year-old is really kind of horrible experience so I was like you know I'll just I kind of agreed to give her a multivitamin and just supplement her and then I had to have her teeth repaired several times because when a child that young has teeth problems they have to go under anesthesia usually and have like it's like a procedure in a hospital they were gonna charge me four thousand dollars and I didn't have four thousand dollars and But I refused. I was like, I don't want to do that. So I had to try to kind of find dentists in the area who would repair her teeth without putting her under. And that was really a pain to do that.

[video] 16:42 And, you know, she had to sit through so much painful dental procedures because I didn't want to put her under. And like kids... they bang themselves all the time but the fillings were constantly falling off and I'd have to get them re-repaired so it was just kind of a nightmare and her teeth still to this day have you know those spots and she's just starting to lose them because she's six now but they have to keep those teeth for a really long time so It's not good. You don't want your kids' teeth to be affected. And then, so I started, actually, my mom pointed out to me, she's like, you know, you had hair when you were two years old. Like, you had a full head of hair, and my daughter did not. She had kind of like a mohawk. Like, it was growing here, but nothing kind of on the sides. And she pointed that out to me, and I was like, you know... I kind of gave in a little bit. I was like, okay, I'll start giving her, I gave them raw egg yolk.

[video] 17:42 And I actually even looked into like that, you know, that cricket powder that we can buy it now at our grocery stores. But I was like, okay, like maybe it's cause apes eat bugs and we should be eating bugs or something. So I started trying to use that and it's, it's horrible. It tastes really bad. And I tried to sneak it into smoothies and it just, I don't know. It was okay, I guess. Um, So, yeah, and another thing my daughter also had was, like, a really bloated stomach all the time. Like, it just always looked big. And I was also looking back at pictures of my son because he didn't have a lot of the dental decay because he got such a good start. But his teeth were actually starting to look kind of stained, like brown stains. I didn't really notice at the time. And his stomach was also bloated like that. Like, they just always had these bloated stomachs.

18:35 What did your children typically eat on a diet?

[video] 18:39 It changed throughout the years, but at first I was kind of feeding them a lot of fruit and green smoothies when I was kind of more raw. And then when I started kind of catching on to like, okay, this is destroying their teeth, I slowly switched over to more like cooked vegan foods. And I started looking into supplements like D and K2 and stuff. And I did all those. But I just don't think they were absorbing them properly or something. Like, it just didn't work. I remember going to the Woodstock Fruit Festival and talking to other parents, and so many of the kids there had the same front four teeth decay. And, you know, they would just chalk it up to... I don't know, everyone gets DK or it's normal in kids, but like it's very common in vegan kids and especially raw vegan kids to have this. I kind of stopped, phased out the eggs and stuff at one point and I was more, okay, no, we're doing vegan. The pregnancy nausea was really bad.

[video] 19:38 And this time, instead of craving, I kind of crave fruit, but... Every time I ate it, I felt really sick. Like I just I didn't feel good. And the only thing that kind of appealed to me was like some of the food at Whole Foods that was like had meat in it. And so a couple of times I cheated and I had it and I felt really good afterwards. But I was like, no, I'm vegan. I'm meant to be vegan. And I remember making myself like this big bowl of potatoes and just throwing it up. And I've never thrown up in any of my pregnancies. And this was the first time I ever just threw up. And but like I refused to do meat. I just kept going and I became very anemic to the point where. I couldn't breathe like I literally just like it was a stressful thing to breathe and I ended up getting a flu and I could not shake that flu.

[video] 20:32 I was in bed with my winter coat covers up to my neck and freezing and it took me like a month to shake like this flu and then I got colds and it was just really horrible and I think that's from like the anemia right like you can't heal from anything and probably a host of other things. At this point like I noticed more wrinkles kind of in my skin but I had actually now going back through pictures like I noticed like the wrinkles kind of started a couple years after I went raw vegan that's when I first noticed them and I was about maybe 25 or 26 when those started so it seemed a little

[video] 21:11 weird that or coincidental you know that I went raw vegan and all of a sudden I was getting kind of these wrinkles I was also skinnier like thinner my face was very thin especially after I did my water fast it was very thin and yeah and so this time I just noticed that and my son was okay like I find babies tend to be kind of okay on your breast milk as long as I don't know I think it helps that I went Weston A. Price for a while. I supplemented a ton and he sort of looked chubby and stuff but at one point he didn't like the vegan food. The only thing he kind of liked was tofu but I didn't want to give him tofu too much because even as a vegan I knew that tofu wasn't good for babies and stuff. So he started kind of losing weight at one point and that kind of just scared me and I was like

[video] 22:11 I don't want to raise another skinny baby with teeth problems. I don't know, I just had this feeling like I don't want to do this again.

22:18 And what year was this approximately?

[video] 22:22 He was born in 2019, so not too long ago. Yeah, so his weight curve was just kind of going down or he was dropping off of it kind of.

[video] 22:37 He still has a little bit of demineralization in one of the first teeth that erupted while I was still on a vegan diet then, so I kind of think it's that that gave him that demineralization.

[video] 22:54 So at that point, I started watching your videos and some of vegan deterioration videos, and I started to see all these vegans are getting the same...

[video] 23:07 the same things and I started to see a pattern and and some of the things they had mentioned I was like oh my gosh I had never noticed it in myself like the hair loss again with my second son I lost a ton of hair and I had these you know bald spots right here and I was looking at a picture of me and I like yeah I really had it like really bad and Another thing that I had noticed only after sort of watching some of these videos was my nose over the years at the tip had gone like, like it was like a C shape like this at the tip. And I compared it to pictures from when I was

[video] 23:51 young and I didn't have that like I never had like a super straight nose but it it wasn't like like this and and then I once I started eating animal products again it slowly kind of fixed itself a little bit and it yeah it was kind of scary to think like it was disfiguring me being on this diet um I remember so I decided to start adding in the muscles and the eggs again And then I remember the first time I had like a big animal food meal, like my heart would just pound, like I would get these adrenaline rushes from, from all this food again. And I just felt so relaxed and like the anxiety just kind of melted away almost instantaneously. I don't feel that I really have it anymore at all. Um, The anemia obviously went away. My skin tone looked better.

[video] 24:49 I remember actually my daughter had these yellow bottoms of her feet were very yellow and those have normalized since we started eating animal products again.

[video] 25:03 Another thing too I noticed was when I started eating a lot more animal products like my body just I obviously gained weight back but like I had these muscles again that I hadn't had in years. And I wasn't working out. So, like, they just kind of appeared. Like, I got muscles out of nowhere. My nose, I said, like, started looking better. And I started having to go on, like, histamine diets to deal with the seasonal allergies, which I kind of still have. I don't know that that's, yeah, it definitely hasn't gone away yet. I feel like there's still a lot of healing I have to do. My headaches got better. There were points when I was vegan that I was getting them kind of once a week or it was weird.

[video] 25:58 It was almost like when I was low-fat vegan, I couldn't eat vegan fat because they would give me a headache. So I just chalked it up to, oh, we're meant to be low-fat animals or whatever, like we're meant to be low-fat animals. because for some reason the vegan fats I couldn't do and it was probably like nuts and stuff you know like I just couldn't do them they would give me headaches but the animal fats like I could totally do I don't know what it was but obviously they're different compositions but yeah I could do the animal fats and I wouldn't get a headache and it actually helps my headaches to the point where now like sometimes I can go three sometimes four weeks without getting one which is amazing compared to before

[video] 26:45 uh, my anxiety got better. And then just the stuff I noticed in my kids, like they just started growing like before they just weren't growing. They, they were, my son was so skinny. He's still skinny, but now like he just looks stronger, I guess. And, and they, they shot up in height and they started putting on weight like really well. My youngest son, he's always kind of just gained weight really well. Um, my daughter's teeth, all of their teeth actually started looking way better when I, we started drinking milk. And that was one thing I was super resistant to was the milk because, uh, I don't know, for some reason that was my last kind of thing I was holding onto. And, but I have to admit like the minute we started drinking milk, the teeth just got white, even though her teeth still had cavities, they just looked better, way better. Um,

[video] 27:45 And, like, for her cavities, I should mention, like, I tried everything. I tried, like, electric brushes. I tried special toothpaste that's supposed to help with cavities. Like, not fluoride, but, like, another kind. It's called Theodent. It's really expensive. I tried... oral probiotics because I thought oh her mouth must be have the wrong bacteria like I'll try these oral probiotic I tried everything like natural to fix her teeth and then I tried supplementing D and K2 and the supplements just didn't work they didn't do anything the natural milk and stuff did work like they looked better I wouldn't say it healed her cavities but they definitely looked whiter and my son's teeth now look really beautiful

[video] 28:36 I slept better they definitely my kids seemed like they calmed down I don't know they just weren't as wild and my daughter used to throw a lot of really bad tantrums and she kind of just calmed down a lot after we started eating animal products her hair now looks great like it just looks normal again it doesn't the baby hairs are starting to grow my hair started to grow their nails used to peel like in layers and now that like it's normal again and my nails are normal again so we've just seen so many improvements since adding in the animal products that

29:20 What you said about the tantrums, in the vegan communities, did you meet people who were kind of aggressive? Would you say that vegans typically portray themselves as very peaceful and so on? Would you say that's a lie, that they're really not like that in real life?

[video] 29:38 I find... I'm probably going to get hated on for saying this. I find the males tend to get very moody. I don't know like the males I found very like they'd be mad at me all the time like or something you know they were moody um trying to think of the females I'm trying to think of myself too like I maybe more aggression uh I definitely find like in the forums right you can't say anything in a vegan forum without getting attacked like unless you got to kind of keep the peace uh Yeah. I know in my daughter, she was definitely way more, yeah, just would just freak out about stuff. And maybe it's part of her personality too, but she's definitely calmed down since then.

30:36 Did you try any B12 or any other stuff like that?

[video] 30:40 Oh, yeah. By the end, I was on B12, very high doses of D. I took 5,000 IUs, I think, and you're supposed to take 1,000. K2, iodine. I was trying to get calcium from tofu, and I would try to eat certain greens that were supposed to be high in calcium. I was very careful about my nutrition because I put everything into chronometer all the time. Even as a raw vegan, I would put it all into ChronoBeater and be like, look, I'm getting everything, you know.

[video] 31:16 And so, yeah, I was supplementing. Oh, and another thing was the DHA. There's like a vegan DHA. You can buy it. It's made from algae. We were taking that as well. And I noticed the first time we took it, we stopped getting sick. Like we used to get cold after cold after cold all winter. And when I took this vegan DHA, it was like our colds just stopped and it was really shocking. That was another thing that I was like, that doesn't make sense because we should be getting omega-3s, right? Like we eat flax, we do all this stuff and yeah, we stopped getting our colds after the DHA. Okay.

32:01 any other interesting stories you remember during the time it's a pretty long period any interesting people you met or any stories any vegans yeah well dealing with Doug Graham was interesting he I was surprised like with the whole community thing that was a huge mess we ended up

[video] 32:30 kicking out the guy who started the community. There was this one woman, she was like hell bent on like destroying him. I don't know. And she ended up getting him legally kicked out of his own community that he started. And then everything was kind of falling apart. And Doug Graham just kind of hid away in the emails and stuff. And if we ever mentioned him, he would come out and just, he was very passive aggressive or like very kind of, It's not my fault, and I've been through horrible things in my life, and you're like, well, I'm the one losing tens of thousands of dollars. But that community was very interesting. I thought I would go and it would be kind of, you know, all this...

[video] 33:17 great I'd meet all these people that were just going to be these great people in my life and they were going to take care of me and and all that but when I ended up getting my staph infection I was trying to fast because that's what they were telling me to do right you need to fast it away but no one like brought me water no one like only one person came to check up on me and he wasn't vegan um and like it was just like a very kind of horrible horrible community to be in and I remember when I had my staph infection, they were like, well, you're not working and you're not putting in enough work now because, you know, you have a staph infection. You're not, I don't know. And I got blamed for not putting in enough work. And yeah, it was just not the people you wanted to be around. That was kind of the first hint where I started thinking, okay, like I thought I would have all these commonalities with these people and I really didn't at all. And they were just not

[video] 34:14 really my my people and that's what kind of brought me home after that was like okay uh yeah i didn't find my my people there at all did any of them ever complain about any health issues or was it more of a secret if at all and did they ever cheat or have any stories like that they all got staff like everyone got staff because we weren't filtering the water so All the water had stuff in it. The dirt had stuff in it. Like everyone got stuff. Some of them were able to fast and I believe it did go away. I was there for about 10 months. So it was kind of like back and forth because I'm not legal to stay in Hawaii. But yeah, what else did they complain of? A lot of them... Well, one of the women, like, she was on the raw diet because she lost a lot of weight. I think they did cheat because they would go to town a lot.

[video] 35:12 Even, like, I stayed on this woofing farm once when I was in Costa Rica, I think it was, and the guy there was, like, a raw foodist, but every once in a while he would go into town and everyone, you know, you knew he was cheating there because he would come back and All he wanted to feed us were a couple bananas. He was definitely cheating when he went into town.

[video] 35:41 When I stayed with Laurent Lachman, I don't know that he actually cheated. I don't know. But he's under the belief that you're supposed to eat very small portions of food. When I was refeeding after my fast, my portions were just very tiny portions. And I remember, like, begging one of the helpers to, like, get me a second portion because I was so hungry. But I never saw him cheat, but he also went into town a lot, you know, by himself. Oh, actually, one time I was in Australia, I saw David Wolfe. He was there for some reason at the same time. He was at, like, a food truck that was not... not vegan, not raw anything. So I'm sure there's a lot of cheating that goes on.

[video] 36:31 I think this community that I was in, like a lot of them weren't hardcore raw vegans or like they were kind of trying to be, but they definitely were eating cooked food when they went into town. Some of the kids too, like they were young kids and they wanted pizza, you know, they'd go into town and they'd want pizza. So they would have pizza and then they would come back to the community and try to be raw again. Um, Yeah, you never know. I know other vegans who definitely cheat and they just kind of chalk it up to, well, I had a craving and I satisfied the craving, but it's not because I need it. It's because, you know, I have cravings still and I have to fight this demon in me, you know, or whatever. But, yeah. Oh, there's one thing that happened at the community that's kind of sad. One of the babies that was born at the community...

[video] 37:26 They were born, I wasn't there at the time, so I just saw this through videos, but the baby was born in the community, like a natural birth or whatever, and it was very tiny, and the mom was really struggling to breastfeed. And I remember just seeing a clip of this baby, and it couldn't lift its head, it couldn't do anything, it was so skinny. And another baby had been born, like a friend of theirs was born at the same time. And this baby was upright, chubby, like she cheated. Like she just cheated her whole pregnancy. And her husband was a very adamant raw foodist and he was very angry at her for cheating. But she would sneak, you know, like broccoli into the house and have to steam it because he didn't want her eating anything cooked. But because she cheated, the baby looked good. And this other baby, like seriously, I don't know how it lived because... I really didn't think it was going to make it.

[video] 38:23 And then I guess they decided, the couple decided to go back to the mainland and start eating cooked starches again. And she got her breast milk and then I saw a picture. I'm not in contact with them, but I saw a picture and the baby did look way better, like at least chubby and stuff. But who knows, like the neurological damage that could have happened during that time or anything like that. That was kind of one of the scarier moments. things I've seen with kids a lot of the kids at the Woodstock Fruit Festival like some of the ones I'm not gonna I don't want to name names but some of the ones who were raised by like fruitarian parents they just like they seemed like they couldn't calm down they were just bouncing off the walls and they talked to you and they had so much to say and they were just like all over the place and very thin and just like their energy was really off you know what I mean like they It just seemed really off.

[video] 39:22 I've met them a few times. The ones that were in hardcore raw families, they didn't seem so great. I remember asking at the Woodstock Fruit Festival, asking all the gurus or whatever, what am I supposed to do with my daughter's teeth? They're crumbling out of her face. What do I do? None of them had any solutions. Some of them asked for water picks or whatever or suggested water picks or whatever like stuff like that but like nothing really substantial I actually remember Doug Graham in an interview and I don't know where the interview could be found but he was talking about his first teeth and they apparently crumbled out of her mouth as well they just disintegrated and

[video] 40:18 I forget why he was talking about it, but he was saying something about, you know, that's what the milk teeth are for, you know, they're meant to just disintegrate out of the mouth or something. So lots of teeth issues with those kids. Trying to think of other interesting experiences.

40:41 If there was one thing that you could say to all vegans right now, what would it be? Do you have a message, anything? Even if it's short.

[video] 40:49 I'm not one to push. I don't care what people do once they're an adult. Just don't do it to kids. It's an experiment. It's never been done generation after generation after generation. It's never been successfully done, let's just say.

[video] 41:08 and it's an experiment and we shouldn't be experimenting on our kids like that like you do whatever you want to your body like that's your choice I you know I can't say anything about that but don't put your kids on it you don't have to put your kids on it too just because you want to be vegan like I would say yeah until we until you know you know for sure it's gonna succeed don't put them through that because some of the damage I think isn't reversible eventually yeah and be more aware like take things seriously like if I regret not taking certain things more seriously I wish I had taken my daughter's teeth way more seriously because in the end like It's not fun to deal with for her or for you.

[video] 42:07 And she's stuck with those teeth forever. You know, the regret that you'll have is kind of intense after a while. And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this was because you don't want that regret. You don't want that guilty feeling as a parent.

[video] 42:27 Yeah, it's not a good feeling. So I think... if parents do come to eventually they'll feel that for sure. I met kind of along the way some vegans that were really damaged by B12 deficiency specifically. One guy, he had a tremor and he was trying to, in Hawaii there's a bunch of different fasting retreats, he was trying to go to a guy to help him fast away his B12 deficiency.

[video] 43:03 well he didn't call it a B12 deficiency but he was trying to fast it away and it just was getting worse and worse to the point where now he has a tremor and even at that point he was still in denial like he was still saying it's not it's not a vegan diet it's not that and so just the it's hard it's hard to get people to see even when they have such drastic health problems it's really hard to to get people to see that. Oh, there was another guy who contacted, he posted on his Facebook, he's like, has anyone dealt with tinnitus? I guess that's another thing I've dealt with too, is tinnitus, like ringing in your ears. That kind of came on throughout the years. And that can be, you know, you have bones in your ear. If those bones are deteriorating, you can get things like tinnitus, I think. And He messaged on his Facebook, anyone ever dealt with tinnitus? And I messaged, yeah, I have it. And he was, like, what can make it stop? Like, it's driving me crazy.

[video] 44:03 Like, he was almost becoming, like, suicidal because of this tinnitus or probably other things. And I mentioned something about diet, and he was, like, no, definitely not diet, you know? Definitely not diet. And, yeah, it's just so hard, like... some of these problems are so intense and and these people just don't realize that or they don't want to see it that way that it's the diet causing it and it's it's kind of sad to think that like you know people could be in really deep depression or stuff like that and they could change it but they can't see through that i don't know wall that's in

44:47 All right. Thank you for sharing your story.

[video] 44:51 Okay, you're welcome.