Raw and Living Foods Expert: Brian Clement of The Hippocrates Health Institute

If you are interested in the healing and anti-aging properties of raw food, Brian Clement of The Hippocrates Institute has a lot to say on the subject. I recently had the chance to hear him speak in Barrie, Ontario at an event sponsored by M&B Alchemy, a small company near Orangeville, Ontario that delivers raw foods to the Toronto area.

Brian Clement doesn’t pull any punches and has strong opinions about conventional wisdom when it comes to nutrition. It is very apparent that he is passionate about the healing power of the the benefits of a raw and living food diet. The Hippocrates Institute program was initially developed by Ann Wigmore, a non-scientist who instinctively cured herself of stage 4 colon cancer by, among other initiatives, eating raw and living foods. Dr. Clement related several instances where people with late stage cancer have arrived at Hippocrates and later been given clean bill of health, astounding and amazing their doctors.

Some notes from this interesting and thought provoking speech:

• For the first time in history, people under 35 are less healthy than people over 65
• The #1 drug prescribed used to be antibiotics – it is now anti-depressants
• If you think some institution is going to help you more than you can do for yourself, you are wrong
• The food industry is evil – see the movies, Food Inc. and Monsanto
• Fish oil is rancid and causes cancer; fish is crawling with parasites (he said that under a microscope it looks like a 70’s disco) and full of heavy metals that are poisonous
• Vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds heal much better than medicine
• Pharmacists are trying to synthesize drugs to sell that duplicate the nutritional benefits of simply eating live raw foods
• There is no such thing as raw agave syrup
• Too much fructose is aging – so don’t overdo the fruit
• Type 2 diabetes is not a disease, it is a lifestyle choice!
• 68% of people, no matter what they eat, are deficient in B12
• Sprouted chia is the best essential fatty acid source – sprout it by soaking, then rubbing over a terracotta pot and misting daily
• Best whole food sources of protein are sprouted flax, sesame, mung bean sprouts, hemp, bee pollen, blue-green algae and wheatgrass juice
• There is such a thing as non-soy tempeh (although I haven’t seen it yet)
• Apple cider vinegar is a good alkalizer, but don’t put it on salad as a dressing as it destroys the enzymes!
• Casein from dairy is the #1 cancer causing food
• Drink your freshly made juice quickly, because after 15 minutes, most of the nutrition is dead
• Blending green smoothies destroys the nutrients

I am sure there are lots of people who will take issue with one or more of the above statements, since there seems to be a lot of disagreement about nutrition even in the raw food community. I am not sure why discussions about nutrition feel kind of like talking politics or religion, but people seem to have very set opinions and I think we all need to be more open to different ideas about what is best for our health, especially given the horrendous state of the diet most people imbibe these days. The rates of illness and disease speak for themselves when it comes to the standard diet in North America. I never fail to be horrified by the non-nutritious junk in the lunchboxes of most kids at school, no wonder the disease rates for children have skyrocketed.

There were a number of vendors in attendance selling everything from raw coconuts (rather amusingly for me, prepared to be sipped by a guy with a big drill) to sprouted grain breads and there were also raw burgers and pizza from Pure restaurant in Collingwood that smelled amazing. There were also booths providing information about colon therapy, aromatherapy and lots of raw foods and whole food supplements.

Many thanks to Briana Southward, a very nice holistic nutritionist, without whom this post would not have been possible, for giving me a piece of paper on which I took some notes!