Facing Multiple Health Crisis’ Head on With a Raw Food Lifestyle

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Victoria Boutenko shares on facing multiple health crisis’ head on with a raw food lifestyle.

Rawkathon with Victoria Boutenko, is part of a raw food family and is the author of Green Smoothies and Green for Life.

Kevin: Victoria. I want to welcome you to this program. I’m excited to have you here.

Victoria: Thank you Kevin. I’m excited and I’m privileged.

Kevin: Let’s start by telling just those who may not know who you are, just a very brief background about your family and what you’ve done to change, to dramatically change, the health of yourself and your family.

Victoria: Fifteen years ago my family became very ill – four of my family became very ill. I developed arrhythmia which is irregular heartbeat. I was very obese. I was morbidly obese, like everybody in my family. And my husband developed hyperthyroid and rheumatoid arthritis and daughter was born with asthma and then my son was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 9.

The doctors didn’t promise us anything good. They told me that I will die any day. They told me that my husband will die in less than two months unless he performs surgery, removing his thyroid. And our daughter was coughing with asthma every night and Sergei, we were told he had to go on insulin.

Kevin: So, what did you decide to do?

Victoria: What actually made me think about for myself is that I went to the medical library and I checked out the book, the very thick book about diabetes, and I started reading it. And on very first page it said that the cause for diabetes is unknown. And then throughout the book many times it said there’s no cure for diabetes. I was thinking, what is this book then? If there’s no cure and there’s causes unknown, what is that book? What is it doing? And as I was reading about insulin, insulin shots, more and more I understood that I should never put him on insulin. My understanding before that was that diabetes causes blindness, kidney failure, amputation and premature aging. This medical research showed and explained very plainly that it’s insulin, insulin overdose or underdose which causes all of these complications. And I was plainly scared to put my son on insulin.

And as I stopped reading this book I made my decision: I’m not putting him on insulin. I realized that there was going to be risks. That the government could take my child away; that’s what I was threatened to do. So I purchased a fax machine that would display the phone number. Fifteen years ago there were no caller ID’s and whenever the doctor would call I would simply not pick up the phone and they stopped calling me. And I was very scared. I realized I was doing something that many people wouldn’t do but I was so afraid to put my son on insulin because my grandmother died from overdose of insulin. And by saying this, I’m not encouraging anybody, by the way, to get off insulin or to stop. I’m just sharing my story.

So I started to research all the alternative ways. And I was searching and searching and searching day and night. I stopped working, I was searching. What can I do? Because I was so afraid my child is going to be hurt in any ways by taking or not taking insulin.

Then in two months I ran into a woman in my bank who was a raw foodist. And I believe maybe she was the only raw foodist in Colorado at that time, 15 years ago, I never ran across anyone else. And she told me that she cured her colon cancer stage 4 with a raw food diet. And in the beginning I was kind of scared and disappointed because I didn’t know anything about a raw food diet. I actually asked her, “So from now on what do I eat? Ice cream and bread?" And she said, “Ice cream is cooked.” I said, “How could it be cooked? It’s so cold. How can one not eat bread? Bread is good food. It’s something that’s a staple.” And she said, ”No. You’re going to have carrots, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and they should be raw.”

I didn’t believe it’s possible but she gave me a book and you know what, Kevin, 15 years ago there was just this many books that spoke about raw food and each of them was printed in a very small quantity like 250 copies. And of course you couldn’t buy them in any bookstores. You had to know the author’s name, the author’s address and you would send a check and they would send you a copy of the book. That’s how it worked. And by the way, today I checked Amazon I put in their little search engine “raw” and “living foods” and I got 650 titles. And it’s almost less than 15 years later. We’re definitely experiencing a revolution. Revolutionary change in diet, in lifestyle.

So that’s how I got on raw food. She gave me this book and I was reading this book and the more I read the more it made sense to me. It made logical sense. I started to understand that our bodies were intelligent and if anybody in the world could heal me, it was my body. If anybody could heal my son’s body, it was his body. In mother’s womb the baby’s perfectly forming and growing without us checking it, taking it out, measuring and giving it orders. Our body’s very intelligent. How dare we think that it cannot not cure diabetes? If anybody in the world can reverse it, it would be your own body.

Then I just wanted to know what to do. Just give it opportunity, take out the obstacles, take out the reasons that caused diabetes. I understood that the cause for diabetes was our unhealthy way of living. And I was so procrastinating. I was so afraid of living this different life. I was thinking, how in the world am I going to just eat this boring, raw food diet just carrot sticks? All while having my teeth in bagel with cream cheese in the morning, I have a big mug of coffee, I was dreaming how I will become beautiful, lose all this weight, wear nice clothing and how my son would never have to worry about diabetes. Still I was procrastinating until the health of my husband and my son became so bad that we couldn’t wait any longer.

Kevin What caused you to stop procrastinating?

Victoria: On January 21, 1994 when the doctor told my husband that he will die soon if he wouldn’t do the surgery, if he wouldn’t remove his thyroid which was six times bigger than normal, I decided that was the day. I threw away all the pots and pans. I turned off the pilot in our gas stove and I covered it with a thick cutting board and I bought -- I remember I bought Washington Delicious apples, oranges and bananas, because we didn’t like vegetables. So I just brought fruits. And we started our raw food life. And nobody was hungry. Nobody wanted any of that. We were not hungry yet for that. But at nighttime I heard people they were I heard opening drawers. They were searching for a dry piece of bread but I cleaned the kitchen really well and by morning everybody felt better. It’s unbelievable.

My son was checking his blood sugar in the morning, poking his finger, and he said my blood sugar monitor broke.” I said, “Why do you think so?” Instead of 300 it shows 140. It’s never been that low yet.” So since then he never had to go on insulin. My daughter never had another asthmatic attack. My husband got well. His arthritis was gone and I lost 120 pounds in one year and I became the skinniest of my family, both my father and mother and father’s relatives, they’re all very overweight. So since then we started to be healthier and healthier and three and a half months after we started, we ran a ten-kilometer race - Bolder Boulder. Three and a half months after we’d been all so sick, we ran a ten kilometer race.