Superfoods, Raw Foods and Fighting Disease With Raw Food Author and Chef Paul Nison

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Health Inner Circle, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeHealth.com. In this excerpt, Paul Nison shares on raw foods and super foods fighting disease.

Renegade Health Inner Circle with Paul Nison. Paul Nison is a raw food chef and educator. He is also the author of seven books including “The Raw Life.”

Kevin: I wanted to talk a little bit more about the Crohn’s Disease. What does someone do when the doctor says to them, “You can’t have fruit.” Or, this happened to me before, someone comes to me - I know what to say - and they say, “I have Crohn’s Disease so I can’t eat fruit or vegetables.” What do you do?

Paul: It’s quite simple. With all disease we’re stressing something out, we’re overdoing something in our body. So we just have to figure out ways to reduce the stress. Only in severe cases do you completely need to stop everything. Crohn’s and colitis are severe cases of intestinal disorders. So for a temporary time we might have to stop doing certain things that are contributing tremendously to the issue. Overeating is more of the problem than the actual thing that you’re eating many times. That’s the first thing we have to cut down. What I tell people, I don’t even tell people to eat raw, whole foods when they have an intestinal disorder because any time a disease ends in “itis” it means there’s inflammation somewhere in the body - colitis, proctitis, all these other illnesses. Inflammation is a later stage of disease but disease doesn’t start with these later stages. It means you’ve missed these beginning stages. Two beginning signs of disease are laziness and constipation, which most people suffer from and all these things start from overeating, usually, or not getting enough rest. So those are the first things I would tell people - you have to look at how much you’re eating and how much you’re sleeping. If people neglect sleep too much, good quality sleep, that’s a big part of healing.

But when it comes to someone saying they can’t eat fruit I tell people is if you sprain your ankle and you try to jump rope you’re going to make the problem worse. You have to rest your body. You have to rest your body from food, your intestinal tract. I would put them on blended foods and give them probiotics to help their colon and intestine heal. Then after the bleeding stops and the inflammation goes down that’s when you would start introducing -- first I would put them on juices, then I would introduce blended foods and then when they were ready for it I would introduce whole foods. Some people, depending how deep their wound is, it will take weeks and some people it’s months.

Now most people don’t have the patience or support around them to go through that process. That’s why I would recommend a place like Hippocrates Health Institute or one of these other places because they’re filled with great support and information. It’s really not that difficult to get better from colitis, Crohn’s Disease and all these other things, physically. Mentally and emotionally it is a big challenge. Then when you have something like cancer it’s a whole other story. In those cases you really need to get to one of these institutes. It’s not something you want to do on your own at home.

Kevin: What do you think of superfoods? What do you think about the buzz?

Paul: I think the most important place to get our nutrients from is from whole sources of raw, ripe, fresh, organic foods, vegetables, nuts and seeds eaten in the right amount at the right time. That should take precedence over anything else out there. Those are the real superfoods.
There are certain times and cases where people might need to take supplements. I think that’s where superfoods are, as supplements. I don’t believe in synthetic supplements but I believe in whole foods in a supplement form when needed and used appropriately. They should never take the place of the whole food, number one. We just had the Raw Food Summit with the raw food leaders from around the world with 500 years of experience. They all agreed that there’s a place for these certain foods but they’re not to take precedence over the whole foods.

The problem with the superfoods is some of them are truly healing to the body. These green powders are excellent. E3Live, even though it’s a whole food it’s classified as a supplement or a superfood. These are wonderful but the problem today is there’s a lot of things mixed in there that are junk food that people are calling superfoods and they’re really not. This is the dangerous thing in the raw food movement. I’d rather everyone completely avoid every single superfood out there if they don’t know what’s truly good and truly bad. That’s the big problem today. There are a lot of people out there today promoting things as superfoods and they’re actually not even not-healthy, they’re actually harmful.

So we really have to be careful and show discern and realize who is saying what, what claims are being made and why. Some of the claims out there are just ridiculous. Unfortunately it the world today people follow crowds and they go with the most charismatic person out there. That’s the person that’s going to say things to get people to follow them. It’s a big problem.

So superfoods are excellent if they’re true superfoods but if they’re these fake superfoods they’re not great. Let me tell you, you could stick a “raw” sticker on a piece of candy and call it healthy. That doesn’t make it healthy. There’s a lot of junk out there that people are sticking stickers on and saying it’s a healthy superfood. It certainly isn’t.

As for the super berries and all these other things, I think the best berries we can get for our bodies are locally grown produce that are fresh. Berries that have to be flown from halfway around the world and dried, that just became popular within the last ten years or so, they’re not needed for health. I know somebody that’s 107 years old. He never had one of these berries from halfway around the world. For example, goji berries. They taste great and they do have a lot of healing properties but I’ll tell you what, a fresh blueberry or mulberry, right off the tree, is healthier than any berry that’s dried and flown around the world. If anyone out there is going to do things like goji berries, soak them overnight and re-hydrate them. Most people don’t like it like that because it takes a lot of the sugar out of it. It doesn’t actually take the sugar out it just re-hydrates it to where it should be. But it’s going to be better off for you.

There are other superfoods out there that. It would be a waste of my breath even talking about some of these things because it’s a joke what people are saying with these things. We really have to wake up and show discern with these things. I plead with everyone out there, look at what’s happening and who’s saying what and what claims are being made. Not only at the Raw Food Summit that we have our leaders at with over 500 years combined, but we have people with scientific information that backs up what we’re saying. We didn’t just have, “I’m going to wake up one day and want to make a lot of money so I’m going to slap this on some dried fruit or powder and call it an amazing superfood.” So we really have to show discern and be careful.

Kevin: One of the superfoods that I had personal experience with is cacao. I know that you’re not very favorable for it. Can you just tell us what your experience with it is?

Paul: First of all, I call it crack-cao because it’s one of the most addicting things out there. Fred Bisci and everyone else confirms this but what happened to me was I used to be a big fan of it because I loved the way it tasted. I started noticing I didn’t feel that great when I took it. But even more concerning was I contacted Jeremy Saffron who is a good friend of mine and he told me that he too thought it was once good and he did more research and found out it really wasn’t. It’s high in caffeine, theobromine and has some other issues with it. The bad weighs out the good. People started coming to my lectures literally shaking. I do a lot of lectures. They were often shaking and saying, “I can’t get off this. Help me. It’s really bad.” It’s basically a drug. I’m not one to say nobody can ever take it and you can’t use it, but I believe it should be used in the same way a person would use like vanilla extract. You use it as a flavoring in very small amount and that’s fine. But when you’re told you need it to be healthy and you have to take pounds and pounds of it every day, that’s a whole other story. That’s where the problem lies.

So we really have to be careful. Nobody is going to buy a month’s worth of vanilla extract, tons and tons of it, so they can pour it down their throat the way they do this crack-cao. It’s just really a marketing scheme here. It’s really dangerous. It is a drug and a lot of people out there feel great taking it because they don’t know the difference between stimulation and true energy. We really have to be careful out there. Yes, it tastes great but there are other things that taste great as well that don’t have the same problems. We need to realize what those are. Give it up. Realize, “I don’t need this. Why am I taking this? Is it as good as it claims to
be?”

I got a book from the publisher that publishes Arnold Ehret’s books. If nobody out there has read Arnold Ehret’s books you have to read “Mucusless Diet Healing,” which is a classic. Anyway, the publisher had another book “Live Food Recipe Book.” It was probably one of the first ones that were out. They actually spoke about it and they said it was a bad food. It’s becoming more common sense and more knowledge and people need to wake up. I know half of you probably hung up the phone because you didn’t want hear it was bad, but I’m not here to become your friend. I’m here to tell you the truth. If you can deal with it great. If you can’t, you’ll come to me later when you’re sick. So that’s that.