Mike: Welcome Dave, to Passion for Health… OK, first of all, could you tell us a bit about yourself and the work that you're doing with regards to diet and healing and so on… and how you got into it all.

Dave: Well, it's quite a story so I'll just give you the edited highlights :). I'm editor and publisher of Living Nutrition Magazine which comes out twice a year. It's America's only raw food lifestyle magazine and we have 3,000 subscribers in 40 countries…

I've also been director of the Colitis & Crohn's Health Recovery Center in northern California since 1993. And I've authored or co-authored several books, for example 'Your Natural Diet: Alive Raw Foods' and 'Self Healing Colitis and Crohn's'. There's lots more to tell though, so if people are interested, they can go to the self healing empowerment website, my full biography is there.

As far as how I got into all this, well, when I was 17 my health began to gradually decline and I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. After that, I had eight tortuous years of colitis flare-ups and off-and-on drug therapy.

By age 26, I was a weak, sickly shadow of my former self. I was having gastric explosions every time I ate, up to 10 painful bowel movements a day with mucus and blood.

Then in 1984, I had the great fortune to find a doctor of Natural Hygiene, Dr. Laurence Galant in Staten Island, who told me about the concepts of self-healing and eating a natural plant-based diet.

After studying Natural Hygiene some more, I had an amazing experience one night and everything just “clicked”. I started a diet with plenty of fruit and it suited me very well. My energies continuously increased as I detoxified and began rebuilding my body. That was the start of my new healthful lifestyle and I've never looked back.

Mike: So, the Crohn's Recovery Center has been carrying on for a while now?

Dave: Yes. I began counseling people professionally in 1992. I overcame the ulcerative colitis 23 years ago and ever since then I've wanted to get the information on how to heal this type of disease out to everyone. I felt like I was kept in the dark.

The answer was always there but it was pretty much hidden and suppressed by the medical community because they don't believe in anything that's not a technological or pharmaceutical cure or remedy. So after I healed up I took off some time, then got back into engineering. And then after working for several more years in that I got laid off in '91 and then I decided that I needed to create my own health career.

I went to a nutrition school out here, Bauman College, and got certified as a Nutrition Educator. My thesis report was on healing colitis and crohn's disease naturally and I kept on expanding that report every year and started selling it and eventually ended up with an on-line book store… selling "Self Healing Colitis & Crohn's".

And then 2 years ago the book became a paperback and since then I've sold about 10,000 copies all told and this winter, my book became number 1 and then number 2 on Amazon.com under "colitis books."

So, I've been counseling people for about 14 years professionally and I get about 99% of them, at least, healthy and it's very gratifying work to pass this information on.

Mike: It's an incredible statistic that… 99%. It's makes you wonder… are there no medical people that know about this kind of thing that are thinking "Wow, you know, this is an amazing thing. Why aren't we doing this to heal Crohn's and colitis?"

Dave: They don't want to know and they're not even allowed to help people with only nutrition and natural methods. They would lose their license if they didn't do the drugging approach. So they don't want to know!

I've had over a thousand clients and most of them go to their doctors and say “I want to do this natural approach” and the doctors either roll their eyes or they say “Don't do it”. A few of them give the go ahead but even if these clients get healthy and they see it, they don't want anything to do with it. They just help the next person because their whole career is based on the medical approach which is nothing but, diagnosis, drugging and surgery.

Now, it’s been an absolute miracle that a gastroenterologist medical doctor in Los Angeles found my book ‘Self Healing Colitis and Crohn’s’ at a health book store in Los Angeles. Her name is Dr. Zarin Azar. She was already knowledgeable of and into Natural Hygiene, nutrition and fasting. And she really wants to help her patients while recognizing that nobody gets healthy doing the medical approach.

Believing in the the Natural Hygiene approach of my book, she contacted me, we met and have been great friends ever since. We’re now planning to work together, helping people heal the natural way. Zarin is an absolutely wonderful person. We hope to get a new Colitis & Crohn’s Health Recovery Center going soon in southern California so we can help a lot more people together.

Mike: And she's a regular General Practitioner is she? A regular doctor?

Dave: She's a gastroenterologist which means she specializes as a medical doctor in helping people with gastrointestinal diseases.

Mike: So what you're saying is… she can't use the ordinary medical channels to help people?

Dave: Well, working in a hospital system she tried but she realized she can help people better in private practice where she is freer to advise on nutrition.

Mike: OK… So, this is going to be a building where people can go and stay, and get better from crohn's and colitis?

Dave: We don't know if they'll be able to stay there yet but she's going to open an office. The problem with colitis and crohn's is that most people are unable to travel because they're going to the toilet left and right. We'll be able to counsel many by phone and the ones that are able to travel can see Zarin for a checkup if they desire that. Hopefully some day we'll have staff, with a nurse or two where we can help people recuperate in-house.

Mike: So the normal medical treatment for colitis and crohn's, does that involve surgery and taking parts of the bowel out and things like that?

Dave: Well, that's usually (but not always) the last resort after a person's been sick with raging bowel inflammation for many years and the medicines are "not helping." Of course, medicines cannot heal. In my case I was sick for 8 years and the last gastroenterologist, after seeing 7 of them, said that… you've been sick for 8 years, statistically, you're probably going to get cancer in a few years. So it's time to either cut out your colon or try 6-mercaptopurine, a drug which knocks out the immune system.

This was when I was age 26 and very sickly and at the brink. So those options sounded like total insanity to me and I wanted no part of either of them. I wanted a natural solution to this and I did not realize I had it in Natural Hygiene.

But yes, that is what the doctors do and it's incredibly sad that some of the clients I've talked to have only been sick for a year or two and they're bleeding and having 10 to 12 bouts of diarrhoea every single day and the doctors say “Lets cut out your colon” which is tragic because in 99% of the cases where they do these surgeries, it's totally unnecessary. The colon can heal up spontaneously if one properly implements the proper diet and healing plan which is what, of course, I and other Hygienic doctors and educators help people with.

My healing was mind-blowing, I healed up so quickly. On the 4th day of all fruit and juices, I knew it was all happening perfectly and on the 4th day, I was jumping for joy! My colon which was sick for 8 years totally healed up within 4 weeks—bloody ulcers and all.

Mike: "Outrageous' is the only word I can really come up with… the fact that the medics will go to the lengths of cutting out people's bowels when something is so simple as a cure.

Dave: Right. I was totally outraged to the point where my head was ready to explode at the whole medical system for keeping me in the dark and drugging me almost into oblivion. I realized that I had to take care of myself and rebuild my health before I could start doing something believable in the world with regard to natural healing. That's because people don't understand it and they wouldn't listen to me until I become healthy myself and was healed and healthy looking for a few years.

But yes, it's incredibly sad. The whole basis of medicine in many regards is incredibly sinister and evil and their egotistic approach to this keeps people suffering when they really need sensible help. But it's promising that a couple of years ago there was a study and it found that about 60% of Americans regularly seek alternative health modalities to help them with their issues. And some medical schools like Harvard offer nontraditional healing classes which are popular. The medical cartel is crumbling as more and more people get worse and worse from its ill-logical ways.

Mike: Excellent. So what specifically did you do to heal? Did you just change onto a raw diet straight away or just fruit or what was it?

Dave: Well, it takes a whole mind, body, even spiritual revelation to get going on this and see really good results. To me it all made sense one night. I realized that biologically we are fruit eaters. We're not designed to eat cooked food, we're not designed to eat all the modern crap that society offers us. And I realized that I had to get totally back to nature and be apart from all the dietary and health beliefs that society is into.

So I got the message from the Natural Hygiene teachings of Dr. Shelton and Dr. T. C. Fry and I realized that I had to do something radical— I had to think "outside the box"—and it all made sense. I understood how to do it one night after reading all this Natural Hygiene literature and really contemplating my fate.

And then it all made sense and I essentially knew exactly how to do it one night and I applied it the next day. I started doing juices and smoothies and on the fourth day I started eating solid fruit, and a little bit later some steamed and raw veggies and, amazingly, I started having formed bowel movements and the chronic pain and bleeding was gone. My vision improved dramatically and depression lifted. I started coming back to life and feeling in love with life again.

I felt like I was let out of jail! It was like dying in hell for 8 years. Finding the solution was as simple as eating fruit and letting go of taking drugs or relying on doctors ever again was liberating and mind-boggling. I got the clear message that my body could totally heal itself and it absolutely did.

Mike: Yeah, my story was similar. I was ill for 13 years with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The transition wasn't as quick as yours but certainly, once I started with a raw diet I actually felt my brain coming back to life… I could feel 'pinging' going on in my brain as if things were waking up.

Dave: I had a similar experience to you I think, because I had chronic fatigue from malnutrition, going to the toilet all the time, being on drugs for 8 years. I healed up quickly but it took me actually 5 or 6 years to totally rebuild my body and to totally overcome the last vestige of the chronic fatigue. So it was a long process of rebuilding but that really seems like nothing now because I became healthier and happier. So I totally understand that it takes time with the chronic fatigue.

Mike: As a sustainable kind of diet, what's a typical days food on a diet like this? Are you in a regular routine with your diet where you'll have a certain thing for breakfast, a certain thing for lunch, certain thing for your evening meal? How do your instincts take over and how does that fit into a daily plan for people to do?

Dave: Well, instincts and senses are the key words. I don't believe in doing anything regimented with meal times and foods, except keep it simple and follow food combining guidelines. I believe in following the senses and empowering people to do that because I don't know what's right for everybody. Their bodies tell them what it needs. I don't give a standard diet and say that this is what you've got to stick with for weeks and months on end. There's flexibility in it…freedom to "follow thy senses."

The key to raw food diet success is to listen to what our senses call for, which means we have to enjoy our food thoroughly. It has to be eaten in a way so that it's digestible and we have to eat so we don't overload our organs of digestion and elimination. And every aspect of eating has to be totally harmonious with our biology. So, I encourage people to read the basics that we teach in Natural Hygiene.

I teach in my books that biologically, we are designed to eat mostly fruit and our digestion functions best on fruit. It has all the nutrients, it's the easiest to digest, it's the most pleasurable and is the best source of caloric fuel.

We also need vegetables but when we have say a gastrointestinal problem, like I had, we certainly don't want to start eating raw vegetables, except in the juiced form. We need a transition and certainly have steamed veggies, sweet potatoes and squash, but to limit that to once a day (dinner). Avoiding mucus -forming foods like dairy and grains is important. In specific cases, people need a simple, high-water content healing diet… it maybe juices or soft fruits for a while.

As far as a daily diet, we should always eat when we experience true hunger. We should try to space out our meals so that we're not constantly eating and flooding our blood stream with nutrients. We should get enough fruit sugar during the day in order to be sustained. Sugar is our cells' only fuel, so if we don't get enough fruit sugar during the day we're going to be looking for caloric satisfaction from other foods and the other choices are really only fatty foods, starch and sweet junk foods. So, if we overeat on fatty foods, specially with people with a history of digestive problems, that just keep people toxic, retarding their healing.

If we get adequate satiation from the fruits during the day then we'll be ok with just having a small meal of something fatty with a salad for dinner. Generally, that's the best approach to long-term health. If people are going to eat the cooked food, the steamed veggies, potatoes and squash, I suggest they eat it with an equal or bigger portion of raw food (a salad) for dinner.

Go to part 2 of the interview

About the Author

David Klein, Ph.D. is a Hygienic Doctor and a certified Nutrition Educator. Since 1992, David has counselled over 2,000 clients back to health via the principles of Natural Hygiene. He is director of the Colitis & Crohn's Health Recovery Center. David is also Publisher / Editor of Living Nutrition Magazine, one of the world's most-read raw food lifestyle magazines.