Go to part 1 of the interview

Mike: Ok… if we could talk a for bit about protein in raw diets? You hear a lot of argument in raw food vegan circles that we are frugivores and so on. And a lot of reference to Bonobos – our closest primate relatives, and that we should use that as a model for ourselves. But then Bonobos eat 5% of animal foods… around about, based on some studies. It seems to me that a lot of raw food philosophy takes parts that they want to use and discards other parts…

Bonobos for example, as well as the 5% animal foods, eat a lot of vegetation which doesn't seem to appear in a lot of raw vegan diets. So do you think if we are going to use a primate model and comparative physiology that we should use the whole of the model and not just bits of it?

Dave: Well, there's a lot of ways to look at the question "What is man's proper diet?" I always come back to "follow your senses." Eating something that crawling on the ground, with big eyes and legs and a shell, or something that's soft and squishy which is crawling around, or something that we have to strangle then try to dig our teeth into, or bash or slice and is dripping blood is not appealing to my senses. I think that kind of behavior is either a perversion or a last-resort when fruits are not available.

We know conclusively that there are no nutrients found in any animal source food that we cannot get from fruits and vegetables. The best testimonial for that is vegans who've been doing this for 10, 20, 30 40, 50 years. And there are many who are doing it in excellent health… not a lot, but we see them, more and more. Many are in the loose-knit raw food community, and most of the healthy raw vegans write for my Living Nutrition Magazine. I, myself, overcame serious severe malnutrition and bone decalcification doing a raw, fruit-based vegan diet for the last 23 years.

So, I don't think we have to look at the primates and say they're including some meat or whatever because it's vital. You know, when an animal is stressed, it does things which are not normal. If the season is not producing enough fruits, if there's a drought or there's not enough supply because the other hungry animals got there first, primates, including humans, will resort to eating anything to survive. We can eat omnivorously. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to digest that food well or that's it's going to be healthy for us but it can certainly be sustaining. Obviously, most humans eat a lot of cooked foods and a lot of meat and most of it doesn't digest and just decomposes in their gut every single day of their life and some of these people live to be 100 years old….suffering common maladies galore with severe physical and mental degeneration.

So, it comes down to this: if we purify our body, our body will tell us what is most appealing, what our true nutritional needs are. If we modern humans have always lived in an area where we can get good quality fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, I don't know why a person would turn to eating raw meat or bugs or anything like that when he/she can get avocados and nuts and seeds which are totally satisfying.

Mike: OK, specifically looking at protein, have you looked into the nitty-gritty of how much protein is in your diet and if it's enough and comparing that to the scientific data and how much protein science tells us we need. For example, I was at looking at the Harvard Medical School site the other day and they were reckoning that for most people, 0.8g of protein per Kg body weight is sufficient to cover 98% of the population. But for vegans, the figure is more likely to be 1g of protein per Kg body weight per day. Have you related what you do to figures like that or are you just going on the "lets just stick with instinct" theory?

Dave: I stick with instincts because I don't think that any modern nutritional science has anything to offer us, for many reasons. Obviously all their studies are based on unhealthy populations who are eating tons of cooked foods. We know that when we cook proteins we're destroying most of it, so maybe that's why their figures are higher than we think they should be. Also, the meat and dairy industries have for 100 years coerced the masses, including the medical associations, into believing we need to eat their products at every meal to get our protein, lest we get sick and perish. We know that's rubbish.

Their figures are pretty much skewed and you can throw most of them out the window and look at the true raw nutritional science behind everything. Dr. Douglas Graham and his wife Rozalind Graham in England, who I'm sure you know, are the most academically-oriented and accurate people when it comes to looking at the science and getting to the heart of the matter and finding out what the truth is and teaching accurate science.

I'm trained as an engineer and a health scientist, yet I know there's a place for science and also a place for living instinctively and not getting bogged down with the numbers. People can challenge me left and right. I encourage everybody to think for him/herself. But you can't really prove anything for yourself unless you've first met some really healthy vegan raw fooders, detoxed and lived on a good vegan diet for a few years. Shooting us vegans down without any personal experience is not valid.

Another aspect we have to recognize is that the body recycles about 80% of it's protein. That means we don't have to stuff ourselves with protein everyday. Also, mother's milk at the height of lactation for a growing infant is only about 5% protein by weight. The ideas that protein is the main thing that makes us grow and prevents us from being too thin and not having muscle and energy is absolutely false.

So, the protein thing is way overdone. We know that most major illnesses are caused by excess protein and really what most people are getting is too much cooked fat and protein which is incredibly toxic after the heat has altered it. So, we don't need to really think about protein. I never heard anybody or any source say we actually crave protein. When we're craving some heavy food and people are used to eating meat, they say they're craving protein, while they're probably just craving fat.

Now if we want high quality protein, if that's something we really want to do, in quantities which feel more satisfying than what they are hearing about, I suggest they get some really high quality raw nuts and seeds. E.g., almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, squash seeds, walnuts. Soak them for an hour or more, rinse them well then blend them up in a blender with water or maybe even some tomato or orange juice and make a dressing with them. They can strain it to get all the gritty particles out (which we can't digest) and they can make a high-protein, satisfying milk out of that. But, really, what they taste and get is fat satiation. That can be a most healthful thing, as long as we don't overeat or combine foods poorly.

We almost never see people with a condition where people are low in protein in this society. Protein is not the main problem, in virtually every case where people are underweight or suffering with other health issues. It's really overall malnutrition.

Mike: I was reading a book recently and basically the theory was this: we were tropical animals to start with, something happened, we left the canopies of the jungle, went onto the savannah and scavenged dead animals, things like that.

We got a lot of protein from vegetation [originally] and, as you said, given certain circumstances where our ancestors' regular food supply wasn't there, they ate just about anything to survive.

The theory is that we started eating a lot more animal protein and fats and, because of that, lots of things happened: we developed a bigger brain, we needed to cooperate and communicate more, especially as we became hunter-gatherers.

What do you think about these ideas, are they something that fit into your philosophy?

Dave: This is obviously a huge subject and obviously no one will ever be able to know the mental capabilities of our ancestors 10,000 -100,000 years ago. We all come up with our own visions and can gain a lot of bio-spiritual insight after we've done a raw vegan diet a while, purified and done some fasting, and our minds have become very clear. We can each reach our own conclusions. People can reject my take on things and that's perfectly good. We each need to delve within for insight. Here's my take:

Obviously throughout history there's been many glacial epochs, a lot of climate change due to volcanoes and natural planetary cycles. Human's food supply obviously has diminished and waned over the epochs and man migrated to the northern parts, Europe and elsewhere, and gotten out of his natural element. We don't have woolly coats, so when we migrate out of our natural climate we need to have clothing, we need to eat heavier fatty foods, to feel sustained.

We have a digestive system that can eat just about manage any foods but that's not going to guarantee that we're going to thrive and have good longevity by eating more fleshy foods. But it helps us cope in cold climates.

History has been a long and mysterious epic. We don't know everything that happened. As far as theories that by eating more meat and getting more protein, that increased the size of our brain, I've never looked hard at the science of that. I like the idea that our brains were fine as they were, that our mental capabilities and senses when we were raw fooders living in tropical forests and jungles were incredibly keen and vibrant, and we did not need to "evolve" further. Did eating more protein make us evolve or de-evolve?

If scientists are correlating eating more protein with brain size, I don't myself really see how that's improved man's function and capabilities as far as living rationally and healthfully on this planet. If that did coincide with man's brain development, I don't necessarily think that that's a good thing or an evolutionary phenomenon. I don't think we should look at primitive man's mental capabilities in a negative way.

There's many many different aspects to look at in that regard. Obviously in the last 100 years, with the technological revolution, man has been destroying the planet and risking his own survival with all this incredible brain power he supposedly now gloats about. Is having a bigger brain and complex communication a good thing? Are we living with less or more stress and is our longevity really that great? I don't think so, but that's my opinion.

I think that living instinctively, living simply, not being a technologically-oriented being, is a much better way of being for humanity and I'm not really impressed with man's increased brain size just because perhaps he ate more protein. Just go out in Nature for a day and think about it the next day when you get back to your modern lifestyle. To me, "being" in Nature beats thinking in this modern human world with all of the complex mental exercises and mind chatter.

Mike: The point is really, have changes taken place in the millions of years since we left the tropical forests that we can't go back on any more? That's the big question. Have we adapted to a diet that's higher in protein and higher in essential fatty acids?

Dave: Certainly not. Our body's capable of digesting just about anything but if you take a look at children who are raised on a raw food diet today, and their parents were raised for generations, many generations on cooked food, and these modern raw food children are fed properly — and I've seen a few of them — they were the healthiest, most beautiful, most beautifully poised and intelligent people you'll ever see.

I myself lived on a diet of junk, eating meat at least twice a day since about age 3 or 4, eating every bit of junk food rubbish you can imagine, living on all kinds of chemicalized or preserved meats and so forth up to age 26. Then, after years of degenerative disease, I suddenly adopted the raw food diet, on about 90% fruit and it didn't set me back. In fact I detoxified and built superior health and I'm about to turn 49 next week and I'm well rested and everything is going well for me. I feel like I'm a teenager and am strong on a supposedly "low-protein diet." And most of my raw vegan friends eat "low" protein diets of roughly 10 to 15% protein per dietary calories. I don't see how humanity has adapted to eating all that meat and rubbish, all that heavy fatty food, since most of them are sick most of the time. Sixty percent of our society are sick today and degenerative disease is the norm in Western society. Cooked fatty, high-protein and cooked, refined grains are the main culprits.

Mike: What I feel is — in terms of optimal nutrition — ok, I agree with you entirely, a diet in cooked grains, high in cooked modern meats is definitely a bad thing. But I do like to look at the diet of bonobos, chimpanzees and even the diets of traditional cultures — and they all include small amounts of animal foods in there.

And I'm just wondering whether it's not a necessity. I'm not saying cooked animal foods — the history of cooking is quite short. But there's even evidence that we even went through an aquatic phase. I don't if you've heard of that one? — which is the reason we lost a lot of our body hair and so on. And maybe we relied on small amounts of fish. And of course it would all have been raw back in those days.

Dave: I don't see any evidence to support that theory.

Mike: I've seen documentaries on the Maori for example who just took things out of the sea and ate them raw, there and then. But these weren't modern, cooked meats, these were things just taken directly out of nature, like eggs, like fish and so on. Do you think the optimal diet might include small amounts of raw animal foods?

Dave: I wouldn't call that optimal, because their toxic loads impose some degree of burden on the body. Those animal food items provide some good nutrients in the raw state but, again, nothing that cannot be obtained from fruits, nuts seeds and plants. Avocados have all the fatty acids and essential proteins we need without the toxicity of animal foods.

Here's the way I look at things: I was just in Belize in Central America last week for a vacation. It's an absolutely beautiful country where monkeys abound in the western hilly jungle forests. Now consider this: all through my stay there I didn't see one avocado. I found out the avocados were out of season.

So, imagine being a monkey or an early primate in the tropical forest. Our sensory apparatus naturally lead us to enjoy sweet foods (such as sugar apples and berries), sometimes fatty and creamy foods (such as avocados and durians which can both have some sweetness) and sometimes savoury and salty foods (such as leaves and tomatoes).

So, if they were not able to find sweet ripe fruits or ripe avocados, as archeology shows most or maybe all of them probably satiated their hunger by eating bugs and bloody animals which are salty and fatty tasting, providing amino acids. Perhaps that behavior became more and more common in some species leading to more stimulation/aggressive behavior because of the toxic load. Does that behavior mean that is optimal just because primates evolved bigger brains?

I look at the big picture: bigger brains did not lead to better health, nor to more harmonious ecological living nor to more culturally civil dynamics. I think that animal protein in the diet did not improve the natural order of things one bit. The animal foods did not give them specific nutrients which were not found in fruits.

Ripe fruits impose no toxic load, supporting serenity without without aggressive killing…without mindless, heartless destruction of living creatures. As a vegan and observer of vegan humans, I don't see how killing and/or eating dead animals improves us in the optimal direction.

As University of California at Berkeley Professor Dr. Katherine Milton has long reported, the Spider Monkeys in Central America eat mostly fruit. They're energetic and they go racing through the trees for ripe fruit, and they're mentally keen. The Howler monkeys in that region subsist on mostly leaves and perhaps some animal foods and they are slow, dull and lethargic. I have also read that Bonobos, our closest primate cousins, eat exclusively fruit if that is what is available.

Obviously these animals are eating a very simple diets, unlike modern humans. I.e., they're not eating, 20, 30 or 50 different kinds of foods per day and polluting their bodies, overloading their organs of detoxification and elimination and corrupting their senses.

So their bodies are much purer, fitter, more robust and capable of handling the animal foods, which are far more toxic than fruits and plants, than we humans are. In other words, they can handle the small amounts of raw animal foods relatively well.

My contention is that if there are no avocados or other fatty foods available to primates and if they are acculturated to eating some vegan foods ("monkey see, monkey do"), or if ripe fruit is scarce, then they're just going to go for whatever food they can find to sustain themselves. It's survival of the fittest. You've got to find something to eat if your food supply is short.

Go to part 3 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.