Today, we are honored to feature Mike Anderson, author of the book “The RAVE Diet and Lifestyle” on our program.

The term “RAVE” is an acronym which stands for: No Refined foods, No Animal foods, No Vegetable oils, and No Exceptions and Exercise.

He is also the producer of three superb films on health and eating: “Healing Cancer from Inside Out,” “8 Minutes,” and “Eating.” 

Mr. Anderson’s works examines the overwhelming evidence that keeping a plant-based diet leads to a life of overall excellent health.

Mr. Anderson(m):
My father died of cancer. My step-father died of heart disease. My mother has severe osteoporosis. My sister-in-law's diabetic. A friend of mine was just diagnosed with breast cancer. My neighbor's on heart medicines and cholesterol-lowering drugs.

All this sound familiar? What's not so familiar is that these health problems were caused by eating habits.

In fact, eating is the biggest cause of disease, disabilities and death in the US today and according to the Surgeon General eating kills 2 out of 3 Americans every year.

HOST:
Mike Anderson, during his early fifties, decided it was an appropriate point in his life to take some time for introspection.

He began to read such books as the acclaimed “Diet For A New America” by vegan, meaning an animal-free diet, advocate John Robbins.

From his readings, here is what he concluded:

Mike Anderson (m):
“My God I’ve stumbled on this big secret that you can reverse diseases with simple changes in diet.” And to me I’d never heard of this before. Of course my field is in computers and so (there was), no reason for me to hear about it.

But I said, “My God, this should be headline news. I should be knowing about this instead of all the drug discoveries and everything,” because you can reverse heart disease, for example, with simple changes in diet.

You can reverse Type 2 diabetes in one or two weeks very easily with just a simple diet. You can reverse cancers. You can reverse virtually any degenerative disease.

That’s what’s killing eighty percent of the population right now, is degenerative diseases.

HOST:
An animal-based diet can lead to serious and fatal illnesses.

Mr. Anderson (M):
When people in other parts of the world abandon their traditional plant-based diets and start eating like Americans, they start dying like Americans.

The pattern is not only obvious, but totally predictable.

No matter where you look when people adopt animal-based diets, heart disease and cancer
suddenly become their biggest killers. This is now happening throughout the world in countries like Japan and China where they're replacing rice and vegetables with meat and dairy products. And American eating diseases are spreading like wildfire.

The one thing an animal-based diet does best is kill people.

It does this by clogging arteries and restricting the flow of blood and oxygen throughout the body. Deprive the heart of oxygen, you get a heart attack. Deprive the brain of oxygen, you get a stroke. Deprive your tissues and cells of oxygen and you set up the underlying cause of all cancers.

HOST:
If we make our diet free of animal products, diseases will disappear.

Mr. Anderson (M):
Virtually all of heart disease is caused by diet.

Now, heart disease or cardiovascular disease, that means clogged blood vessels throughout the body. Heart disease is just one subset of cardiovascular disease. Type 2 diabetes, (is)100% caused by diet, 100%.

How do we know this? We can reverse it with diet, and (it’s)very easy.  Its been shown time and time again, its been proven.

Now, there is a cure for diabetes I am here to tell you, give me any diabetic and I will reverse it and get them off insulin.

Cobb(f):
You can completely heal diabetes and very, very quickly.

Gerson(f):
In most cases, 5 to 7 days. We have a few cases that are particularly severe. It might take two weeks.

Lodi(m):
We find in 5 to 7 days someone with type 2 diabetes, if they eat 100% plant-based diet, they’re no longer on insulin. I haven’t seen that not happen.

Mr. Anderson (m):
Osteoporosis is another one. Our acidic diet essentially uses up the calcium in our bones, that results in osteoporosis. Cancer is another one, we shouldn’t have any cancer, our bodies are capable of handling toxins in the environment, genetics only accounts for a couple percent and even genetics can be trumped by diet.

Bad genes don’t express themselves in another words with good diet, with a bad diet they are going to come out and play.

Mr. Anderson (m):
Two doctors have estimated that, 75% to 85% of the people in the hospital are there because of their diets. You got the broken arms and car accidents, that sort of thing, but the vast majority are there because of the diet.

HOST:
Welcome back to Healthy Living for our discussion with author and film producer Mike Anderson on how our dietary choices are so crucial to preventing and reversing illnesses.

Here, Mr. Anderson discusses the fact that prominent members of the medical community support  the vegan diet for treating heart disease.

Mr. Anderson (m):
Dean Ornish, for example, he did the foundation study for reversing heart disease and it was published in peer-reviewed journals and he is very, very credible.

John McDougall is another one, Joel Fuhrman another one, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn from the Cleveland Clinic, he’s another one.

He has [the] longest heart disease reversal study ever, out there. But he is reversing heart disease with diet.

Mr. Anderson (m):
In “Eating” I interviewed Neal Pinckney. He is an MD. He was scheduled for an emergency bypass operation. What he did was he walked away from it. He knew what that involved. What he did, he set out to discover on his own how to reverse his heart disease.

He went on the Internet. He finally discovered Dr. Dean Ornish and his book. What happened with him is amazing because he couldn’t walk two hundred feet without experiencing severe angina (chest pain).

Within two weeks after changing his diet the angina was almost all gone. Within two months it was completely gone. Seven months later he was running in an eight and a half mile (NFT: 13.5km) marathon and finished in the middle of the pack.

Now, here’s a guy scheduled for emergency bypass surgery, seven months later he’s in a marathon. That, no drug in existence, no operation, can do that.

Bypasses are a temporary fix. Angioplasty is a temporary fix. Statin drugs, they just allow you to continue living with the disease, they don’t cure it.

Diet is the only cure for that.

So I was stunned. I wanted to get something out to help promote the message.

HOST:
Mike Anderson believes that to truly enjoy optimum health, one must be a healthy vegan. This means avoiding refined foods as well.

Mr. Anderson (m):
Bad food means food that has too much saturated fat, that has cholesterol in it, that has a lot of toxins in it, is contaminated.

When you look at our beef supply for example, or any animal supply, they are eating crops that are heavy with pesticides.

In fact, crops destined to be fed to cattle, there are virtually no regulations on the pesticides they can spray on the crops. So in fact 95% of the pesticide intake comes from animal foods that we eat.

Bad foods are refined foods. Your white bread. The refined sugar, with very simple sugars and vegetable oils too, because  it’s a refined food.

You don’t see vegetable oil cans hanging off trees or anything like that.

HOST:
Many misconceptions surround the consumption of fish.

Supreme Master TV:
What would you say to people who think; “Okay, fish doesn’t have fats and cholesterol.” What would you say to them?

Mr. Anderson(m):
Well fish does have fat, it does have cholesterol. You look at the salmon. People are eating fish because of omega 3. Where (does) the omega 3 come from originally – the algae that they eat.

Plant foods have plenty of omega 3. The average salmon is 60% fat; It’s full of cholesterol. Shrimp has the highest amount of cholesterol per calorie of any animal on the planet.

It’s no different, it just has a fin instead of a hoof. That’s about the only difference between a fish and a cow.

HOST:
Governments definitely have a vital role to play in changing the way people eat.

Mr. Anderson (M):
The problem to me is all of these bad foods are subsidized.

Sugar industry is subsidized, meat and dairy is subsidized. Every bad food has heavy, heavy subsidies behind it. We are talking billions, tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidies to prop them up.

Now, these same people who run these industries are all saying “I like the free enterprise system and no government interference” or “We want free market.”

I agree with them, let’s have a free market. Let’s get rid of subsidies altogether. The health of the nation will improve a thousand percent, because of it. Milk and dairy will be too expensive, sugar will be too expensive, all of these are political subsidies going to artificially support that market.

So I am in favor of free markets. Let them be free and our health will improve. That’s to me the bottom line. Because anyone will tell you who knows, there is a direct connection between what we’re eating and the diseases we are getting.

The linchpin behind that is the subsidies that allow this food to be so cheap. That’s why people are eating so much.

Supreme Master TV:
With the governments, what do you think their role could be in this? What could the governments do to improve the nations’ health and change our diets?

Mike Anderson (M):
Just get rid of the subsidies,  that will do it overnight. Let the market take care of it.

HOST:
Remember to join us next Monday for the second segment of our interview with author and film producer Mike Anderson on the virtues of the plant-based diet.

Our esteemed viewers, it was very much a pleasure to have you join us today for this edition of Healthy Living.

For more details on Milk Anderson's works, please visit:
www.ravediet.com
Media Available At the Site:
Eating (DVD)
The RAVE Diet and Lifestyle (Book)
Healing Cancer From Inside Out (Book and DVD)
8 Minutes (DVD)