Below is the interview transcript for Lex Rooker's (a former vegan of 20 to 25 years!) interview with JoanneUnleashed.com.
My comments: I was also a very determined but failed former vegan, high fruit low-fat raw vegan, to be exact. I was following the 80/10/10 dietary guidelines by Dr. Doug Graham in his book. It just sounded like the perfect diet in the world - no cruelty, peace and love to all animals. I felt so righteous. Some symptoms I had when my health went downhill in the last 2 months of eating 80/10/10 (tried 80/10/10 for around 6 months in total) included:
Symptoms numbered 1-11 gradually disappeared within a month on uropathy and raw paleo diet. Eyebrows and receding gums will probably take a while to recover.
Interview with Lex Rooker
Lex Rooker Talks About His Raw All-Meat Diet
and Relief from Migraines Joanne: Welcome to Joanne Unleashed. Today I have with me Lex Rooker who, amazingly, has been on an all raw-meat diet for five years. Hey, Lex.
Lex: Hi, Joanne. How are you?
Joanne: I’m fabulous. I’m really glad we’re having this call today. What I’d like to start out with, I’d like to talk about your health issues when you were younger. I mean you had quite a few of them.
Lex: Well, I certainly did. It started when I was very young. About the time I hit puberty I would start getting these horrible headaches. I mean they were just awful. They were miserable migraines that they would just send me into a dark room with a pillow over my head, a heating pad across my face, and I’d be there for 24 to 48 hours. They were just awful. At times I was taking 12 Excedrin and it wouldn’t even knock the edge off of it sometimes. It was pretty bad.
Joanne: Yeah. I used to get a lot of headaches when I was younger, too, and the only thing that really worked was Fiorinal.
Lex: Yeah. They’re pretty bad. So that kind of got me on the thing of diet. I was reading all the gurus that I could find. I jumped on every bandwagon that I could jump on from the time I was 15 up to the latest one.
Joanne: And who were the gurus that you were reading?
Lex: Well, I started with Renee Taylor and Hunza. Then we went on to people like Pritikin and Walker and Shelton and Carrington and Wigmore and Kulvinskas and you name it, I’ve read them.
Joanne: Okay. All the vegetarian, vegan, raw-food people.
Lex: Well, most of them were. Pritikin wasn’t. He was probably, if anything, the one that kind of saved me, because I had done the fasting bit. Shelton and Bragg had convinced me that what I needed to do was a long fast. You know, that detox stuff.
Joanne: Right.
Lex: So I did a 31-day fast, and I went from about 190 pounds down to, I think it was about 86 pounds.
Lex: I could literally put my hands around my waist and touch my fingers.
Joanne: That’s really extreme for a 31-day fast. I mean that’s unheard of. I’ve never heard of that.
Lex: I think I almost died. When people tell me today that they want to do that kind of thing, I suggest that they don’t do that. I think that maybe a day or two, it gives the body rest. But let me tell you, the long extended fast, it took me probably two or three years to recover, and who knows if I fully recovered. Because I know a huge amount of muscle mass was lost and who knows what really happened.
Joanne: Well, you know, I think back in Shelton’s time, and their time in the early twentieth century, fasting that long wasn’t that bad, because they weren’t eating a lot of processed food, and they weren’t as nutritionally deficient as we are now. Because when we fast now and we’re nutritionally deficient, you know, you run out of your nutrient stores and you crash.
Lex: Well, I think beyond that the… When they did the, I forget what you, therapeutic, that was the word I was trying to come up with. You know, at my age a light bulb goes out in the corner, and I have to scratch around to try to find out what it was I was thinking of. Anyway, therapeutic fasting was often done in what was euphemistically called a sanatorium. And so, you know, people were watched. They didn’t have a lot of activity and that kind of thing. But I was going to work every day. I probably looked like the wrath of Moses, and people were really concerned about me. I had to walk back and forth from the bus stop, which was about two miles from my home. Had I been in bed and convalescing, I probably would have been in better shape. But trying to go to work and do all that, it was a problem.
Joanne: I mean, one hundred pounds in one month! So why did you break the fast?
Lex: Well…
Joanne: I mean why did you, actually, why did you go so long, is the better question.
Lex: Well, it was kind of a historical thing with me. You do things because they’re the “right thing” to do. That’s what the guru says. And if you’ll remember, if you’ve read Shelton and Bragg and those kinds of things, they will tell you, oh, well, you fast until natural hunger returns.
Joanne: Oh yes, and the tongue, the coating on the tongue clears.
Lex: The coating on the tongue goes away and all that other stuff. And, you know, quite frankly, I wasn’t hungry. I don’t think that we in modern times really know what natural hunger is. We wouldn’t recognize it if it fell on us. Believe me, my parents, my wife, everybody was thrilled to death when I broke the fast and returned to my vegan ways at that point.
Joanne: Oh, when did you start being a vegan?
Lex: I started that, gosh, in about 1968 or so, I think it was.
Joanne: How old were you?
Lex: That would have put me at about 17. And what I was trying to do was get rid of the headaches. It seemed to work for a while. They’d go away, and they’d be gone for a few weeks, or a few months, and then they’d return, and I’d figure well, I needed to do something else, so I would modify what I was doing. At one time I was eating eggs, so I dropped those. And then I would pick up and eat soy, and then I would drop that and try something else. It got to the point where I was eating boiled wheat, which my coworkers called cockroach eggs.
Joanne: I’m sorry, what did they call it?
Lex: Cockroach eggs. That was a, that would be my lunch, would be boiled wheat similar to just whole wheat, like whole rice. The difference was that it has a very tough coating on it, the wheat bran. And let me tell you, that runs right through you and strips out everything on the inside. It’s not pleasant. But I did it, again, because it was the “right thing” to do. And at that time I was also doing tons of juicing. So I had gotten onto Ann Wigmore in the early ’70s.
Joanne: Oh, the wheatgrass queen.
Lex: Yes, the wheatgrass connection. And Viktoras Kulvinskas in his Survival in the 21st Century: Planetary Healers Manual and Sprouting for the Good of Every Body. And so I was eating lots of sprouts. And I had turned my patio into a full wheatgrass production system. Well, I was pulling out and drinking full flats of wheatgrass every day. And then I was also juicing carrots, the whole carrots, carrot tops, beets and beet tops, turnips and turnip tops, parsley, cilantro, you name it. If it was green, it went in it. Kale. Cabbage. Because this, of course, is where all your vitamins come from.
Joanne: Right.
Lex: And so all the people that drink green juices, and I figured, well shoot, if a shot is good, a cup is better, and we’ll go with a quart, and then we’ll know we’re good.
Joanne: Yeah. And you were eating vegetarian/vegan at the time.
Lex: And I was eating vegetarian and vegan at the time, and I was sprouting. I had sprouts everywhere. We had mung bean sprouts and black bean sprouts and wheat sprouts. And I was also making Essene bread with sprouted lentils and sprouted wheat, and raisins and dates, and that kind of thing.
Joanne: You’re just the picture boy for the whole raw food movement.
Lex: Oh yeah, I was the poster boy for the whole…
Joanne: Poster boy. That was the term. I’m getting old too.
Lex: Yeah, the poster boy for the hygiene movement.
Joanne: Yeah, natural hygiene. I love natural hygiene, I just can’t stand their dietary recommendations anymore. You know, if you could throw out that, the rest of it’s pretty good.
Lex: Yeah, well, then, of course, I was a follow of T.C. Fry for a while.
Joanne: Oh, the fruit man.
Lex: Yes. And I actually met him. He looked like the wrath of Moses when I met him, and I think he died a year or so after I met him. But he didn’t look all that great.
Joanne: Just for the audience, T.C. Fry was a natural hygienist who recommended an all-fruit or predominantly fruit diet. And he had very poor health when was younger, and he went on this all-fruit diet, he recovered his health, and he was doing well for a while. Then he started binging on ice cream and cheese and all these fats at night, you know. And of course the natural hygienists blamed that as the reason why he died, not the fact that he ate that because he wasn’t getting what he needed from the fruit.
Lex: There’s something wrong with ice cream?
Joanne: I mean, I love it.
Lex: If I was… Five years ago, if I was going to die, somebody would look at me and say that I was going to die of ice cream overdose, because I could sit down and eat half a gallon in a sitting. It was no problem.
Joanne: Yeah, me too.
Lex: And of course it was perfectly legal on the diet.
Joanne: Uh huh. Oh, it was?
Lex: Oh, certainly. And I’m sure that the Heath bars crunched up in it weren’t a problem either.
Joanne: Ha ha. Okay.
Lex: And that’s probably why I weighed 220 pounds.
Joanne: Oh, so you got up to, back up to 220? You gained over a hundred pounds eating all this raw?
Lex: Oh yeah. I gained over… But I’m sure it was the ice cream and the Heath bars and that kind of thing.
Joanne: So you were also gorging on that, on fats?
Lex: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, because I was always hungry, and I was always cold. I was always freezing. I could never get warm. I would get in my car on a summer day heading for work, and I would have to turn the heater on, because, why, you know, it was only 70 outside. It’s cold.
Joanne: Yeah. I had that same problem. But, I guess with that really healthy raw vegan diet you regained your health?
Lex: Well, it depends on what you would call regaining your health. I ate as much as I could of the raw vegan diet and, you know, it was certainly better than fasting. But I wouldn’t say that I regained my health, because over time I lost the enamel on my teeth, my blood pressure started going up, my fasting blood sugar started rising, my cholesterol started going up, the bone density in my jaw, according to dental X-rays, was going down, and my teeth were loosening. The dentist was saying that it wouldn’t be long before I would be in for partials, and probably I would need full dentures by the time I was 60.
Joanne: I remember a few months ago reading this blog of this woman, she was an 80/10/10er, which is a diet by Doug Graham: 80 percent carbohydrate, 10 fat, 10 protein, and the carbohydrate is mostly fruit and some greens. And she’d been away from the blog for a while, and then she came back and saying she was still on this all-fruit diet, she was feeling great, her health was good, but she’d been to the dentist, and she had to have a bunch of dental work done. But she was sure it had nothing to do with her all-fruit diet.
Lex: Oh, yeah. Well, professor Hotema, back in the ’50s, I think, and early ’60s believed the same thing. And he felt that citrus fruits were the fruits of the gods, and that’s all you needed to eat. And so he moved to Florida. I think by 42 or something he had lost all of his teeth, and shortly thereafter he had died. But of course none of it had to do with his diet.
Joanne: Well, some of them feel that losing their teeth is a form of detox.
Lex: Yeah, right, exactly. I had finally given up on the detox thing. I fell for that for years and, you know, that’s one of the reasons I went on the fast. Because everything I read and everyone I talked to, “Oh, well, the reason that you have your headaches, and the reason that you have this, and the reason you have that, it’s all due to detox. Your body’s detoxing. You’re highly toxic.” And so, you know, I went on that 31-day fast figuring that, well, that’s going to get all the toxins out of my body.
Joanne: Oh, so you went on the fast after you had been vegan for a while.
Lex: Oh, yeah. Because, why they, the reason that I still had the headaches and still had some of the problems that I was having was due to the fact that, why, it’s detox! So this is a good thing, and you can speed it up by fasting.
Joanne: Yeah. Well, before you became a vegan, what kind of foods were you eating as a teenager and a kid.
Lex: Well, actually not too bad. You know, I grew up in a middle-income, lower middle-income family, and my mom cooked dinner every day. We very seldom had soda pops. It was a big deal in the 1950s and early ’60s to have soda. I mean we’d go out, I think, once every month or two we would go to either Fosters Freeze, or we would go to A & W and, you know, we would have a hamburger and a root beer or a soda. And then if we were at Fosters, we got an ice cream cone. But that was like once a month. The rest of the time it was, it was, you know, typical food of the time. We had, you know, roasts, and chicken, and tuna sandwiches for lunch, and all that kinds of stuff. So it wasn’t really bad. My mother was very health conscious. She was buying whole wheat bread. And she would make bread every day. It was not unusual to come home from school and she had homemade bread and butter for us. But we always sprinkled a little sugar on it, you know, it was a treat.
Joanne: Well, you know, I also noticed when you were younger, you know, you got radiation treatments, and you had half of your thyroid removed. Well, recently…
Lex: The thyroid was when I was born, apparently back in those days, back in the early ’50s, radiation was a treatment for everything. And the thymus glad, which is in the upper chest, lower throat area, apparently as we, when we’re very young, that is one of the defense mechanisms for our body. And I was kind of a colicky kid. Normally the thymus gland, as we get older, quickly gets smaller, and the body’s immune system beefs up and takes over. And in my case it didn’t meet the criteria that the doctors wanted it to meet. So the doctors decided to intervene, and they did radiation treatments to cause the thymus gland to shrink, which it did. The problem was by the time I was six years old I had tumors on the thyroid. I was raised as a Christian Scientist, so my grandmother was a staunch Christian Scientist, and she said, “We’re taking him to a practitioner to get him cured.” And my father said, “The practitioner has a week. If that doesn’t work, we’re taking him for surgery.” So, you know, within a couple of weeks it was still growing and doing whatever, and it was a large lump in my throat. So they took it out. And then back when I was eleven…
Joanne: What did they take out?
Lex: They took out the tumor.
Joanne: Okay. On your thyroid.
Lex: Right. On the thyroid. But they left everything intact. When I was eleven the tumor came back, and that had the doctors mightily worried, because they thought, wow, now it’s probably cancerous. But they went in and it was benign, but they took out half the thyroid to make sure that they got it all.
Joanne: Did they put you on hormone supplements for the thyroid?
Lex: Nope.
Joanne: So you’re working with half a thyroid.
Lex: So I’m working with half a thyroid.
Joanne: And that’ll, I’ve been studied thyroid recently, and that’ll really mess you up.
Lex: Yeah, I haven’t taken any of that. I haven’t had any hormone treatments or anything like that.
Joanne: You’ve just had bad health. Ha ha.
Lex: Yeah, just bad health. So anyway, the thyroid tumor is gone. And then, you know, I was a very heavy dairy eater when I was a teenager. “Everybody needs milk.” And you know, my parents were convinced that we needed lots of milk and that kind of thing. And I got cystic acne. And so I then went to get treatment for that from the dermatologist, and of course the treatment of choice was radiation. So they would paste little lead pasties over my eyebrows, and put things over my eyes, and then they would radiate my face to get rid of the acne. They also put me on Avlosulfon and Tetracycline, and I guess Avlosulfon is a rather nasty antibiotic. It does damage to the whatever in our body creates red blood cells. So I would have to go in every week and get blood tests to determine whether I could stay on the Avlosulfon. And then I was cycled off of it periodically depending on what the blood test said. And then as soon as the blood would build back up they’d put me back on it.
Joanne: And then in your thirties you started getting cancer lesions on your face.
Lex: Yeah, I’d get those precancerous lesions on my face, and I would have to go in and have those frozen off about every six months. And they’d find about a dozen of them usually every time I went in. And that was from my mid-thirties, about 35, 36 on until just recently.
Joanne: Jeez. So fast forward. You read a book that made you open your mind to the possibility that a vegan diet really wasn’t the best choice for you. What was that book?
Lex: It was pretty obvious that things were going downhill, and I was looking for the next guru. Because the latest, all the gurus up ’til then hadn’t been working very well. I did cycle over into Pritikin, which did allow a small amount of meat.
Joanne: That’s low-fat isn’t it?
Lex: Very low-fat, and you’re eating, you know, just plain boiled potatoes and that type of thing. And so I thought, well, I’ll combine that and do a raw Pritikin. You know, cook the meat of course, because, why, raw meat is inedible. Just ask anybody. You’ll get sick and die. But I was trying to eat potatoes and things like that raw which, believe me, our bodies are not designed to digest that stuff. I would chew that stuff up, and it would come out just the same way it went in. And it was terrible. But I kept doing it because I was convinced it was the “right thing” to do. And then I ran across Ray Audette’s book NeanderThin. I, you know, I had found a soul mate. Here was a guy that was in worse shape than I was. He had rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes, and a bunch of other stuff, and he was a relatively young man. And he had discovered this Paleolithic way of eating, and that was my first introduction to that. So I jumped in with both feet coming from more of a vegetarian background, and I read his list of good foods and bad foods. So I avoided the bad foods, but I got the hunter/gatherer thing backwards. I was gathering, so I was eating lots of fruits and vegetables, and I was doing the Pritikin thing with, you know, four ounces of meat every day. I finally figured out that I got the hunter/gatherer thing backwards, and that hunter came first. I started changing things a little bit, and I started reading a little more and discovering that fat was extremely important and that that we probably needed to reduce the carbohydrates a bit. So I raised the meat but was still relatively low-fat. Essentially what I was doing was eating things like the chicken Caesar salad with an extra chicken breast. But I was now having meat at every meal. You know, it was a good-sized salad, because “you need that,” you know, for all those vitamins. And then I was just having lots of meat. But I was avoiding breads and soy and all the other stuff that used to be my staples. And I was feeling much, much, much, much better. More and more recent research was showing that carbs were a problem. And I ran across Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories. And I ran across Life Without Bread by Lutz and Christian, Christian Anderson (Allan), I think. And both of those seemed to point to reducing carbs. So I started cycling carbs off and raising my meat, and it became obvious that meat alone was not going to handle it, that I really needed fat. I started adding fat, which was a big problem for me, because I’d been fat-phobic for, you know, 50 years.
Joanne: What kind of fat were you adding?
Lex: Well, I was just trying to eat the fat from the meat. And so, you know, I would have a steak, and I used to trim all the fat off and everything. And so now I’d have a steak, and I’d try to eat the fat and I’d gag. It was just tough getting it down. But I persevered. I actually started getting a lot better, and the headaches became less frequent. Then I ran across Geoffrey Percell’s Yahoo group, Raw Paleo Diet group, and that was where I had first run across Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s work and his published articles back in the 1930s in Harpers.
Joanne: Now he was the guy who went to the hospital and ate just nothing but meat to prove to them that it wouldn’t harm him?
Lex: That you could do that. Yeah. I think he was an anthropologist of some sort. He was supposed to be on some kind of scientific expedition up to the North Pole area. And he got seasick, so he didn’t take the ship like the other people did. He went across land, and a storm came in, and it was a lucky thing he didn’t take the ship, because everybody on the ship died. But he hunkered down with the Inuit and ate the way they did, which was basically, you know, meat, whale blubber, and seal, and that kind of stuff.
Joanne: And rotten fish.
Lex: Fish. You know, some of it boiled, some of it raw, whatever. And he did just fine. He said at the time that the hardest things was not eating that way but getting over the psychology of eating that way. Because it’s very hard to believe that you can eat nothing but meat. So then when I had found, I had read in his articles that he had done this one-year study with Belleview Hospital, I found the results of that and I was fascinated. So I thought, wow, I’m going to give this a try. And it just was an adventure. That’s what I started.
Joanne: That was five years ago, right?
Lex: So I went to my doctor, and I told him what I was going to do, and he about died. He said, Oh my god, your cholesterol is, you know, over 250, and you go and eat nothing but meat and fat like this, and it’s going to skyrocket. And you’re going to end up with, you know, hardening of the arties and your heart failure and the whole thing. Your blood pressure’s already borderline high at, you know, at 145, 150 over 95, and that’s going to skyrocket, and this is just going to be a mess. And I was also had diabetes, or early stage diabetes where fasting blood sugar was up in the 140s. So he was not optimistic at all, but I told him what I was going to do. And he said, well, you know, I’d rather that you take Vytorin for the cholesterol and Metformin for the diabetes and blood pressure medication, and all that kind of stuff, and we’ll control it with drugs. You don’t need to do anything like that. So I said, you know, I don’t think I want to take those drugs for the rest of my life.
Joanne: I mean that’s got to be pretty daunting. First off, you’re coming from a background of all the natural hygiene and vegan raw diet and all that, and now you’re switching to all-meat. And you’ve got the medical profession telling you’re going to kill yourself. I mean, it must take a lot of courage to persevere.
Lex: Well, I don’t know if it’s courage. It might be stupidity. You know, anybody who is willing to follow gurus for 20 or 25 years where it was obvious that their health was failing and getting worse but still doggedly sticking to it, I don’t know that you’d call that courage.
Joanne: Well, I think switching away from it is courage. You know, to admit that you were wrong.
Lex: There was no one, there was really no one there, either, doing it. I mean there was Stanley Owsley, the Bear, who is infamous for having been essentially a meat-only eater since he was about 24, and he’s now, I think, in his mid-70s.
Joanne: Oh, wow. I never heard of him.
Lex: Yeah. He was the soundman for the Grateful Dead. And he was also, he’s also more well known for the do-it-yourself-LSD-in-your-bathtub guy. He was the one that started the LSD in, back in the ’60s.
Joanne: I thought that was Timothy Leary.
Lex: Yeah. So you can find him on the Web. He lives in Australia now.
Joanne: The Bear?
Lex: Yeah, the Bear. So between that and Stefansson’s work I thought, well you know, what have I got to lose. We’ll give it a shot. I started just eating meat, and I normally just cooked it about medium. You know, That’s the way I’d been eating it all my life.
Joanne: Just muscle meat at that time?
Lex: Yeah, just muscle meat. And I could only afford hamburger, so I’d eat ground meat, form it into paddies and lightly cook it ‘til it was pink in the middle. And then I would chow down. I evolved then to taking the, I’d get the fattier cuts, and then I would drain the grease out of the pan back over the paddies after I had eaten them. And then it sort of came to me that, gee, no other animal cooks it’s food; why should I? So I went from medium, to medium-rare, to rare, and finally to raw. And it was quite a trip. It took me a couple years to transition fully to where I can now tell you with a straight face that I now prefer it raw. I don’t like it cooked.
Joanne: You’ve been eating raw five years, right?
Lex: Well, I’ve been eating raw about probably three and a half to four. Yeah, I’ve been eating raw three and a half to four years, but I’ve been almost totally raw or total meat for almost five years.
Joanne: You’ve been experimenting with the fat and protein ratio.
Lex: Well, I got that from Gary Taubes. You know, it was interesting. I read his Good Calories, Bad Calories, and my interpretation of what he had said was that, well, if you don’t eat any carbs and if you reduce protein, which might turn into glucose, (the body can convert some of that into glucose) and you eat higher fat, that you can’t put on weight. And I thought well, gee, that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s true. So I went out and I bought a fat analyzer, the kind they used in the markets to test the ground beef to see what the percentage of fat is so that they can correctly mark their packages. And I started measuring what it was that I was eating and keeping track of my blood glucose and ketones and the whole shot. And also keeping track of the fat ratios. And what I discovered was I was normally eating about 65 to 70 percent calories from fat. And I’d been doing that for almost two years.
Joanne: Did you see the doctor after you’d been doing that for like two years?
Lex: I go see the doctor every year.
Joanne: And so what was your cholesterol looking like at that time since it was going to kill you to eat all.
Lex: My cholesterol kept dropping. It went from, you know, from 250 down to 211 down to 190, and the most recent test last year it was 175.
Joanne: And how about your blood pressure?
Lex: Blood pressure went from roughly 150 over 95, and it dropped rather rapidly within the first year. It now is down around 106 over 65 or so. Blood glucose dropped from around 140 down to just under 100. And it seems to sit there at just under 100. And most people who are trying a zero carb diet find that their blood sugar drops initially but then over time it comes back and it just stabilizes almost at 100.
Joanne: Yeah, isn’t that pretty much what we’re shooting for is stabilization?
Lex: Stabilization, but the doctors will tell you that, oh, well, anything above 99 is borderline diabetic, and we’ve got to get you on some kind of medication.
Joanne: Naturally.
Lex: I’m not so sure. I think that because we eat so many carbs and the pancreases work so hard to dump lots of insulin, that… Our blood sugar is a yo-yo, and of course it overshoots, and so blood sugar drops low. It can go up a couple hundred points after a meal, and glucose is deadly to us if it goes too high, it pumps out insulin assuming that this is going to be a horrible thing, and then it overshoots. And then of course our blood sugar plummets. And then we get starved again. And so we have to have a candy bar or a soda pop or something a couple hours later. And we’re on this constant yo-yo.
Joanne: And the doctors, you know, are basing their opinions on a populace on the standard American diet.
Lex: Right. That’s going through this all the time. And then of course what happens is people go to bed after eating dinner, blood glucose shoots high. The body reacts by dropping blood glucose low because it was so high that it overshoots. But then they’re not hungry. And they’re told before they go to the doctor, “Don’t eat anything before you come in for your blood tests in the morning. We need the fasting levels.” So even though they’re ravenous hungry, they go in and blood sugar’s low. Unless, of course, their pancreas is overworked and just can’t keep up with the mess they’re giving them. But you see in my case I monitor my blood glucose all the time. And when I initially make a change I’ll monitor every 15 minutes after eating until I see what the curve is going to be. But generally my blood glucose doesn’t change more than 20 points one way or the other. I can eat a huge meal, and I only eat one meal a day, and my blood glucose will slowly rise from about 95 or so, and it’ll slowly rise up to maybe 115 over three or four hours, and then it slowly drops down back down into the 90 to 100 range, and it just stays there for the next 20 hours until I eat again.
Joanne: And your meal is typically? What do you have when you have that one meal?
Lex: Well, right now it’s just one meal of about a pound and a half to two pounds of raw meat that’s about 30 percent fat by weight or 80 percent calories from fat.
Joanne: And you’re not hungry the rest of the time.
Lex: No, I am not hungry. Not at all.
Joanne: Okay, so that’s your diet now, is about a pound and a half to two pounds of just raw meat, hamburger.
Lex: Just raw meat. Hamburger. I eat grass-fed meat from, that I order from Slankers. And over time I’ve kind of come to believe, or at least I initially believed, I should say that, I initially believed, and I don’t know whether it’s true, but I felt that organ meats were probably important. You know, to sit down and eat a kidney or to sit down and eat a liver, whatever, was not all that appealing to me. And I also felt that I needed a large variety. I found that Slankers and U.S. Wellness and some of the others offer pet food. And it usually is the ground-up leftovers, the tripe and the pancreas and the spleen and the liver and the kidneys and the heart and all the stuff that they can’t sell. And they grind that up for pet food. And I thought, wow, this is perfect. So today I mix a little bit of Slankers pet food with their regular ground beef. It’s worked out very well for me. Now I must warn you that pet food is not USDA-inspected. If I told the Slankers that I was eating their pet food, they probably wouldn’t sell it to me, because it’s against the law for them to do so. But I haven’t had a problem eating it, and I’ve been eating it now for four years.
Joanne: Now, tell me a little bit about, like, your mental health and your moods from when you were a vegan compared to now. What were they like when you were on the vegan diet?
Lex: Well, ever since I can remember I was kind of mentally a roller coaster. I’d be high and on top of the world one day, and the next day I was down in the dumps and absolutely miserable. I might have one or two or three good days in a row when I felt great and could accomplish a huge amount and was very creative. And then, oh, within two or three more days I was down in the dumps and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and sleep. It was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and get to work and get home so that I could go back to bed. And that was kind of my life. The good times were really good; the bad times were really bad. And they were punctuated by horrible migraine headaches about once a week.
Joanne: And how about now?
Lex: Well, that was one of the interesting things. When I started the all-meat thing, within a week I didn’t have another headache.
Joanne: Within a week?
Lex: Within a week. I had a bad headache in the first week or so, and then after that I haven’t had a headache. I mean, if you ask me I can’t even hardly remember them. It’s been a long time.
Joanne: And your moods?
Lex: My mood has, it’s just evened out. I now, I feel really good all the time. I can’t say that the high is quite as high, but I no longer have those days now when I just want to lay down and go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I’m excited about the day, and I usually have something planned that I’m going to do, and I just hit the ground running.
Joanne: This is a common scene that I hear from people that, you know, when they were vegan they were either manic and depressed, or they were angry or highly irritable. And, you know, myself, when I’m off sugar I’m really even keeled.
Lex: Well, and, sugar was a huge part of what I ate. Well, almost everything that you eat on a vegan diet turns immediately to sugar. You don’t have to just eat sugar, but then of course I was…
Joanne: Well, I’m talking carbohydrates.
Lex: …eating lots of ice cream and candy bars and, you know, those things that are vegan-friendly.
Joanne: You’ve journaled this experience for quite some time now on the raw paleo forum, and I saw that in 2008 you got a kidney stone.
Lex: I certainly did, yeah. The first one I’ve ever had. And my dad suffered from them terribly later in his life. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t know what it was. It’s the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life. It’s like somebody is scraping the inside of whatever it is, the ducts going between kidneys and bladders and whatnot, you know, they’re tearing it open with razor blades and then pouring alcohol in it. When I first got this I went to the emergency room, and I was literally convulsing on the floor from pain. I couldn’t even fill out any of the forms. It was awful.
Joanne: You’re not convinced that this is from your diet though.
Lex: Well, I’m not convinced it is, and I’m not convinced it isn’t. There’s a lot of theories out there, but there are people all over that have kidney stones. Kidney stones seem to be rather common. And my father suffered from them, and he certainly didn’t eat the way I did. My son-in-law, he’s and MD, and he suffers from them terribly, and he certainly doesn’t eat the way that I eat. I’m considered somewhat of a nut. A nice nut but a nut all the less. But then I’m certainly not going to discount the fact that I didn’t have them before, as far as I know, you know. Within about four years of starting a meat and fat only diet, and that’s all I eat is meat, fat, and water, I suffered from these stones. And I had two of them. One in each kidney. One moved into the bladder, but I have no evidence that it has moved out. And the other one six months ago was still up in the kidney. I’ll have an X-ray when I go in this next time to see where they are and what their status is to see if they’ve grown, whatever, I’ll know more. But I have nothing to compare with. I don’t have any before and after. I just have excruciating pain. We discovered that they’re kidney stones. And now we’re just doing watchful waiting to see what transpires here.
Joanne: You’re also modifying your water intake, right?
Lex: Right. There are… Our ketogenic diet, which is essentially what an all-meat-and-fat diet is, is something that’s been used for quite some time to control epilepsy. And they found that kids that they put on a very high-fat, about 85 to 95 percent fat, 5 to 15 percent protein, almost 0 carb, they had a much increased risk of getting kidney stones. I’m not putting it past the diet. What I did realize is that my dad suffered an enlarged prostate, and so to control that he would reduce his water intake because, you know, it’s unpleasant to suffer from BPH and have to go to the restroom every 15 minutes and not be able to get much out. He had reduced his fluid intake. Part of this epilepsy treatment, they also reduce and manage water intake. In my case, I also suffered from BPH, so I was reducing my fluid intake. So I decided to increase water. So I went from about a liter of water a day to about two and one-half to three liters of water a day.
Joanne: I guess we’ll have to wait ‘til your next test to see how that’s doing.
Lex: Exactly. And then of course it’s nothing definitive. Because we have no idea whether it was the previous diet that caused it and this diet reversed it, and loosened them, and they went away or whether it’s the water that has changed it, or whether it’s the ketogenic diet in the first place that caused it. No way of knowing.
Joanne: You also, I read that on your journal that your doctors had warned you because of lack of fiber you were going to get colon cancer. So you had a colonoscopy. So what were the results of that?
Lex: Yeah, that was interesting. They were concerned that, especially, I’m over 50 and I’m telling my doctor what I’m doing, and he’s going, “Oh my goodness. Well no fiber. You’re really at high risk for colon cancer. You’ve had polyps before, and we’ve got to get a handle on this.” I had been eating this way for about three years. The doctor, after it was over, came out and said, “That’s one of the healthiest colons I’ve seen. There are no polyps. One thing I can assure you of: you won’t be dying from colon cancer. You don’t need to bother to come back.”
Joanne: We’re all convinced that we need fiber to keep everything moving.
Lex: Exactly. I can tell you that it did take some time when I transitioned over the all-meat and fat for my digestive system to settle down. I’d go from bouts of what I thought was constipation to bouts of loose bowels, but not what you would call diarrhea. It took me three years, maybe four, to get to where I was even having one bowel movement every day, because there’s such a small amount of waste on meat. It’s about one-third or less the amount of waste on a carb diet. So my colon was used to be stuffed with all this fiber. That was what would trigger a bowel movement. And when you start eating meat, there’s almost no waste. Now I have a bowel movement every day, but it is very, very small.
Joanne: Well, I’ve heard that most of the bulk of the feces is dead bacteria from the colon.
Lex: I’ve read that it’s about 80 percent. Whether that’s true, I don’t know.
Joanne: So you must not have a lot of bacteria in your colon.
Lex: Right. I don’t believe I do. And of course the bacteria is of a completely different kind. Lactobacillus acidophilus and lactobacillus bifidus and all those things that are in the probiotics that they tell us that we need, those don’t survive on fat very well.
Joanne: I just did an interview on http://joanneunleashed.com/2010/03/health-benefits-of-lacto-fermented-foods-by-former-vegan-maria-atwood/">interview on lacto-fermentation. I guess that’s kind of important if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates, and maybe not so important if you’re on a predominantly meat and fat diet.
Lex: Yeah. Yogurt was a staple there for a while. I haven’t had the need for any of that, and I don’t take any supplements anymore, you know, any probiotics or anything like that, and haven’t, really, since I started this. To me it was important to know whether this diet really was all-encompassing. Because I wasn’t eating all the things that they said I should eat. And my doctor warned me I was going to have beriberi and scurvy and all that other stuff unless I took lots of supplements, and I haven’t taken any supplements. And none of that has occurred.
Joanne: Well, what’s the response of your doctor? You keep going back to him. Your health has improved. You don’t have all these things that they warned you about? What’s his response?
Lex: He just shakes his head. He’s in his mid-70s, so I doubt if you’re going to change his mind on anything. I must be an anomaly.
Joanne: Yeah. Like the French.
Lex: Although one of the other issues that comes up is people tell you, “Oh well, where are you getting your calcium? You aren’t eating a lot of dairy, and that’s where your calcium comes from.”
Joanne: Yeah, where’s your K? Where’s your vitamin C?
Lex: Yeah, “Where’s your vitamin C?” So last year, after being on this three and a half, four years, I told my doctor that, you know, I’d like to get a bone scan. And he concurred immediately. “Yes, indeed, we should do that because you’ve been doing that now for several years. There’s a good chance your bones are rotting away.” We did a DEXA scan, which is the gold standard, I guess, of determining bone density. One of your scores is against your peers, of your same age group, and another one against how you compare to somebody in their late 20s, early 30s, where their bone density would be peak. Well, my bone density scan came out between 95 and 105 percent of the peak bone density. So I was pretty happy with that.
Joanne: Yeah, I saw that today on the PaNu blog.
Lex: Yeah, Doctor Harris was kind enough to actually analyze my DEXA scan.
Joanne: Let me ask you some quick questions, and then we can wrap up here. I feed my cats raw meat, and like you say, their stools are much smaller. They’re also very dry. I mean they dry and crumble, whereas when they were on canned food with gluten in it and stuff they were very sticky.
Lex: Right.
Joanne: And their feces also smell hardly like anything. If I took a standard cat’s feces and smelled it, I would gag and almost vomit. These guys I can smell, and it smells sometimes like fish oil if I’m supplementing with that. I mean, it’s just entirely pleasant. I never know when they’re going. How about yours? Do yours smell?
Lex: Now a lot of that has to do with whether you overeat. So if I force myself to eat a lot, some of it just won’t get digested.
Joanne: Yeah, and it putrefies.
Lex: And then, yeah, then there’s putrefactive bacteria, and that does smell. Generally no, there is little or no odor and the volume is very small.
Joanne: And you probably have no gas.
Lex: I do a very small amount. Just every once in a while. But not like I did when I was eating a standard American diet.
Joanne: Ice cream and oranges?
Lex: Yeah.
Joanne: Oh, I had horrible gas back then.
Lex: And also, you know, the worst thing I ate for gas was the green juices. When I was drinking those things, boy, I was a major machine. A tooting machine.
Joanne: You were filled with bacteria.
Lex: All I got from that was I ended up with foul-smelling, runny stools, and people could hardly stand to be in the room with me.
Joanne: Now has there been a change in your body odor on all meat?
Lex: I believe so. Now I really don’t have to wear underarm deodorants or that kind of stuff. There’s very, very little odor.
Joanne: Yeah, see, these are all the selling points that I used to bring up when I was in, you know, into the vegan diet. “Well look, the vegans don’t have this and the vegans that.” It turns out when you clean up your diet that odors go away and, you know, like the vegans don’t get bitten by mosquitoes. But then the guy in the book Sugar Blues, he gave up sugar and he wasn’t a vegan, and he didn’t get eaten by mosquitoes.
Lex: Well, yeah. And of course, but I also remember reading back in my vegetarian-type days was that sugar was the perfect fuel, and that meat and fat were horrible. I’m not so sure of that anymore.
Joanne: Well, the body sure works hard at getting the sugar out of the bloodstream. I mean we’ve come to believe that that’s a normal process but, you know, from what I understand that’s not even insulin’s major role.
Lex: It wasn’t supposed to be insulin’s major role, maybe.
Joanne: Yeah. You throw all that sugar in there, and the pancreas secretes all this insulin because, really, you’ve got to get it out of the bloodstream. We’ve got to store it somewhere because it’s damaging.
Lex: That’s its priority. After we eat our body goes into overdrive, because if it didn’t we would die.
Joanne: And then one more thing. Not a lot of people are going to go raw meat. They’re just not going to do it. What kind of advice would you offer to someone who wanted to improve their health toward something that you’re doing but not in the extreme like that?
Lex: Well, I’ll tell you. Anybody asks me, my standard response is most of your calories and most of your nutrition should come from meat and fat. Keep the fat up. You want fairly high fat. So think in terms of rib eye steaks, ground meat that is 22 percent fat to 30 percent fat. Leave that 7 percent and 4 percent fat for somebody else, and only opt for the 15 percent fat if that’s all they got. So essentially eat meat and fat until you’re full you don’t want anymore. And then supplement with a small salad and maybe a piece of fruit.
Joanne: You know, before talking to you, because when I went onto the Paleolithic diet I bought like half a cow and half a pig, and I started eating meat every day. And that’s really all I wanted. And then making a salad was kind of annoying. And then having to, you know, I thought I had to make vegetables because I need the minerals and all this stuff. And you know, I would really just rather eat meat.
Lex: Well, that’s what I did. And again, just cook the meat… I would recommend try to cook it as rare as possible.
Joanne: Well, I like Cornish game hens and salmon. I don’t mind the salmon mostly rare, but I like Cornish game hens and chickens.
Lex: I only eat red meat and fat predominant. I very seldom eat fish. I very seldom eat chicken. I eat pork once in a while. I save the chicken and fish and those kinds of things for when we’re going out to dinner, and we’ll go to a nice place, and they’ll have the chicken Caesar salad. So I’ll get one of those with three extra chicken breasts, and then I throw the salad away. I found the same thing you did. Once I actually got converted over to where I was just eating meat and fat, I didn’t want the stuff. But most people feel that they need it, so have a small salad or a piece of fruit and call it good. Just don’t make salad and fruit the main portion of your meal and then meat as the small amount.
Joanne: Well, I think I can do it with a lot more confidence now even though Primal Body-Primal Mind by Nora Gedgaudes, she talks about keeping the protein low because of the mTor pathway thingy. I don’t understand it.
Lex: Well, one thing that I don’t think we touched on that I want to get before you go. You did ask about the organ meats. And I alluded to the fact that I thought they were important at one time. They’ve been working for me, and so I do add them in the form of the pet food. But a small amount. So for every, I’ll put a one and a half-pound package of the pet food in with four to six pounds of regular ground meat. That will become my food mixture. So there isn’t a whole lot in there, but there is some. Now I’m not sure that that really is required. There are a lot of people that are living on pemmican. It has no organ meats in it. And I know Stanley Owsley has gone for 50 years, and he did not include organ meat. How important those are I don’t know. I’ve included them and continue to include them because they work so well, and I haven’t had any problems. And I see no reason not to eat them, but I’m not sure that people need to include them. And certainly I wouldn’t shy away from this way of eating because you couldn’t tolerate or couldn’t think about eating organ meat. Try it without the organ meat and see how well you do, because there’s a whole lot of people doing that, and they’re doing just fine. They have had no deficiencies either.
Joanne: Cooked meat are you talking about? Or are you talking about the raw meat eaters?
Lex: Usually lightly cooked. So most people are able to get down to medium-rare, and they can tolerate that without any problem. Most go to, ultimately go to rare or raw over time, but they haven’t had a problem with medium-rare either.
Joanne: Well, they’re also, there are a lot of people that are eating raw pork and raw chicken. I mean there are people doing that with a clean food supply, right?
Lex: Yeah, well, you know, trichinosis and those kinds of things were probably really important back in the day, but our animals today that are farmed the way they are, that stuff is very, very rare.
Joanne: In both pasture-raised and feedlot?
Lex: Yeah, trichinosis and parasites are not the problem anymore. The feedlot, of course, is the E. coli and salmonella problem. And, you know, they spray the carcasses now with lactic acid, which is a byproduct from lactobacillus acidophilus. And, you know, those things do solve the E. coli problem for the most part. The only thing that I think is important in the grass-fed meat is the fat, because the fat profile is completely different. The fat profile of grass-fed meat, about 50 percent of the fat is composed of omega 3 fatty acids. The grain-fed beef, the stuff that’s finished in the feedlot, is only 2 to 3 percent omega 3 fatty acids. And so to me that is probably the biggest difference and the most critical one. Because we do need high omega 3 fatty acids. So what I do if I’m out and away from my grass-fed meat I, you know, take a handful of fish capsules. I don’t do that often anymore because I eat so much of the other stuff, but when I first started this, you know, I didn’t have a source for grass-fed meat. So what I would do is I would take 15 or 20 fish capsules a day to supplement on top of the just plain, store bought ground meat I was buying.
Joanne: Okay, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much, Lex. I’m looking forward to further adventures in your diet.
Lex: Well, it’s been a pleasure. And if you want to do this again with, talk about pemmican and jerky and the other stuff that I’m relatively well known for, give me a call.
Joanne: Okay, great.
Lex: All right.
Joanne: Thanks, Lex.
Lex: Bye.
Joanne: Bye-bye.
My comments: I was also a very determined but failed former vegan, high fruit low-fat raw vegan, to be exact. I was following the 80/10/10 dietary guidelines by Dr. Doug Graham in his book. It just sounded like the perfect diet in the world - no cruelty, peace and love to all animals. I felt so righteous. Some symptoms I had when my health went downhill in the last 2 months of eating 80/10/10 (tried 80/10/10 for around 6 months in total) included:
- Fingernail fungal infections (never had them in my life) that spread to 2-3 fingernails on each hand.
- Insomnia
- Extreme fatigue during the day even after 12 hours of sleep (I thought it was detox)
- Depression
- Extremely cold hands and feet. Toenails and feet turned purple very easily.
- Wake up in the middle of the night with chills and feeling ice cold
- Deeply cracked fingertips that wouldn't heal
- Resurgence of eczema rashes on whole body
- Extreme meat cravings, resulting in binge eating, self-induced vomiting, then chew-spitting disorder when I "discovered" it.
- Anxiety, panic attacks
- Diarrhea or very loose, liquid stools (bowel movements)
- Eyebrows started falling out and thinning
- Rapidly receding gums, leading to tooth sensitivities
Symptoms numbered 1-11 gradually disappeared within a month on uropathy and raw paleo diet. Eyebrows and receding gums will probably take a while to recover.
Interview with Lex Rooker
Lex Rooker Talks About His Raw All-Meat Diet
and Relief from Migraines Joanne: Welcome to Joanne Unleashed. Today I have with me Lex Rooker who, amazingly, has been on an all raw-meat diet for five years. Hey, Lex.
Lex: Hi, Joanne. How are you?
Joanne: I’m fabulous. I’m really glad we’re having this call today. What I’d like to start out with, I’d like to talk about your health issues when you were younger. I mean you had quite a few of them.
Lex: Well, I certainly did. It started when I was very young. About the time I hit puberty I would start getting these horrible headaches. I mean they were just awful. They were miserable migraines that they would just send me into a dark room with a pillow over my head, a heating pad across my face, and I’d be there for 24 to 48 hours. They were just awful. At times I was taking 12 Excedrin and it wouldn’t even knock the edge off of it sometimes. It was pretty bad.
Joanne: Yeah. I used to get a lot of headaches when I was younger, too, and the only thing that really worked was Fiorinal.
Lex: Yeah. They’re pretty bad. So that kind of got me on the thing of diet. I was reading all the gurus that I could find. I jumped on every bandwagon that I could jump on from the time I was 15 up to the latest one.
Joanne: And who were the gurus that you were reading?
Lex: Well, I started with Renee Taylor and Hunza. Then we went on to people like Pritikin and Walker and Shelton and Carrington and Wigmore and Kulvinskas and you name it, I’ve read them.
Joanne: Okay. All the vegetarian, vegan, raw-food people.
Lex: Well, most of them were. Pritikin wasn’t. He was probably, if anything, the one that kind of saved me, because I had done the fasting bit. Shelton and Bragg had convinced me that what I needed to do was a long fast. You know, that detox stuff.
Joanne: Right.
Lex: So I did a 31-day fast, and I went from about 190 pounds down to, I think it was about 86 pounds.
Lex: I could literally put my hands around my waist and touch my fingers.
Joanne: That’s really extreme for a 31-day fast. I mean that’s unheard of. I’ve never heard of that.
Lex: I think I almost died. When people tell me today that they want to do that kind of thing, I suggest that they don’t do that. I think that maybe a day or two, it gives the body rest. But let me tell you, the long extended fast, it took me probably two or three years to recover, and who knows if I fully recovered. Because I know a huge amount of muscle mass was lost and who knows what really happened.
Joanne: Well, you know, I think back in Shelton’s time, and their time in the early twentieth century, fasting that long wasn’t that bad, because they weren’t eating a lot of processed food, and they weren’t as nutritionally deficient as we are now. Because when we fast now and we’re nutritionally deficient, you know, you run out of your nutrient stores and you crash.
Lex: Well, I think beyond that the… When they did the, I forget what you, therapeutic, that was the word I was trying to come up with. You know, at my age a light bulb goes out in the corner, and I have to scratch around to try to find out what it was I was thinking of. Anyway, therapeutic fasting was often done in what was euphemistically called a sanatorium. And so, you know, people were watched. They didn’t have a lot of activity and that kind of thing. But I was going to work every day. I probably looked like the wrath of Moses, and people were really concerned about me. I had to walk back and forth from the bus stop, which was about two miles from my home. Had I been in bed and convalescing, I probably would have been in better shape. But trying to go to work and do all that, it was a problem.
Joanne: I mean, one hundred pounds in one month! So why did you break the fast?
Lex: Well…
Joanne: I mean why did you, actually, why did you go so long, is the better question.
Lex: Well, it was kind of a historical thing with me. You do things because they’re the “right thing” to do. That’s what the guru says. And if you’ll remember, if you’ve read Shelton and Bragg and those kinds of things, they will tell you, oh, well, you fast until natural hunger returns.
Joanne: Oh yes, and the tongue, the coating on the tongue clears.
Lex: The coating on the tongue goes away and all that other stuff. And, you know, quite frankly, I wasn’t hungry. I don’t think that we in modern times really know what natural hunger is. We wouldn’t recognize it if it fell on us. Believe me, my parents, my wife, everybody was thrilled to death when I broke the fast and returned to my vegan ways at that point.
Joanne: Oh, when did you start being a vegan?
Lex: I started that, gosh, in about 1968 or so, I think it was.
Joanne: How old were you?
Lex: That would have put me at about 17. And what I was trying to do was get rid of the headaches. It seemed to work for a while. They’d go away, and they’d be gone for a few weeks, or a few months, and then they’d return, and I’d figure well, I needed to do something else, so I would modify what I was doing. At one time I was eating eggs, so I dropped those. And then I would pick up and eat soy, and then I would drop that and try something else. It got to the point where I was eating boiled wheat, which my coworkers called cockroach eggs.
Joanne: I’m sorry, what did they call it?
Lex: Cockroach eggs. That was a, that would be my lunch, would be boiled wheat similar to just whole wheat, like whole rice. The difference was that it has a very tough coating on it, the wheat bran. And let me tell you, that runs right through you and strips out everything on the inside. It’s not pleasant. But I did it, again, because it was the “right thing” to do. And at that time I was also doing tons of juicing. So I had gotten onto Ann Wigmore in the early ’70s.
Joanne: Oh, the wheatgrass queen.
Lex: Yes, the wheatgrass connection. And Viktoras Kulvinskas in his Survival in the 21st Century: Planetary Healers Manual and Sprouting for the Good of Every Body. And so I was eating lots of sprouts. And I had turned my patio into a full wheatgrass production system. Well, I was pulling out and drinking full flats of wheatgrass every day. And then I was also juicing carrots, the whole carrots, carrot tops, beets and beet tops, turnips and turnip tops, parsley, cilantro, you name it. If it was green, it went in it. Kale. Cabbage. Because this, of course, is where all your vitamins come from.
Joanne: Right.
Lex: And so all the people that drink green juices, and I figured, well shoot, if a shot is good, a cup is better, and we’ll go with a quart, and then we’ll know we’re good.
Joanne: Yeah. And you were eating vegetarian/vegan at the time.
Lex: And I was eating vegetarian and vegan at the time, and I was sprouting. I had sprouts everywhere. We had mung bean sprouts and black bean sprouts and wheat sprouts. And I was also making Essene bread with sprouted lentils and sprouted wheat, and raisins and dates, and that kind of thing.
Joanne: You’re just the picture boy for the whole raw food movement.
Lex: Oh yeah, I was the poster boy for the whole…
Joanne: Poster boy. That was the term. I’m getting old too.
Lex: Yeah, the poster boy for the hygiene movement.
Joanne: Yeah, natural hygiene. I love natural hygiene, I just can’t stand their dietary recommendations anymore. You know, if you could throw out that, the rest of it’s pretty good.
Lex: Yeah, well, then, of course, I was a follow of T.C. Fry for a while.
Joanne: Oh, the fruit man.
Lex: Yes. And I actually met him. He looked like the wrath of Moses when I met him, and I think he died a year or so after I met him. But he didn’t look all that great.
Joanne: Just for the audience, T.C. Fry was a natural hygienist who recommended an all-fruit or predominantly fruit diet. And he had very poor health when was younger, and he went on this all-fruit diet, he recovered his health, and he was doing well for a while. Then he started binging on ice cream and cheese and all these fats at night, you know. And of course the natural hygienists blamed that as the reason why he died, not the fact that he ate that because he wasn’t getting what he needed from the fruit.
Lex: There’s something wrong with ice cream?
Joanne: I mean, I love it.
Lex: If I was… Five years ago, if I was going to die, somebody would look at me and say that I was going to die of ice cream overdose, because I could sit down and eat half a gallon in a sitting. It was no problem.
Joanne: Yeah, me too.
Lex: And of course it was perfectly legal on the diet.
Joanne: Uh huh. Oh, it was?
Lex: Oh, certainly. And I’m sure that the Heath bars crunched up in it weren’t a problem either.
Joanne: Ha ha. Okay.
Lex: And that’s probably why I weighed 220 pounds.
Joanne: Oh, so you got up to, back up to 220? You gained over a hundred pounds eating all this raw?
Lex: Oh yeah. I gained over… But I’m sure it was the ice cream and the Heath bars and that kind of thing.
Joanne: So you were also gorging on that, on fats?
Lex: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, because I was always hungry, and I was always cold. I was always freezing. I could never get warm. I would get in my car on a summer day heading for work, and I would have to turn the heater on, because, why, you know, it was only 70 outside. It’s cold.
Joanne: Yeah. I had that same problem. But, I guess with that really healthy raw vegan diet you regained your health?
Lex: Well, it depends on what you would call regaining your health. I ate as much as I could of the raw vegan diet and, you know, it was certainly better than fasting. But I wouldn’t say that I regained my health, because over time I lost the enamel on my teeth, my blood pressure started going up, my fasting blood sugar started rising, my cholesterol started going up, the bone density in my jaw, according to dental X-rays, was going down, and my teeth were loosening. The dentist was saying that it wouldn’t be long before I would be in for partials, and probably I would need full dentures by the time I was 60.
Joanne: I remember a few months ago reading this blog of this woman, she was an 80/10/10er, which is a diet by Doug Graham: 80 percent carbohydrate, 10 fat, 10 protein, and the carbohydrate is mostly fruit and some greens. And she’d been away from the blog for a while, and then she came back and saying she was still on this all-fruit diet, she was feeling great, her health was good, but she’d been to the dentist, and she had to have a bunch of dental work done. But she was sure it had nothing to do with her all-fruit diet.
Lex: Oh, yeah. Well, professor Hotema, back in the ’50s, I think, and early ’60s believed the same thing. And he felt that citrus fruits were the fruits of the gods, and that’s all you needed to eat. And so he moved to Florida. I think by 42 or something he had lost all of his teeth, and shortly thereafter he had died. But of course none of it had to do with his diet.
Joanne: Well, some of them feel that losing their teeth is a form of detox.
Lex: Yeah, right, exactly. I had finally given up on the detox thing. I fell for that for years and, you know, that’s one of the reasons I went on the fast. Because everything I read and everyone I talked to, “Oh, well, the reason that you have your headaches, and the reason that you have this, and the reason you have that, it’s all due to detox. Your body’s detoxing. You’re highly toxic.” And so, you know, I went on that 31-day fast figuring that, well, that’s going to get all the toxins out of my body.
Joanne: Oh, so you went on the fast after you had been vegan for a while.
Lex: Oh, yeah. Because, why they, the reason that I still had the headaches and still had some of the problems that I was having was due to the fact that, why, it’s detox! So this is a good thing, and you can speed it up by fasting.
Joanne: Yeah. Well, before you became a vegan, what kind of foods were you eating as a teenager and a kid.
Lex: Well, actually not too bad. You know, I grew up in a middle-income, lower middle-income family, and my mom cooked dinner every day. We very seldom had soda pops. It was a big deal in the 1950s and early ’60s to have soda. I mean we’d go out, I think, once every month or two we would go to either Fosters Freeze, or we would go to A & W and, you know, we would have a hamburger and a root beer or a soda. And then if we were at Fosters, we got an ice cream cone. But that was like once a month. The rest of the time it was, it was, you know, typical food of the time. We had, you know, roasts, and chicken, and tuna sandwiches for lunch, and all that kinds of stuff. So it wasn’t really bad. My mother was very health conscious. She was buying whole wheat bread. And she would make bread every day. It was not unusual to come home from school and she had homemade bread and butter for us. But we always sprinkled a little sugar on it, you know, it was a treat.
Joanne: Well, you know, I also noticed when you were younger, you know, you got radiation treatments, and you had half of your thyroid removed. Well, recently…
Lex: The thyroid was when I was born, apparently back in those days, back in the early ’50s, radiation was a treatment for everything. And the thymus glad, which is in the upper chest, lower throat area, apparently as we, when we’re very young, that is one of the defense mechanisms for our body. And I was kind of a colicky kid. Normally the thymus gland, as we get older, quickly gets smaller, and the body’s immune system beefs up and takes over. And in my case it didn’t meet the criteria that the doctors wanted it to meet. So the doctors decided to intervene, and they did radiation treatments to cause the thymus gland to shrink, which it did. The problem was by the time I was six years old I had tumors on the thyroid. I was raised as a Christian Scientist, so my grandmother was a staunch Christian Scientist, and she said, “We’re taking him to a practitioner to get him cured.” And my father said, “The practitioner has a week. If that doesn’t work, we’re taking him for surgery.” So, you know, within a couple of weeks it was still growing and doing whatever, and it was a large lump in my throat. So they took it out. And then back when I was eleven…
Joanne: What did they take out?
Lex: They took out the tumor.
Joanne: Okay. On your thyroid.
Lex: Right. On the thyroid. But they left everything intact. When I was eleven the tumor came back, and that had the doctors mightily worried, because they thought, wow, now it’s probably cancerous. But they went in and it was benign, but they took out half the thyroid to make sure that they got it all.
Joanne: Did they put you on hormone supplements for the thyroid?
Lex: Nope.
Joanne: So you’re working with half a thyroid.
Lex: So I’m working with half a thyroid.
Joanne: And that’ll, I’ve been studied thyroid recently, and that’ll really mess you up.
Lex: Yeah, I haven’t taken any of that. I haven’t had any hormone treatments or anything like that.
Joanne: You’ve just had bad health. Ha ha.
Lex: Yeah, just bad health. So anyway, the thyroid tumor is gone. And then, you know, I was a very heavy dairy eater when I was a teenager. “Everybody needs milk.” And you know, my parents were convinced that we needed lots of milk and that kind of thing. And I got cystic acne. And so I then went to get treatment for that from the dermatologist, and of course the treatment of choice was radiation. So they would paste little lead pasties over my eyebrows, and put things over my eyes, and then they would radiate my face to get rid of the acne. They also put me on Avlosulfon and Tetracycline, and I guess Avlosulfon is a rather nasty antibiotic. It does damage to the whatever in our body creates red blood cells. So I would have to go in every week and get blood tests to determine whether I could stay on the Avlosulfon. And then I was cycled off of it periodically depending on what the blood test said. And then as soon as the blood would build back up they’d put me back on it.
Joanne: And then in your thirties you started getting cancer lesions on your face.
Lex: Yeah, I’d get those precancerous lesions on my face, and I would have to go in and have those frozen off about every six months. And they’d find about a dozen of them usually every time I went in. And that was from my mid-thirties, about 35, 36 on until just recently.
Joanne: Jeez. So fast forward. You read a book that made you open your mind to the possibility that a vegan diet really wasn’t the best choice for you. What was that book?
Lex: It was pretty obvious that things were going downhill, and I was looking for the next guru. Because the latest, all the gurus up ’til then hadn’t been working very well. I did cycle over into Pritikin, which did allow a small amount of meat.
Joanne: That’s low-fat isn’t it?
Lex: Very low-fat, and you’re eating, you know, just plain boiled potatoes and that type of thing. And so I thought, well, I’ll combine that and do a raw Pritikin. You know, cook the meat of course, because, why, raw meat is inedible. Just ask anybody. You’ll get sick and die. But I was trying to eat potatoes and things like that raw which, believe me, our bodies are not designed to digest that stuff. I would chew that stuff up, and it would come out just the same way it went in. And it was terrible. But I kept doing it because I was convinced it was the “right thing” to do. And then I ran across Ray Audette’s book NeanderThin. I, you know, I had found a soul mate. Here was a guy that was in worse shape than I was. He had rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes, and a bunch of other stuff, and he was a relatively young man. And he had discovered this Paleolithic way of eating, and that was my first introduction to that. So I jumped in with both feet coming from more of a vegetarian background, and I read his list of good foods and bad foods. So I avoided the bad foods, but I got the hunter/gatherer thing backwards. I was gathering, so I was eating lots of fruits and vegetables, and I was doing the Pritikin thing with, you know, four ounces of meat every day. I finally figured out that I got the hunter/gatherer thing backwards, and that hunter came first. I started changing things a little bit, and I started reading a little more and discovering that fat was extremely important and that that we probably needed to reduce the carbohydrates a bit. So I raised the meat but was still relatively low-fat. Essentially what I was doing was eating things like the chicken Caesar salad with an extra chicken breast. But I was now having meat at every meal. You know, it was a good-sized salad, because “you need that,” you know, for all those vitamins. And then I was just having lots of meat. But I was avoiding breads and soy and all the other stuff that used to be my staples. And I was feeling much, much, much, much better. More and more recent research was showing that carbs were a problem. And I ran across Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories. And I ran across Life Without Bread by Lutz and Christian, Christian Anderson (Allan), I think. And both of those seemed to point to reducing carbs. So I started cycling carbs off and raising my meat, and it became obvious that meat alone was not going to handle it, that I really needed fat. I started adding fat, which was a big problem for me, because I’d been fat-phobic for, you know, 50 years.
Joanne: What kind of fat were you adding?
Lex: Well, I was just trying to eat the fat from the meat. And so, you know, I would have a steak, and I used to trim all the fat off and everything. And so now I’d have a steak, and I’d try to eat the fat and I’d gag. It was just tough getting it down. But I persevered. I actually started getting a lot better, and the headaches became less frequent. Then I ran across Geoffrey Percell’s Yahoo group, Raw Paleo Diet group, and that was where I had first run across Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s work and his published articles back in the 1930s in Harpers.
Joanne: Now he was the guy who went to the hospital and ate just nothing but meat to prove to them that it wouldn’t harm him?
Lex: That you could do that. Yeah. I think he was an anthropologist of some sort. He was supposed to be on some kind of scientific expedition up to the North Pole area. And he got seasick, so he didn’t take the ship like the other people did. He went across land, and a storm came in, and it was a lucky thing he didn’t take the ship, because everybody on the ship died. But he hunkered down with the Inuit and ate the way they did, which was basically, you know, meat, whale blubber, and seal, and that kind of stuff.
Joanne: And rotten fish.
Lex: Fish. You know, some of it boiled, some of it raw, whatever. And he did just fine. He said at the time that the hardest things was not eating that way but getting over the psychology of eating that way. Because it’s very hard to believe that you can eat nothing but meat. So then when I had found, I had read in his articles that he had done this one-year study with Belleview Hospital, I found the results of that and I was fascinated. So I thought, wow, I’m going to give this a try. And it just was an adventure. That’s what I started.
Joanne: That was five years ago, right?
Lex: So I went to my doctor, and I told him what I was going to do, and he about died. He said, Oh my god, your cholesterol is, you know, over 250, and you go and eat nothing but meat and fat like this, and it’s going to skyrocket. And you’re going to end up with, you know, hardening of the arties and your heart failure and the whole thing. Your blood pressure’s already borderline high at, you know, at 145, 150 over 95, and that’s going to skyrocket, and this is just going to be a mess. And I was also had diabetes, or early stage diabetes where fasting blood sugar was up in the 140s. So he was not optimistic at all, but I told him what I was going to do. And he said, well, you know, I’d rather that you take Vytorin for the cholesterol and Metformin for the diabetes and blood pressure medication, and all that kind of stuff, and we’ll control it with drugs. You don’t need to do anything like that. So I said, you know, I don’t think I want to take those drugs for the rest of my life.
Joanne: I mean that’s got to be pretty daunting. First off, you’re coming from a background of all the natural hygiene and vegan raw diet and all that, and now you’re switching to all-meat. And you’ve got the medical profession telling you’re going to kill yourself. I mean, it must take a lot of courage to persevere.
Lex: Well, I don’t know if it’s courage. It might be stupidity. You know, anybody who is willing to follow gurus for 20 or 25 years where it was obvious that their health was failing and getting worse but still doggedly sticking to it, I don’t know that you’d call that courage.
Joanne: Well, I think switching away from it is courage. You know, to admit that you were wrong.
Lex: There was no one, there was really no one there, either, doing it. I mean there was Stanley Owsley, the Bear, who is infamous for having been essentially a meat-only eater since he was about 24, and he’s now, I think, in his mid-70s.
Joanne: Oh, wow. I never heard of him.
Lex: Yeah. He was the soundman for the Grateful Dead. And he was also, he’s also more well known for the do-it-yourself-LSD-in-your-bathtub guy. He was the one that started the LSD in, back in the ’60s.
Joanne: I thought that was Timothy Leary.
Lex: Yeah. So you can find him on the Web. He lives in Australia now.
Joanne: The Bear?
Lex: Yeah, the Bear. So between that and Stefansson’s work I thought, well you know, what have I got to lose. We’ll give it a shot. I started just eating meat, and I normally just cooked it about medium. You know, That’s the way I’d been eating it all my life.
Joanne: Just muscle meat at that time?
Lex: Yeah, just muscle meat. And I could only afford hamburger, so I’d eat ground meat, form it into paddies and lightly cook it ‘til it was pink in the middle. And then I would chow down. I evolved then to taking the, I’d get the fattier cuts, and then I would drain the grease out of the pan back over the paddies after I had eaten them. And then it sort of came to me that, gee, no other animal cooks it’s food; why should I? So I went from medium, to medium-rare, to rare, and finally to raw. And it was quite a trip. It took me a couple years to transition fully to where I can now tell you with a straight face that I now prefer it raw. I don’t like it cooked.
Joanne: You’ve been eating raw five years, right?
Lex: Well, I’ve been eating raw about probably three and a half to four. Yeah, I’ve been eating raw three and a half to four years, but I’ve been almost totally raw or total meat for almost five years.
Joanne: You’ve been experimenting with the fat and protein ratio.
Lex: Well, I got that from Gary Taubes. You know, it was interesting. I read his Good Calories, Bad Calories, and my interpretation of what he had said was that, well, if you don’t eat any carbs and if you reduce protein, which might turn into glucose, (the body can convert some of that into glucose) and you eat higher fat, that you can’t put on weight. And I thought well, gee, that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s true. So I went out and I bought a fat analyzer, the kind they used in the markets to test the ground beef to see what the percentage of fat is so that they can correctly mark their packages. And I started measuring what it was that I was eating and keeping track of my blood glucose and ketones and the whole shot. And also keeping track of the fat ratios. And what I discovered was I was normally eating about 65 to 70 percent calories from fat. And I’d been doing that for almost two years.
Joanne: Did you see the doctor after you’d been doing that for like two years?
Lex: I go see the doctor every year.
Joanne: And so what was your cholesterol looking like at that time since it was going to kill you to eat all.
Lex: My cholesterol kept dropping. It went from, you know, from 250 down to 211 down to 190, and the most recent test last year it was 175.
Joanne: And how about your blood pressure?
Lex: Blood pressure went from roughly 150 over 95, and it dropped rather rapidly within the first year. It now is down around 106 over 65 or so. Blood glucose dropped from around 140 down to just under 100. And it seems to sit there at just under 100. And most people who are trying a zero carb diet find that their blood sugar drops initially but then over time it comes back and it just stabilizes almost at 100.
Joanne: Yeah, isn’t that pretty much what we’re shooting for is stabilization?
Lex: Stabilization, but the doctors will tell you that, oh, well, anything above 99 is borderline diabetic, and we’ve got to get you on some kind of medication.
Joanne: Naturally.
Lex: I’m not so sure. I think that because we eat so many carbs and the pancreases work so hard to dump lots of insulin, that… Our blood sugar is a yo-yo, and of course it overshoots, and so blood sugar drops low. It can go up a couple hundred points after a meal, and glucose is deadly to us if it goes too high, it pumps out insulin assuming that this is going to be a horrible thing, and then it overshoots. And then of course our blood sugar plummets. And then we get starved again. And so we have to have a candy bar or a soda pop or something a couple hours later. And we’re on this constant yo-yo.
Joanne: And the doctors, you know, are basing their opinions on a populace on the standard American diet.
Lex: Right. That’s going through this all the time. And then of course what happens is people go to bed after eating dinner, blood glucose shoots high. The body reacts by dropping blood glucose low because it was so high that it overshoots. But then they’re not hungry. And they’re told before they go to the doctor, “Don’t eat anything before you come in for your blood tests in the morning. We need the fasting levels.” So even though they’re ravenous hungry, they go in and blood sugar’s low. Unless, of course, their pancreas is overworked and just can’t keep up with the mess they’re giving them. But you see in my case I monitor my blood glucose all the time. And when I initially make a change I’ll monitor every 15 minutes after eating until I see what the curve is going to be. But generally my blood glucose doesn’t change more than 20 points one way or the other. I can eat a huge meal, and I only eat one meal a day, and my blood glucose will slowly rise from about 95 or so, and it’ll slowly rise up to maybe 115 over three or four hours, and then it slowly drops down back down into the 90 to 100 range, and it just stays there for the next 20 hours until I eat again.
Joanne: And your meal is typically? What do you have when you have that one meal?
Lex: Well, right now it’s just one meal of about a pound and a half to two pounds of raw meat that’s about 30 percent fat by weight or 80 percent calories from fat.
Joanne: And you’re not hungry the rest of the time.
Lex: No, I am not hungry. Not at all.
Joanne: Okay, so that’s your diet now, is about a pound and a half to two pounds of just raw meat, hamburger.
Lex: Just raw meat. Hamburger. I eat grass-fed meat from, that I order from Slankers. And over time I’ve kind of come to believe, or at least I initially believed, I should say that, I initially believed, and I don’t know whether it’s true, but I felt that organ meats were probably important. You know, to sit down and eat a kidney or to sit down and eat a liver, whatever, was not all that appealing to me. And I also felt that I needed a large variety. I found that Slankers and U.S. Wellness and some of the others offer pet food. And it usually is the ground-up leftovers, the tripe and the pancreas and the spleen and the liver and the kidneys and the heart and all the stuff that they can’t sell. And they grind that up for pet food. And I thought, wow, this is perfect. So today I mix a little bit of Slankers pet food with their regular ground beef. It’s worked out very well for me. Now I must warn you that pet food is not USDA-inspected. If I told the Slankers that I was eating their pet food, they probably wouldn’t sell it to me, because it’s against the law for them to do so. But I haven’t had a problem eating it, and I’ve been eating it now for four years.
Joanne: Now, tell me a little bit about, like, your mental health and your moods from when you were a vegan compared to now. What were they like when you were on the vegan diet?
Lex: Well, ever since I can remember I was kind of mentally a roller coaster. I’d be high and on top of the world one day, and the next day I was down in the dumps and absolutely miserable. I might have one or two or three good days in a row when I felt great and could accomplish a huge amount and was very creative. And then, oh, within two or three more days I was down in the dumps and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and sleep. It was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and get to work and get home so that I could go back to bed. And that was kind of my life. The good times were really good; the bad times were really bad. And they were punctuated by horrible migraine headaches about once a week.
Joanne: And how about now?
Lex: Well, that was one of the interesting things. When I started the all-meat thing, within a week I didn’t have another headache.
Joanne: Within a week?
Lex: Within a week. I had a bad headache in the first week or so, and then after that I haven’t had a headache. I mean, if you ask me I can’t even hardly remember them. It’s been a long time.
Joanne: And your moods?
Lex: My mood has, it’s just evened out. I now, I feel really good all the time. I can’t say that the high is quite as high, but I no longer have those days now when I just want to lay down and go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I’m excited about the day, and I usually have something planned that I’m going to do, and I just hit the ground running.
Joanne: This is a common scene that I hear from people that, you know, when they were vegan they were either manic and depressed, or they were angry or highly irritable. And, you know, myself, when I’m off sugar I’m really even keeled.
Lex: Well, and, sugar was a huge part of what I ate. Well, almost everything that you eat on a vegan diet turns immediately to sugar. You don’t have to just eat sugar, but then of course I was…
Joanne: Well, I’m talking carbohydrates.
Lex: …eating lots of ice cream and candy bars and, you know, those things that are vegan-friendly.
Joanne: You’ve journaled this experience for quite some time now on the raw paleo forum, and I saw that in 2008 you got a kidney stone.
Lex: I certainly did, yeah. The first one I’ve ever had. And my dad suffered from them terribly later in his life. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t know what it was. It’s the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life. It’s like somebody is scraping the inside of whatever it is, the ducts going between kidneys and bladders and whatnot, you know, they’re tearing it open with razor blades and then pouring alcohol in it. When I first got this I went to the emergency room, and I was literally convulsing on the floor from pain. I couldn’t even fill out any of the forms. It was awful.
Joanne: You’re not convinced that this is from your diet though.
Lex: Well, I’m not convinced it is, and I’m not convinced it isn’t. There’s a lot of theories out there, but there are people all over that have kidney stones. Kidney stones seem to be rather common. And my father suffered from them, and he certainly didn’t eat the way I did. My son-in-law, he’s and MD, and he suffers from them terribly, and he certainly doesn’t eat the way that I eat. I’m considered somewhat of a nut. A nice nut but a nut all the less. But then I’m certainly not going to discount the fact that I didn’t have them before, as far as I know, you know. Within about four years of starting a meat and fat only diet, and that’s all I eat is meat, fat, and water, I suffered from these stones. And I had two of them. One in each kidney. One moved into the bladder, but I have no evidence that it has moved out. And the other one six months ago was still up in the kidney. I’ll have an X-ray when I go in this next time to see where they are and what their status is to see if they’ve grown, whatever, I’ll know more. But I have nothing to compare with. I don’t have any before and after. I just have excruciating pain. We discovered that they’re kidney stones. And now we’re just doing watchful waiting to see what transpires here.
Joanne: You’re also modifying your water intake, right?
Lex: Right. There are… Our ketogenic diet, which is essentially what an all-meat-and-fat diet is, is something that’s been used for quite some time to control epilepsy. And they found that kids that they put on a very high-fat, about 85 to 95 percent fat, 5 to 15 percent protein, almost 0 carb, they had a much increased risk of getting kidney stones. I’m not putting it past the diet. What I did realize is that my dad suffered an enlarged prostate, and so to control that he would reduce his water intake because, you know, it’s unpleasant to suffer from BPH and have to go to the restroom every 15 minutes and not be able to get much out. He had reduced his fluid intake. Part of this epilepsy treatment, they also reduce and manage water intake. In my case, I also suffered from BPH, so I was reducing my fluid intake. So I decided to increase water. So I went from about a liter of water a day to about two and one-half to three liters of water a day.
Joanne: I guess we’ll have to wait ‘til your next test to see how that’s doing.
Lex: Exactly. And then of course it’s nothing definitive. Because we have no idea whether it was the previous diet that caused it and this diet reversed it, and loosened them, and they went away or whether it’s the water that has changed it, or whether it’s the ketogenic diet in the first place that caused it. No way of knowing.
Joanne: You also, I read that on your journal that your doctors had warned you because of lack of fiber you were going to get colon cancer. So you had a colonoscopy. So what were the results of that?
Lex: Yeah, that was interesting. They were concerned that, especially, I’m over 50 and I’m telling my doctor what I’m doing, and he’s going, “Oh my goodness. Well no fiber. You’re really at high risk for colon cancer. You’ve had polyps before, and we’ve got to get a handle on this.” I had been eating this way for about three years. The doctor, after it was over, came out and said, “That’s one of the healthiest colons I’ve seen. There are no polyps. One thing I can assure you of: you won’t be dying from colon cancer. You don’t need to bother to come back.”
Joanne: We’re all convinced that we need fiber to keep everything moving.
Lex: Exactly. I can tell you that it did take some time when I transitioned over the all-meat and fat for my digestive system to settle down. I’d go from bouts of what I thought was constipation to bouts of loose bowels, but not what you would call diarrhea. It took me three years, maybe four, to get to where I was even having one bowel movement every day, because there’s such a small amount of waste on meat. It’s about one-third or less the amount of waste on a carb diet. So my colon was used to be stuffed with all this fiber. That was what would trigger a bowel movement. And when you start eating meat, there’s almost no waste. Now I have a bowel movement every day, but it is very, very small.
Joanne: Well, I’ve heard that most of the bulk of the feces is dead bacteria from the colon.
Lex: I’ve read that it’s about 80 percent. Whether that’s true, I don’t know.
Joanne: So you must not have a lot of bacteria in your colon.
Lex: Right. I don’t believe I do. And of course the bacteria is of a completely different kind. Lactobacillus acidophilus and lactobacillus bifidus and all those things that are in the probiotics that they tell us that we need, those don’t survive on fat very well.
Joanne: I just did an interview on http://joanneunleashed.com/2010/03/health-benefits-of-lacto-fermented-foods-by-former-vegan-maria-atwood/">interview on lacto-fermentation. I guess that’s kind of important if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates, and maybe not so important if you’re on a predominantly meat and fat diet.
Lex: Yeah. Yogurt was a staple there for a while. I haven’t had the need for any of that, and I don’t take any supplements anymore, you know, any probiotics or anything like that, and haven’t, really, since I started this. To me it was important to know whether this diet really was all-encompassing. Because I wasn’t eating all the things that they said I should eat. And my doctor warned me I was going to have beriberi and scurvy and all that other stuff unless I took lots of supplements, and I haven’t taken any supplements. And none of that has occurred.
Joanne: Well, what’s the response of your doctor? You keep going back to him. Your health has improved. You don’t have all these things that they warned you about? What’s his response?
Lex: He just shakes his head. He’s in his mid-70s, so I doubt if you’re going to change his mind on anything. I must be an anomaly.
Joanne: Yeah. Like the French.
Lex: Although one of the other issues that comes up is people tell you, “Oh well, where are you getting your calcium? You aren’t eating a lot of dairy, and that’s where your calcium comes from.”
Joanne: Yeah, where’s your K? Where’s your vitamin C?
Lex: Yeah, “Where’s your vitamin C?” So last year, after being on this three and a half, four years, I told my doctor that, you know, I’d like to get a bone scan. And he concurred immediately. “Yes, indeed, we should do that because you’ve been doing that now for several years. There’s a good chance your bones are rotting away.” We did a DEXA scan, which is the gold standard, I guess, of determining bone density. One of your scores is against your peers, of your same age group, and another one against how you compare to somebody in their late 20s, early 30s, where their bone density would be peak. Well, my bone density scan came out between 95 and 105 percent of the peak bone density. So I was pretty happy with that.
Joanne: Yeah, I saw that today on the PaNu blog.
Lex: Yeah, Doctor Harris was kind enough to actually analyze my DEXA scan.
Joanne: Let me ask you some quick questions, and then we can wrap up here. I feed my cats raw meat, and like you say, their stools are much smaller. They’re also very dry. I mean they dry and crumble, whereas when they were on canned food with gluten in it and stuff they were very sticky.
Lex: Right.
Joanne: And their feces also smell hardly like anything. If I took a standard cat’s feces and smelled it, I would gag and almost vomit. These guys I can smell, and it smells sometimes like fish oil if I’m supplementing with that. I mean, it’s just entirely pleasant. I never know when they’re going. How about yours? Do yours smell?
Lex: Now a lot of that has to do with whether you overeat. So if I force myself to eat a lot, some of it just won’t get digested.
Joanne: Yeah, and it putrefies.
Lex: And then, yeah, then there’s putrefactive bacteria, and that does smell. Generally no, there is little or no odor and the volume is very small.
Joanne: And you probably have no gas.
Lex: I do a very small amount. Just every once in a while. But not like I did when I was eating a standard American diet.
Joanne: Ice cream and oranges?
Lex: Yeah.
Joanne: Oh, I had horrible gas back then.
Lex: And also, you know, the worst thing I ate for gas was the green juices. When I was drinking those things, boy, I was a major machine. A tooting machine.
Joanne: You were filled with bacteria.
Lex: All I got from that was I ended up with foul-smelling, runny stools, and people could hardly stand to be in the room with me.
Joanne: Now has there been a change in your body odor on all meat?
Lex: I believe so. Now I really don’t have to wear underarm deodorants or that kind of stuff. There’s very, very little odor.
Joanne: Yeah, see, these are all the selling points that I used to bring up when I was in, you know, into the vegan diet. “Well look, the vegans don’t have this and the vegans that.” It turns out when you clean up your diet that odors go away and, you know, like the vegans don’t get bitten by mosquitoes. But then the guy in the book Sugar Blues, he gave up sugar and he wasn’t a vegan, and he didn’t get eaten by mosquitoes.
Lex: Well, yeah. And of course, but I also remember reading back in my vegetarian-type days was that sugar was the perfect fuel, and that meat and fat were horrible. I’m not so sure of that anymore.
Joanne: Well, the body sure works hard at getting the sugar out of the bloodstream. I mean we’ve come to believe that that’s a normal process but, you know, from what I understand that’s not even insulin’s major role.
Lex: It wasn’t supposed to be insulin’s major role, maybe.
Joanne: Yeah. You throw all that sugar in there, and the pancreas secretes all this insulin because, really, you’ve got to get it out of the bloodstream. We’ve got to store it somewhere because it’s damaging.
Lex: That’s its priority. After we eat our body goes into overdrive, because if it didn’t we would die.
Joanne: And then one more thing. Not a lot of people are going to go raw meat. They’re just not going to do it. What kind of advice would you offer to someone who wanted to improve their health toward something that you’re doing but not in the extreme like that?
Lex: Well, I’ll tell you. Anybody asks me, my standard response is most of your calories and most of your nutrition should come from meat and fat. Keep the fat up. You want fairly high fat. So think in terms of rib eye steaks, ground meat that is 22 percent fat to 30 percent fat. Leave that 7 percent and 4 percent fat for somebody else, and only opt for the 15 percent fat if that’s all they got. So essentially eat meat and fat until you’re full you don’t want anymore. And then supplement with a small salad and maybe a piece of fruit.
Joanne: You know, before talking to you, because when I went onto the Paleolithic diet I bought like half a cow and half a pig, and I started eating meat every day. And that’s really all I wanted. And then making a salad was kind of annoying. And then having to, you know, I thought I had to make vegetables because I need the minerals and all this stuff. And you know, I would really just rather eat meat.
Lex: Well, that’s what I did. And again, just cook the meat… I would recommend try to cook it as rare as possible.
Joanne: Well, I like Cornish game hens and salmon. I don’t mind the salmon mostly rare, but I like Cornish game hens and chickens.
Lex: I only eat red meat and fat predominant. I very seldom eat fish. I very seldom eat chicken. I eat pork once in a while. I save the chicken and fish and those kinds of things for when we’re going out to dinner, and we’ll go to a nice place, and they’ll have the chicken Caesar salad. So I’ll get one of those with three extra chicken breasts, and then I throw the salad away. I found the same thing you did. Once I actually got converted over to where I was just eating meat and fat, I didn’t want the stuff. But most people feel that they need it, so have a small salad or a piece of fruit and call it good. Just don’t make salad and fruit the main portion of your meal and then meat as the small amount.
Joanne: Well, I think I can do it with a lot more confidence now even though Primal Body-Primal Mind by Nora Gedgaudes, she talks about keeping the protein low because of the mTor pathway thingy. I don’t understand it.
Lex: Well, one thing that I don’t think we touched on that I want to get before you go. You did ask about the organ meats. And I alluded to the fact that I thought they were important at one time. They’ve been working for me, and so I do add them in the form of the pet food. But a small amount. So for every, I’ll put a one and a half-pound package of the pet food in with four to six pounds of regular ground meat. That will become my food mixture. So there isn’t a whole lot in there, but there is some. Now I’m not sure that that really is required. There are a lot of people that are living on pemmican. It has no organ meats in it. And I know Stanley Owsley has gone for 50 years, and he did not include organ meat. How important those are I don’t know. I’ve included them and continue to include them because they work so well, and I haven’t had any problems. And I see no reason not to eat them, but I’m not sure that people need to include them. And certainly I wouldn’t shy away from this way of eating because you couldn’t tolerate or couldn’t think about eating organ meat. Try it without the organ meat and see how well you do, because there’s a whole lot of people doing that, and they’re doing just fine. They have had no deficiencies either.
Joanne: Cooked meat are you talking about? Or are you talking about the raw meat eaters?
Lex: Usually lightly cooked. So most people are able to get down to medium-rare, and they can tolerate that without any problem. Most go to, ultimately go to rare or raw over time, but they haven’t had a problem with medium-rare either.
Joanne: Well, they’re also, there are a lot of people that are eating raw pork and raw chicken. I mean there are people doing that with a clean food supply, right?
Lex: Yeah, well, you know, trichinosis and those kinds of things were probably really important back in the day, but our animals today that are farmed the way they are, that stuff is very, very rare.
Joanne: In both pasture-raised and feedlot?
Lex: Yeah, trichinosis and parasites are not the problem anymore. The feedlot, of course, is the E. coli and salmonella problem. And, you know, they spray the carcasses now with lactic acid, which is a byproduct from lactobacillus acidophilus. And, you know, those things do solve the E. coli problem for the most part. The only thing that I think is important in the grass-fed meat is the fat, because the fat profile is completely different. The fat profile of grass-fed meat, about 50 percent of the fat is composed of omega 3 fatty acids. The grain-fed beef, the stuff that’s finished in the feedlot, is only 2 to 3 percent omega 3 fatty acids. And so to me that is probably the biggest difference and the most critical one. Because we do need high omega 3 fatty acids. So what I do if I’m out and away from my grass-fed meat I, you know, take a handful of fish capsules. I don’t do that often anymore because I eat so much of the other stuff, but when I first started this, you know, I didn’t have a source for grass-fed meat. So what I would do is I would take 15 or 20 fish capsules a day to supplement on top of the just plain, store bought ground meat I was buying.
Joanne: Okay, that’s a wrap. Thank you so much, Lex. I’m looking forward to further adventures in your diet.
Lex: Well, it’s been a pleasure. And if you want to do this again with, talk about pemmican and jerky and the other stuff that I’m relatively well known for, give me a call.
Joanne: Okay, great.
Lex: All right.
Joanne: Thanks, Lex.
Lex: Bye.
Joanne: Bye-bye.