As probably most of you know, the beyondveg website has a bunch of bios of
people who failed on raw vegan.

  Could we have some success stories?

  Then if we compare the failures and the successes we might be able to find
a pattern that explains why these people failed and why those people succeeded.

  For a story to qualify as a raw vegan success story, I suggest the
following requirements (and perhaps more).

1. The diet must be raw.
  If the diet includes cooked food, then it does not qualify as raw.

2. The diet must be vegan.
  This means no eggs, fish, chicken, meat, dairy, and generally no food of
animal origin.

3. The diet must not be supplemented.
  Supplements might be a good idea from the point of view of health and
maybe even urgen
tly recommendable. But if you want to prove that a diet is
nutritional adequate and therefore does not need supplements, you don't
prove that by taking supplements.

4. It must be long-term.
  The reason for this is that you might live on a nutritionally inadequate
diet and in spite of that continue to be healthy on reserves until the
reserves run out. To prove that a diet is nutritionally adequate, it must be
continued long enough to rule out the possibility that you are living on
reserves.  I don't know how long "long-term" is.  I'm guessing about ten years.

5. And of course you must be healthy.
  Obviously if health fails, the story can't be a success story.  And in the
evaluation of health, I hope you are not offended if I suggest that
objective evidence of health is preferable to subjective feeling good.
People can feel good and at the same time have a serious health problem that
they are not aware of.



  Assuming that there are success stories, and assuming that these success
stories stand up to close examination and turn out to be truly success
stories, then we can attempt to find a pattern that explains why some people
fail and why some people succeed.  What might this pattern be?

  I don't know and I don't pretend to know.  But I'm guessing that it has to
do with soil and micronutrients.  I'm going to go out on a limb and put
forth the following theory, speculation, guess, hypothesis:

  I'm guessing:
  Those who succeed (as above described) are those who eat food grown in
good soil.  Those who fail are those who eat food grown in poor soil.
  In the preceding statements, good soil means soil that has all the
elements in the right amount and in the right form and the organic matter
and the microorganisms and earthworms and so on and so forth.
  Furthurmore, I'm guessing that aft
er all the research is done and all the
analysis is done, those who fail will turn out to be deficient in certain
micronutrients, most of them not known in 2003 but will be discovered in the
years and decades to come.
  Bottom line: Nutrition starts with soil.

  Quality of soil affects micronutrient content of plants more than
macronutrient content of plants.

  An experiment with mice showed that quality of soil affected their health.
Both groups ate the same food, but one group ate food from ordinary soil and
the other group ate food from high quality soil. The difference in health
was dramatic.  I don't remember the source info about this experiment.

  There is a hint of evidence that neurological diseases tend to be caused
by deficiency of certain micronutrients.  Information about this is scarce.
Altho vegans (and I asume raw vegans) have a lower rate of the popular
disease such as heart disease and can
cer, they seem to have a higher rate of
neurological diseases. Perhaps because their diet is deficient in zinc and
selenium and cobalt and other microelements because it comes from poor soil.

  Ooops!!  The limb is starting to break.