The following interview of David Wolfe (NFL) was conducted by Bob Avery,
coordinator of Natural Health M2M, via email during the month of August,
1997 and first appeared in the October issue.  To subscribe to the NH M2M
(or receive a sample copy) send an email to Bob Avery
([log in to unmask]).  The interview is posted with permission from
both parties.

Best, Peter
[log in to unmask]


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Q: Who is David Wolfe? How old are you? How were you educated and what do
you do for a living?

A: I am co-author of the controversial new book Nature's First Law: The
Raw-Food Diet. I have also recorded an audio cassette series entitled "The
Systemless System Of Success." I have been around the Sun 27 times! I have
degrees in Mechanical and Environmental Engineering and Political Science.
I have studied at many different institutions including Oxford University.
I concluded my formal education with a law degree from the University of
San Diego. I am co-founder of Nature's First Law, a raw-food organization
based in San Diego which hosts events and distributes an enormous selection
of Raw-Food Diet books, videos, and audio tapes world-wide. I co-founded
the group three years ago with my partners Stephen Arlin and RC Dini. Our
goal is to bring The Raw-Food Diet to a mass audience. We are currently
engaged in a massive multi-media campaign to bring this message to the
world. We can be reached in the United States at 1-800-205-2350. I host
seminars around the country and my goal is to become the greatest promoter
of The Raw Food Diet in the history of the world.

Q: Do you eat 100% raw foods?

A: I've been eating 100% raw plant foods exclusively for about 3 years now.
There is a magic to 100% raw which is indescribable. Everything keeps
getting better; my life has improved in every way and in every direction
many times over. Raw food is FUN! Cooked food is dead, lifeless, and
boring. No amount of cooked food is ever benign. Nietzsche said, "God is
dead." We say, "Cooked food is poison!"

Q: What inspired you to become a raw-foodist?

A: A 100% Raw-Food Diet is the greatest secret in the world today. What we
eat deeply and radically affects the way we think, feel, and behave. It
radically affects the entire life process of planet Earth. 90% of the
Earth's abundance is being burned up in the kitchen fire. Ann Wigmore did a
study which demonstrated that 83% of the food's nutritional value is lost
in the process of cooking. That means that 83% of the TIME, LABOR, and
RESOURCES which went into creating that food are also destroyed by cooking.
This idea affects everything! It affects all agriculture, all politics, all
business, all economics, all over the world! The global impact of
humanity's eating habits prompted me to dedicate myself to this message of
physical and planetary rejuvenation. A 100% raw plant food diet IS the
greatest discovery in the history of the world. It is THE path which will
lead humanity out of the present chaos into a bountiful future.

I have always been health conscious, being the son of two medical doctors.
I saw ill people my whole life and naturally wanted to avoid going down the
same path. So, I stopped taking medicine at 10 years old against my
parents' wishes, and stopped dairy products at 19. Then I gradually cut out
the dead animal muscle (meat) and was a vegan for a time, until exposed to
the raw-food idea by reading Bircher-Benner's Nutritional Diseases which we
had in my home. After which, I became a raw-foodist overnight.

Q: What is your current height and weight? What changes have you noticed,
both subjectively and objectively, pro and con, since before you went raw?
Can you give us any data on personal biomarkers, like pulse rate, body
temperature, vital lung capacity, various blood parameters pre- and
post-raw?

A: I am 6 feet tall, 155 pounds. The changes I've noticed are so
intriguing, it is tough to put into words! The only way I can describe it
is that a 100% raw plant food diet liberates your natural self, mentally,
emotional, spiritually, AND physically. I don't look anything like I used
to. I definitely understand now how cooked food blocks natural beauty and
hinders the true manifestation of what we can be. I can't say there are any
cons to what I have experienced. In terms of biomarkers: I've always had
low blood pressure which hasn't changed from before raw to after raw. My
body temperature is about 1.8 degrees lower than it used to be! My vital
lung capacity has increased dramatically. I really agree with Joe Alexander
when he mentions in his book Blatant Raw-Foodist Propaganda that the lungs
and digestive organs work in a tandem sort of way. When one is overburdened
the other is not able to function properly. I have been doing at least 30
deep breaths every day for about 6 years now and I discovered one day after
doing 100% raw-food for a few years, that I was suddenly a diaphragm
breather--I had such a tough time with chest breathing and the problem just
one day disappeared. I went to have my blood viewed under a
microscope/television setup a few months ago, and the guy could not get a
sample of blood to drip from my finger.

Q: Do your parents approve of what you are doing? Have you been able to get
through to them about the importance of raw foods? Has your example worn
off on them at all?

A: They've seen the transformation I have gone through over the past 3-4
years and are now getting the picture. My dad had a heart attack and a
stroke a year ago and after coming out of that bought 30 fruit trees which
he planted in his yard. So things are definitely changing in the right
direction.

Q: How did you arrive at your philosophical selection of the raw-vegan diet
as optimal for mankind?

A: The structure and function of humanity's teeth, digestive canal, sense
organs, nourishment for the young, children's development, sexual desire,
mental set, emotional feelings, as well as the cause and cure of disease
and unhappiness all demonstrate that humans are biologically frugivorous
(an eater of fruits and vegetables) and are neither carnivorous,
herbivorous, nor omnivorous.

It is just simple common sense.

Q: Archeological research indicates that man has been a hunter for perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years. Why shouldn't raw animal foods play a role
in a raw food diet?

A: It is a well-known fact of biology that environmental toxins accumulate
in animals, especially in animal fats. All the toxins being poured into the
atmosphere end up being collected in the tissues of animals. Eating those
animals, whether they be insect, fish, or mammal will also give you a
strong dose of toxins. John Robbins mentioned in Diet For A New America
that dead animal muscle (meat) contains ten times the pesticide level an
equivalent weight of commercial plant food would contain; dairy products
contain four times as much.

Additionally, raw dead flesh is loaded with worms and parasites; even
someone who eats McDonald's three times a day knows that!

Eating raw animal foods is not only unnatural, but also quite dangerous in
the present world we live in.

Omnivorous feeding patterns discovered in the genus Homo (by nescient
researchers in archeological digs) before the discovery of fire in
scattered places throughout the world dating back from the 100,000's to
millions of years do not signify anything of significance except for the
fact that some humans were living in contravention to their natural design,
perhaps due to terrestrial disasters, confusion, or unknowable factors.
Also, there is no evidence that we modern humans are directly descended
from any such Homo progenitors.

Q: No evidence? The M2M's founder, Ward Nicholson, summarized the known
widely accepted scientific archeological evidence in favor of such a
genealogical linkage in his very well researched and massively footnoted
3-part interview in Chet Day's natural hygiene newsletter Health & Beyond.

The most recent study I've seen on the subject analyzed the DNA of
chimpanzees, Neanderthals, and modern humans. The study found (and because
this is off the top of my head, the numbers could be slightly off here) 56
differences between chimps and modern humans along a certain segment of
DNA, 27 differences between Neanderthals and modern humans, and 8
differences among all modern humans.

The researchers suggested that such a great variation indicated that
Neanderthals were a different species and that modern humans are not
descended from Neanderthals. And don't share a genetic development into
modem humans.

This is just one example of a lack of genealogical linkages between other
Homo species (Neanderthal, Erectus, Habilis, Archaic Sapiens, etc.) and
modern humans. There are many more.

I would like to point out the evidence which demonstrates modern Homo
Sapiens have been around for millions of years and did not appear 100,000
to 200,000 years ago as Ward and many evolutionary scientists are
suggesting.

Professor of Geology, Gene Ragazoni discovered in Castenedolo, Italy in
1860 and 1880 the remains of at least four anatomically modern human
skeletons in undisturbed Miocene strata. Such formations date back at least
2 million years.

In Buenos Aires, in 1896, below a hardened limestone layer of tasca 35 feet
down, dock workers unearthed the crown of an anatomically modern human. The
rock formations dated back 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago.

In Trenton, New Jersey, researchers unearthed an anatomically modern Homo
Sapiens femur dating back 107,000 years ago.

When the gold rush began in California in the 1860's, miners unearthed
inexplicable artifacts. "Inexplicable" because they were so old! In 1877,
John H. Neal entered the Montezuma mine shaft in Table mountain in
California. He discovered at the leading end of a mine shaft a mortar and
pestle layered in the late Miocene formations of gold-bearing gravels. This
would indicate the objects could be seven to nine million years old. Miners
made similar discoveries at dozens of nearby locations, including Kincaid
Flat, Goldspring Gulch, Oregon Bar (in Placer County). These findings were
all reported by J.D. White, the State Geologist of California.

Ward's scientific evidence is simply "research"--he has researched other
people's theories, concepts, and ideas. I would highly recommend that he
and others read Joel Barker's famous book The Business of Paradigms. Barker
demonstrates how preconceived ideas can literally blind us to evidence
staring us right in the face. I tell my audiences, "They don't believe what
they see, rather they see what they already believe!" We may well remember
that the Theory of Evolution was formulated before archaeologists began
digging into the Earth--thus, the idea of what they should find was already
firmly embedded in their minds. It is in this way that much evidence in
contravention to the Theory of Evolution has been passed over or ignored by
many scientists (but not all!) because it doesn't fit the paradigm!

Q: What is your general opinion of raw animal food consumption and
instinctive eating in particular?

A: The raw animal eating fad is the result of people trying to go raw the
easy way (the new magic pill). Eating raw animal food instead of cooked
food is just replacing one toxic substance for another. If people want to
eat animals, they should do it in exactly the same fashion as every other
carnivore/omnivore on the planet--freshly killed and raw--if they can.
Humans can't and are averse to it by intuitive nature.

Q: But don't all primates eat insects, including all of homo sapiens'
progenitors? They are even eaten to this day in many human societies.

A: Many primates eat their own feces too. Soon. we'll have people claiming
we need to eat our own feces to be healthy! The fact that we are naturally
averse to eating bugs speaks strongly. We have a natural biological design
for certain types of foods (raw fruits and vegetables). If we want to
actualize our true potential we need to obey that design--this is Nature's
First Law.

I believe very strongly in the dictum "Water seeks its own level.''

Oral fixation is the primary problem facing humanity. People cannot or
don't want to control what they are putting into their mouths. Raw animal
eating is another manifestation of oral fixation. We are currently
publishing a book entitled "Primal Mothering In A Modern World" by Hygeia
Halfmoon. In the book, Hygeia makes the incredible observation that it is a
lack of breast-feeding which is the primary cause of oral fixation later in
life!! I believe cooked-food addiction also plays a major role as well.

To overcome oral fixation, one must realize that food is not an end in
itself: but a means to an end!!

Q: How do you respond to the charge that the vegan diet is unnatural
because there do not exist, nor, it appears, did there ever exist, any
predominantly vegan societies?

A: That is an assumption based upon inaccurate data. My mom is from Persia,
and in that country they have vegan communities dating back thousands of
years. They also have raw-vegan communities with similar traditions. In
fact, Farsi (the Persian language) is the only language with a specific
word for a rawvegan and every Persian knows what it means! The word is:
"Khom Gia Khori."

Q: Hmm, almost looks like three words to one who speaks no Persian. Ward
Nicholson and others have determined that flesh-eating is much more common
than not throughout man's history and that the proportions in the diet were
not insignificant. Doesn't this indicate that we have adapted to such
foods? How can this evidence be so easily dismissed?

A: Ward Nicholson has been sold--fruit, stem, and root--on the Theory of
Evolution. He has made the enormous assumption (as have many other
scientists of this age) that species gradually evolve and adapt, which is
not at all supported in the fossil record nor in the experimental
laboratory.

Q: Don't you believe in the Theory of Evolution?

A: No. The most obvious refutation of the Theory of Evolution is
paleontology itself. Simple probability indicates that fossil records can
only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage
of evolution/adaptation, and there ought to be "transition" types, not
particularly of one species or another. Instead, what we find, in the
actual fossil record, are genus forms that have not developed themselves on
the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definite
shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become
rarer or finally disappear, while quite different forms arise again.

The species that we know today are all stable, and no case has ever been
observed of a species "adapting" itself to change its anatomy or
physiology, which "adaptation" then resulted in more fitness" for the
"struggle for existence," and was passed on by heredity, with the result of
a new species.

Darwinians cannot get over these facts by bringing in great spaces of time
(concepts like "millions of years"), for no one has ever discovered any
transition types for any organism--only distinct species exist. Nor are the
extinct fossil plants and animals any simpler than present forms, although
we are told the course of evolution was from simple to complex life-forms.
This is crude anthropomorphism--humans are complex, other animals are
simple, and they must be tending towards more human-like form and
"intelligence," since humans are "higher" biologically.

If the Theory of Evolution were correct, species ought to be fluid at the
present time. They should be "adapting" and turning into one another. There
should actually be no species, but only a surging mass of individuals,
engaged in a race towards complexity," "humanity," and "intelligence."
This, of course, is not the case. The "struggle" is quite inconclusive. The
lower forms, simpler--less fit?--have not died out, have not yielded to the
principle of Darwinian evolution. They remain in the same form they have
had for eons. Why do they never "evolve" into something "higher?"

The utilitarian aspect of the Theory of Evolution is also quite subjective.
A species without hands has no need of hands. A hand that slowly evolved
would be a positive disadvantage over the "millions of years" necessary to
perfect the hand. Furthermore, how did this process start? For an organ to
be utile, it must be ready; while it is being prepared it is not utile. But
if it is not utile, it is not Darwinian, for Darwinism says evolution is
utilitarian.

A species appears suddenly, both in fossil-finds, and in the experimental
laboratory. Sudden or quantum mutation is a legitimate description of the
process, if the idea is free from any mechanical-utility causes, for these
latter are only imagined, whereas quantum mutations are a fact.

Origins are forever hidden from us. How we got here or and how Life began
is an impenetrable mystery. To concoct outlandish theories saying "this is
how we got here" and "this is how we lived in the past" based on 1,000
pieces of a puzzle containing 6 million pieces seems to me to be very naive.

Q: Do you have any peer-reviewed literature on this subject we can sink our
teeth into?

A: Initially, I would recommend the book Darwin On Trial by Berkeley law
professor Phillip Johnson. Professor Richard Thompson's work, also is very
informative. Hugo de Vries' Mutation Theory is another good one.

Q: Are you against science?

The whole field of Darwinism/Evolution is a product of scientific
materialism. Scientific materialism has a false assumption at its basis.
This assumption is that Life is formed by the outer environment. This
generated the sociology of "environment" as determining the character of
living beings. And yet, in a purely factual sense, what is Life? Life is
the actualization of potential. Potential is actualized in the midst of the
outer environment. The environment does not determine the inner
potential--it can only help or hinder its expression. Also, the inner
potential can actually determine and alter the outer environment!

We are interested in a way to manifest our full potential. And this can be
done by obeying the Laws of Nature!! This automatically begins to shape the
outer environment to fit the expression of the inner potential.

In my seminars I teach the basic tenet of all success information: In order
for your life to change...YOU have to change!

The principle I am describing here is very simple. Life change comes from
the inside out. Once you change on the inside, everything changes on the
outside.

The Laws of Nature are there and they stay there. Human progress through
knowledge has been solely and exclusively a chiselling away at the
distinctions which define the Laws of Nature. The greatest insights in
history have been by those who revealed a new distinction about Nature
(which was actually there all along)!

Q: Have any of these works or findings you cite appeared in peer-reviewed
scientific publications?

A: Great question. Of course there is a massive body of evidence to support
what I am saying and it appears in peer-reviewed literature. The premier
scientific journals Nature and Science and the somewhat more popular
Scientific American and England's New Scientist carry articles about the
precariousness of dating fossils, the fact that the fossil record runs
contrary to the theory of evolution, the lack of transitional forms, and
other articles on related topics I have touched upon. The story of the
controversy at the British Natural History Museum on this subject found in
editorial and correspondence sections of Nature from 1980 to 1982 is very
instructive as to the confusion present in scientific evolutionary circles
when confronted with the evidence.

The best analysis of scientific data gathered on the fallacy of the theory
of evolution is found in Michael Denton's fantastic book entitled
Evolution: A Theory In Crisis.

Another great scientific book completely refuting evolution is Dr. Duane
Gish's Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, which blows apart Gould's
"punctuated equilibrium" theory and other attempts to save Darwinism from
the fossil facts.

Both of these books and Johnson's Darwin On Trial can be ordered directly
from the Institute for Creationist Research (which is far more objective
than any Evolutionist Research Facility I've encountered) in my hometown of
San Diego. Call them at 619-448-0900. I highly recommend these books to
anyone who believes the theory of evolution is a fact.

I would like to add here I don't believe the Earth was created 10,000 years
ago. The past history of the Earth is profoundly and deeply mysterious and
not one in ten thousand of its secrets has been revealed.

This information about the fallacy of evolution is liberating, for it opens
up a whole spectrum of speculation and potential!

Q: Your enthusiasm is infectious! What kind of diet, specifically, do you
promote?

A: I promote a modified fruitarian diet of 100% raw plant foods. Fruit is
the staple food of humankind. In addition to that we have green-leafy
vegetables and herbs as well as occasional nuts and seeds. Wild food is by
far the best food. I think it would be great for everyone to seek out and
learn about wild foods in their area. One of our best products is a video
called "Edible Wild Plants." Check it out! Cultivate a taste for wild food
and reconnect yourself with Nature. I love wild food and, if I'm eating
food, I strive each day to reach my goal of eating 100% wild food.

Q: That's quite a goal! Isn't something like that only achievable for
fortunate folks like yourself who live in lush warm places like San Diego?
Where do you go to forage? Is it legal?

A: Actually, San Diego is an arid desert and is not so lush as one might
imagine. However, there is plenty of food to forage. I forage in my own
backyard and in the canyons near and around my home. I don't know if it is
legal or not, but I'd imagine there'll be a law against it soon enough! The
wild animals living in every locale survive on wild food and you can too!

Q: What are some examples of wild fruits and herbs that you enjoy?

A: I don't know the names of all the wild foods I eat, but here are a few:
dandelion, prickly pear, napolitos, wild mustard greens & flowers, fennel,
wild celery, lamb's quarters, lemonade berry, rosemary, wild oats,
tumbleweed, etc.

Q: How do you feel about raw grains (soaked and/or sprouted)?

A: Many grains are hybrids and don't survive in Nature. I don't eat raw
grains now--except for chewing on wild oat greens in winter time and eating
raw corn which is the fruit of the grain plant. I have eaten grain sprouts
in the past and I think that good hardy sprouted winter wheatberries would
be great to get someone through a tough winter in the northern areas of the
United States or the world.