Dr. Doug Graham - Overcoming Common Issues of the Raw Food Diet (Part 1)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 by: Kevin Gianni
Tags: raw foods, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) This is an excerpt from Dr. Doug Graham's interview for the Raw Summit, a complete interview encyclopedia of cutting edge living and raw food knowledge. You can find the complete transcripts and audios at (http://www.RawSummitArchives.com) and (www.RawSummitArchives.com) . In this excerpt, Dr. Doug Graham discusses some of the common issues with the raw food diet and how he brought a 36 year old NBA basketball player to the top of his game.

Raw Food World Summit Interview Excerpt with Dr. Doug Graham, creator of the 80-10-10 Diet

Kevin Gianni: Hi everyone! This is Kevin Gianni, optimal health expert, and I'd like to welcome you to another very special Raw Summit Teleseminar, which can be found online at (http://www.RawSummitArchives.com) and (www.RawSummitArchives.com) . The purpose of the raw summit is to pass along cutting edge information about raw and living food technology for you to reach optimal health, wellness, and success.

Today, I have a fantastic guest on the line. He is an author, a lifetime athlete, and a 27-year raw fooder. He has also been an adviser to world-class athletes and trainers from all around the globe. He has worked professionally with top performers in almost every sport and every field of entertainment including notables such as tennis legend Martina Navratilova, Chicken Soup for the Soul co-author Mark Victor Hansen, and actress Demi Moore. Today, we are going to talk about the new distinctions he has made about the raw food lifestyles. So, Dr. Doug Graham, I want to welcome you to the Raw Summit.

Doug Graham: Thank you! Thank you, Kevin. It is a pleasure to be here with you.

Kevin: Great! So, why don't we get into it and let's start with a little bit of a landscape of your history and why you are here now.

Doug: You know I always find this a funny question and I know people are fascinated and it's one of the most boring parts for me. It's a funny world isn't it? You never know exactly what it is that is going to be meaningful to somebody else. I was a sick child. I was physically sick, I was an athlete, but I went every week to the allergy doctor for years and years for "shots". I had every childhood disease at a very early age and I was a sick child. I never left the house without a pack of tissues in my pocket. It never occurred to me that I was a sick child because I was an athlete. But I was always looking for a way to improve my athletic performance, it just seemed there must be an edge I could gain over the competition, somehow. So, I started looking into food at a fairly early age.

My family was very open- minded about food and we went on many diets because my mother especially, was trying to control her weight. Whatever diet she went on, the family went on. Eventually, she discovered Weight Watchers and succeeded with that. The whole family went on Weight Watchers and I was just still approaching my teens. By my mid-teens I was making wholesale dietary changes, to attempt to eat more healthfully. I had coaches in grammar school, health classes, and high school health classes telling me to eat my fruits and vegetables. I was a health and Phys Ed major in college and the teachers all touted the health benefits of fruits and vegetables. And by the time I was in college, I was eating as a vegetarian and noticed small improvements. After a few years as a vegetarian, eventually the concept of vegan came to me. I was exposed to it. Before the internet, you know, these things came a little more slowly that they do now.

Kevin: Absolutely.

Doug: So, I did the vegan experiment and literally decided I would try it for a month to see if I liked it and I tried it for a month and at the end of 2 weeks, the changes were so profound. I could breathe better, I could run better. I found myself thinking more clearly. I was sleeping less and having more energy. And you know what? At the end of two weeks I was sold for life right then and there. Well vegan did not last long. To be quite honest, every time I thought I had arrived, it was a shock because it wasn't where I was going. There was more. I bumped into a gentleman and I still stay in touch with him, who started explaining to me some of the benefits of raw food. And although I swore up and down that he was an absolute nutcase at the time, you know, you know you cannot get the thought out of your head once it is in.

Kevin: That is the truth.

Doug: I started eating more raw, and more raw and more raw. By the late seventies, I was eating a high percentage of raw diet which essentially was the raw diet back then and I got in touch with the various people who were promoting raw food. At the time, there were really only five major leaders in the raw movement and I contacted them and asked them about it, and all of them said the same thing about it. They said, look, we know how to get sick people well but helping athletes perform is really not our thing. So, it was reinvent the wheel, and reinvent the wheel over and over again. And I went through what maybe the world's slowest transition into the raw food diet. Because I did not want to go there, it was just the results were inarguable. I did not want to go there.

I like all my food and it took me a long time to realize that essentially, I'm in a relationship with food. And that what ended up happening was that I loved all food, but all food did not love me back. And I much prefer to be in relationships with people who love me as much as I love them. Those are the most rewarding relationships. And so, gradually, I came to the realization that I was going to have to make some decisions about my food based on how much the food loved me. How did it make me feel? Did I want to wake up the next morning feeling like I have been in a train wreck? Did I want to ache in my joints, or be congested in my head? Or did I just want to feel fantastic all the time. Eventually, I committed to what was called an all-raw diet and failed miserably for seven years on the all-raw diet.

Kevin: Really?

Doug: Oh failed miserably. I either would loose my health or I would find myself binging on cooked carbohydrates, or both, or I would just get soup and eat myself into oblivion. I just couldn't find anything even remotely that I would call balanced until I finally did the unthinkable thing which was to eat a lot more fruits and a lot more vegetables and reduced the amount of other raw food in my diet. I found that if I ate a lot more fruits and a lot more vegetables and started reducing nuts, seeds, avocados, olives, oils and other foods, I almost magically felt better. My athletic performance soared. My clarity of mind was better than ever. And I had no idea what I was doing, but it was working like crazy. So I just decided to keep on working it. This is about 1985. And I opened up a health retreat in 1986 where people came to fast with me and when they recovered from their fast, I would put them on to this version of the raw food diet where fruits and vegetables predominated over all other food both in volume, in weight, and in total calories, which was the big kicker.

Kevin: Total calories ok.

Doug: Total calories, because a teaspoon full of oil is only, you know, a teaspoon full. But in terms of calories, it's many calories as an entire head of lettuce. So, once I got to that, we used that program for 10 years at the health retreat and had fantastic results helping sick people get well and then my roots of athleticism just kept coming back. Various doctors from around the world and athletes from around the world would contact me now and then asking for help.

I would help them as best that I could. And one of them, a player from the NBA, a gentleman named Ronnie Grandison came to me and said, "Look, this is my last year of playing basketball pro and I want to do the best I can." And I said, " Well, you know, don't waste my time because I can't imagine that your going to do what I'm gonna suggest." And he goes, "No I really will, I am that kind of guy, I am extremely motivated." So, I explained to him what to do over a series of telephone calls and he did it really to the letter, got phenomenal results and felt so good at the end of the year that he continued and went back the next year and tried out for his club who had told him he was too old the year before, but now he wasn't too old anymore. Now, he was fitter, faster, shot better, thought more clearly and ended up playing another five years of NBA ball.

Kevin: Wow.

Doug: And the only reason he quit when he did was because he fell down in a training game, in a practice game, he fell down, when in a freaky accident somebody pushed him at the same time that somebody else stepped on his foot. Well, when he landed, because he was pinned, you've got to remember that guys six foot eight fall pretty hard. He broke both hands.

Kevin: Oh wow.

Doug: And was going to be out for several months. And by the time he was out for that long he just said, you know what, my family commitments are getting really strong and I want to spend my time with them. So, he did. But he said, "I am thinner than I have ever been." At 36, he was actually the fittest man on the team and actually thinner than he had ever been when he played college ball. And what he said to me, in some ways haunts me and in some ways motivates me. But he said on many occasions, he said, "Doc are you going to die with all that information in your head or are you going to write it down?" I got to tell you I don't like writing it down. It is a lot of work to write it down.

Kevin: Right.

Doug: But for Ronnie Grandison, I have written a few books and I continued to do so. And eventually through a back door, and I am almost closed, but eventually through a back door, I started realizing what I was doing that was different than most other people in the raw food world were doing. It is not about right or wrong, good or bad, in any way, it is strictly about consequences. But I started realizing what I was doing that was different. And what I was doing that was different was I was taking the science of nutrition that I have learned in various areas. As I said in college, I was a nutrition major and health and Phys Ed and nutrition. Studying the various research that was out there, looking at the textbooks that were out there, looking at the private books that people had written, responsible nutritionists and doctors from the vegan world and from outside the vegan world have written a huge number of books, and it turned out that all of them agreed on one point and one point only.

In every other area they seem to have their own little perspective, you know, of this and that. But at one point they agreed, and that was that when your fat intake in terms of total calories exceed ten percent of calories consumed, predictable health decline ensues. Various doctors explained why from various fields, even the sports nutritionist say the same thing and they could tell what happens and why it happens. Whether it has to do with the lowered oxygen-carrying ability of the blood or whether it had to do with reduced permeability of the vessels so that various nutrients don't cross the vessel wall as well. Whether it had to do with build-up on the arterial walls or in the joints but it did not seem to matter what it was. They all had a perspective, but they all agreed on this ten percent number, that when your fat intake exceeds ten percent, of course, you know, I am fighting that tooth and nail, because raw is different than cooked, right? And plant is different than animal, but it turned out that study after study kept confirming that it really didn't matter whether it was cooked or raw, animal or plant. The kicker was when I started getting raw food clients coming to me who had heart attacks while they were on the raw food diet.

Kevin: Wow.

Doug: When I started putting those case histories together and looking at what was the common denominator between the various people having diabetes on a raw diet, having heart disease on a raw diet, experiencing chronic fatigue on a raw diet, experiencing candida on a raw diet and a wealth of various issues and huge digestive problems. These are things that we don't tend to think of. They are not the norm, but I am seeing them in fairly large numbers. And when I start seeing those things happen, and looking for what is the common denominator, the common denominator was dietary fat. In the raw diet when the dietary fat level goes up beyond a certain point we start to see health decline rather than health improvement. And so, that stimulated for me a breakthrough in consciousness. So, I started saying, "You know what, let me start to define what I am doing. Rather than just calling it a raw diet, let's call it a specific kind of raw diet. We will define the parameters of it a little more. and over the last ten years have been defining and referring to what I call the 80-10-10 diet".

To read the rest of this interview please visit (http://www.RawSummitArchives.com) and (www.RawSummitArchives.com) . This is just an excerpt of over 14 hours of cutting edge living food, raw food or health information revealed during the Raw Food World Summit.

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show "The Renegade Health Show" (and get a free gift!) with commentary on natural health issues, vegan and raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here.


His book, "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," is a step-by-step guide to optimum health for the time and energy-strapped. To find out more about abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here... or you're interested in the vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here. For access to free interviews, downloads and a complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com.