David Wolfe on Healthy Living

David Wolfe is one of the founders of the raw-food nutritional movement and is a leading authority on the practices and benefits of eating a raw-food diet. He is the author of The Sunfood Diet Success System, Eating for Beauty and Naked Chocolate. In 1994, he co-founded RawFood.com (now Sunfood.com), the world’s largest online distributor of organic raw food and related products. Here, Wolfe explains how including raw vegetables in one’s diet can improve overall health.

How are health and life related?

Health is energy, fortitude, strength, persistence, intelligence—to have all your faculties about you to achieve your purpose on the planet. Food seems to be the key element to that. Obviously, you can’t really be healthy without exercise.

How is health tied to one’s destiny in life?

I think that most people do not know what their destiny is, but as you get healthier, you start to get into alignment with what your destiny is. When you get into living foods, it compels you to do what you want to do. People will eat all the wrong stuff, whether it’s cupcakes or too much coffee, to mask doing a job they don’t like to do.

What are the worst things people do to their health?

Anything dehydrating, such as soda and starchy carbohydrates, is a problem. If someone is abusing something like coffee, that’s very detrimental. Also, eating a diet that consists of junk food or no organic food.

How can people get started on living foods?

It’s our direction that determines our destination, so what I try to do is get people directed so that they’re in organic food stores, around people who are into living foods, and reading books on living foods. All of a sudden they start to identify with the whole thing.

What’s the biggest misunderstanding about raw foods?

It’s a myth that all raw foods are created equal; some raw foods are more powerful than others and it’s more important to include some types of raw foods over others in your diet. For example, apples and oranges are great. But, those things are not spirulina—they’re not super blue-green algae—and they’re not bee pollen. Those foods are what we call superfoods. Those foods are extraordinarily nutrient rich. They can affect your metabolism.

Another big myth is the importance of green leafy vegetables. People don’t eat enough [of them] in our culture. The lack of that food is what’s causing most of the health problems in this country. Green leafy vegetables are the best source of iron, magnesium and calcium. They’re alkaline, so they neutralize the acid in food. And chlorophyll is probably nature’s number one healing liquid.

Is it possible to be healthy without eating living foods?

If someone ate zero living foods, it’s not possible to be healthy in my opinion. It’s definitely possible to be healthy eating 50% living food. There’s some kind of vital factor about living food that you have to have. Without that, we end up in the syndrome where people are exercising and they feel like, “Okay, I’m getting my act together,” but then they’re 50 or 60 years old and suddenly everything falls apart. With living food, all that is gone. I don’t even think about any kind of injuries or anything like that anymore. Some people think that they have an injury that’s not healable, and that’s just not correct. Your body can heal any injury as long as you give yourself the right nutrients, nutritional support and exercise.

What do people underestimate or overestimate when they start a living-foods program?

The main thing is people underestimate the power of raw and live foods to cause you to lose weight. All weight problems essentially go out the window with the living foods approach. From an overestimating point of view, people think they’re immediately going to be transformed into this luminous being. It does transform you, for sure, but it takes a long time.

What about older people?

The main thing with older people is that, generally, they don’t have strong hydrochloric acid in their stomach, so you have to be a little careful about putting a bunch of fiber in there. If you start someone who’s 70 or 80 off on giant salads, that may not be appropriate. But, if you blend it down and make an energy soup, you couldn’t have a better food for someone that age. They’ll become rejuvenated.

What’s the one thing you know today about being healthy that you didn’t know a few years ago?

One thing is the power of water. It’s a big thing in healing. The best water for us is fresh, coming out of the ground spring water. The power of that water to heal us is profound. I’m really working on the question of how to get the highest possible quality water to people. I’m also learning about the power of drinking cold water. Cold water is more structured and organized and has more rejuvenating qualities than hot water.

What do you see on the horizon over the next five years?

Besides water, I’m exploring how to maximize the mineral intake of each individual. I really feel that minerals are the major things that heal us and the major things that ground us. When we become ungrounded, what brings us back down to earth is eating a mineralized diet. Minerals are also the main thing that allows us to be solid and strong and charge forward with a lot of brainpower and physical power. That leads us to the third thing I’m studying, which is agriculture: How do we maximize the food at the agricultural level, instead of just dealing with what we have in a store? One technology I’m researching is using diluted ocean water on crops. The homeopathic solutions to farming are the most powerful ways to approach it, meaning that you use water as the vessel with which to heal the soil.

What do you think people should know about yoga and meditation?

Yoga is a big thing for me. Yoga’s primary goal is about neurological and spinal health, which are related: The spine and brain are major parts of our nervous system. So, I find that sometimes I’ll stay up late too much and don’t get enough yoga in, and I feel like I’m getting out of alignment. But as soon as I do one hour and a half yoga class, my hips line up, shoulders line up, back lines up and my aches and pains go away. Massive amounts of people are suffering from back pain. They think it’s a curse and they’re never going to get out of it. Yoga is a way of alleviating back pain for the rest of your life. Yoga protects you from developing any kind of hunchback, severe scoliosis or sciatica.

The yogis say if you do the physical yoga, then you’re calm enough to do the meditation. And that’s what I’ve found. Sometimes I’m going at such a high speed that it takes the yoga to get me to a place where I can calm down and meditate. I think meditation is one of the greatest uses of your time, if not the greatest use of your time. People say, “Oh I don’t have time to meditate,” and I say, “You don’t have time not to meditate.”

What is the source for people to find health information?

I really feel that you have to read to become empowered. Reading transforms life; it’s always been the thing that creates magic. For the average person, I would say go to a health food store. They carry books that you can’t get anywhere else, such as books by Viktor Schauberger about his water technology. You can’t even get those books on Amazon! Not to toot my own horn too much, but I’d recommend The Sunfood Diet Success System, now in its sixth edition. It has a list of every healing center that does live food in the world, plus every raw food restaurant. It’s a compendium of everything I know in the field of health.

For more information about David Wolfe, visit www.davidwolfe.com or www.sunfood.com.