• Preface and introductory remarks

• Problem: Finding unsanitized reports about the full spectrum of real-world results with vegetarian diets
  
  • Background on the Natural Hygiene Many-to-Many as a pool of information about individuals on vegan and raw diets.
    
  • Assessing the veracity and relevance of people's individual stories.
    
  • Why the Many-to-Many was started: bypassing "official" vegetarian organizations with vested interests to get less filtered information.

• The attractions and pitfalls of purist black-and-white dietary philosophies
  
  • PROBLEM #1: Confusion and contradiction in the marketplace of dietary ideas and research.
    
  • PROBLEM #2: Feeling powerless over microbes, genetics, or out-of-control authoritarian health-care.
    
  • PROBLEM #3: Thoughtful non-authoritarianism vs. mere reactionary rebellion.
    
  • How Natural Hygiene and raw/vegan diets satisfy the above appeals--the attractions and the pitfalls.
    
  • Other unconscious needs also met.

• Success/failure rates of vegan diets in Natural Hygiene
  
  • Rough estimate of success/failure rate of vegan diets based on experiences of people in the N.H. M2M.
    
    • Dropouts over time and "cheating" on the diet complicate the assessment.
      
    • The problem of vested interests among "official" sources in getting straight answers.
      
    • "Party line" views and ostracism of dissidents.
      
    • Special measures that may make the diet work for more individuals argue against its naturalness.
      
    • Gap between uncensored reports and officialdom rarely surfaces publicly in a way that gets widespread attention.
      
  • Success/failure on all-raw vegan diets compared to more conventional vegan diets that include cooked starch sources.
    
    • The distinction between short-term and long-term results is critical in evaluating "success."
      
    • Are the rare all-raw success stories the "ideal," or simply "exceptions"?

• Symptoms of "failure to thrive" on raw and/or vegetarian diets
  
  • A look at the most serious potential problems.
    
  • Low-profile symptoms more commonly seen.

• How people get trapped by "pure" diets that don't maintain long-term health
  
  • The "frog in slowly boiling water" syndrome.
    
  • How can things end up bad when they started out so good?
    
  • The lulling effect of imperceptibly slow declines in health.
    
  • Emotional "certainty" shuts down one's ability to rationally assess symptoms.
    
  • The willingness to make sober judgments of current symptoms is perpetually displaced into the future.
    
  • Those who are successful are partners in reinforcing the tendency not to see failures as real failures.

• How obsessively striving for absolute dietary purity becomes a fruitless "grail quest"
  
  • Significant parallels with religious behavior.
    
  • The role of unseen and unverifiable "toxemia" as evidence of one's "sin."
    
  • The "relativity" of absolute purification transforms it into an ever-receding goal and goad.
    
  • Self-restriction becomes its own virtue as absolute purity recedes.
    
  • Endgame: fundamentalist obsessive-compulsiveness.

• Successful vegetarian diets require more than simple dietary purity
  
  • More attention to robust nutritional intake and other health factors.
    
  • Stress and vegetarian diets.
    
  • Stress creates less margin for error for nutrition's contribution to physiological maintenance.
    
  • Successful Natural Hygiene diets are often less strict and more diverse than traditional/"official" recommendations.
    
  • Special nutritional practices added by some individuals.
    
  • Potential role of involuntary "lapses" in filling nutritional gaps.
    
  • Lapses usually automatically interpreted as "addictions" instead by adherents.

• Rationalizing dietary failures with circular thinking and untestable excuses
  
  • Pat answers and mantras.
    
  • Unfalsifiable excuses impervious to testability.
    
    • "You're too addicted."
      
    • "You just haven't given it enough time yet."
      
    • "Unnatural overstimulation."
      
    • When symptoms are always seen as "detox."
      
    • Other meaningless, unhelpful, or unfalsifiable excuses.

• 5 tips for staying alert to the traps of excessive dietary idealism
  
  • Self-honesty instead of denial.
    
  • Focus first on results rather than theoretical certainty.
    
  • Utilize reasonable timeframes to gauge trends.
    
  • Exercise at some activity that gently challenges your limits, to hone sensitivity to changes in your capacities and health.
    
  • Don't ignore feedback about how you are doing from people who know you well.

• Interview wrap-up
  
  • The science will change somewhat but big picture is more important than disputes over details.
    
  • Tolerance for our own mistakes, tolerance for others.
    
  • Open-mindedness is an ongoing process, not something one achieves and then "has."

• Further observations about "failure to thrive" on vegan diets
  
  • Case of rickets in vegan toddler.
    
    • Family environment and parents' dietary beliefs/practices.
      
    • Particulars of father's diet (reflected to some degree in toddler's diet).
      
    • The son's diet was not much different, though perhaps heavier in fruit.
      
    • Calcium deficiency rather than vitamin D deficiency as potential cause?
      
    • Elimination of problem using supplements/animal foods demonstrates insufficiency of diet, regardless of exact cause.
      
    • Tendency is to rationalize as to speculative possibilities while ignoring probability/plausibility.
      
  • Special measures to make vegan diets work can be seen as compensations for lack of evolutionary congruence.
    
  • That even informed advocates acknowledge vegan diets should be carefully planned suggests that less margin for error is a real issue.

• The yo-yo syndrome as potential indicator of failure to thrive on strict diets
  
  • Viewing the yo-yo syndrome as valuable feedback to help pinpoint problems breaks the cycle of guilt over so-called "lapses."
    
  • Unhooking from guilt frees attention to seriously consider and evaluate practical solutions one may have been blind to before.
    
  • Experimental attitude requires new mental relationship with the question of "certainty."

• Why is being "hungry all the time" on a veg-raw-food diet such a problem for some individuals even in the short-term before any deficiencies could have arisen?
  
  • Diet is lower in overall nutrient/energy-density than the one the human body evolved on.
    
  • Human digestive system not optimized for maximum extraction of nutrition/energy from a diet of all high-fiber foods.
    
  • Eating like a gorilla leads to a life centered around food like a gorilla.

• Becoming highly dependent on "mainstay" foods in a veg-raw diet
  
  • The frequency of dependence on avocados and/or nuts is explained by human digestive system's design for denser foods.
    
  • Raw-foodist eating patterns and difficulties are predictable/understandable given evolutionary design of human gut.
    
  • Once all other, more energy-dense foods are eliminated, "fruitarianism" is the logical/inevitable outcome.

• The fallacy of fruitarianism: word games vs. the real world of practice and results
  
  • Word games over what qualifies as "fruit" often expand the definition so far that the distinction means little.
    
  • Were our evolutionary primate predecessors really true "fruitarians"?
    
  • Simply put: Humans are not apes.
    
  • People may do well at first, but this is because they are living off of past nutritional reserves.
    
  • Advocates of "fruitarianism" frequently change their definition of it over time.
    
  • Synopsis of 4-part 1970s-era "Fruit for Thought" article series, by the American Vegan Society's Jay Dinshah.
    
    • Fruitarian gurus weren't actually practicing what they preached, but followers who did ran aground.
      
    • Excuses, excuses.
      
    • Failures the rule, no successes ever came to light.
      
    • Little change in fruitarian movement between now and then.
      
    • Notable Natural Hygiene practitioner at the time related specific problems seen in numerous fruitarian patients.
      
  • Beyond the myth of fruitarianism is the empowerment that freedom from fantasy brings.
    
    • When evaluating claims, look beyond the word games.
      
    • A more "evolved" path, or only more extreme?
      
    • Judge the diet, not yourself--by bottom-line results, not high-sounding philosophy.

SEE BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEE TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR: PART 1 PART 2 PART 3

GO TO PART 1 - Setting the Record Straight on Humanity's Prehistoric Diet and Ape Diets

GO TO PART 2 - Fire and Cooking in Human Evolution

GO TO PART 3 - The Psychology of Idealistic Diets / Successes & Failures of Vegetarian Diets

Back to Frank Talk by Long-Time Insiders