Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

I'm revisiting an older Mercola post because of something a friend sent

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

which led me to begin viewing two other vids of Campbell-McBride on youtube (better than the mercola audio interview by far)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONYR7vAD-A

http://youtu.be/Z_0NvcJZwa8

I agree with the idea digestion has been damaged by post industrial life styles, and that this problem is corrected most efficiently using the idea "food is medicine". This is IMO at the base of all effective non-medical healing of the maladies of the industrialized world. I would be curious to see if McBrides method is as rapid and complete as Graham's (water fast followed by fruits and vegetables) in healing the variety of life style damaged conditions we see in ourselves and all around us.  My money going in would be on Graham, she in my opinion suffers a typical situational (cultural/industrial) form of myopia in the idea that humans are biologically suited to the modern industrialized "delivery of calories system" (fats as primary source), which is predicated on convenience (distribution and concentration of calories) not health, in my opinion. Sure it's more "efficient" to distribute and consume concentrated calories (fats), but is it healthy?

Which is not to say the multitude of other fractionated processed and refined "foods" are not also responsible for galloping disease, it is an overdetermined problem. So McBride, and the paleo community in general, have it half right IMO by eliminating fractionated/processed/refined foods. But the (health) problem is complex because there is more than one thing causing it. Concentrated calories is also a (mostly unrecognized) culprit. We run most efficiently on fruit and vegetable carbohydrates (when consumed in context of whole fresh ripe raw organic especially). Yes we also burn fat for energy, but it is less efficient than carbs when pushed to be the primary source of fuel. And when it comes to health, it's difficult to argue against the most efficient delivery of fuel and nutrients to the body.

But there also seems to be a problem with combining high levels of fats and carbohydrates into one diet - it appears to induce the condition known as insulin resistance, precursor to unhealthy weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease, among many others. So it's kind of a "pick your poison" kind of thing, to be optimally healthy it's either going to be a mostly carbs or mostly fats question. And then you also have to ask the other question, which choice is better overall?

It is true that 100% vegan raw is not sustainable the way it has been practiced, in my humble opinion. Well it's not just my opinion, all one has to do is look for healthy long term 100% raw vegans in the world... it's a small number. But Graham recognized this problem early on and asked the right questions - if a 100% raw vegan diet is truly sustainable (peak health over the long term), it would also have to sustain peak levels of athleticism (not just disease recovery), and robust growth. Graham realized which parameters constitute ideal measures for sustainability, and AFAIK he is the only raw foodist to have analysed the "sustainable raw food diet" problem from that perspective.

We all have inculturated "industrial world" myopia to one extent or other, so it is not surprising that Graham's method (fruits and vegetables almost exclusively) is "a bridge too far" for most citizens of this modern world. And there are many effective ways to address the "damaged digestion" problem, but the question remains open as to which is the most effective method across the broadest population. And as long as industry (medicine, science, pharma, ag) principally control what is formally studied we will not have a satisfying "hard science" answer. As Doug Graham himself said once to me: "you have to find the thing you CAN do".