Victoria Boutenko - Author of "The Raw Family"

Kevin Gianni

Victoria Boutenko discusses how to break through a raw food plateau. This is an excerpt from Victoria Boutenko'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 www.RawSummitArchives.com.

Kevin Gianni: What advice can you give to a family who wants to incorporate more of a raw food lifestyle into their day-to-day meal?

Victoria Boutenko: The advice I would give advice to people who want to incorporate more raw food diet in their family members' diet is to be a good example. We always start with our self because if I believe in something within myself, if I really believe that is good, somehow the other members of my family would sense it from me. They'll sense that I'm honest. Then my vibration will be different. They will never see me cheating or doing something. But on the other hand, if I will cheat, if I will go eat somewhere and come home and pretend that I'm eating something, first of all I wouldn't be really eating with the appetite and excitement, and then, I wouldn't look as healthy. My breath wouldn't be fresh, and they would recognize it right away. So the first thing is to be example. When your loved ones will see how important that is for you, they will respect it. And sometimes, we could even ask for support. I don't think we could say, well you are all carnivores here, you know, how would I say it? "Don't eat that crap in front of me anymore. I'm a raw foodist here." That's very insulting, but we could ask for support. We could say, "Can you please not, can you please not indulge me in any chocolate eating because whenever I eat it, I later really regret and I have headache." That's okay, to ask for help, to ask for support is okay, but not demanding, not criticizing people, and I don't even like when other people say coooked food - other people with junk food, I think it's insulting. Even if we know really scientifically that it is junk food, we can't really call it names because a while ago, I was eating this food and I was innocently believing that it was good for me in a certain way. So we could say just something - we could say, "I don't want to have unhealthy cravings." Or we could say not the best choice, but we cannot really say, give names to the food, and I don't like even when people say SAD diet because some people could be really insulted by this and that will create resistance in them. And it will really do the opposite from what we want them to do because I think that we really want to be inviting not criticizing. That's very important.

Kevin: Yes. When you started, did you clean out all of the cabinets?

Victoria: I cleaned it myself, and I did it all in one day. I turned off the pilot. I had covered the cooking stove with a big cutting board, and I read all the labels and everything had to go - the whipped cream, the old cheeses I had, and beans, and rice and everything, the cereals. My cabinets were empty. Not only the food I had to throw away, but the toast maker and coffeemaker and I had to crack the window of the microwave because I would be tempted. As soon as I get hungry, I cannot manage myself. I couldn't.

Kevin: So that was the compulsiveness? If you have any...

Victoria: Yes, I'm a compulsive eater, yes.

Kevin: If you had any remnants of it you...

Victoria: Yes, yes. And then, I also, I just purchased two month's ago, Martha Stewart pots and pans so I had to put them out. I put them on the sidewalk. They've disappeared in a minute. It's still brand new. So I had nothing. And that was good because at night, very often I heard somebody walked in the kitchen. If I could only guess who, I opened in the cupboard looking for something - dry piece of bread or something, and I remember how my husband said, "Oh, I thought I was just going to some place and buy myself a dozen of egg," but there's nothing to fry them in, and this is just a pain in the neck to go and get the pilot in the middle of the burners in the middle of the night so he would give up. And in the morning, he will say, "Oh good."

Kevin: Right. Right. Were you guys never hungry, you know just craving that food?

Victoria: Oh yes. Oh yes, that's for sure. Not only hungry. We have that urge to eat.

Kevin: Then what were some of the discussions that you had about that? Was it just like, I'm going to... your husband said, "I'm going to go and get eggs," but...

Victoria: Well, in the beginning we were hiding it from each other, but then we have learned that we actually speak out, it literally instantly get health and we support each other, we talk about this. It's the only way to manage. When I found in my husband's pocket once when I was doing laundry, there are receipt for pizza, I just didn't know what to do and I came to him and I said, "Why is your face so red?" And he wouldn't say anything. I'd say, "You kind of smell... you look like, you know not healthy," and then finally he said, "Well, I ate a piece of pizza and I feel really sick."

Kevin: Oh yes.

Victoria: And I said, "Well, honey when next time you would want to go, why don't you talk to me before and maybe I could help you to overcome it. Maybe we could do something together. Maybe we walk or maybe we could just go swimming or do something" just you know go sit down and talk, just hug or just anything so that you don't have to suffer. And from then, we were like one AA group altogether. We would support each other. If one person begins to think into temptation, then the rest of the family begins to talk and I remember how the children, they were really, really good at that. They would say, "Mom, I like how you look now. I was so ashamed of you when you look so old and so fat."

Kevin: Wow.

Victoria: Or something like, "Mommy, I don't want to die. You too die because I understand you could have died. Doctors said you could have died." And that would be the like the best remedy right away like bring me back to the surface.

Kevin: Yes, just a reality check.

Victoria: But also, because we were doing it on our own, we were kind of pioneers. We had lots of hardships. We went through a lot of pitfalls.

Kevin: Okay, what were some of those?

Victoria: About seven years into raw food, we reached the plateau when we stopped feeling better, and better and better and within several months, we started to go backwards and we started to experience unwanted not positive symptoms of not perfect health. And it's not like we got bad diabetes and arrhythmia but we started to develop some symptoms of not perfect health. For example, every one of us developed at least one wart, which is the symptom of low immunity, and I remembered how I was thinking how could it be? We are in the best in the world diet, which we know from the first hand that we cured ourselves on that diet only now we eat all organic, and we've combined the food better. How could it be that we develop warts?

And then we started to develop cravings - so strong cravings that we didn't have for so many years. We just started to have cravings especially in the evening, the urge to eat and we couldn't even find out what exactly we wanted to eat, but it was definitely something we didn't have in our fridge.

And then my hair started to fall and our nails became brittle, and then I started to gain weight again. I was exercising and I started to gain weight in a raw food diet. I couldn't believe it. I thought, "Oh no!" And then finally, our teeth began to fall apart so quickly. Like for eight years, our teeth were in such a good shape. We would go to see the dentist. The dentist will look and they will say, "Go home. You don't have anything to do here." And suddenly, we started to develop cavities like by the month. New cavity, new cavity, new cavity - painful!

So something was happening. And first what I did, I wrote an e-mail to all raw food experts that I was aware of in the world and I asked them, "If you know anything about the plateau, I'm going backwards." And I got answers from most of the doctors or experts, and they said yes. But I reached my plateau two years into raw food and... I reached my plateau four years into raw food. And then I said, "What do you do?" And everybody sent me different responses.

Kevin: Okay.

Victoria: One person said, "You need to now drink goat's milk." Another person said, "You need to eat 20% cooked food." Another person said, "You need to start taking supplements." But then they say... it's very interesting they say, but it doesn't really work for me. I go yo-yo all the time. I'm still looking for a solution.

Kevin: Um hum.

Victoria: So, I didn't get any solution. Then, I decided I'm just going to sit down and make my own research. One day, I took the list of nutrition that is recommended by USDA, and then I wrote down the list of all food, nutrition... nutrients in all foods that exist including meat, dairy and everything - shellfish, whatever. And I started to play with this, combining the diet that will cover all the nutrients that humans need to have according to USDA, and I discovered that it just couldn't be possible. It just doesn't work this way. We eat a lot of food even and then it doesn't cover what we need.

Even we use in fruits and vegetables, until I found one food group that is not listed anywhere. It's not listed by USDA. It is called greens.

And when I looked at greens and I did a kind of initiative on my own, the nutrition content of greens perfectly matches human body nutrition. I saw instantly that it's like prime food, prime source of nutrients for humans. It has absolutely everything except one thing, vitamin B12. It has all the essential minerals. It has all the essential fatty acids. It has all essential vitamins and all essential amino acids in them in exact quantities that the human body needs.

For example, calcium. USDA recommends that we have 1000 milligrams of calcium per day, which is huge. It's like a brick. And lamb's quarter, which is the name of the weed. It's a green weed, has 1403 milligrams. So, it has even more than what's recommended.

Kevin: Wow!

Victoria: And the essential amino acids. And why they are called essential is because they... out of 21 amino acids, nine cannot be produced by the body and has to come with the food through the mouth. So, if I take all these nine amino acids and I list them, and then I list across from them kale and what amino acid it has, so this is almost match - almost like identical.

And for comparison, I took a carrot and I took apple and I put it down, and carrots and apple have only two or one digit when USDA says we need three or four digits, when greens have exactly the same digits. So, it's like it's made for us. And then I saw it makes sense because that's where a cow gets her protein, and a cow is just a middle man.

There's no way that the cow could have more essential amino acids than the grass, than the greens. And so when I just - I realized that, I thought that was amazing because I'd... in my family, we did not really put emphasis on greens. We were just kind of trying to eat them, but we didn't really consume them on a regular basis plus we really surprisingly never developed a taste for greens. We would eat some tender greens once in a while like we put them in salad, but we prefer to have salad made out of beets, carrots or some other things.

And then I wanted to know how much greens humans have to have, and I read lots of books of experts and I could not find how much because everybody says as much as you can, but nobody says one cup, five cups, 10 cups - how many?

At that point, I decided to compare humans to the most close to humans animal, which is a chimpanzee, and see how much greens a chimpanzee consume if she does consume at all because chimpanzees share with humans 99.4% of the same sequence of genes. They have the same three types of blood that could be transferred to humans. They have the same heart, liver and kidneys that could be transplanted into humans, but they're not economical to grow because chimpanzees are very expensive to grow.

But they are so close to us that in America, there are 200,000 of those poor animals in medical labs where medical doctors - they're experimenting with them because they are so close to humans, and they try to put human ailments on them like AIDS, hepatitis C and cancer. But chimpanzees have such a strong immunity that they cannot contract AIDS, hepatitis C, cancer and other diseases. And wow! When I read all of these, I thought, "Instead of putting our illnesses on them, why don't we rub some of their immunity on us?"

To read the rest of this interview please visit 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.

Like What You Just Read? Try These Similar Links...

·  How to Transition Your Family into the Raw Diet with Victoria Boutenko of "The Raw Family" ·  How to Be a Superhero and Find True Fitness Motivation ·  Superfoods and Super-Nutrition for the Super-You - An Interview with one of America's Premier Health Experts Susan Smith Jones, PhD. ·  Why Organic Foods? - A Humorous Look with Store Wars ·  25 Healthy Snacks and Quick Healthy Meals