Raw Spirit Festival - Sedona, Az. (Part Two)

Friday

I spent the morning trying to see as much of Sedona as I could and arrived at the festival early in the afternoon, in time for several keynote addresses...two memorable, one not.

Viktoras Kulvinskas gave a lively opening presentation. He is the co-founder of the Hippocrates Health Institute and a pioneer in the live food movement. At 70 years old he looked fragile, but energetic.
I learned from the address that often it's not what we eat, but what we don't eat that can help us to get healthy. In other words, don't eat animal products. Our bodies store toxic waste, we need to keep it out of our systems. Heated animal protein causes oxygen depletion and that triggers cancer.

I learned that our belief system does more harm to us than chemicals and poisons. Viktoras said that it is easy to change our thoughts. The mind is stupid, if we monitor it we can silence the unhelpful tapes just by telling our mind to turn away. It is funny that if you tell your mind to stop thinking something, it will obey. Awareness is the key.

Victoria Boutenko spoke before dinner. It was her book, Green For Life, that got me interested in raw foods. Victoria told how humans share 99.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees. They do not get cancer or heart disease. She wanted to know what they eat, maybe that was the key to good health. She found out that their diet consists of 50% fruits, 40% green leafy vegetables, and 10% nuts, seeds, and insects.

So, when she tried to copy the chimps (without the insects) she had a problem...how do you eat all those greens? Eventually she hit on putting them in a blender, which tasted horrible. Then she added fruit to the mix and the whole thing tasted delicious. And Green Smoothies were born.




The advantage to blending greens, besides being able to consume more of them, is that they are much easier to digest having been liquefied. It was the Green Smoothie that got me interested in raw food because for whatever reason, after making them for breakfast everyday, I stopped craving meat.

Victoria recommends that we follow the example of our nearest relatives and consume lots of fruits, Green Smoothies, and a large salad at dinner time. So far, she makes the most sense to me.