Recommending adjustments to vegetarianism/raw foodism

Because my elderly mother (recently deceased) had diabetes and a raw fooder friend I invited to live/work in our house and I thought she could get her blood Sugar under control very quickly on his raw food diet (and, sure enough, it happened -- fast too) plus I wanted to be on it for independent longevity reasons, all three of us were on his raw food diet starting about seven years ago. It wasn't just fruits and vegetables: We also had smoked salmon and some other smoked fish (nothing 'cooked' at above about 117 F but various meats 'dried' at that temperature).

Well, after about three years I was extremely tired and just dragging myself around: I couldn't think well enough even though I had an intellectual job that required thinking. So my hours of work went down and I was 'dog tired' all day long. Eventually I realized that I had developed pernicious anemia for lack of vitamin B-12, a very common risk factor for vegetarians and raw fooders. It took about three years for my body's vital store of vitamin B-12, sequestered since birth, to become depleted. In those three years I didn't feel bad nor did I sense a gradual decline. The symptoms I noticed came on pretty fast after the three years because a vitamin B-12 deficiency doesn't really show up until the liver gets depleted. Then -- watch out! For some people it takes up to ten years. Many vegetarians and raw fooders are seriously blind-sided by this just like I was. After that happens to you, you have to start supplementing with vitamin B-12 (arguably like you should have been doing all along) and catering to foods, all meat products, that are rich in vitamen B-12 (or to avoid this, despite hypothetical desires to conform to 'pure' vegetarianism, you should have been including them in your diet all along to an adequate degree). Liver is the best but eggs also contain vitamin B-12.

Peope used to think that most ape species were 100% vegetarian -- think the proverbial monkey swinging from tree to tree with a banana. But in recent decades scientists have realized that occasionally they kill animals and eat them -- often other apes! The reason for this appears to be an instinctual drive to eat the internal organs of the other animals to store up on vitamin B-12 which is in insufficient supply in their diet without this special, occasional effort. So even the species we thought were so vegetarian it turns out are not exclusively so because of this very problem!

Humans, whether in our idealism we like it or not, are omnivores and, apparently, with few exceptions, cannot/do not live healthy lives on fruits and vegetables alone. It's in our genetics and we can't ignore it. That means, at a minimum, augmenting a vegetarian or raw fooder diet with eggs or maybe even liver. One famous raw fooder is, I think, 100% raw vegetarian except for liver which he deliberately makes an exception so he wisely doesn't develop pernicious anemia!

My friend knew that certain elements in our diet were needed from meat so that is why he put some smoked fish in our meals right from the beginning. Apparently, though, that did not provide enough vitamin B-12 for me (but he had an easier time of it even though his hair analysis, he told me, revealed that he was at death's door according to what they look for when analyzing hair samples). I/we was/were blind-sided because we didn't try hard ENOUGH to get the vitamin B-12 in our diet that we should have. It's a lesson for wise vegetarians and raw fooders to take away from our experience!


On another subject, if you already have teeth problems, even though in your idealism you'd like to stay away from all meat and diary, you probably will also find it very difficult to get enough easily assimilable calcium through vegetable sources: It's not that the calcium isn't there but it is just that most people need so much of it that it would be a chore to do that using vegetable sources alone. I definitely do not advocate cow's milk or any cow's milk products because it is too rich in mucus forming factors that help a calf grow to a ton or so in just a few years. People can't handle all that stuff so they get plugged up -- cow's milk products, for instance, being one of the main causes of constipation in children as most mother's know but the mucus causes colds, flus, runny noses, congestion and a host of other ills as the human body tries hard to get rid of it -- often with clogged bowels it ends up resorting to the lungs and skin (e.g. dits) to do the job. But goats grow more slowly, at a pace more comparable to humans, so that goat milk (Biblically sanctioned, unlike cow's milk) does not have as much mucus forming factors to clog up the human body and be gotten rid of. If I was in your shoes I would supplement my vegetarian or raw fooder diet with goat's milk -- but if you want to go to the trouble, almond milk might supply you with enough calcium but you'd have to work to make it every day. Since I need vitamin B-12 I can't be a perfectly idealisitic raw fooder so I find buying goat's milk in the two grocepry stores in the city that seem to carry it let's me get adequate calcium plus I might get a little vitamin B-12 that I need anyway and I don't like the time consumed in making up a daily batch of almond milk.

Anyway, that's my two-cents-worth!