 So I know this video is going to piss some of you off, and that is not the explicit goal of the video, but I think it is something that will naturally happen for a certain percentage of the people watching it. Now in this video I want to talk about something that I see quite a lot in California and why I don't think it is a good health practice for most people. Now I didn't think I would need to shoot a video on this, but it comes up frequently enough that I thought I would actually take the time to address it from a Chinese medicine and a health perspective. Not my personal opinion, not an ideology, not religion, but really an empirical scientific perspective that I see clinically with patients. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master of the Day, Doctor of Chinese Medicine. Now, before we jump into this video, check out two links right below this video. The first is for a free download, four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And the second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, the info to my private practice, my contact info is below. So we are talking about raw vegan diets here. And it seems to be a very trendy thing both within California, within influencers on YouTube and on the internet, on Instagram. And there's a specific kind of archetype that seems to find this very appealing. I said in this segment the truth about raw vegan diets and high-vibed diets. What is tricky is that I find that a lot of people believe that a raw vegan diet is high vibe. Now, I don't know what high vibe really means from a medical perspective. What I track with my patients is really how they feel and they're both subjective and objective symptoms and reporting. So someone can of course say that they feel good, but based on the symptoms they're having is not a sign of good health. Now, I actually had a conversation with a woman, not a patient, not anyone that I know personally, complete random person. And they said to me, she found that her men's stopping as a result of doing a raw vegan diet was a sign that she was becoming high vibration. And if I had a CGI team, I would have my head exploding right now and just splattering on the screen. Thinking that your men's stopping is a good thing is what a mentor of mine said is almost psychosis. This is not a good sign, a female health. And I find that there are many examples just like this where a lot of people apply new age thinking or spiritual thinking or pseudo spiritual thinking to biology, physiology, biochemistry. And I think it is often more damaging than it is good. But let's talk about this a little bit more concretely now. Why do we trust an idea or an ideology when the body is showing symptoms? I'll give you five symptoms I've seen in people who are raw vegans. That should not be raw vegans, which is pretty much everybody. Number one is diarrhea or digestive upset. Having constant ass, constant bloating, loose stools, not a sign of good health from Chinese medicine, bad, bad, bad sign. Regardless of what you think your diet is, if you're having that, it's not a good diet. And of course, there are many reasons other than diet, dietary reasons that you may be having those. But keep that in mind. Symptom number two is just visibly emaciated. And I hate to use this because it's superficial. But there is something to visual observation to see if somebody's healthy or not. Facial color. Are they pale and they have power like I do? Not a good sign. Do they have abnormally dark circles under their eyes? Not a good sign. Are they someone who's just unhealthily skinny? Do they look frail? Not a good sign. Symptom number three, I would say, is hair falling out, feeling cold and general hypothyroid symptoms. The number of women that come to me that have what looks like a hypothyroid picture and they are adamantly raw vegan, this will only worsen that from my clinical experience and based on what Chinese medicine views a raw vegan diet as. Keep in mind that there is to my understanding, there is no indigenous culture in the world that is a raw vegan culture, right? There are some that are a little bit more vegetarian. Some that are almost entirely meat like the Eskimo. These indigenous diets consider them the most proven diets in the survivors throughout history. Even the blue zones, it is primarily plant based, but they still have coffee. They still have wine in many of them. They still have meat, but the obsession with raw vegan, one can eat vegetables or can eat healthy without it being all raw vegan and without it being all raw. So continuing off that, these are often symptoms that are hypothyroid and there even is someone who's an influential multiple actually influential YouTubers, personalities, celebrities, authors who were vegan or raw vegan and then due to poor health had to reintroduce meat that Dalai Lama was someone that was vegetarian and then had to add fish to his diet due to health problems. So consider that what we should be focusing on maybe is really the subjective in the objective, how we actually feel using symptoms, using how you feel using objective diagnoses to confirm that this is health and not our concept of what we think health is. More symptoms I see here a lot fluid or water retention. I tend to see most often the women that I see, it looks like an anemic picture, right, hypothyroid, Hashimoto's is what eventually for some of them it leads to. So if you're fatigued all the time, you're having digestive problems and you're cold, I mean, there are so many other things can happen. Your hair is falling out, your hair is thin, your hair looks dry. Not a good sign. In Chinese medicine, we say that the hair is the excess, the surplus of the blood. When we say a woman wants to build her blood, for example, after giving birth, one of the things we recommend is a formula that includes lamb meat, lamb being one of the warmest, quote, blood building foods. And a raw vegan diet is one of the coldest depleting kind of diets that a person can have. A lot of people feel better in the short run though, because when you come from a standard American diet, of course, when you're eating a 800 calorie meal versus more vegetables, that's like a couple hundred calories, maybe 500, even with an oil based sauce. So you're gonna of course feel better when you're eating more vegetables and it's a lighter meal, etc. And I'm not saying to never eat this, I'm not saying not to eat vegetables, I'm not saying you could not have one of these meals every now and then. But this ideology I see is more destructive in the majority of people really long term than it is a measure of good health. So because of the fact that this is considered a very, very cold and hard to digest diet, ironically, when you look at really sick people, really, really, really severe GI illness, like let's say Crohn's disease or Ulcerative Colitis, when I hear from patients what they say they can only eat, they never, ever, ever say they can eat raw vegetables, ever. That is one of the specific foods they reference will destroy their insides. It's very common for anyone who sees digestive patients. What you will hear is that they'll say, I can only eat like plain boiled chicken or just like just white rice or apple juice. You're almost never gonna hear that they can eat large amounts of raw vegetables. And that's another key sign that when the gut is severely impaired, people will eat whatever they can eat just to survive and just to feel well. And the Chinese medicine point of view is that this is very cold, very hard to digest. And ironically, a lot of the people that I see already have digestive weakness and are already cold and are already often thinner. So why they gravitate towards this diet, I'm honestly not quite sure. But for most, it's really not a very healthy thing. The point of me sharing this video is not to slam raw vegans or raw vegan diet. It's just to suggest, why do people trust an ideology over their own body's knowledge, their own body's wisdom? If your body is having just a horrendous response to something that you've convinced yourself is good for you, maybe consider why that is. And maybe consider that your body often is a lot smarter than the diet you are trying to give it. That often, not always, your body will know what is good for it. And that if you're getting all these other symptoms but you've convinced yourself, this diet is good for you, maybe try listening to your body's symptoms instead for a period of time and see your results on that. All right guys, that's my fire rant for today. Again, if you'd like to stay in touch, like become a patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, a link below the video is for my private practice and how to reach out to me in my clinic. And other than that, I have two related videos for you over here.