 Episode 10 of the Anthony Anderson show is brought to you by Mezzy Grill, that's M-E-Z-E grill dot com. And Carpe V-M-C-A-R-P-E-V-M dot com. And SunWarrior, SunWarrior dot com. Hey everybody, greetings. This is Anthony Anderson, coming at you live from New York City. Today we have a very special guest. This is, I always have a lot of friends on the show, but this is not only, like, I'm proud to call my friend, but truly, I can maybe count five people in the world that I really look up to, especially with diet, lifestyle, the whole approach, and that's Daniel Vitalis. And I was lucky enough to spend some time with him personally about a year ago, and we've really connected. And I really resonate with his approach, and it's really an honor to have him on the show. So, hi Daniel, how you doing man? I'm doing great Anthony. It's so great to see you have this show, and I'm really honored to be on it as well. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I know you got a really busy schedule with all the events coming up, but I really, really appreciate it. I'm happy to be here. Cool. So, let's start off with some of the events. What do you got coming up this month? Well, this month what we have coming up is the Rootstock event. It's the first time Mountain Rose Herbs, and I've been a fan of that company for a long time. Mountain Rose Herbs is a place I sent a lot of people to get their bulk herb supplies. I think they started off producing herbs for herbalists, and now they're much more accessible to the public. And this year they're doing an event that's really a benefit for wilderness, and it seems like it's going to be a really epic outdoor festival, really culminating on a Saturday night with a masquerade that we're really excited about. A whole event is designed really to protect wild lands, but I'll be speaking there twice. So we're getting ready for that. That comes up right around the Equinox September 21st through the 23rd. 23rd is my birthday, so I'll get to speak on my birthday, which is exciting. And we're going from there. That's in Oregon. We'll be going down to Los Angeles to do my third time doing the Long Jevy Now conference with David Wolf and his team at New Horizon. So that's really exciting. And then from there, I'm going to do a little R&R at Eden Hot Springs in Arizona and pop into Tucson for an event there as well. So that'll be my first time speaking in Tucson. Okay. So you're well known in the community, not only, I would say, not only the raw vegan community where you've really shaken things up, but also like now the primal and the Western price community. So what was your path? I mean, a lot of people know, but a lot of people on the show may not quite know what your path is. So let's lay down a little bit of a foundation so people can get a good grip on where you're coming from. Okay. Well, my path is one that's constantly changing too. And so I think for people, you know, it's always interesting to get to, I haven't spoken publicly for a little while now. And so things are always changing in flux for me. I'm really open to new information coming into my life that changes the direction of things. But about age 15, I got introduced to some of the, that was the beginning stages of the modern raw food movement about that time. So it's about 17 years ago, early stages of the internet, you know, most everything being learned from books that were available on the subject. And at that time, I got exposed to juicing and juice fasting and the idea of cleansing. And I got started then. I walked that path out for a long time that led me on to that raw vegan diet, which I did for a long time. And even took that all the way to that fruitarian kind of a diet, similar to the guest you had recently, a durian rider actually tried that diet for a time and kept trying things, kept approaching new things. A couple of years ago, I had sort of hit a wall. I had sort of realized that my nutrition was not only was it not taking me towards my goals, but I was actually getting, I was starting to develop symptoms of deficiency. And that led me to that Western price information and that primal information, that idea of incorporating animal foods back into my life after about a 10-year hiatus from animal foods. And I started adding that in and I brought that information back to the raw food community thinking, hey, you know, this is going to really help some people. What really did was shook up the movement dramatically. And I got the honor of taking the flak for that for some time. But it did open up a space for a lot of other people to say, hey, you know, that's what I'm doing as well. I've been incorporating animal foods or bouncing raw foods and animal foods together. For me, the question has always been the reason I'm doing this. The question for me was, what's the natural diet animal homocyte? What's its zoological diet? It took many, many years. And you know, and I'm a bit embarrassed to say it took me over a decade to actually come to a place where I realized that if I wanted to know the natural diet for our species, I would have to find people who lived in a wild environment still, undomesticated humans, without their diet's work. And that led me to study the indigenous people in their diets, not because I think that any of us anytime soon are going to revert indigenous lifestyle, but because even though we live in culture, it's important that we understand our biological needs. So I've been studying now for the last couple of years the indigenous of the world, trying to bring that to our lives so we can at least approximate it, because the evidence is very, very clear now that the departure from our indigenous diet has initiated the degenerative disease today. And so that's what I've been doing. And I want to just say that where I'm at right now is incorporating back a lot of the raw food principles I've learned to find that really nice balance of those two worlds. Yes, yes. And the book that inspired a lot of that would be the Weston Price book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration? Yeah, Weston Price was a dentist in the early 1900s who, his work was really pivotal because what he asked the question, why do we develop cavities? And cavities, if you understand physiology and anatomy, you'll know that teeth are essentially bones, they're modified bone structures that protrude through the skin. And his question was, since we're developing these caries in our teeth, which essentially means that we have a bone disease, and since most people in Western culture develop this bone disease, rather than just filling them, his question was why are we getting them? And that led him to travel around the world to, I think, 12 different indigenous and traditional cultures to study them, to study their diets, and primarily to study their teeth, their dentition, and their dental arches. And that's work that could not be repeated today. I want to be clear about that. I couldn't really go around the world and do that today because there's so few people living still in the traditional way. So his work was very important, maybe not recognized so much at the time, but today we actually have a record of indigenous people and their teeth and their diets and the diets that developed their perfect teeth, their near-complete lack of dental caries, and their very broad dental arches. These are people who it wasn't like they didn't have access to dentists so their teeth were all mangled. They had perfect dentition. They didn't require braces. They didn't require dental surgeries to make their teeth straight. They had broad faces, broad cheekbones, perfect teeth, broad nostrils so that their bodies function perfectly. And what that leads us to is the conclusion that, wow, our bodies are actually breaking down. We're in a state of degeneration. It has a lot to do with our diets and a lot to do with our lifestyles. It's funny enough, I was rereading that book last night on the plane and for anyone out there, you can purchase the book. I would highly recommend purchasing the book and get on Amazon or whatever, but there's a free ebook and if you will just Google Weston Price ebook, it'll come up. It's like Gutenberg.au and you can read the whole thing. All the photos are there. And I was rereading it last night and it's just phenomenal to be able to see what he saw and just realizing that how clean they were and how totally free of disease and then as soon as they started going into society and a lot of times, like he said with the Swiss people, when they were young, they would maybe 18, 19, they would go into the city and then they would lose a few teeth and then they would come back to the village and then have kids and then live out to old age. But they always lost a few teeth when they were in the city. And I highly recommend that people really read that book because it'll just change everything and especially those people that are interested in having kids. If not now, but maybe five or ten years from now, it's really important to start laying down that foundation of health to really pass it on to your kids. So what I'm curious about is, is it possible, like let's say I was raised in a mediocre environment with less than optimal foods, can I still bump up the nutrition and hopefully have children that have those characteristics again? Or do you think there's been too much of a decline where it would take a few generations to bring it back? Okay, this is a really complex question. There's a lot of different pieces to it. Before I answer it, I want to say that there's a new emerging science called epigenetics. And epigenetics comes out of those, that human genome study that was done, where essentially what we found is that there's more going on in the differentiation between people than just our gene sequence. There's something above the gene sequence. This is the epigenome. And these are essentially like switches that are activated or deactivated, sort of like a light switch on our genes. Now what turns a switch on for a gene to become represented or turns a switch off for a gene to be shut off is environmental factors. I want this to come across really clearly for the audience. I want you to consider your food and your water as environmental factors. They're part of your environment. And so it's not just our food, but we do know that food is one part of it. That everything we're being exposed to, whether that's the light that we're exposed to, the air we're exposed to, the food, the water, the stresses, the work, the friends, the exercise, everything we're being exposed to is influencing the expression of our genes. And this is now conclusive fact. It's called epigenetics. What we do know, though, is that the lifestyle of a person two generations back will influence you. So it's not just how your mother lived, but how your grandmother lived. Now interestingly, because of epigenetics, we know that everything we do today is influencing our genome and it's going to influence the genome of our children and their children. So I don't think, and this is going to be counter to a lot of what people in the raw food community want to believe, because the people in the health food community and raw food community, they're sort of looking all the time for the panacea, like the philosopher's stone, something they're going to eat or take that's going to make them perfect. And I don't think that that's really realistic, but I think we can overcome considerable health obstacles that we have. We can really change aspects of our body. It's really easy to change the condition of your skin, the condition of your teeth, the condition of your hair, the condition of your thinking. These things we can definitely influence with our diet, with our food. So I think we can make huge strides, but I think that our children are still going to be paying the price of our grandparents' lifestyle, of our parents' lifestyle. And so what we really need to do right now is sort of turn a corner. We need to make some changes. They will benefit us dramatically. They'll benefit our children even more and their children. So we can make changes now, but you know what, if our teeth have grown in very crooked, they're not going to straighten by eating a healthy diet. However, our chances of having things like cancer, other degenerative diseases, diabetes, heart disease, those things can be considerably lessened or even negated completely through our lifestyle choices. I can almost see people after they read that book, they start looking at potential partners, looking at their nostrils and seeing if their jaw is wide enough, seeing if they're fit for reproduction. It's kind of like a whole total mind change. You're looking for the optimal partner that can produce really healthy kids. And that's the funny thing, there's such a huge movement in the raw vegan realm as vegan mommies and having kids that are vegans and thinking that that's the ultimate. And I just can't, I don't see it. I don't want to insult anyone, but I really don't see it as something viable at all. So what would you suggest to people that are considering maybe incorporating some animal products? Would you have them look more at their ancestors and see what kind of animal products they had or play around with perhaps butter or something? What would you say? Well, what I would say is this is a much more emotional issue than it is a psychological or a knowledge issue. So people are very emotionally attached to these different types of food. When somebody's been interested or practicing veganism for a time, it's not just about information. They have a very emotional reaction or response to animal food. So the first thing I would say is this, if we pulled an animal out of nature, we put it in a zoo and we were having problems with that animal. Like say that animal was sick or developing symptoms that we didn't fully understand. I think that the first thing we would do is look at its diet. I think that's obvious. And rather than, if we had this animal in the zoo, rather than maybe going to a book to determine what its nutrition should be or rather than going to a zoological nutritionist to determine, probably make sense to have a look at that animal in its wild environment, figure out what it ate there and try to recreate that. Not just its food, but its whole environment. I think similarly, anybody who's interested in diet, I think it'd be crazy not to take the time to look at what indigenous people eat. Our wild ancestors see what they ate and what kept them healthy because it's well established that not only did they not suffer from cavities and crooked teeth, they didn't have heart attacks, they didn't have cancer, not an appreciable amount anyway. They didn't develop arthritis or these diseases of culture. So the real question is, what's our natural diet? Now some people have made a leap to the idea that our natural diet is free of animal foods completely, but there is literally zero evidence of that. In fact, all the evidence, all the indigenous diets surveyed around the world, hunter-gatherer people, non-agriculturalists, show us that their diets are usually 45% or more calories from animal food, 45% being the lowest that I've personally seen. Now occasionally people will pull out these reports of these monastic-like indigenous people living in these high altitude, secret cities where they're vegetarians or vegan, but this actually is not really ever born out from any evidence. So I'd say take a look at indigenous diets. A great place to do that would be starting with Western Crisis Book. If you want to go further, start looking at the articles. Get on the Google Scholar and start looking up hunter-gatherer diets and you can see surveys of their diets. And you'll see that animal foods, not only are they important, they're the foundation of indigenous people's diets. So I think there is the piece you brought up which is great. What did my ancestors, in my particular lineage, but more importantly, what's the basic human diet look like and how can we start to approximate that again in our lives and know that there's lots of little, and you know this, Anthony, there's lots of little pitfalls and little traps and little tricks because we've been so isolated from our natural environment that we have beliefs about nature that are absolutely fantastical and not based in reality. From our armchairs, watching nature programs and going out for walks in Central Park, we develop ideas about nature that have more to do with Disney movies than they do with reality. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, working with animals, getting involved in the permaculture stuff, for me that was like my big wake-up call because I saw people working with animals and I could spend time with animals myself and I realized how Disney and Hollywood totally personified animals and it's just not like that. I mean, they don't, you know, it's definitely a fantasy world and there can be so much emotion built up in that and then people just want to do the right thing in their mind with the, you know, the morality, but it's really, it's really skewed by Hollywood and all that stuff. So let's talk about, one thing that I incorporated was fish. I got back into fish. I eat a lot of sardines and I eat salmon and especially I eat a lot of canned salmon. What would you say about people that bring up the heavy metal issue, things like that, PCBs, all that stuff? Like there's a lot of people that are scared about some of these animal products and I think a lot of it's kind of unfounded and they're not looking at the bigger picture, they're just kind of looking at the worst of the worst, like maybe swordfish, and then they're thinking that it's all like that. Let me answer your question in a really roundabout way and say the existence of genetically modified plants, keep in mind that right now no supermarket in the United States is openly selling any genetically modified animal food. The closest would be the bulging growth hormone milk, but outside of that there's no animals that are on the market today that are genetically modified, but of course there's quite a few plants now. The existence of genetically modified plants does not make me become a 100% carnivore. I don't issue eating plants because there are genetically modified plants. The fact that pesticides and herbicides are used on so many plants does not make me decide that I'm going to give up plant food completely. The fact that plants are monocropped in a way that I personally think is cruel, the fact that massive forests are cut down to grow monocrops of corn or wheat or rice, that doesn't lead me to give up plants completely. Now the fact that there are animals out there that have parasite problems, animals out there that are cruelly treated, animals out there that have bioaccumulated environmental toxins does not mean that we can just issue animal products altogether and expect ourselves to be healthy. That is classic Western extremism at its best there. Let's say this. Right now, unfortunately, our environment is so completely saturated with industrial and nuclear age technologies, byproducts and pollution that there is no way to avoid that. Simply eschewing animal foods does not. Most people I know who eschew animal foods still have to drive cars, still have to walk down streets where cars are spewing out heavy metals, still have to accumulate heavy metal dust all over their shoes and pants when they're walking on the street and drag that into their house and wash their clothes. You see it cycles through our bodies regardless of whether or not we eschew animal foods or not. The bigger picture question, I think the more evolved view is this. First, we need to accept the fact that our environment is currently saturated with toxins and that we need to avoid bioaccumulating those. One, we need to develop strategies for ourselves to keep things like heavy metals, things like PCBs out of our body. We need a strategy for that and that has less to do with whether or not you eat animal food and more to do with are you employing these strategies because those strategies exist. The second thing is I think there's a far more evolved view in understanding that all living things are equal. I think it's very childish and foolhardy to think that animals have some special hierarchical position in the kingdoms of life and that plants are sort of below animals and therefore killing plants or monocropping plants or cutting down plants to plant other plants is okay but raising animals and eating them is really wrong. If that is somebody's point of view, I ask the question where do the fungaloids fit in that because mushrooms are not plants. They respirate oxygen like people. Where do they fall into these categories? Is it okay to eat them? It's not okay. It just seems strange to me. The more evolved view I think being all life forms are equal. The second question of course is how do we keep this stuff out of our body because heavy metals get into plants, get into funguses, get into animals, get into everything we eat and get all over our bodies. So how do we keep those things out? Yeah, excellent point. I see that so much. It's kind of like that anthropocentric, we go from maybe monkeys would be the most taboo thing to eat and then it goes to mammals and then reptiles, then fish and then plants and the further away you get from human, it seems like it's okay. It's morally... Hence we have people who call themselves vegetarians but eat fish. I ask then what kingdom of life do fish occupy? Interestingly, I would ask the vegan community, you kill mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are animals. So where do we draw the line exactly? Interestingly, I want to hit on this, that many indigenous people, particularly the forested individuals, hunt and eat primates. And another interesting point I think a lot of people don't know is that chimpanzees themselves also eat meat and they hunt other primates, primarily the bush baby which is a small monkey that they consume. We have developed this idea, it's a Darwinian idea. I just want to say that we were all raised that way. Our brains, our synaptic network was developed around that hierarchical idea so it's not anyone's fault that they think that way but I think we need to examine those beliefs because that belief that humans occupy the top and then like you said, primates beneath that and so on is what's led us to think it was okay for us to change and destroy the environment around us because we thought we occupied the top position. I think that idea is fading. Yeah, I think it is. With people like you and just spreading this mentality I think there's a more holistic view that all life is sacred and that eating plants is just as sacred as eating an animal. I think it's a really important thing to realize too. I think the real thing to focus on is the factory farming of both animals and plants and we can think that it's okay to eat vegetables and stuff and people always, even people that don't eat grains they still bring up the point that all these grains could be used to feed people instead of feeding animals that feed people. They wouldn't even eat the grains themselves and it's just kind of like, you know, and to realize that that was a forest. Another way to say that would be it's better to factory farm people than it is to factory farm animals. Essentially is what that's saying, because when you rear people up on a grain-based diet you're essentially factory farming them. My feeling personally, having studied genetics and epigenetics and the history of homo sapien as an animal is that the human race today is a factory farmed animal. You know, essentially, and we've talked about this in prior interviews, Anthony, that you're born in a hospital, you're schooled, you're put into the workforce, basically you die in a hospital and have your money robbed from you and the whole time you're fed agricultural food. It's essentially like a large factory farm operation for human labor. And we've all been sort of enmeshed in that our whole lives and educated to call that, we've been miseducated to refer to that system as freedom. That's fascinating. So I think a lot of us are breaking out of that. I think some of us break out of it and we get stuck at certain points and that's what leads to sort of like the militant vegan idea. I want to be real clear here that I think vegetarianism is beautiful. I think veganism is dogmatic, so I want to make a distinction. But essentially people get stuck at a certain point and I think that it would be wise, like I said, to look backward a little bit because one of the things we see is that ideas like veganism and vegetarianism are very new. They didn't exist amongst our ancestors 10,000, even 10,000 years ago, which is very recent. These are all completely new ideas. They're as new as bungee jumping and skydiving and all these other crazy things we've developed in the grand scheme of things. It's just another fun, it's just another lifestyle like an extreme sport, like golfing, like paragliding. It's like some people's whole thing is food and they become obsessed with food and veganism and vegetarians are just these extreme versions of it. Just like sort of mountain biking is extreme biking. Vegetarianism and veganism is extreme eating. So on a somewhat related topic, let's talk about water. Your approach to water completely changed my life. I mean really when I first went to a spring it was Stoke State Forest in New Jersey and I got the bottles and filled it up and just tasting that water for the first time and then how my body was, I had to urinate maybe like 15 times the next day because just like everything was flushing out and I still do it to this day and I couldn't imagine not doing it but beforehand when I heard you coming on the scene and everything and talking about the water I thought to myself like there's no way I'm ever going to drive to a spring and collect it and now I couldn't imagine not doing that. So where did all that come from and what are some of your strategies and when people ask you like why do you drink spring water and aren't you scared that it comes from the ground? I get that a lot because people think that since it comes from out of the ground it's not clean but it's always kind of a funny conversation. So where did all the spring water stuff come from? Well it's a really vast subject but having been involved in the raw food community which I want to say the raw food community sometimes reminds me of almost like martial arts where the more you restrict out of your diet the higher you climb again in that hierarchy it's like you get up to your black belt when you eat almost nothing. And at that point I got interested in water because I started thinking hey you know I'm going I'm eating all so specific about every single food I eat and my water seemed to just come I was confused it was like should I drink bottled water I don't really want to drink tap water it's got chlorine in it, it's got fluoride in it but the bottled water seems weird too doesn't it absorb plastic? I started asking questions eventually that led me to going to springs and studying some of the work of hydrologists in the past to tell us hey you know what there's something about spring water that can't be repeated in a filtration system that can't be captured in a bottle very well I started doing more and more research I started going to springs and getting all my water from springs and that was just at that time sort of a purist thing that I was doing but what I initially realized was wow I think I've never been hydrated before in my life and this water is hydrating me in a different way I feel different I started researching a little bit about the chemistry of water and what I learned was fascinating because water is an anomaly to science to this day you would think that water was one of the most understood things in chemistry however water behaves in ways that are contrary to most of the laws of physics unlike other substances it will expand when it cools rather than contract that's very bizarre water has a very bizarre surface tension water even the fact that water is a liquid is rather bizarre we would assume there's liquids all over the planet turns out in the natural world there's very few substances that can remain a liquid at normal barometric pressure and normal earth temperature most substances are either a gas or a solid very few things are even liquid you start to understand eventually why the ancients had such mysticism around water and it's to this day still a mystical substance but what it turns out is water has the ability to remain crystalline even in its liquid state it can do that in other words it's a liquid crystal it seems to me and this is something that science is still reaching to validate but I think at some point will be very well understood in the future that different water has different properties different crystalline properties and that our body prefers certain types of water over others the water that comes naturally to the surface at springs of its own volition hydrates the body in other words it's biocompatible in a way that other waters aren't and this gets very obvious once you actually go to a spring and you drink that water and try to compare that against an RO or versus osmosis water a distilled water a desalinated water a deionized water even a bottled water that's set around for any period of time also what you learn if you do the research is that what we call spring water the water that comes in bottles often is not spring water at all but is well water or is water that's been put through lots of filtration processes and it changes the structure the crystalline structure that water and that water is just simply less hydrating and this is born out of experience so Anthony as you know I created that website findaspring.com and that's a free resource on the internet to help you find springs where you live there's a big google map and you can go to different areas of that map to try to find springs where you live and you can actually drive there visit the spring drink the water yourself and have that hydrating experience and the people who the naysayers often are people who have never tried spring water and don't know that they're not hydrating because they've been dehydrated their entire lives the fact that we can actually live on such treated water is strange to me but it's just like the fact that we can grow up living on processed food and we'll survive that processed food compared to whole food is very similar it's a good analogy processed water water in bottles water from the tap water from filters is just simply not as nourishing as whole water water that comes from the ground like springs. Yeah wild water and yeah it's really like a whole life changing thing and I know like when people a good movie actually is a movie called tapped and it's all about the bottled water industry and how they're actually there's like some french companies that are going into these maybe Michigan or some and they're draining the entire aquifer because there's like these little loopholes and they're able to just pump out all this water and then sell it in these plastic bottles and you know it's all cooked to the don't they have to sterilize it somehow before the water's been sterilized what people don't realize that water has essentially a shelf life that water will natural water if we went to the spring and we grabbed a glass of water and we sat that out in the sun in the open air within a period a short period of time that water will turn green and that's because there are organisms in there that will begin replicating once they have oxygen and once they have sunlight so in order to keep water stable on the shelf for a long period of time it's put through either ozonation process or a UV light treatment or a submicron filter or reverse osmosis filter in order to remove all the life forms from that water now most of us would think oh that's great what we don't realize is just like if we took a chimpanzee out of the wild and put it in a zoo we'd want to replicate its natural food and water while we sort of live in a zoo and our natural water comes up out of springs untreated that's what we always drink and it would be again foolhardy to assume that we don't have some symbiotic relationship with the organisms that inhabit natural spring water to think it's okay to just remove them is like I said it's a premature idea we should do a little more research those of us who drink water from springs have found that whatever it is going on in spring water that that water is more beneficial and if it wasn't I don't think we'd take the time or energy to go visit the springs like you do we do that for a reason so again I want to draw a couple distinctions the difference between natural water and process water and the idea of water that's probiotic that contains healthful organisms compared to water that's been sterilized because if we've grown up on bottled water we've grown up on sterilized water a bigger picture view of what's happening on the earth right now just like there are those entities out there singenta, monsanto who envision a world where you have only the option of buying their patented genetically modified organisms for food there are also these multinational corporations today who see a world where every single person living must purchase their water rather than receive their water free from the earth this was an abhorrent idea to people not long ago who were so indoctrinated and miseducated that that starts to make sense to us and we don't realize that the water we drink is our blood and that if you're having to buy your water all the time you're essentially having to purchase the base material to make your blood plasma rather than believing that should come freely from your mother earth I think that's indicative how far we've fallen from our sort of more natural state of grace state where we understand that the earth provides freely for us or for those who want to steward the earth so I go to springs not just because I find that water more hydrating I go to springs because I find the idea of having to purchase my blood plasma abhorrent it's funny now how people would actually prefer the processed water because there's a trust they trust that it's been it's healthy or they wouldn't trust the stuff coming from mother earth it's really kind of a twilight zone going on and for anyone that hasn't been to a spring remember findaspring.com and make a day out of it you don't have to just go there and collect water like even if it's two hours away you know do it once a month make a make a whole day out of it go for a hike spend some time in the town that's nearby and then you know make it worth the gas money if that's what you're worrying about but really once you start doing it it becomes a lifelong habit I think and I think you actually get to the point where you're looking to buy land with a spring and I know Matt Monarch and he just found a piece of property and they have like eleven springs on it and all that and pretty happy for them let's take a quick break for our sponsors and we will talk about Mezzy Grill first Mezzy Grill they are on 8th Avenue 55th Street in New York City it's authentic Mediterranean food that meets modern flavor they have recently been accepted onto the New York City clean plates edition and they don't use any hydrogenated oils it's really nice Mediterranean food I've been there the falafels are really good I highly recommend it it's actually a really fair price and again it's on 8th Avenue and 55th Street that's mezzygrill.com and CarpeVM CarpeVM Charlie who's the owner of CarpeVM he works really closely with you from beginning to end to ensure that your video makes an impact so if you're looking to promote your show your website your business CarpeVM is an awesome option and video on the web is ideal to engage your viewers and SumWarrior.com SumWarrior.com is a new sponsor I've always been a fan of SumWarrior they have a really great line of products they're really well known for their rice protein and it's highly absorbable about 98.2% absorption 82% protein by weight they have my favorites the vanilla it's sweetened with stevia coconut milk or I just blend it with spring water and maybe 4 or 5 raw eggs in the morning and I'm good till like 4 o'clock in the afternoon it's super satisfying I highly recommend it SumWarrior.com Alright so back actually I got a lot of questions from the internet some people were sending in some good stuff and there's a couple of good ones that I really want to run by you I've got two questions you have been a huge influence in my life this past year number one I feel like a lot of people are destroying their digestion by eating fruit after their meals as a dessert I've never heard you speak about food combining any thoughts? Yeah okay my thoughts are this I'm very careful around that idea of food combining because I think it lends itself to dogmatic ideas this is the thing Homo sapien no longer resembles its ancestor in fact myself and attacks on this friend of mine have been joking recently that it might be time to reclassify Homo sapien because I think more fair to say we're Homo sapiens domesticus in the same way that the dog is Canis lupus familiaris and its predecessor is simply called Canis lupus Canis lupus familiaris the familiaris refers to the fact that it's domesticated we're similar in that way Homo sapiens domesticus sometimes we'll say fragilis so as this domesticated version of Homo sapien we're all different we have different breeds some of us are very tall some of us are very short some of us are very wide some very thin some very muscular some very lean some very prone to holding oils on their bodies some less so just like we have all these varieties of dogs now to look if we got all the varieties of dogs together the sum 250 to 500 variety of dog even though they're all the same species I think we can see that they would all have different needs based on the different body types well similarly what combines well for you Anthony might combine differently for me now the person asking this question may have the experience eating fruit after their meal is negative for their digestive process other people might not have that problem at all so I wouldn't I don't really want to go there because I feel like each one of us it's different and it is such a monumental task and skill today to be able to determine what works for you it doesn't that I think that's really where everyone should be at what works for me personally it's not fair to talk about us like we're all the same because we're really not we're all dramatically different just like the bloodhound is different from the chihuahua is different from the bulldog is different from the terrier is different from the great vein they're also dramatically different their body types, physiology, metabolism are different so are ours so what I would say is really focus on what's working for you there are some great broad generalizations for Homo sapiens but when we get to specifics about what foods are in what order this is really each person is going to have to determine that for themselves yeah well put I know really like that's an interesting thing where you really get into where are our ancestors from and I do really well with dairy like dairy is so good for me I always you know and as a vegan for five years I thought dairy was going to give me pimples and mucus and all that and once I went to high quality dairy it was just like night and day for me and I consume large amounts of it but then you know someone is maybe from Latin America or Asia and they hear that I'm doing really well on dairy and they try it for themselves and they have indigestion whatever you know they'll just automatically think that oh it's it's horrible and they'll tell maybe they're Caucasian friends from Norway that it's horrible too and you know it's like we really have to accept that we are all very different I really appreciate your approach with that can I just say real quick Anthony when it comes to dairy it's a very different situation because we have had a genetic change those of us who come from dairy consuming cultures actually have had a significant shift in that we are what's called lactase persistent we produce lactase enzyme into adulthood now that's a mutation that's not present in the more original genetics of humans on the planet and as you mentioned a lot of the people of Asia of South America people in Africa many people from African descent are not lactase persistent we call those people lactose intolerant like as if they're intolerant like they have a problem they're intolerant where actually we're the mutated ones now based on my research into natural human diets I would love to reject dairy as a food I know that it's a very recent to make 8,000 years we've been using it but that said I happen to do very well on dairy particularly on raw goat dairy and Jersey cow dairy I excel on that food so as much as I'd like to say I eat only a primal diet unfortunately I do really well on it and I need to accept that upon myself and I need to accept that the person next to me may not do well in that food because they come from a different descent this is not the um in the past we would have been geographically distributed essentially with our family groups our familial groups today we've so mixed ourselves through globalization that literally the person who shares a bed with you may be from such a radically different descent that you essentially have different physiological needs and we need to respect that yeah yeah absolutely ok here's one about plants how do you feel about taming wild food plants and bringing them into cultivation with the intention of benefiting humanity do you know about companies like Oikos tree crops that work with a lot of not domesticated but kind of lightly tweaked wild plants like maybe the American persimmon stuff like that maybe the pawpaw that's a great question I think that's fantastic um those what you call semi-tweaked I think what the term we would use in otney or um taxonomy would be their semi-domesticates or semi-cultigens and semi-domesticates and semi-cultigens occupy that space like there's always a gray zone between domesticated organism and a wild organism they're sort of in between this year in my garden where I'm growing lots of different domesticated species I have wild plants who found their way into my soil now it's been fun to watch them because they've grown they've grown much better than they grow in their wild environment because the soil is very rich because of competition there so it's been fun to watch for instance my lamb's quarter develop into a massive plant unlike what I normally see in its wild environment um I think this is a good thing I don't think domestication of plants is a bad thing I think it's just a thing we need to do with consciousness when we start genetically modifying organisms with DNA from other kingdoms of life when we grow and domesticate organisms specifically for shelf life specifically for um color patterning just so that we can commercialize them I think we start to produce foods that are weak nutritionally but domestications will allow us and we're having this internet conversation right now is because of domesticated plants I mean without that without agriculture we would be in a very different place today um I think there are benefits to it and it exists so we're gonna have to work with it I think the idea that you've just brought up of semi cultivation is a really great direction for us and could help us to backtrack ourselves slightly out of a lifestyle where everything to eat is completely domesticated incidentally the reason the main reasons for domestication is to move the medicinal component of plants so I would say with semi cultogens what's interesting is that they'll still carry over a lot of their medicinal or mildly toxic components and those are things we're evolutionarily adapted to and without those um alkaloids those plant toxins or plant medicines we end up becoming very reliant on pharmaceuticals so semi cultogens, semi domesticates are a great direction for us because they take us back towards foods that contain the alkaloids and the uh the uh the mm anyway the uh all of the different substances that we require those medicinal uh compounds that are no longer in our domestic plants right so since some the harvest season is coming up what are some of the plants in your area in the northeast that you're gonna be looking for this fall well interestingly on the um semi cultogen conversation I have lots of feral aptuaries here that are almost ready cool so those are something that we're gonna harvest and we're gonna be doing that thing of working with the semi cultogens there we have new plants for me new plants that I've never harvested before in the bernum genus that's the carc genus that's wild and raisin which I'm really excited to be harvesting that's just ready I've been out last we're harvesting our blackberries and we did a lot of berry harvesting um there's something really fascinating to me in the literature uh the studies of indigenous people and that's that the preferred food for indigenous hunter gatherer men is meats the preferred food for indigenous uh women in hunter gatherer societies is berries and my partner alley is so uh excited to get out for berry harvest that we've done more berry harvesting this year than I've ever done before and a lot of those berries find their way into our freezer find their way into our yogurt find their way into the meats that we brew at home um and so we've been following the berry harvest we just got some right now drying some rose hips and I've been harvesting quite a bit of um wild herbs that I'm gonna put together in a smoke blend this year as I have a huge fascination with the indigenous use of herbs for smoke ceremonies so I've been gathering together wild plants doing my own tobacco plants for that mix they're doing that harvesting as well and looking forward again to this year's hunting season my hunting prowess is nothing like my ancestors or like a lot of the manors where I live but I do like getting out each year so I plan on getting out again this year as well and looking for what uh animals would you be looking for this fall white-tailed deer and turkey those seasons are coming up for us and incidentally we've just entered into the mushroom harvesting season and uh this year I've had my uh my ecology really push to another level because people around me uh are more skilled mushroom foragers than I am I've spent a lot of time harvesting medicinal mushrooms but this year I'm looking for more edibles so I'm studying the bolides uh this year and harvesting more bolides mushrooms of which there are many species and learning which ones can uh be used in our food here as well oh cool do you have um do you have any intention in Maine or do you plan on building a family there staying there for a while is that the place the good question I'm really happy here right now I'm super open to changes I'm um at a place in my life now where I'm starting to really consider where I'm going to plan that route but for right now I really like it here in Maine although I am considering entering somewhere else this year for the first time I've never really done that before so myself and my whole company Sir Thrivell we're talking about maybe going somewhere for the winter we're operating our company from somewhere else oh very cool we continue enjoying the sun is the big thing that we lack here in the winter time yeah I couldn't see why not I mean I'm sure you guys can structure it where you can you know go down for four months and come back up and yeah absolutely and how is Leilann and the family is good everyone's good there yeah everybody Leilann of course my business partner at Sir Thrivell she's fantastic her family's doing really great and um our company's doing really well we continue to all those people who are watching who have been supporting us at SirThrivell.com thank you so much the company's really growing putting that money back into the company we have lots of new products coming on board on lots of new areas that the company's going to move into which I'm really excited to announce soon we're introducing a product that's very different from what we've done before but really fits with that Sir Thrivell theme and so I'm excited to be sharing that we're working with great artists and some wonderful t-shirts for us this year working with a very amazing artist we're publishing our first book this year so lots going on we're really excited for all of the amazing benefits that success has brought to us as a company and are you planning on launching those products at Longevity now? we'll launch some of those products at Longevity now and many more as the season progresses and we get towards winter I think a lot more of those things will become available yeah okay and speaking of that conference what is your topic what are you going to be talking about alright the topic is sovereign health and you know that word sovereign I think if you don't know that word look it up because it's a word that's been erased from our vocabulary in a sort of Orwellian style removed from our speech and that word was incredibly important to the foundations of this country to the foundations of the modern legal system foundational to our modern freedom I'm calling the talk sovereign health and the subtitle rewild yourself one because they rhyme and two because I think that that's really if we want sovereign health we have to begin rewilding ourselves to some degree I don't mean that we have to become indigenous people living in loincloths in the forest but I do mean that we need to reduce our dependency on others for our health care because essentially the numbers don't lie health care is not keeping people healthy the further we go into health care the sicker we get it's so I mean I'm just so tired of this socialist idea of some kind of universal free health care I don't understand how people don't see that what that's going to lead to is sicker and sicker people more and more taxation less and less freedom just so everybody has equal access to being cut earned and poisoned by doctors this is insane we need to let it go we need to start embracing sovereign health care sovereign self health care where we realize for the first time that nobody has any invested interest in our health except us we need to take care of our health and second to that take care of the health of our family and loved ones no one else is coming to rescue us no one's coming to save us responsibilities on us that for me maybe for some people that's a little scary at first but it becomes real exciting because taking care of yourself is truly the adventure of a lifetime and it's sort of the adventure all of us have been craving because we've been deprived of it so my talk is going to be really focused on motivating people to get excited of taking responsibility for their health I mean total responsibility for what you eat for what you drink for what you breathe for the sunlight that you get how you take care of yourself because again nobody's got a financial interest in your well-being they have a financial interest in your being unwell so they can treat you with cutting, burning and poisoning and if you're lucky a radiation so there we'll be talking about how we can become sovereign again and really actually we're going to have to talk about what that word sovereign actually means it essentially a king or a queen of your own universe and no one has any authority over you whether it's about your health, about your money about your work, about what you do with yourself so I might like the idea of sovereignty and that's the idea I'm going to bring into longevity now. Awesome super cool and I know you I was visiting with Frankie G and he was talking about the ancestral ignition event that you guys are having up in Maine if you want to tell us a little bit about that too. Yeah that's a workshop I have coming up not this weekend but the following again 16th through the 18th that workshop is focused and that's a workshop I want to be clear here there's a couple different things I do my career there's the part where I go to conferences like longevity now conference and give talks like that and then there's workshops that are more intimate that I do that are more focused on those people who are really interested in rewilding so this is a workshop we're going to be gathering materials from the landscape and actually focusing on the production of friction fire, fire by friction that's using essentially two pieces of wood to create ignition so that we can create fire that is one of the most fundamental and most important practices of indigenous people around the world and of ancestors in fact nothing can be done in an environment without fire realized once you actually start trying to live outside a little bit more so we're going to be focusing on how to make fire from our landscape without lighters without matches we'll be doing that with my friend and business partner Arthur Haynes who's just an amazing wealth of information he's a very leading taxonomist and botanist here in Maine you can find him at ArthurHaynes.com or if you go to danielvitalis.com you can find the workshop there and some videos talking about that so I'm really excited about that workshop and that for me is a continuation of my own education as much as it is a workshop that I'll be co-leading I'll be there to deepen my practice with the ancestral indigenous with rubbing two sticks together very cool and so anyone that's going to be happening in Maine and then if anyone wants to come up I mean it's definitely worth the drive it's a three day event yeah that's going to be a Friday night Saturday and a Sunday now that event is completely catered with whole organic and local food by Chef Frankie G you can find him at Frank Gig... oh shhh Chef Frankie G what's his website? it might be frankgiglio.net and then Frank's finest LLC yes thank you so you can find him there you can find him via my blog at danielvitalis.com and he's going to be catering all that food we did a workshop with him last year that was earlier in the year that was really successful that was called ancestral plants and Frank catered all that food Arthur did all the botanical work and I of course helped to facilitate that workshop now we're going to be doing it again around fire we're going to put together some really amazing food for that now that event is in Maine and if people would like to come to that we could accommodate a couple more people you have to come right up to Maine here with us we'll provide the food the whole time it's a camping event so everyone will be camping here on the land where I live and we'll be showering outside we'll be sleeping outside we'll be spending most of our time outside and a lot of our time around the fire which is really exciting and really learning about the sacred stewardship of flame and a lot of control in our civilization so each one of us will leave this event sort of a steward of the sacred flame if you will very cool if you want to give us any parting words or any other websites to check out maybe like a book that you've read recently anything for the viewers I want to say this is my website danielvitalis.com and through that website that's my personal blog you can find my other websites I've just become really passionate about which is producing and providing the highest end medicinal foods from nature that I can find and so you can find my product line there it's www.thrivil.com and you can find www.spring.com through danielvitalis as well so danielvitalis.com is my sort of main portal to my other websites, my other projects and to my current events what I want to say is keep rewilding yourself at whatever pace you can or you want to just know that if you make a 180 turn and just start taking baby steps you can develop sovereignty that will give you a sense of confidence and fulfillment that our society is never going to offer us right now all around us our civilization is coming unglued for some of us that's scary and for some of us it's very exciting it's exciting for me because I really believe we become better people when we become more sovereign so keep rewilding yourselves please feel free to go to YouTube put in danielvitalis and you'll find many videos that I've produced over the years on many subjects thanks for taking the time Anthony to give this interview yeah thanks so much I mean gotta have you back on there's so many more questions I want to ask you about there's just so many things but again thank you so much for coming on I think the viewers really got a lot out of this talk and we will definitely have you back on soon when you can have a good time with all the events thanks Anthony and please come out visit us here in Maine anytime you can yeah very soon very soon thanks daniel peace buddy cool alright thanks everybody Anthony Anderson check everything out at onlyonetv.com and that's about it thanks so much have a great day and I will see you next time oh and again this is now available on downloadable mp3 so you can download this listen to it on your iphone your ipod whatever a cute computer at home on the train on the subway wherever you want to take it it's available on pod track it's all on the link onlyonetv.com and we will see you next time alright take care peace