Guest Post from Vanessa in Salt Lake City

Today’s post is a feature written by Vanessa Johansson of Salt Lake City, Utah. She is an amazing mother, wife, and inspiration to many. Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to spent a good amount of time with her. At different retreats, events, and last year had the pleasure of staying in her home. When I stayed there, we discovered a local organic goat farm in the area, and we were delighted by their many delicious choices. Still to this day, some of the best cheeses I have ever had – Goat Mozzarella, Ricotta, and Feta that was absolutely amaaaazing!

Anywho, here is a lovely piece of writing from her. More from me in the next day or two.

Enjoy!

To eat meat or not to eat meat….this is the question.

Many many years ago, I was the co-owner of a 40 restaurant franchise in multiple states. Subway to be exact. I was retired and never needed to work again. Then I began to uncover the horrors of factory farming, as well as the researched and documented health challenges directly caused by the consumption of cooked conventional meat. I knew that my days of being a franchise restaurant owner were over. I also began intensive experimenting on my own body via herbs, raw foods, wheat grass juicing and enemas, fasting, colonics, super foods, ozone therapy, Bio mat technology, zapping with the terminator II night and day, endless raw food retreats, weeks at the Optimum Health Institute, reading endless books on alternative therapies, nutrition, raw food, etc, sun gazing, inversion table therapy, DMSO and garlic IV drips, sprouting, mineral rich gardening, urine therapy, eating clay, and getting two degrees in Holistic Nutrition. I watched hundreds of parasites land in the toilet bowl out of “me bum”, and watched one very long tape worm squiggle out of me on day 30 of a juice fast. I watched my body shrink and grow and go pale and fill out and get sick and weak and so much more. Hives, acne, a sore throat for 18 months, candida, weird emotional stuff, and so so so much more. It has been an informative journey thus far and I have been front row witness as well as In House Shaman and Medicine Woman to my three superhero children and my one very brave and willing husband, darling Dabu.
When I stepped onto this path of extreme health, it was in large part motivated by the understanding that other feeling and living beings were suffering so that I could have life. This seemed unnecessary to me, and so I cut out anything with a face in my diet. I felt that if I ate lower on the food chain, not only would there be more food for all, but there would be less suffering in the world. I wanted to preserve the natural resources of this planet, and understood that eating meat was resource intensive, and conventional methods were responsible for pretty much all of the illness and disease being experienced today. Not to mention the destruction to our land, water, air, and trees.

I stand in a very different place today, and it has been a riveting journey to get here, and I know for sure that my position and perspective will continue to evolve as my understanding continues to grow and build upon what I have already understood.

So, let’s address the moral issue first. If you are purchasing produce from the store, even from Whole foods, you are killing more animals than if you simply hunted a deer or an elk locally. The elk would leave zero footprint and the organic kale would leave a wake of jet fuel, carbon emissions, deforestation, and hundreds upon hundreds of dead deer, gophers, rabbits, foxes, squirrels, birds, marmot, and so much more killed on the roads and plowed up in the fields. Ask any farmer and he will tell you just how many animals are killed in the fields every year. So the “I don’t kill animals” rational for eating vegetarian does not hold up. It is a lie and it was a painful admission to make to myself. I loved not eating animals and believing that I had eradicated the killing of animals from my karma. Not true. All vegetarians and vegans are in a mass psychosis about this. Eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is not necessarily the most sustainable diet, unless you can manage home grown and wild foods exclusively through all four seasons. Good luck with that.

Then there is the issue of what is alive and what is not. Or in other words, is a tree less alive than a deer or a cow? Read “The Secret Life of Plants” and you will know that plants are as conscious as you and I are. A three hundred year old tree may be more conscious than you and I. Why do we so readily lend our compassion to the animals and exclude completely the forests and grasslands of the world as part of the living circle of life? Are they less meek and humble and worthy of our pity? Does the grass not constitute life? Is the grassland and forest not life itself just as we are? Out in the wild, the grasslands and grass ARE THE life, the BIG life. All else is little life that depends on the big life for survival. Even wolves and humans are little life. Creatures that eat grass are bigger killers than creatures that eat meat. To us, we pity the gazelle and the cow and the sheep. So the grasses are not to be pitied. The gazelle has four fast moving legs, and most of the time wolves spit up blood from exhaustion trying to catch them. When the gazelles are thirsty, they run to the river to drink, and when they are cold, they run to a warm spot to soak up some sun. But the grass? Grass is the big life, yet it is the most fragile, the most miserable life. Its roots are shallow, the soil is thin, and though it lives on the ground, it cannot run away. Anyone can step on it, eat it, chew it, crush it. A horse or human or dog urinates on it and burns a big hole into it. And if the grass grows in sand or in the cracks between rocks it is even shorter lived because it cannot grow flowers which means it cannot spread its seeds. There is nothing more deserving of our compassion than the grasses. If you want to talk about killing, then the grass eaters kill more than anything else. When you kill off the big life of grass lands all the little lives are doomed. The damage done by a gazelle far outweighs the damage done by a wolf. Yet we eagerly run out and juice our grass and grains, we sprout grass grains and eat without any compassion for the living grasses. What is this prejudice? Is it that the more something is like us, the more consideration that we give to it, and the less it is like us, the less we attribute life like qualities to it? Is the water less alive then I am as I thirstily drink it down? I think not. Is the tree less alive than I am? I think not. So then how do I begin to parcel up what is alive and being killed when I consume it and what is not alive and thus okay to consume like a greedy little pig? Species-ism is the universal prejudice still agreed upon. The righteous vegan raw foodists of the world wash their hands of the blood of life and snarf down avocadoes and leaves and flowers and nuts and seeds and all manner of life in total ignorance. Oh how ignorant we are. It is ALL life. The entire Universe is consuming and excreting itself. Only ALWAYS! It is our own judgment that keeps us from truly being reverent and humble about what it is that we are taking and what it is that is being given to us. Just because the blood of a plant is green and not red, does it bleed any less than we do? Science has proven that plants faint and scream as we approach to cut them. Just as I would if something were coming to cut and devour my body. I could go on, but I trust that my point is as obvious as day. The moral karmic position for not eating animals does not have any legs…it does not stand up to close scrutiny. This same argument that animals did not have souls or feel pain made it possible for horrible live experiments to be done on living animals. Plants are simply the new animals for this day and age. One day we will prostrate ourselves upon the ground and bury our faces in the earth itself in complete humility and total surrender for we will have finally understood what it has taken for us to understand, and that the infinite expression of life and its Omnipotent Author have given everything for us to know what love is, and all of life and creation have participated in our ultimate and complete understanding that there is only life, there is only God, and we have blasphemed in the temple of the Divine, only in our ignorance, like little babies with soiled diapers and runny noses and messy faces and loud voices, as all of creation has looked on and waited and continues to wait patiently for the dawning of wisdom to fill our minds and for consciousness to grow as we go from being unable to move, to rolling over, to sitting up, crawling, walking, running, and finally flying.

So the next issue is to ask “what is sustainable”. It is a wonderful step to take as a living being when one becomes aware that this is a shared planet, and that all need to be fed, sheltered, watered, and given their time in the sun and on the earth. How do we make it equitable? What is fair and right, and how can we make sure to leave enough for those who come after us? These are important questions that indicate a rising of consciousness and awareness within a being. How can I live in a way that is sustainable over the course of my life and makes life sustainable for everyone? Well, rule number one is to understand that we can’t pollute the pond that we live in. So sustainable will of course mean no pollution, or not more than can be easily handled by the earth and trees and waters and by our own bodies and the bodies of all living things. Sustainable ideally means that what we take is all renewed quickly and easily and the balance between taking and receiving, or the male and the female, are balanced, and the waste that is left is pure food for what eats it…such as the bacteria living in the soil, the carrion birds, the giant compost heap of life if you will. As we know, our waste will once again become our food or food for our food, so it should all be great from start to finish. Is maca flown in from the Andes on an airplane sustainable? Well, for the calories that it provides, the calories or units of energy required to get it from there to me does not balance out but creates a deficit. On top of which the packaging must be dealt with, the jet fuel absorbed into the earths body and into our body, the fossil fuel emissions metabolized(and it doesn’t), the roads paved to drive on, etc. To me, this is clearly not a sustainable way to live. Local seems important. Eating food that is grown where I live, in soil that is loved and feeds the people of its surrounding areas is sustainable. It used to be that the food supply regulated the population. A community or tribe would not have more people in its fold than there were resources to support them. Other animals self regulate their numbers this way as well. This is no longer the case for humans. So we are out of balance. A direct relationship with your food deletes out pollution, waste, and overpopulation. It is impossible to have this relationship when your food is grown in soil on another continent or even in another state. Respect for the soil and the water are the keys to the health of the planet and of the people and of all living creatures. Eating a mango in Salt Lake City in January is not sustainable. The footprint is larger than the life it provided for the body. What is sustainable is hunting an elk and eating it all winter long. No footprint, no waste, all good.
I was a survival instructor for a time in the Great Basin Desert, and learned the ways of living close to the land. I trapped my own food, made fire with sticks rubbed together, slept on the earth, even in the snow, drank from streams and rivers and cavities in rocks where water had collected the night before. I carried my tools in a blanket on my back, and found a peace that I had never known before nor have I found since.
I know a man who lives in Boulder Utah. He lives in a hand made mud structure. It is wrapped with skins that he cured from animals that he hunted with tools made with his own two hands out of natural materials. He makes his own clothes. He walks wherever he needs to get to. He digs roots and picks berries and leaves and nuts and seeds from the land. He drinks from the river and he is warmed by his own fire started with a bow drill set that he made with his stone knife and braided rope from dogbane bark and a tinder bundle from sage brush bark. He sleeps when it is dark and is awake when Gods Lamp is on. He fishes with a hand made spear and hunts with a throwing stick and bow and arrow and runs on his legs and uses his hands and his mind to live in what appears to me to be the most peaceful way to live that I have witnessed in this life.
He leaves no footprint on the earth. If you didn’t know he was there, you would not even see his home, as it is built right into the side of a rock cliff and blends right in. His urine and feces are pure food for the earth, and he is intimately connected to His Mother as he sleeps and walks upon her every moment of his life. He is not confused about his place in the circle of life, nor his relationship to all of his brothers and sisters, regardless of their form or shape or species. He has been living there alone in the wild since he was sixteen years old. He says little and lives a lot. His life is the full and complete embodiment of sustainability. Ouch you say? What that ouch represents is all that is keeping us from truly choosing that instead of talking about choosing that without ACTUALLY choosing it. I am guilty as charged by the way.
Super foods and gadgets and Vita Mix blenders and driving a Prius and vegan shoes and solar panels are all ways of keeping the existing system in place and trying to keep our creature comforts while still being entertained and kept comfy. We are still making too much trash, we are still polluting our water, and we are still hogging the Earth. That’s how I see it. So is a vegan or vegetarian diet sustainable in Salt Lake City year around? For me, it is a resounding NO.
It sure is fun to eat at Living Cuisine from heart shaped plates and hug each other real tight and look into each others eyes and all that fluffy glittery stuff….but we still pay with paper money printed by the Federal Reserve that is our own jailer keeping us in chains (by our own choosing). We still leave Living Cuisine in a car and use our EMF manufacturing cell phones as we drive and we still poop in pure water in the bathrooms and wipe our arses with the last of the trees.. Behind the gentle vegan raw tapestry is a trail of mangled, bloody, dead bodies of living feeling innocent creatures all the way from the agricultural fields of California, Mexico, Washington, Chile, Tibet, Peru etc leading directly to your bowl of Sweet Basil Salad and your glass of Goji lemonade. So again, the not eating animals because it is more sustainable does not hold up under close scrutiny either.
Consider how you would live as a Native American in this valley through all four season with your tribe, and this is probably the most sustainable option.

Now we address health. What is the healthiest way to eat? First, it depends on where you are at health wise. For some, they are at the beginning or middle stages of cleansing, which can take many many years to work through. Getting the garbage out so that the good stuff can get in is the first step. So this would mean a juicy high nutrient and low density diet, such as raw fruits and veggies, sprouted nuts and seeds, all organic, as locally grown as possible, super foods, healthy raw fats, medicinal herbs and healing plants. The goal here is to get out all of the bad stuff interfering with your bodies own Divine Intelligence, and at the same time making up for deficiencies. It is an art really to cleanse without depleting too much and while still adding in what is needed to mitigate the stripping effect that cleansing has on the body. Colonics, addressing the internal soil with enzymes, fermented foods, probiotics, and lots of fiber. The raw vegan living foods diet is a cleansing diet. It supports the process of distillation, where areas of greater concentration move into areas of lesser concentration. So as the blood thins due to a hydrating, enzyme rich, digestible raw diet, the lymph dumps into the blood its load of waste. As the lymph thins out, the cells dump their load of toxic waste into the lymph. If the colon is clear, which it must be in order for cleansing to take effect, all is dumped through the colon, the pores, the mouth, and the anus and the body begins to experience healing. Alkalizing minerals are pulled from the bones and tissues to neutralize toxins as they make their way out of the body, hence the need for a high living green diet when cleansing. The body, just like this Universe, is a balance of intake and out put. The entire Universe is participating in this process. So we take in soil and excrete out soil. We take in water and excrete out water. We take in air and excrete out air, and we take in fire (the sun) and excrete out fire (sweating, panting). If any of these systems are out of balance for too long, sickness ensues. As it is with food. There is a time to cleanse and a time to build. Over time, if a body remains in a mode of cleansing without taking nutrition back in, it will begin to break down.
About four years into a raw vegan diet, I began to feel what I will call “hungry” and I didn’t know why. I chalked it up to needing to cleanse more, and so I did just that. Lots of juice fasts, lots of intestinal cleanses, just more of what I had already been doing. It didn’t seem to be making me feel any better. I battled for about a year with this, before really beginning to trust that my body was telling me something. It was sobering as well as exciting for me to begin to understand that the Divine Intelligence that is my body is far superior to the factoids and niblets of memorized information stored in my finite puny human brain. My body is profound in its wisdom, and I can only continue to learn how to attune to this wisdom, bow to it, and be respectful of its magnitude and my own brain limitations. So though I had read all of the books on why vegan in best and I had amassed a group of raw vegan personalities as friends, something was still not adding up in my own body. It was hard to let go of what I had decided was TRUE and allow something bigger to teach me. I learned a lot in that transition about the nature of life and the constant movement of consciousness as we evolve. What was true six years ago is not true today. It just depends on where you are standing. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Our perspective is always limited and we can only see from where we stand so we must simply trust the journey, do our homework, and evolve out of arrogance…. as arrogance and thinking that we know is always the only obstacle to vibrant health.
So, let me say this one important bit here. All of the studies done on meat and dairy eaters and their health were done on people eating conventional, not organic, AND they were done on cooked animal product eaters, not raw. This is a critical distinction and one that I make in my own life. I do not advocate cooked or conventional animal products ever. So “The China Study” and “Diet for a New America” and “Food Revolution” all focused on conventional methods of farming and raising and processing animal products and cooked protein for their statistics and studies. I am talking about raw organic free range grass fed. Please remember this as it is important to understand that what you have read never included the whole picture.
I have found that over time, the raw vegan diet becomes too flimsy. I don’t know how else to say this. The feeling that something is missing. This is what is true for me. There is a very feminine quality to this diet that for a lot of people simply does not work long term. There is an over abundance of phytoestrogens in plant foods, and especially nuts and seeds including coconuts and avocadoes, that are highly estrogenic. Combine that with an over estrogenic environment due to hormone disruptors such as phthalates, all pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all plastics, and so much more, and we are truly in danger with this estrogenic dominance. All female cancers are created from an over abundance of estrogen, as is male pattern baldness, fat on the hips and thighs, as well as docility.
It is generally accepted that high levels of estrogen are associated with cancer of the breast, uterus and cervix; with cystic breast disease, uterine fibroids and endometriosis; with heavy bleeding and premenstrual syndrome; with depressed thyroid function; and with fluid retention and weight gain. Some lesser known associations are the following, as reported in the Nutri-Spec Letter of Guy R. Schenker, DC (1-800-736-4320):

Estrogen levels increase under the stress of injury, surgery, exposure to cold, infection and fasting. (Am J Vet Res, Feb 1998; Keio J Med, Sept 1989; Prog Clin Biol Res, 1989; J Clin Endocrine Metabl, 1974; Am J Clin Nutri, 1989)

Postmenopausal women with higher levels of circulating estrogen experience greater cognitive decline. (J Am Ger Soc 1998, Vol 46, Pages 816-21)

Alcoholism is associated with abnormally high levels of estrogen. (S Gastroienterol, Oct 1988 German)

Estrogen exacerbates symptoms of allergies and asthma. (Rev Pheumol Clin, Oct 1999, Vol 55, No 5, Pages 296-300; Ann Allergy Asthma Immunol, Sep 1998, Vol 81 No 3, Pages 243-6) One study presented evidence that the increasing incidence of asthma in children is due to the mother’s oral contraceptive use prior to pregnancy. (Pediatr Allergy Immunol, Nov 1997, Vol 8, No 4, Pages 200-4.)

Estrogen can actually cause osteoporosis! (Menopause 1991 1(3):131-136) According to Dr. Schenker, between the ages of 21 and 40 there is a considerable increase in women’s estrogen production. However, bone loss has been shown to actually begin around the age of 23 and progresses through the years when estrogen levels are actually rising. Weight gain patterns in middle age women can interfere with bone mass scans, leading to false conclusions about the effects of estrogen on bone health.

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I am into the warrior energy myself, for a number of reasons, and I became aware over time that I just felt really soft and weak no matter how much I exercised. Then I noticed that some of my favorite raw vegan heroes were kind of chubby and had man boobs and really did not look much younger to me that their cooked food meat eating counter parts. I then began hanging out with Robert Cassar and saw that he understood some things based on his physical appearance. Then I started hearing about all of these big names that had crossed over into the animal products world. Even David Wolfe is now heavily promoting raw free range grass fed organic dairy such as butter, milk, cheese, and raw egg yolks. So whats the deal here? Why the big switch? Well, our endocrine system for one. This is a hormone game folks. What keeps us young has a lot to do with our hormones. Too much estrogen can break down the whole system, and we are in trouble in this area. One way to counteract that is to pull back some on all of the plants and start to add in some of the raw dairy and raw egg yolks. They really stimulate a whole different range of hormones and chemicals that are more masculine such as strength, flexibility, lean muscle, mental sharpness, and really enhanced brain function due to the high long chain fatty acid and omega three fatty acid profiles. We are so out of whack as a society with our omega 3 to omega six balance. We should be four times higher in omega threes than sixes but we are ten times higher in omega sixes than threes. There are some who feel that this alone is the missing link to humans highest evolution. Animal products take care of this. Science has shown that the human brain has grown in actual size directly in proportion to the consumption of fatty acids found in animal products.
In my own personal evolution, what I have discovered is that eating raw salmon is CRITICAL for my health, wellness, and balance. I deeply feel the absence of omega three fatty acids in my diet, found in high amounts in fish, when I go long periods of time without eating them. My whole family has noticed this for themselves, and we periodically eat raw salmon or cold smoked salmon, sourced from native tribes and caught by hand in Alaska. Adding in raw milk and egg yolks has also been met with a two thumbs up from the family after years of raw vegan eating. We all just feel much better. We eat all of our animal products raw, and we source the highest quality possible.
Raw milk and cheese and butter are the most alkalizing food that you can eat. You will literally feel your body remineralizing as you eat them. Raw dairy from free range, grass eating animals is so high in healthy bacteria that e coli or staff bacteria dropped into the milk is destroyed on contact. Imagine what it will do in your body! My daughters long term acne cleared up within one month of getting on raw milk, and she also lost a significant amount of weight. My husband says that he finally feels really well after years of really struggling to feel excellent on the super food diet.
The Chinese have been eating whole raw eggs for centuries and credit this part of their diet with strength, energy, and mental clarity. There are epidermal and nerve growth factors in animal products that cannot be found in plant food. Vitamins B-12 , A, and D, and vitamins k cannot be found in plant foods. All four of the longest lived peoples of this planet include a small portion of animal products into their diets. The Hunzas, the Okinawans, the Vilcabambans, and the people of the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. They all eat animal meats, fats, and dairy. The vegetarian inhabitants of Southern India on the other hand have the shortest life span of any peoples on earth.
Nucleotides are found in the highest concentrations in nutritional yeast, egg yolks, and sardines. These are critical longevity foods as they prevent the corruption of the DNA codes which are quite literally our body’s Instruction Manual from God. Interesting that they were feeding Ceaser salad with two of these ingredients to the royal Ceaser family. Wonder why?
A vegetarian diet lacks the fat soluble catalysts needed for mineral absorption. Over time this can lead to break down in the body as well as critical deficiencies. A meat or animal product free diet in the short term is very cleansing and healing but for long term, from what I can tell, most of us will do well to add in some raw milk and eggs and maybe even some fish. I personally have not felt the need to go any higher up the food chain than fish and most of the time am really happy with just the raw dairy. This is a process though, so who knows where I will end up. Wild meats make sense to me, and I can see myself getting into that through the winter and off of Whole Foods limp organic kale for five dollars a head, grown under artificial lights in a temperature controlled green house and shipped on a refrigerated truck and mineral devoid by the time its gets into my salad bowl.
In the end, only you will be able to tell what your body does or does not need. Knowing that the moral or sustainable arguments do not hold up really helped me to get out of my head and into my body and just pay attention and listen. I encourage you to do the same for yourself. I still love my superfoods and greens from my garden and my grapes and peaches and tomatoes. I also now love my raw milk and my raw wild salmon. Go figure.
Jesus tells Glenda Green in “Love Without End,” when asked about a vegetarian diet, that the only issue with any food was whether or not it was loved. Loved soil, loved water, loved air and light, loved seeds, loved animals, gratitude and love are the vibration that we are looking for. It is the consciousness of greed and irreverence that is making us all so sick. I believe this and am freer today having dropped my judgments and gotten a bit closer to the bigger picture. Its all Mama. Massively bless everything!

“WaterFire” Salt Lake City, UT

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