Hallo, vibrant viewers, and welcome to Healthy Living. Most of us wonder about the elements of excellent health and often ask, “Why did I get this illness?” or “Why am I not feeling as well as I should” or “What can I do to improve my health?”
On today’s episode we will learn the answers to these and other health-related questions from renowned health pioneer and vegan, Dr. Adiel Tel-Oren.
Dr. Tel-Oren is a licensed physician, university professor and holistic scientist. He promotes “functional medicine,” a science–based, natural approach to diagnosis and therapy.
Dr. Tel-Oren, who received his medical training in Europe and the US, is also a doctor of chiropractic and a licensed nutritionist certified with the American Clinical Board of Nutrition.
Currently President Emeritus, Dean of Medical Sciences and Professor of Functional and Nutritional Medicine at the University of Natural Medicine in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Dr. Tel-Oren has founded and supported many projects, including a health network called “Ecopolitan,” which houses, among other things, a detoxification and healing hospital, a raw juice bar and a non-profit, 100% organic raw vegan restaurant.
Let us hear from Dr. Tel Oren and more about the life-saving plant-based diet.
Supreme Master TV (F):
Dr. Tel-Oren, you have put all your knowledge and experience to good use to become a holistic scientist and a functional medicine practitioner.
You practice all over the world. For our viewers, can you please explain what a functional medicine practitioner is and also can you talk about Ecopolitan?
Adiel (m):
First of all, functional medicine, in short, in a nutshell, is the field of medicine that employs holistic thinking and utilizes science to support that holistic thinking.
It’s important today not just to treat symptoms, but to actually find out what causes people’s aliments. To diagnose the causes, not just to diagnose a name of a disease and simply attach a drug to it or even attach a supplement to it, or other product.
You need to find out what's causing people’s sickness because without sickness being deciphered, there will never be a solution.
And people are getting sicker and sicker everywhere and there is no such thing as a sustainable living when people are sick.
HOST:
Dr. Tel-Oren founded Ecopolitan since he wished to inform others how to live a healthy, ecologically friendly lifestyle.
Adiel (m):
The Ecopolitan eco-health network tries to teach people the truth about their food, the truth about their lifestyle and how to live sustainably so that they can be both ecological and healthy at the same time, since the two cannot be separated.
We have even created a whole website for this called TheTruthAboutYourFood.com which offers free tele-seminars for everybody telling you the truth that you've not normally heard about your proteins, about your fats, about your sugars, about processed foods, not what you normally hear, totally different things.
HOST:
At the beginning of time, people lived healthful, active lives in accord with nature.
Adiel (m):
They don’t eat any mass produced animals, they don’t manufacture agriculture of animals, they don’t harvest animals, they don’t harvest the glandular secretions of animals, which is what dairy is.
Dairy products are no more than glandular secretions of other animals.
There are no animals in nature that would do that. Only humans.
Adiel (m):
The dairy industry, the cattle industry are huge industries and they influence our politicians and our governments to make us believe, and they influence our experts and they pay their way to make us believe that their products are acceptable for human beings to consume.
In nature, we don’t see any animal drink the dairy or the glandular secretions of other mammals, they only drink their own mother’s milk for a certain amount of time before they reach their weaning age or their maturity to deal with foods from their environment.
HOST:
Mots of today’s food are processed foods, meat and dairy products, which are highly damaging to our immune systems.
Adiel (m):
Animal products are associated with numerous chemical changes in the human body, with not just acidity and digestive difficulties and pollution within our body, but also with auto-immune disease and neurological disease, and generally, they change the ecology within our body.
They change how we function, they make us behave in different ways, because they change our hormones, and really, it's important for people to note that in studies that were done by epidemiologists, you can trace many diseases, many conditions to animal products that were never available or never present in human populations until we started depending on the these foods; depending on growing those animals and eating their hormones and eating their concentrated pollutants, the heavy metals go higher and higher in quantity as you go up the food chain.
Adiel (m):
Any meat eater, any dairy eater, any flesh eater has to worry about numerous nutritional deficiencies, so it's not just vegetarians and vegans.
It's about the environment; it's about our lifestyle, about the modern lifestyle that we have today, about agriculture, about processing of foods; all of those things count here.
It's more important that everybody is aware, not just vegetarians and vegans.
HOST:
Dr. Tel-Oren further clarifies misleading concepts about vitamin B-12 deficiencies in vegetarian and vegan diets, stating that just as with other forms of nourishment, everyone needs to consume a balanced variety of vegetables and fruits in order to obtain sufficient nutrition.
Adiel (m):
Today almost everybody is B-12 deficient, including meat eaters. And in fact, people who are heavy on the meat intake are specifically deficient in B-12.
HOST:
Although countless studies have shown the harmful effects of a meat diet, Dr. Tel-Oren explains that many people have a hard time giving it up because like drugs, it is highly addictive.
Adiel (m):
There are numerous aspects on the physiological and the anatomical level that indicate time and time again that we are not built to handle such foods in such quantities.
If somebody insists on being addicted to such foods, and they are addictive, by the way. Dairy products are definitely addictive, it’s proven, there are sufficient studies about that.
The effect on the immune system is very significant; the effect on our hormones is significant.
Animal protein causes increase in our cortisol secretion. Cortisol is a very important stress hormone, which makes us feel high, increases our blood sugar level, makes us feel good, which is addictive.
So when people eat such foods they are tending to be more and more
Adiel (m):
….addicted to them. And if they start with just once a month, they end up once a week and then once a day and then three times a day.
Every meal has to have a piece of flesh on the center of the plate, and this is the result of addiction.
And as societies become more and more affluent, they want to emulate other affluent societies and increase their meat and dairy consumption accordingly, and get sicker and sicker.
And suddenly, we see how major societies which changed their position from being Asian and becoming European or American, suddenly they start having all these diseases that they never had before, cancer, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, autoimmune disease.
HOST:
Many illnesses are, in fact, caused by protein changes in our bodies due to meat consumption.
Adiel (m):
And these diseases are not because of the fats change, not because of the carbohydrates change.
They are directly correlated with the protein change. They're eating too much protein suddenly. Nobody wants to touch the “holy cow” of protein.
It's always fighting sugar, carbs or fats.
Both of those are almost indistinguishable as far as energetics metabolism is concerned.
They both burn clean in the body.
Adiel (m):
It's protein that burns dirty.
That we make energy out of in a very dirty way and therefore pollute our body and create new chemistry that leads to all those diseases, including diabetes.
Diabetes does not happen in all those countries in the world that eat lots of carbohydrates, they eat lots of sugar.
They're not necessarily as healthy as they could be, but they don't develop these diseases that I mentioned earlier.
But when they increase their animal protein, that's when they start getting all these cardiovascular diseases and diabetes and auto-immune disease and cancer.
So we are showing again and again that our physiology is not made for that, infectious agents that are found in dairy products, even after pasteurization that will scare people away, the pus that is always found in ulcered udders that is found in 80 to 90% of dairy cows, that are ending in our food.
HOST:
From a health perspective, Dr. Tel-Oren urges us to consume the wide variety of greens found in nature.
Adiel (m):
Then we go to a supermarket and go to the produce section, and in the produce section there are a lot of foods that most of us don't recognize.
We need to start recognizing them and increase the variety of what's going to be on our plate.
There are numerous greens that we don't even try.
Most people don't even know the names of most of those greens that they see in the health food store, in their co-op, or in the large supermarkets that today have some produce that they didn't have just 20 years ago, like dandelion greens, like chard, mustard greens, etc.
People throw away the tops of beets and the tops of radishes and turnips.
And those tops are far, far healthier and more nourishing than what we are accustomed to eat, which is the bulb, the root.
So every day we must eat a good variety of green, leafy vegetables.
That's where we get our power house of nutrients. That's where we get the highest density of nutrients per calorie.
HOST:
Dr. Tel-Oren believes that through a balanced, organic, vegan lifestyle, one can maintain a high state of health.
Adiel (m):
Everything goes down the drain when people get sick, and most people are getting sick.
The only way to address that is with a science-based approach that looks for the causation, that understands the nutritional ramifications, the environmental aspects, the pollution aspects, the stress and emotions that factor into this thing called disease.
And only when you address all those factors and causative agents can you actually improve people’s health, and then they can have the enthusiasm and the excitement about making this world a worthwhile place to live in.
HOST:
There are numerous medical reports evidencing that many diseases arise from the consumption of animal products.
Dairy products such as milk and ice cream are not truly the wholesome foods that they are portrayed to be.
People are not aware that they're eating pus every day.
People are always thinking of the benefits of dairy as a lunch program, when we have so many children who have asthma only during the school year when they're forced to do dairy as a part of their lunch.
Then in the summer they avoid dairy and their asthma disappears.
We are force feeding an entire society a food that is not made for human consumption, and that is a travesty.
Adiel (m):
Based on our physiological adaptation over the millennia, our anatomy, our bio-chemistry are tending to be plant-based, and in our thousands and thousands of years of evolution we have adapted to various foods that nature has provided us, which were largely plant-based and very, very little of it, maybe one to two or three percent of it was not plant-based.
There is largely 95 to 99% vegan.
HOST:
Physiologically, the human body is not designed for meat consumption.
Adiel (m):
If it were, we would have the anatomy to capture the flesh, to capture the meat with our own teeth and nails and to engage in feeding frenzies without the convenience of cooking, tenderizing, coloring, increasing shelf life and making such flesh entities become a palatable thing on a plate.
It wouldn't have happened.
Our digestive system is not made for that in its length.
We develop putrefaction. We develop fermentation. We have insufficient stomach acids to handle the load.
And in general it affects our bio-chemistry as a result of this type of lifestyle. Today, we know more about the scientific facts of our food and of our body.
And therefore, we can be more effective in treating ourselves so that we can thrive instead of have chronic disease for the majority of our life, and therefore, there's no excuse in doing this and eating such foods.
Even if they were necessary for survival back in the time, today, we have transportation, we have technology.
We can live mostly on a plant-based diet and get what we need, mostly without problems.
We don't have to do this. Plus we don't have to endure the cataclysmic effect of such an animal-based diet on our planet.
Supreme Master TV (f):
And to thrive as you say, what should the human body be fed?
Adiel (m):
We should just look at nature, and look at other animals that are 98-plus-percent identical to us genetically and see what they're eating. And then after understanding what they're eating, we need to modify it to feed our environment.
Each person is inspired at a different time after having gone through a certain path. Some of us develop a desire to eat healthy only when we become really sick. Some of us change our diet only because of humanitarian reasons, and some of us because of ecological concerns.
Therefore, we are not exactly the same. Each one of us has a different genetic blueprint that would indicate that some of us could handle certain foods more easily than others, or have difficulties with some food more than others.
The same is true for all the animals. They don't have significant rules. They don't combine their food in certain ways. They don't choose to always do this and then that. They don't have calorie counting in their lifestyle.
Adiel (m):
They don't care so much to eat this food or that food because of its level of nutrients. They simply eat what nature provides, don't they?
Therefore, we should think about it in the same way. So obviously in a natural environment we would go to nature and start foraging, right? We would be picking different plants and seeds and leaves and fruits and bulbs and roots and stems.
We would be eating everything that the trees and the plants would provide. We would be eating all those things and we would have a huge variety.
Thousands of plants and each season, there would be a different part of the plant showing itself as edible.
When I go foraging and I lead people on foraging trips, I see how many foods we have to eat. And I'm shocked at how few we actually eat today when we go to the supermarket. So let's keep that in mind.
HOST:
Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Healthy Living as we continue our conversation with Dr. Adiel Tel-Oren right after these brief messages.
Welcome back to Healthy Living. Today Dr. Adiel Tel-Oren, a certified nutritionist and doctor of chiropractic, shares his views on the overall benefis of a plant-based lifestyle
.
Adiel (m):
What is the root of our problem today?
We eat so many calories with so little nutrients. This is the beginning of degrading our health and becoming chronically ill, as we depart from nature and from health at the same time.
Whether it is eaten raw or blended or steamed or slightly cooked, the important thing is to eat a large number of dark green leafage.
The next thing we must eat every day is a good amount of crucifers, cruciferous vegetables.
Today we have to eat more of these than we did in the past, because they offer us certain protections against pollutants and against the development of chronic disease.
Those crucifers will offer us cancer protective and cardiovascular protective and infection protective agents that we need much more now than we did 100 years ago.
HOST:
Cruciferous vegetables are high in soluble fiber, vitamin c, and nutrients.
What are some of these vegetables that are so beneficial?
Adiel (m):
So those are the broccoli, the cauliflower, the cabbage, the Brussels sprouts the Bok Choy, the Napa cabbage, and many of the greens can overlap between being greens and being crucifers, a big bunch of these every day, raw or steamed or blended every day.
The next thing that we must eat every day is a big variety of fruit, and I recommend a large fruit salad, once a day at least, as a big meal.
If you eat a big fruit salad, you have several types of fruits in there, and they have the variety and the nutrients that come with that.
You can also eat them separately, just apples one meal, just pears another, just orange in another, etc.
But try to vary your fruits, eat a lot of plums, eat a lot of berries and cherries in season.
HOST:
Dr. Tel-Oren encourages buying local produce, an eco-friendly practice that helps to lessen
the burden on our planet in this time of climate crisis.
He explains how food that must be transported far distances is harmful for our environment.
Adiel (m):
They're pre-packaged in un-ecological wrappings and aluminium and plastics, and they're transported thousands and thousands of miles.
That's very unhealthy for the ecology and for our body in comparison to the berries that grow right in our backyard, in our own state, in our own location.
And use those in your fruit salad as well.
By eating a big fruit salad and also snacking on fruit between meals, and eating a large number of greens and crucifers, you already have a good foundation.
To that we also add a big colorful vegetable salad, with all the other vegetables which are really the fruits, like bell peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers, and even the bulbs and roots are not a part of what we mentioned so far.
And those can all be cut, and made into a beautiful, colorful rainbow of hues on your plate.
HOST:
According to nutritional information charts, nuts are very high in nutritional value. They provide protein, essential vitamins, minerals such as phosphorous and potassium, and fiber for our bodies.
Adiel (m):
And I recommend that everybody eats three to four, depending on body weight, let's say two up to four heaping tablespoons of nuts and/or seeds every day.
They must be in their raw, unprocessed, unsalted state. They must not be rancid. They must not be pulverized ahead of schedule for you.
You should pulverize them yourself in your coffee grinder, and have those daily
Adiel (m):
to compensate for your environmental changes and pollution that we live in today, and the impact on our immune system and on our detoxification capabilities.
So we need to eat more of these than we would have in nature. That's an adaptation.
And since they are very hard to digest, they must always be eaten with fruits or with vegetables.
They must be diluted by the fruits or the vegetables.
So three or four tablespoons, and ideally they should be rotated, not eaten in a big mixture every day on every meal, because then you are likely to develop allergies to them.
You can have mushrooms once in a while; you can have seaweed once in a while, like kelp, nori, etc. once in a while. And those are the main things. It's the protein that's really the worst for you, more than the sugar.
For lactose-intolerant people, thanks to their lactose intolerance, they avoid the worst part of the dairy, which is the protein, casein, albumin, lactalbumin, all those proteins that cause allergies, sensitivities, inflammation and casiomorphines.
HOST:
Dr. Tel-Oren explains that when people are well, they can better care for themselves as well as their surroundings.
In striving for better health for our bodies and our planetary home, a plant-based diet is the key to sustainability.
Adiel (m):
If you are not making people healthier or if they don't know how to take care of themselves,
it will not be sustainable, and our goal is to make the world a better place for the future generations.
This can only happen if people are maintaining their own health.
Doesn’t matter what lifestyle they choose, if they lose their ability to function, they lose their need or their desire to act sustainably and responsibly and maintain the health of the environment and the ecology.
HOST:
We thank Dr. Tel-Oren for his devoted work in promoting a natural and animal-free diet.
Heaven bless him with further success in his noble endeavors for fellow humans, animals and our precious planet.