Interview with Dave Klein by Michael Snyder

Mikesnyder081105

Interview with Dave Klein by Michael Snyder

July 27, 2005

Mike Snyder:I’m very please to welcome you to this tele-seminarwith Dave Klein and Mike Snyder.This is Mike Snyder speaking. Today we’re going to be discussing a few topics with you. Dave is a healthful living educator, certified nutrition educator and diet counselor. He’s been on a raw foods diet for 21 years and his life was saved by the practice of natural hygiene.

He’s the author of many books including Your Natural Diet, Self-Healing Power and Living Nutrition magazine. He’s organizing Raw-stock III, the world’s premiere raw food lifestyle festival which is taking place in California August 26th thru the 29th. So, welcome, Dave.

Dave Kline:Thanks, Mike. That’s a pretty good build up.

Mike:Thanks. I think we should start out talking about the Rawstock festival. What inspired you and Dr. Doug Graham to put on the first Rawstock?

Dave:Well, I wanted to put a bit of fun into my life and some may know that we put on two Raw Passion jamborees at my friend’s farm, Macdonald’s Farm where I used to actually live for a couple of years and it was very informal, out in the apple orchard and just in the heat of the summer and had a lot of great educational talks by all the great educators that I know.

I don’t think we had any music back then but it was just great to put on your own festival and to have all your best friends there performing and to see all the people come from all over the West Coast and a few from other parts of the world just show up and commune together, you know, break bread so to speak and get to meet new friends and just have a place to hang out in nature and eat cold, ripe fruit and vegetables.

So, I think it was 3 years ago that Doug and I were sitting on the ground listening to someone speak at the last jamboree and he whispered this little word into my ear. He whispered the word “Rawstock”.

My eyes rolled back and it sort of blew my mind and I said, “Doug, we’re not ready to do Rawstock next year.” I had envisioned 10,000 people and this huge, fabulous festival. He just planted the seed and I said, “No, we’re not ready to do that.”

But after the festival, a week or 10 days went by and I couldn’t stop thinking about doing a Rawstock. Then one morning, I e-mailed Doug and I said, “Doug, we’re going to do Rawstock next year.”

And we did it, we did it at Ocean Song and we lost several thousand dollars but we enjoyed every moment of it and then we went back to the farm last year and just had an absolutely wonderful event. Two hundred people showed up, two tents and we had about 30 speakers and a staff of about 30 people and everybody just was absolutely glowing. I think we just did an absolutely awesome job, the logistics there was just fantastic.

And this year, we’re going way beyond. We just have the most amazing musical acts showing up. So what inspired me to do Rawstock was just to have fun and provide a stage for what I believe are the best raw food health educators in the world and so everybody could gather together and just have a really healthy time and get fresh figs, we just supply, you know, the raw fooders dream at Rawstock.

Mike:What’s unique about this festival in comparison to other raw food festivals?

Dave:Well, we teach only Natural Hygiene. All of our speakers are congruent. You won’t hear people giving different messages, there’s no conflicting information, and we’re all on the same page. We’re all academically trained, very well schooled in science and the health sciences and have a background, a lot of us, a clinical background in fasting.

We have four fasting doctors in our event and I believe that everybody who speaks at our event and presents at our event is an authentic example of true health. We are people who have detoxified and are following a close-to or totally 100% raw food diet and been sharing our hearts and our talents with people for many years and we all get along in harmony and it’s just absolutely wonderful, this energy that evolves from putting together an event with all these great souls.

So Rawstock is different from the other festivals. I’ve been to the Portland one a few times; that was just big and fabulous. Doug and I just pretty much designed it the way we wanted to do it so we can enjoy not only the education and the people but a lot of great music.

Doug and I are sort of amateur guitarists and we formed our own band, the Raw Passion band. My little secret is that’s my favorite part of the year when we all get together and we practice and play our favorite tunes from the 60’s and 70’s. I guess we haven’t grown up from that era and we just have a blast expressing our talent.

Mike:Some people have mentioned that it might be a little too expensive. What would you say to them?

Dave:Yes, we’ve heard that for years. I grew up in the health food movement in the 80’s and 90’s and a lot of us are not working corporate jobs and don’t have a lot of money left over but we want good education and we want to gather together. Doug and I are pretty driven, type A kind of people who want to put on the best educational event possible.

So we have all these amazing educators, about 15 of them, giving all these amazing talks and I think it’s the highest quality education in one weekend that you can get anywhere in the world about health and life, really.

So we’re pretty much the most top notch, high quality educational seminar for that part of the Rawstock festival and providing a setting where people can actually see what a healthy lifestyle is about, eating just whole, unprocessed fruits and veggies in their natural state.

Plus we go way out of the way to provide all kinds of comforts and features from fitness, games, volley ball, Tai Chi, yoga, massage, all kinds of great features which makes for a magical experience where you just don’t get any place else. So there’s lots of magic in the air at the Rawstock festival and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow.

We need to find a new site for next year because the farm is not going to be available for us to do it there and hopefully we can find a new, bigger site and maybe even extend it to 3 or 4 days of full activities and maybe see 5 or 10 thousand people show up some day.

Mike:Do you have plans for the next one? Do you know when or where it will be held?

Dave:Well, it will probably be in July or August of next year. We started the search around here in SonomaCounty, I want it to be within a few minutes drive of where I live because I have all the supplies and materials and I have to shuttle back and forth a lot during the week preparing up to the event.

So we’ve looked at a lot of camps and other sites around here and haven’t found any yet. So I’m going to be exploring, connecting with some sustainable farmers in the county here and see if they have some land and are open to the idea or keen to the idea so we can have it out in a farm kind of setting surrounded by trees.

Mike:Do you have anything new in store for Rawstock III?

Dave:Yeah, we have a lot of stuff. We obviously know that people don’t want the same presenters and acts every year saying the same thing and there is obviously just a wealth of really talented people in the raw health world. And it’s just totally neat to connect with all of these special spirits with all kinds of awesome talents in the field of music and acting and physical culture and education.

We’ve brought in a few really fantastic people with different talents and I’ll be glad to tell you about a few of them. So far, one of my favorites is Dr. Henry Anderson. You’ll read about him in the next issue of Living Nutrition, not the next one actually but the one that is coming out in the winter.

Henry is the founder and chancellor of City University Los Angeles. He’s an amazing man. I’m not going to give away his age but you would not believe, well, this man is beyond being a senior citizen. He’s dynamic.

He’s been a fruitarian ever since he heard about T. C. Frye about 15 or 20 years ago and he’s just absolutely brilliant man whose mission in life is to empower people who show high promise to go on to great things in life through his university and other programs. He’s a really hilarious speaker.

He’s one of the finest educators you’ll ever meet and he just came back from Oxford, England where he was in a round table of 40 university leaders from around the world who were invited to discuss the topic of higher education.

He is going to discuss how he laid on this entire panel the natural hygiene trip and it’s just amazing the courage he has to actually present this information and challenge everybody there, just blind side them and tell them they need to rethink the way they’re thinking about disease and health.

And after he did it, he sent me an e-mail from England and said, “They were actually a bit interested.” So Henry is just a delight to be around.

We’re also bringing Dr. Samuel Mielcarski from Georgia. He just got his doctorate in physical therapy and he’ll be teaching about physical posture, movement, hygiene and those sorts of things.

We also have our local friend here, Luke Snyder, who is a teacher and also a permaculture expert. And he’ll be teaching us how to make a better worm box and he’ll be teaching about ecological design and gardening. He’s just a really charming and earthy fellow.

There’s Charlie Abel. If you saw, I think, a couple of Living Nutrition’s back then you’ve seen the amazing physique on Charlie Abel. He’s raw fitness trainer. He made the transition to a 100% raw food diet very quickly about 2 years ago and he has a local gym here which he is actually selling and he and his wife are moving to Hawaii.

But he’s been a fitness trainer and he’s been doing it on 100% raw food and he just placed 3rd in a body building competition in San Francisco. He’s got the most, I think he’s there; I’ve never seen or heard of anybody that’s got a better, more muscular physique for a raw fooder. He just absolutely has a wonderful body and it’s just a great testimonial to the assertion that you can build as much muscle as you want on this diet.

For some, it’s not easy, like myself, for some it takes a long time. But between Doug Graham and Charlie Abel and Kenny Lauher coming, you’ll see some really strong, muscular bodies on 100% raw fooders.

Let’s see, who else is coming? Ashenon is a really lively, earthy, reggae, tribal, funky kind of band from New YorkState. They played at the two other festivals, at least the one that was in New YorkState. And they’re bringing their 35 foot, solar-powered bus out here and they are really going to liven the place up with some really great dance music. They’re going to play every single night.

We’re going to have Cecilia Benjumea who’s a fantastic young raw food chef who makes really healthy and beautiful cuisine and will do the raw food demo on the second day. She was featured in the last Living Nutrition and also should be in the new one, too.

And also, about two weeks ago, I was really excited. I got an e-mail from out of the blue from a lady I had never heard from before. She was in Bali and on her way to Italy and she said she was coming to Rawstock and wanted to know if she could play crystal bowls. Her name is AwaHoshi Kavan and she’s pretty well renowned. If you look at her website, there’s a link from the Rawstock site.

You’ll see that she’s an elegant lady who plays the crystal bowls and I think she has an advanced degree in education and she’s a healing kind of performer and I’m really looking forward to that because we’re going to have her play in the orchard like after 8 pm where dusk is creeping in and it’s just absolutely wonderful to be out there in the orchard as the moon is rising and we’re under the stars. It will be a really beautiful hearing experience that I’m really looking forward to.

And just one more and we’ll move on to the next question. Maybe some callers would like to ask some questions. We are also bringing in Hiep Trinh who’s a fantastic Tai Chi teacher. He’s originally from Viet Nam, I believe. I experienced one of his classes at our natural hygiene symposium last year back in Florida and he’s just a marvelous Tai Chi teacher.

So we’ve got a lot of really awesome people coming in. Oh, Bryan Yamamoto is going to teach yoga. He’s an absolutely wonderful model of poise and just really magnificent health. He’s from the EastBay out here in California.

So that’s about it, Mike. I guess I could go on a bit more but...

Mike:Thank you, Dave. That’s a great lineup. Amazing. Very exciting. Would you like to open up the line for questions right now?

Dave:Yeah, why don’t we take a few questions and then I know you’ve got a few more questions you want to ask.

Mike:Okay, if you have any background noise on your line, you can hit *6 to mute. And *6 will bring you back in or mute.

All right, I’ll open the lines and just say your name and ask your question. If you have any questions, go ahead and ask them.

Michelle:Has anybody ever had an issue with having black tongue? After eating, I’ve been eating raw for about 3 months.

Dave:What is your name?

Michelle:Michelle from New York.

Dave:Hi, Michelle. A black tongue. Are you detoxing heavily? Is there mucus and junk coming out of your system or is the flesh just black?

Michelle:Not really. It’s not really; the only thing is that it’s dark. You know, it’s not even like thrush. But it does seem to be coming from within; it doesn’t seem to be like a staining because I eat raw cacao, you know, so I thought that could be part of it but it’s just like really dry and black almost, brownish-black.

Dave:I haven’t eaten hardly any raw cacao so I don’t know if that could be an effect. I don’t really have an answer to your question but I refer people that have questions that I don’t have a clue to my friends, Dr. Doug Graham and Tim Trader. So one of them will definitely answer your question pretty soon so if you want to e-mail me at , I will connect you with them and I’m sure they will help figure this thing out.

Michelle:Okay.

Ron:This is Ron in Portland and I have a question. I’m having some bad issues with detox. And when I started out doing raw food, I was doing 100% and I felt great and then after a couple of weeks, I was real hard to get out of bed. Actually, my back from my neck to my waist jammed up, I would say.

I was having a ton of problems that way and after about 4 days of absolutely feeling miserable, I ate some raw food, because I had no idea what was going on, I couldn’t believe it was going on like in the way that it was, I ate some raw food and the next day I started feeling better.

So I’ve been trying to figure out, trying to analyze what I was eating to see how I could have done things better. Right now I’m on mixed raw and cooked, (We have a lot of background.) and I’m having a lot of skin breaking out including into my mouth. What do I do?

Dave:Well, as a health counselor, I’m...

Ron:What would you do? How about that?

Dave:Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do. As a health counselor, what I do is go through a questionnaire; it’s about 4 pages where you tell me your health background, your past diet, your current diet and a lot of other little things or major things like “Are you working full time? How many hours of sleep do you get? What has your diet been like?”

I mean, some people eat 100% raw food diet but they’re way overboard on some kind of foods, say nuts and seeds or nut butter or avocado or something like that and it’s really affecting their health in a negative way.

So I would need to know a lot more information about what you were eating before, what are your height, weight and age? Some people, you know, actually need to lose 50 pounds. Some people are working a stressful 9 to 5 job which is actually taking up 90% of their day and their body doesn’t even have the energy to keep itself balanced when they start on a raw food diet which triggers a total housecleaning.

So for some people who have had compromised health by eating a pretty bad diet which may be high in fried foods or a lot of meat and dairy and other mucus forming foods, a good portion of those people have a really difficult detox. It really can be impossible to do if you’re working a full time job.