The True Test of Will: My Week as a Raw Food Vegan II:

As the week went on however, my taste buds came out of hiding from semester of salty campus food and the flavors of the food began to come out. By the end of the week, I found myself relishing the complex flavors of the juicy sprouts. The last couple of meals I was unable to finish a whole plate without feeling full.

The premise of a raw food diet is to eat food that is living and uncooked. Almost all of the seeds, nuts, beans, grains and lentils at Hippocrates were soaked and sprouted – allowing them to germinate and begin processes to alter their internal chemistry. In other words, the food is literally alive at the time of consumption.

The program not only fed us healthy food, but subjected us to a regiment of classes on how to take care of ourselves. It was a cruel and unusual joke that they told us to drink water all day and then subjected us to two hour classes without bathroom breaks.

Hippocrates Co-Director Brian Clement PhD L.N.C. walks and talks like a stereotypical self-help opportunist. He wears a crisp suit and tie with hair spray with a trimmed goatee. He is a master of the stage, and the patrons of his classes seemed allured by his presence.

He said that cooking food kills helpful enzymes and chemically alters nutrients into a form that is harder for the body to process. In contrast, living foods contain more nutrients, enzymes, oxygen, and bio-electricity.

While I would personally like to debate some of the finer points of Brian’s lectures (for example, he cited a common misconception that humans only use 3 percent of their brains, any neurologist will tell you otherwise), I agree with many of his fundamental arguments.

He said that we humans have strayed from the diet of our ancestors. We have altered our foods and eating habits so severely in the last hundred years that evolution is unable to keep up.

Food and drug companies are pumping foods full of cheap additives to make products more profitable. At the same time, the companies we work for are training us to spend more time working and less time taking care of ourselves which is more profitable for them at least in the short-term.

Overall, an unhealthy person is more profitable than a healthy one.

“Sometimes I think that what I do is important,” Brian said. “But then I realize that I’m teaching grown adults how to eat right and take care of themselves. There’s something fundamentally wrong with that.”

He also said that food is not a religion, and people should not judge each other as sinner or saint based on what they choose eat. Studies show that for the first time in history, people over 50 years old are actually healthier than those under 30.

The program also included a daily dosage of juices. We had 16 oz of “green drink” three times a day, which consisted mostly of cucumber, celery, and sprout juices. When we fasted on Thursday to accelerate the detoxification process, I was able to go all day on the juices alone – hardly getting hungry at all.

Wheatgrass juice was also taken daily as an important healing agent. It tasted like lawnmower mulch, but had a sweet and refreshing aftertaste (I overheard other people saying that store-bought wheatgrass juice is bitter and hard to drink). I found it to be a great stimulant – almost like a shot of espresso that lasted almost all day. Once, I took it at six in the evening and it kept me up past midnight.

Brian said the nutritional and medicinal properties of wheatgrass were not discovered by science, but by instinct. Hippocrates founder Ann Wigmore observed that cats and dogs ate grass when they are sick, so she did the same to recover from her own illness. She placed several kinds of grass in front of neighborhood pets and observed that they would consistently sniff the other grasses and then eat the wheat grass.

Decades later, scientists are finding evidence that wheatgrass is an excellent blood purifier, cleanser and detoxifier. Hippocrates is the only natural health organization to have large amounts of scientific blood test data on its patients showing significant improvements in illnesses and cancer because of wheatgrass treatment, Brian said.

Wheatgrass can also be taken rectally, where it helps colon health and is absorbed into the body more quickly and efficiently. They gave us a class on how to perform daily enemas and wheatgrass injections and then passed out enema bags to everyone. My sister held up hers to me and declared, “I was OK until THIS.”

I decided to go through with it for the sake of science. I’d come this far and felt I had to go along with the program 100 percent to see if it worked or not. After the initial unpleasantness of the enema (I’ll spare you the details), I felt quite good. The rectal wheatgrass injection gave an energy boost comparable to a double mocha, but it was more mellow and longer in duration.

The wheatgrass and sprouts are grown in trays on-site at the Hippocrates greenhouse, and they gave us instructions on how to grow our own. Obviously, this is exponentially cheaper than paying $10 a pound for the stuff at a natural foods store. Also, growing your own eliminates the need for environmentally harmful plastic packaging and the carbon emissions associated with shipping foods from places like Canada or Mexico.

The program also included a series of therapies at the spa. They zapped me with a series of infrared, electromagnetic, and crystal energies that I will never understand. What I did understand, was the Swedish massage, which was nothing short of divine. The masseuse pressed her fingers hard into my neck and shoulders, which were hard as wood.

“This is where you keep your stress,” she said merrily.
“Oh,” I said. “I was wondering where I put that.”

(Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!!)