If I had been told as a child that I would go on to write a book about diet and nutrition, not to mention that I have been doing a health radio show for over 36 years, I would have thought whoever told me that was crazy. When we lived in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I ate anything with a face or mother except dead, rotting pig bodies, although we ate bacon (as if all other rotting meat bodies were miraculously clean). Things were no different throughout my high school and college years. In fact, my diet change didn’t happen until I was 30.
To put things in perspective, after graduating from Weequahic High School and before attending Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job as a butcher. I was the delivery man and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness or perception as no change ever occurred despite the horrors I witnessed almost daily.
After graduating from Seton Hall with a degree in accounting, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was essentially a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a “plastic” community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the superficiality finally got to me. I told my wife that I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear that she needed to be close to her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and went to Colorado.
I was living with a woman in Aspen in late 1974 when one day she said, “Let’s go vegetarian.” I have no idea what made me say it, but I said, “Okay”! At this point I went to the freezer, pulled out about $100 worth of frozen dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mom who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week, and then the bride broke up with another man.
So here I was a vegetarian for a few weeks and didn’t really know what to do, how to cook, or how to basically prepare anything. For about a month I lived on carrot sticks, celery sticks and yogurt. Luckily, when I became vegan in 1990, it was an easy and natural step. Anyway, as I was walking around the town of Aspen, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called The Little Kitchen.
Let me back up a little. It was April 1975, the snow was melting and the drains of Ajax Mountain filled the streets with knee-deep mud. Well, Aspen was great for skiing, but walking was a shame when the snow melted.
I was ready to break up and needed somewhere warmer. I’ll explain this in more detail in a moment.
But now back to “The Little Kitchen.” Knowing that I would be leaving Aspen and essentially becoming a new vegetarian, I needed help. So I marched into the restaurant, told them about my plight and asked them if they would teach me to cook. In return, I told them I would wash dishes and empty their trash. Then they asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, “Let’s make a deal. You do our taxes and we’ll feed you too.” So over the next few weeks I did her taxes, washed her dishes, emptied the trash, and learned as much as I could.
But as I said, the mud was bothering me. So I got a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was “Hawaii.” As I was looking through the book, I noticed that there was a small vegetarian restaurant in Lahaina, Maui called Mr. Natural’s. I immediately decided to go to Lahaina and work at Mr. Natural’s. To make a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.
So I’m working at Mr. Natural’s and learning all about my new eating style – it’s been great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch around 1 p.m. and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka’anapali and play volleyball while someone stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought I would be asked to stay and cook dinner. Well, one afternoon that’s exactly what happened; It was my turn. This posed a problem for me because I had gotten to the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and up the creek with virtually no paddle. Luckily, a friend of mine was sitting in the restaurant’s pavilion and I asked him if he could cook. He said the only thing he could cook were enchiladas. He said his enchiladas are bean and dairy free. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but he had to show me because it was my turn to make dinner.
Well, the boys came back from playing volleyball and I was asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; The owner wasn’t happy. I told him mine were bean and dairy free. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, “Did you expect less?” Apparently it was so good that it was the only dish on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen of them every night we had them on the menu, and people were walking around Lahaina broadcasting, “We’re having enchiladas at Natural’s tonight.” I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed and somehow I was drawn to a small health food store in Wailuku. I didn’t tell anyone that I was an accountant, but basically demoted myself to a truck driver. The people who ran the health food store had friends in similar stores and farms on many islands. I told them that if they could organize and start a business, they could probably capture the state. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and “Down to Earth” was born. Down to Earth became the islands’ largest health food chain, and I served as its chief financial officer and co-manager of its largest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I began doing a weekly radio show to introduce people to a vegetarian diet and stop them from killing innocent creatures. I still do this show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors who don’t compromise my honesty. What was a little troublesome was the fact that I was forced to get a master’s degree in nutrition science to silence all the doctors who asked about my qualifications.
Through this radio show, through endless research, I was able to see the corruption that existed in the big food industry, big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industry and government agencies. This information, as incomprehensible as it may be, made me realize how broken our healthcare system is. This is discussed in more detail in the introduction and throughout the book, and once you have read through the book you will see it clearly and hopefully it will inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, became board certified as a sports injury massage therapist, and began traveling the world with a group of people making a martial arts film. After doing this for about four years, I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of the best fitness clubs in Hawaii. There I met the love of my life, with whom I have been together since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She said, “If you want to be with me, you have to stop working on naked women.” So I went back into accounting and was CFO of a large construction company for many years.
When I lived in Newark as a toddler, I had no idea what a “chicken,” an “egg,” a “fish,” a “pig,” or a “cow” was. My diet plan was forced on me by my parents, just as theirs was forced on them by their parents. By the grace of God, I was able to put things into perspective, improve my health, and increase my awareness.
The path I started down in 1975 eventually led me to write my book, A Sensible Diet for a Mad World. We hope that the information contained herein is insightful, motivating and inspiring and encourages you to make different decisions. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course of action. I hope that through the grace of the many friends and personalities I have met along the way, you will have a better idea of which path is best for you, not only for your health but also for your consciousness.
Last but not least: After the vaccination, I developed asthma as a child, which plagued me throughout my life. In 2007 I was exposed to the organic sulfur crystals which cleared up my asthma in 3 days and hasn’t recurred for over 10 years. This is just the tip of the iceberg and has helped people cure stage four cancer, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraines, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis and more. Due to the detoxifying effect through the release of oxygen that penetrates and heals all cells in the body, parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals and all the other crap that is forced into the environment by big industry are removed.
For more information, visit www.healthtalkwaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
