Diet for a New America

Prelude:
"I think what I really learned in all of this was to be true to myself, to be true to my inner voice. I began to see that we really do have the power. Our own lives really do make a difference. Just by being more conscious of the food that we eat, we can heal ourselves, we can heal the environment, we can heal this planet."


This is the story of  John Robbins who walked away from his  family fortune. Below is excerpted from his video, "Diet for a New America."

"When I was young, my family was very disappointed in me. My father had built a very successful business, Baskin Robbins and he groomed me to follow in his footsteps. As I began to mature my own conscience pulled   me in a different direction. My father had accomplished the American dream, yet I felt drawn to a deeper dream, a dream where society is at peace with its conscience because it lives with respect for life, with reverence for life.

And soon enough I left.  And I walked away from the ice-cream coned shaped swimming pool in our backyard (laughter) and the whole life style. I told my family I dd not want a life trust fund, that I didn't want any access or reliance on the family fortune. I really wanted to follow my integrity, follow the call of my conscience and just see what that would do. I had no idea but being young and reckless and a little flip inside, I felt like giving it a shot.

And so I left the family's empire and moved to a little island off the coast of British Columbia with my wife and we cleared land and we built the log cabin. We began to grow all our own food and we began to weave ourselves back into the web of life and trying to our dig roots down into the earth community and feel what that would be like. We lived on about $600 a year for about 7 years. It was a real pendulum swing, I am sure you can tell. (Laughter).

And my father and family..... I mean I cannot really understand his point, he thinks I am crazy. He worked so hard to attain that success and had done so and here I was walking away from it. He couldn't understand, I didn't understand him either, I  must admit.

I was sick physically. I had a form of polio as a child that left me for a time paralyzed  from the waist down. I had some fairly substantial health problems when I was growing up. And this led me to be very, very interested in how I could regain my health.

I explored and experimented with different diets. And I begun to look at what most of us eat in this culture and I begun to wonder what impact that has on our health. Heart attacks, certain cancers, osteoporosis, diabetes and major diseases of our society may be caused in part by what we eat.

One of the physicians who helped me to understand why is Dr. Michael Klaper."


Follow John Robbins fascinating story below -a series of 8 videos:

  

Care to share what you think of this "Diet For a New America?" What can we do collectively, knowing what we know now from this video?