- Frederic's Update: Escaping the cold in Costa Rica

- Feature Article: Vegetarian Dog Lives 189 Years

- Q&A: Frederic Answers Reader's Questions (That's You!)

I’m writing this from an undisclosed location in Costa Rica, where I’ll be spending the next few months to escape the brutal Canadian winter.

“Undisclosed” because this little town is just too much of a gem, off-the-beaten-tracks kind of thing, and I don’t want the word to get out there too fast about it.

But if you’re really interested in moving to a tropical paradise one day, there’ll be a time and place where I can share this secret with you.

It seems that I left at the right time! When I left Canada, it was -4 Fahrenheit (-20 Celsius) at night, and now it seems with wind factor Montreal was -27 (or -33 in Celsius!) yesterday.

I honestly thought I could make it through the cold winter. I don’t know why I thought this year would be different, but I entertained the romantic notion that I would somehow get “into” winter sports and maybe enjoy it.

But I couldn’t. In fact, I have no interest in ever stepping on a ski slope in my life again!

But I’m not here just because it’s warmer. Lots of places are warmer, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to be there.

I really love Costa Rica. I love the people, I love the fruits, I love its Nature, its combination of expats and visitors of all kinds (from eco-loving hippies to conspiracy theorists wishing to “escape” the USA), and the rural, quiet pace of life.

I won’t be alone because lots of friends are visiting: my girlfriend of course, but also my brother and fellow raw-foodist Roger Haeske (check out his site at www.rogerhaeske.com)

In the middle of moving here, I also launched my course “How to Make a Living in the Natural Health Movement.” Things are doing great and we should fill all 50 student spots very soon.

If you’d like to start your own business, work from anywhere and spread the word about health and raw foods, I encourage you to check it out at:

www.fredericpatenaude.com/makealiving.html

Okay, that was a pretty long intro but I really have a jam-packed issue to present to you today!

Hope you like it.

If you have any comments, you can share them on my blog (www.fredericpatenaude.com/blog) or at www.replytofred.com

Yours for health and success,

Frederic

PS: Don’t forget to check out “How to Make a Living in the Natural Health Movement” at www.fredericpatenaude.com/makealiving.html

Vegetarian Dog Lives 189 Years

I was recently reading the story of a vegetable-eating dog who lived to the ripe age of 27, in dog years, or 189 in human years!

The dog "Bramble", a Chocolate Labrador, lived in the UK and held the Guinness World Record for being the oldest living dog.

What's most amazing about this story is that the dog actually lived on an exclusively vegetarian diet of rice, lentils and organic vegetables.

He ate once a day this vegetarian meal, and exercised a lot.

The owner of the dog was a vegan herself, and she just fed Bramble that big bowl of vegan fare every evening.

In my book "The Raw Secrets", I also published the story of another woman in San Diego, Karen Schechet, who fed her dogs a vegan, mostly raw diet that consisted of:

Breakfast: ripe fruits
Lunch: apple pieces mixed with dates
Dinner: cooked potatoes mashed with avocado and salad

Karen's dog lived to the age of 20, which is still 140 years in human years!

You might be wondering... aren't dogs carnivores?

They are indeed. But you should also know that carnivores are the shortest-lived animals in nature. Frugivores are the longest-lived ones.

When I was 20, I briefly worked for a company that sold high-end dog food.

One thing I learned there is that they knew of only one way to influence dog's longevity.

Can you guess what it was?

It's not just caloric restriction, as many people think, but it's mostly about lowering the protein content in the dog's diet, especially as they get older.

You could feed your dogs a low-protein diet and see them live a long time.

But this "dog diet" also works for humans! In fact, it works great for humans because we are not natural carnivores.

If you eat lots of protein, you might experience fast growth. But the downside is that you'll live a short life.

Just look at all the protein-guzzling body-builders. Ever heard of any of them reaching a venerable age?

Mike Mentzer, the famous body-builder, died at the age of 50 of heart disease. He was supposed to be an advocate of "healthy" living. Two days after his death, his brother Ray also died in his sleep.

Today children are fed a lot more protein then used to be natural for humans. They grow tall; they mature earlier, and die early.

A slow growth gives you the potential for a long-life. The later the onset of adolescence, the healthier and longer your life can be.

But still, every "expert" in the world will tell you not to feed your dogs a vegan diet, and certainly not to attempt to live on a low-fat, raw vegan diet yourself.

They also think that 45 is "old" and that if you live to be 70, you lived a long life.

But if you look at the model in nature, pretty much every animal lives around 5 to 7 times their growth period.

For humans, the normal growth period is 21 years (after that age, you generally won't grow any taller). According to this model, the normal lifespan of human beings should be between 105 and 147 years.

If a dog can live 189 years in human years, what makes you think we can't?

Yours for health and success,

Frederic

PS: By the way, if you want the full story on protein but also know exactly how avoid deficiencies on the raw food diet, check out the Raw Health Starter Kit. It includes all of my most important books, tools, and planners to make the raw food diet work. Check it out here:

http://www.fredericpatenaude.com/starterkit.html

“Make Passive Income in the Natural Health Movement” Want to start your own website? Generate passive income? Make a living doing what you love? Start a career in the natural health movement. Learn my complete system for creating passive income doing what you love. Click here to register

Frederic Answers Reader's Questions

Are Humans Supposed to Eat Meat?

Just a sincere legitimate question:

I have been reading a lot of respected sources, including Steve Pavlina and your own site, but there are also some respected sites that stipulate quite the contrary, that meat and fats are good for human health. One example are the Eskimos that live healthy on almost fatty meat and cite that in the glacial Era there where little fruits.

I have found compelling respected evidence with citations and references of *both* that humans are natural carnivorous and herbivorous.

Some sites/books even say that most of my calories should come precisely from fat

There are also comments that the meat ingestion was responsible for the growth and evolution of the human brain.

Please help me with this issue, as the two theories are quite opposite and cite the other not only of neutral but as dangerous.

How can I know which is right?

Sincerely,

Spencer

MY ANSWER:You seem like a honest health seeker, and in fact I remember clearly being exactly where you are right now.

Let’s take a look at the issue and see if you can understand my own point of view on this.

So the question is: are humans supposed to eat meat? And is our ideal diet high in fat or high in carbohydrates?

First, let’s start with the Eskimos. Although prior to the arrival of western civilizations they were living in pretty robust health, the Eskimos are not reputed to have a very high life expectancy.

The lowest figure I have heard was 35 years. The highest was not much higher than our current life expectancy.

On the other hand, the three, longest-lived cultures in the world known in the last 100 years have been:

The Vilcambaba in Ecuador, the Abkhasia in Russian, and the Hunzas in Pakistan.

All of these cultures, without exception, have lived on a low-fat diet with limited supply of meat and animal products.

As for the growth of the human brain, to me it’s completely ludicrous that this came from eating meat. The researchers who came up with that are lost in their own wonderland of romantic thinking about the strong hunter-gatherers and cave-men who dragged their female partners by the hair to their caves, and from whom we supposedly evolved.

Come on!

Just look at the model in nature.

The most intelligent of all apes are the ones that eat the most fruit. Bonobos are the most intelligent of all the great apes and they’re the one eating the most fruit and the least animal products.

It seems to me more obvious that fruit eating is has a direct relationship with intelligence in animal species, rather than meat eating.

After all, the carnivores are not necessarily the smartest creatures around, compared to the smart frugivores.

Think about it: an orangutan most have knowledge of over 150 species of fruit and plants to survive. It not only knows which fruit are in season, but can precisely time its eating patterns to specific trees in a rather large area where it lives. As one fruit tree goes out of season in one area, it knows that another variety somewhere else far away is about to go into season. And that without calendars!

To me being a frugivore in nature requires a lot more intelligence than hunting for meat. And that’s why I think our brain evolved.

Humans will survive on ANYTHING!

And all of the primitive diets are healthier than the standard-American-diet for a very good reason. They avoid four of the main culprits that make our own diet so bad. These are:

• Bread and gluten containing products
• Refined dairy products
• Caffeine
• Processed foods

Just put anyone on any diet that eliminates these categories of foods and they’ll get better, no doubt about it.

In my book the Raw Secrets, I describe in details the reasons why we are meant to eat a low-fat, high-fruit diet and how to best thrive on this diet.

You can find out more about this here:  http://www.fredericpatenaude.com/starterkit.html

Why not give it a try? Do you honestly believe that killing animals and eating their flesh is what humans are supposed to do to best thrive on?

What about the fact that our entire system is NOTHING like that of a carnivore or an omnivore. Our entire system matches that of the frugivore.

I will agree with you that the traditional, vegan diet which contains a lot of bread, wheat products, refined foods, soy and fat is not healthy.

This is not what I’m proposing here. I endorse a raw vegan diet composed mainly of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. For the details on how to make this diet work, check out the Raw Health Starter Kit:

http://www.fredericpatenaude.com/starterkit.html

If you need more scientific evidence on the animal products issue, read some well-researched books such as:

• The China Study
• Eat to Live

These are the two books I recommend. They’re not raw-food books but have some important information on the subject.