Today’s Healthy Living will be presented in Persian, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

Welcome, marvelous viewers, to this week’s edition of Healthy Living, the first in a two-part series featuring the dietary and nutritional views of Iranian-American, raw vegan physician Dr. Zarin Azar of San Diego, California USA.

Dr. Azar specializes in gastroenterology, the study and treatment of the digestive tract and hepatology, the study and treatment of the liver. Besides her training in these nutrition-related specialties, Dr. Azar has 25-years of self study in the area and is a Life Member of the National Health Association and a Life Partner of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), both of which advocate the vegan lifestyle.

She is certified by the PCRM in the use of the plant-based diet in clinical practice and by Our Place International in natural care of the body and fasting. Let’s now find out why she chose to adopt the plant-based diet.

Since when did you become vegetarian and what led you to become vegetarian?

I have been vegetarian about 20 years. What happened was, when I came to the US I started to eat pizza and hamburgers and such things. Gradually I noticed that every day my size was increasing and not only that, but I also felt it affected my energy level. I was low in energy, I did not feel well.

Eventually, after two to three years, I thought to myself that this wasn’t how I wanted to continue living, and from that moment I started to read more and more about nutrition.

The first thing I did was to stop eating red meat. Like many other people, I thought that chicken and fish were better than red meat. Then I reduced the chicken and fish in my diet and eventually I started to do sports and physical exercise. I was following that process and also reading about nutrition, and at the same time, I encountered the issues with animals.

I have to say, although I became a vegetarian because of health reasons, animal issues became important to me, and in fact they became a fundamental issue in my life. And I really got to know the suffering that animals have to endure, the way they are raised, the way they get them to become fat, so that they would be consumed by us humans. Since that time, I became a strict vegan. I became a vegan and have been a vegan ever since.

As a raw vegan, Dr. Azar consumes only unprocessed, uncooked plant-based foods.

Followers of this diet do not heat food above 46 degrees Celsius as they believe this destroys its enzymes. They also believe that cooking decreases the nutritional value and “life force” of food.

What are the advantages of a raw diet over a vegetarian diet?

A raw diet enables us to be able to grow our own food, anywhere we live, in our gardens, or if we live in an apartment, on our window sills. By planting our own fruits in our gardens, we can drastically reduce all the transportation of our food, from far away locations.

A raw diet makes us very healthy, and as a result we do not have to resort to doctors and drugs so much and therefore it creates a revolution in the field of medicine. Leading a natural life helps our psychological health, so we can look at our lives, and re-assess all our beliefs and principles of our lives which we follow without even thinking about them, and then put them aside.

So, I thought and realized that many of the much needed changes for the benefit of humanity, animals and our natural world would be achieved simply by changing to a raw vegan diet (Right). And my experience, both from my personal life, as well as from my dealings with my patients, has shown that this is a very good diet.

No doubt, a vegan diet is very good and is superior to an omnivore or a meat diet, but because by cooking food, many of the nutrients of plant-based food and indeed other kinds of food are destroyed, so with a raw diet we can obtain more nutrients for our body while consuming much less food. So, I believe that a raw vegan diet is the final stage in the continuum of human nutrition, human health, and preservation of our environment and animal lives.

So, as a medical expert who fully understands the human digestive system, do you consider a raw vegan diet as the best diet for human health?

No doubt, no doubt about it. In my opinion, not only our social system is not healthy from a dietary point of view, which promotes the inappropriate diet for our physical health, but also from a mental and emotional viewpoint, the inappropriate diet causes many problems.

Therefore, in my view, an illness is not just a physical health issue. I think humans must fundamentally change their lifestyles, their world viewpoints, their beliefs in themselves, their beliefs about their health, their bodies’ strength, their belief that Nature has the cure for all illnesses.

After this brief message, we’ll hear more from Dr. Zarin Azar. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

A vegetarian diet and the raw vegan diet are returning to humans’ natural diet. Whether you are pregnant, you are old, for your children of any age, whatever illness you might have, whatever your doctor has diagnosed, the raw vegan diet is the best diet for you.

Welcome back to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television featuring our interview with raw vegan gastroenterologist and hepatologist Dr. Zarin Azar. Dr. Azar is active in the field of public health and is very much involved in the initiatives of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

As a Life Partner of the organization, she works on important national legislation such as the Child Nutrition Act that affects school nutrition programs, makes presentations on heart health and diet to community groups, and writes many articles on wellness. Now let’s learn more about Dr. Azar’s treatment methods.

Dr. Azar, have you had cases where, in order to treat a patient, you recommended that they try a raw diet?

Oh, definitely, always. In fact this is the first option of my treatment methods. All the patients who visit me, I recommend the raw diet to them. Of course, this depends on the illness, depends on the patient who comes to me, and the lifestyle and depends on their diet in the past.

No doubt, my recommendation is that if they can, they should become a raw vegan, and if this is not possible for them, I strongly recommend to them, for the transition period, they should become vegetarian. And if possible, they should try an 80% raw vegan diet. Let me repeat here, that for each illness, there is an appropriate diet. For instance, a patient with a cholesterol problem will be different than a colitis patient.

I recommend a special diet for a colitis patient, such as particular fruits, which are not so stimulating, while for a patient with high cholesterol, or for a diabetic patient, the dietary advice will be different; for a diabetic person, more vegetables and for a high cholesterol patient a different vegetarian diet will be recommended. But overall, my advice is that patients should adopt a vegetarian diet and, at least an 80 to 85% raw vegan diet.

Yes. Alongside recommending a raw vegan diet, do you also prescribe conventional drugs?

Never. People come to me, and in fact they are already on prescription drugs. I do my best to help them to gradually come off these drugs. For some illnesses, for instance, like high cholesterol, I help them to give up drugs immediately.

For an illness such as colitis, some patients come to me who take steroids and prednisone, or even heavier drugs, which put their immune system to sleep. In fact, for such patients, we try to gradually stop their medications by lifestyle changes and dietary changes, and patients themselves are aware of my treatment methods.

How about special diseases like cancer? Do you think a raw vegan diet helps cure these diseases?

I am not aware of any illness which a raw vegan diet cannot help. I cannot say this can completely cure them, because that will depend on the progress of the disease, and also on the past diet of the patients and how much they follow the new diet. But I need to make one point clear. I do not view food as a drug.

Food is not a drug; in fact, our body does not have any need for drugs. The body is intelligent. Humans’ bodies as well as animals’ bodies, plants’ bodies, and in general, nature are intelligent, and this natural intelligence knows how to self heal and repair any illness, or bodily injury.

Therefore my point is not that in order to be healed we should avoid drugs and replace them with plants and food; the point is that we need to create a system whereby our bodies have more chances to utilize their own natural power, and heal the illness. What I mean is our bodies are fighting day and night with various symptoms.

About cancer, day and night, the cancer cells are being produced in our bodies, and from the metabolic activities in our bodies, waste material is produced. But our intelligent bodies consciously know how to cleanse and eradicate these cancerous cells.

Our bodies know how to get rid of the resulting waste material as the result of the metabolic activities in our body, which are harmful and expelled via our kidneys, as feces, through sweating, through our mouth, and our skin.

Do we need to use vitamin supplements in addition to our vegetarian or raw vegan diet?

Whoever asks me this question, I always answer that, “Well I don’t think someone who is vegetarian needs any dietary supplements, but someone who is a meat eater, most definitely needs food supplements.”

You see, as I mentioned before, vegetarian and raw vegan diets are the primary diet for humans. The point whether we should take or not take a particular food supplement tablet depends on the viewpoint, about attitude toward food. If we have a good diet, if we are vegetarians, if 80 to 85% of our food is from fresh vegetables and fruits, and if the rest of our lifestyle is healthy, there is no need to take any drug or medicine.

Dr. Azar, we deeply appreciate your sound nutritional advice and are happy that your patients are able to live healthier, more active lives after adopting the raw vegan diet. Respected viewers, please join us again next Monday on Healthy Living when we’ll present more of our engaging interview with the wise and knowledgeable Dr. Zarin Azar.

To contact Dr. Zarin Azar, please email: drzarinazar@yahoo.com

Thank you for your company on today’s program. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May your life be filled with happiness, grace and love.