Know Any Literary Animal Lovers?

Hi there PureJeevan readers! We wanted to let you know that Jim's new novel CHROO is available on Amazon. It's a crazy adventure involving a billionaire heiress, her Chihuahua BFF ("Chroo") and a host of human and animal characters. Find out more on Amazon! Here are some links:




Every day I receive countless emails filled with questions about the raw food diet, my own success with reducing nearly 100 pounds and regaining health, and pleas for help by many who feel like they've hit bottom and there's no way up. Some emails have me in tears, because I can completely relate to what many of you are going through. I feel your pain, frustration, desperation.

One thing I've always been good at is listening, truly listening to what others are saying (and being an empath allows me to know what some are saying, even when they many times aren't verbalizing it). Another thing I've always been good at is intuitively knowing how to help others who are asking for advice. Jim used to joke that he wanted me to go into business running an advice column because ever since he's known me, I've been the person everyone comes to for help and advice. So, when I receive so many emails asking for help, it feels natural for me to reach out and connect with those needing help. It's what I do best well, that and spreading love!

Hi all-? Jim here from Pure Jeevan with our next eipsode of "Know Your Food."? This is "Episode 2 (salvaged): Turnips."? As far as that "salvaged" parenthetical... This relates to the story I told in our first episode -- about how we're planning to upgrade our video equipment, audio equipment, video editing software, and more. I hope you like it, though. Still working on getting them down to 3-4 minutes. This one's just over 5 minutes. If you're wondering how Wendi became strong as Xena Warrior Princess, you'll have to watch this vid!

So, to summarize:? Turnips are great for the root portion (the turnips, proper) or the greens. (Here at Pure Jeevan, we like to use turnips as shells for rawvioli, or simply sliced and served with a little salt. The greens are great juiced!)? Turnips are starchy, but not as heavy as potatoes, and are a great Vitamin C source. They contain fiber, manganese, pantothenic acid, thiamine, potassium, folic acid, copper, niacin, B6, E, riboflavin, and more. The greens of course have calcium, and are a particularly great source of folate (esp. important for pregnant women) and many of the vitamins and minerals listed previously, along with Vitamin A.

And here's the conclusion of Wendi's San Francisco travelogue:

That evening we met up with Carolyn, a long-time friend since college, who was our lovely host for a few days. Carolyn has a gift with cats, which was a real treat for KDcat to see. Do you know how you can teach dogs to sit and give kisses? Well, Carolyn has taught one of her rescued cats to do the same thing! He *really* sits and *really* gives kisses on command! WOW!

Carolyn showed us all around the San Franciso and Berkeley areas, bringing KDcat to a thrift shop (she's been having fun popping into random thrift shops to see what she can find) and a fun shop called Ancient Ways, stopping by some Indian shops so I could pick up some more bindis and some ground coriander for a dish I made while visiting, checking out the Berkeley campus area, and taking us shopping for organic foods.

Today's post isn't specifically about raw foods. But, we wanted to post a few videos highlighting some interesting research by an Italian doctor named Tullio Simoncini, who just might be onto something HUGE! Dr. Simoncini treats certain cancer patients with ordinary sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), based on his premise that cancer is a fungal problem and that a solution of baking soda is anti-fungal. Naturally, he's been vilified by the medical establishment for making such a seemingly simplistic claim. But, what if he's right?

Here at Pure Jeevan, we're very much into health research -- not so much with an aim to cure any specific disease or ailment, but rather to understand ways in which our bodies can become what we like to call unbalanced, as well as the ways in which we might return our bodies to proper balance, when necessary. In this way, I suppose that we, like many in the natural health world, feel that the body is amazingly capable of healing itself (in many circumstances) as long as the body is able to find a favorable state from which it can properly do what it naturally wants to -- which is to return the body to an optimal state of health.

Medical doctors don't buy into this theory very much. ?However, it's certainly ironic how, where certain areas of standard medical practice are concerned, what I described above is exactly what doctors do. Take something like a broken bone, for example. A doctor does not normally attempt to surgically repair the bone itself. Rather, the standard and time-honored practice is to set the bone (say, with a cast), and then to let your body heal the break naturally, on its own, making those skeletal connections as only the imponderably complex, ever-evolving wisdom of the human body can facilitate. (True, doctors do often intervene these days with surgery for broken bones. But, their aim there is mainly to position the bones for proper healing, and/or to do things like insert pins in an attempt to improve functionality after healing. Either way, the procedure here still relies on the body's ability to eventually heal the problem.) Standard medical knowledge in this area is without question outstanding -- and this is why most people in the natural health world have little problem with going to see a medical doctor for emergency treatment.

Last night I dreamed of meandering through an unfamiliar cityscape, following some lonely sidewalk next to a river at night, feeling particularly sad and miserable beneath dim yellow street lights. I wore a black suit, carried a highball glass, and was absolutely drunk!

Having crossed the river, I soon realized (even in my dream-drunken state) that I'd been wandering aimlessly. Feeling rather pathetic, I decided to walk back across the river and sober up in a casino that I knew was there. Drunk and depressed, I figured I'd just sit in front of a slot machine for a few hours.

If you ve been a Pure Jeevan family member for a while, you know we don t always focus on food in regards to health. Health isn t only about the food you put into your body; it s about so much more. We are mental, spiritual, emotional, physical beings who thrive best when we have a balance in all those areas of our lives. Humans are, for the most part, social beings. If we lack something as vital as social interaction, we become out of balance. As young children, our primary social interaction is through direct contact with our parents and close family members. As we mature, almost all of us develop friendships with individuals outside of our family s social circle. Friendship is essential in helping us maintain a healthy balanced life.

How we meet friends, and how we interact with them, has been changing over the years as online social media communities have been created. For those living a raw food lifestyle and using the Internet to connect with like-minded others, you have no doubt realized there is a strong and growing virtual raw food community online. It s a large tribe, of sorts, where we are able to wander from website to website, meeting others and creating friendships together. (Be sure to join Pure Jeevan s Facebook page to connect with other Pure Jeevan family members.)

We began this series with one possible psychological explanation of obesity, moved on to a possible philosophical explanation, and will now cover one that could be both of those, or could find classification within the emotional and/or spiritual realms. ?Wendi has often told me of hearing Dr. Gabriel Cousens speak in Sedona, Arizona, a few years ago. One remark in particular stuck with her. This may be a slight paraphrase, but Dr. Cousens said:

"There's never enough food to feed a hungry soul."

As we all know, physical hunger happens when our bodies need food -- when our stomachs are literally empty and aching for fuel to sustain our life. But, what about non-physical types of "emptiness"? Surely, we experience a kind of hunger in these cases as well.

Following up on yesterday's post, today we're going to take a look at the "Clean 15." These are the 15 produce items that, according to research done by the Environmental Working Group, contain the least amount of residual pesticides (even though they're still grown using pesticides).

What this boils down to is: IF you're going to eat conventionally grown produce, these items will harm you much less than those we covered yesterday. So, here's the list, and then we'll try to come up with a sentence to help you (and us) remember everything:

Let's take a quick look at a few dessert pictures, then compare and contrast, shall we First up is a small slice of some normal pastry:

Looks sinful, right It seems to proudly display its bready crust, its gooey chocolate center, some sort of butter-rich top layer coated with lovable little bits and bobs, and a liberal sprinkling of confectioner's sugar to make the whole thing cute as a wintry scene from one of those holiday specials hosted by the claymation likeness of Burl Ives. I'm sure it's delightfully rich, too. A tad small, though, eh ? It's probably all anyone can take of such decadence without worrying about clogged arteries or putting in extra time on the tread mill for the next three days.

Thinking of Writing a "My Raw Story" Piece for Pure Jeevan's Blog

Fantastic! We d love to consider running your raw story to help inspire others. Please know that the "My Raw Story" series isn't only about success with weight loss on the raw food diet. It's about an overall life change that happens when a raw food diet is followed. We want to hear how your life was dramatically changed by adopting a raw food lifestyle. Below are some guidelines to help you submit your story:

It's been an interesting week for us here. We've looked at a handful of ways that people may either become obese, or sustain an obese body -- all largely for reasons outside of dietary intake. The three situations we looked at included maintaining weight as a defense mechanism (Tuesday), becoming obese through worrying about becoming obese (Wednesday), and obesity as basically a physical manifestation of a non-physical longing (Thursday).

Without a doubt, these are just three out of hundreds of possible non-physical contributors to poor health. The idea was merely to start a thread on these things, opening people's minds to possibilities that perhaps they'd never seriously considered.