John Roth, Healthiest Skier in Telluride, CO

This is Part I of my interview with N.D. John Roth. John is a naturopathic doctor and has logged more lifetime days on the Telluride ski area than anyone. John at 65 skis nothing but double-black-diamond bump runs, and leaves most local skiers half his age in the dust. John also runs everyday in the summer at high altitude as he lives at 9,000’. He enjoys running a half marathon through the mountains each summer and won his age group last summer. Here is the secret to John’s health—strict veganism.

Chuck Burr: Today is February 17, 2009

John Roth: February 16th is the Day of Buddha’s Enlightenment; that was the day of Buddha's enlightenment.

CB: We are going to talk about the big picture of diet. What would you say is the summary of what we are trying to achieve with our diet?

JR: We are going to discuss vegetarianism and veganism and why it is advantageous for a person to consider that option in their lives. Advantageous in the sense of the footprint that we make upon the earth,  the impact we leave on the earth, and the ability of the earth to feed the people.

Karma was really the bottom line, you know the idea that you have to commit violence [to eat meat], and violence was a big part of the picture, also that violence in killing an animal is a moral decision everyone has to make for themselves, but should always consider. We should all know that we get what we give. This is an irrefutable aspect of life. So if we want to be blessed, we need to shower blessings on the earth as well as all the children of the earth both man and animal.

We will talk about how to be a vegetarian and how to get the nutrients that you need and why it was advantageous to be a vegan instead of a vegetarian, to cut out the eggs and the dairy and the affect of the eggs and the dairy. The time it takes to pass through the digestive tract and the affects that they have on the body.

Yin and yang is an important consideration especially depending on where you live, and the kind of diet that you would want to eat as a vegetarian or as a vegan.

Yin and Yang Diet, What to Eat With the Seasons

CB: Tell us what yin and yang is and how where we live affects that. We live in a temperate climate here in Telluride, CO.

JR: The idea of yin and yang stems back so as far as I know about 10,000 years and it comes from China originally. It is the idea that there are opposite yet complementary parts to everything. There are two parts to everything, and to understand either of those two parts you have to understand both parts. We can see the parts exemplified in up and down, black and white, male and female, hot and cold. And, the oriental people have taken this theory of yin and yang and applied it to food.

It’s easiest to see when you consider people that live on different parts of the planet. Hot is yang and cold is yin. And, all food is divided into yin and yang, and to be really be balanced and to really be healthy you have to balance the yin and yang of your life and of the climate to the yin and yang of your diet. It becomes pretty easy to understand when you think of Eskimos that live in a very old climate, so the cold is very yin, and their diet consist primarily of an animal based diet. Whale [and seal] blubber and things like that and meat is very yang, so they live in a very yin climate and Eskimos eat a very yang diet. In a certain sense of a word, the two balance each other out.

One thing that is interesting about the whole equation, there are only two things that do not have the yin and yang balance are, although one is yin and the other is yang, The only two things that do not have a yin and yang balance are meat and alcohol. Alcohol is yin and you can’t really balance it with yang; and meat is yang but you can’t really balance it with yin. This is another of many reasons, both karmic as well as conscious for always avoiding these two things.

But in the gross sense of the word, the very cold climate that the Eskimos live in being very yin balances out with their diet, which is very yang. They traditionally do not get any fruit, fruit is yin, and they do not get any fresh greens especially in the wintertime. Their diet consists primarily of sea bird eggs and flesh.

On the other hand, if you lived on the equator, which would be a very warm yang climate, you would be inclined to eat a very yin diet. A yin diet would be a lot of fruit, fruit juices, more raw food, more cool things. They live in a yang climate and the yin and the yang tend to balance out through diet.

Ultimately, the healthier a person becomes, the more prone they become to listening to what their body says and tells them about diet. And if you live in a four seasons climate like we do here in Telluride, you should notice that your body craves different foods in the summer than it does in the winter. In the winter time a vegetarian living in a very cold yin climate like Telluride would not eat meat, but they would eat a lot more grains, cooked food, more nuts, and seeds than they would in the summertime. That is how they balance the yin and the yang in their diet.

In the summer time when the climate is more yang they would eat more of the same diet that they would eat in the tropics, more salads, fruit, smoothies. In the wintertime you would not have much a craving for fruit and fruit would not be too good for you.

If you think about the yin and yang so far as diet goes, if you lived in a climate 200 years ago, you would have to eat what grew in that climate and those are the foods that you should eat. So, in the climate that we live in, in the summer time the fruits all come out. The fruits come out in the sequence that they are most advantageous to the body.

For instance, cherries come first and they are the strongest cleansers for the body. So they clean the body of all the winter heavier foods. And then you go all the way to the end of the season where you have apples, and apples are the most yang of all the fruits and you can keep them into the yin of the winter cold because they store well. Apples are the one to eat when the climate starts cooling off, that’s when they appear. So all of the fruits come in the sequence that is most advantageous to your health when you live in a climate like this.

CB: We live in a world, at least for a short time longer, with modern transportation where we can get fruits and we can eat salads in the winter. What does that do to us? Should we be taking advantage of that, or does that do us a disservice in our diet?

CB: Transportation fuel cost aside, why should we avoid fruits?

JR: Because they are all too yin and we are living in a yin climate in the wintertime. There is a spectrum that they use to diagram yin and yang. It is line that has the center point, which is balance. Then it has single, double, and triple yin. And on the other side, it has single, double, and triple yang. When you consider that continuum, you consider the climate itself, and you consider the food. For instance, ginseng is triple yang, it is the most yang thing there is. Sugar is the most yin of all the foods.

The thing that is interesting about the yin yang theory is that it is like a pendulum, and your balance swings right and left. Once you get off the center, the easier it is to be pulled off the center. So, once the cold yin weather comes, then you begin to get a taste for yin food. For instance you get a sweet tooth and start eating sugar, well that pulls your further out to the yin end of the spectrum.

The yin end of the spectrum is the susceptibility end of the spectrum. When the cold weather hits and you start eating sugar, your immune system starts getting really compromised from the sugar, and you are so far out on the yin end of the spectrum that you become a very easy source of attack by viruses on people.

CB: Lets talk about what is happening inside your body—combined with the climate, in the winter we have to burn more BTUs to heat ourselves. Carbohydrates are your body furnace so although you always need some carbohydrates, you need a larger proportion of these in the winter. What do the sugars and fruits do to make you more susceptible to a virus?

Why Not Eat Processed Sugar, Avoiding Illness

JR: According to Chinese medicine, which I was studying when I was getting my naturopathic doctor’s degree, if you have any kind of illness, a virus or anything, you should stay away from anything that has any kind of sugar in it. And fruit sugar, although it is nowhere in the league of refined sugar, it still feed virus, so Chinese medicine would say, “if your fighting the flu or a cold, then you should not be eating any kind of fruit or fruit juice or any kind of food that is sweetened with of sugar.”

CB: That is regardless of the season?

JR: That is regardless of the season. Yes. An interesting thing is that refined sugar has been concentrated 4,200 times from the time it leaves the sugar cane, and it has an incredibly stronger impact on the body than other sugars do. It is the only kind of food that elicits an adrenaline reaction in the body. It paralyzes the digestive track and the immune system. It paralyzes the white corpuscles for about two hours and it feeds that virus.

The virus also breeds in the mucus tissue which you get too much of if your eating eggs or dairy or meat which are very mucus forming. So a vegetarian or vegan has a lot better chance of not getting ill in the winter because they are not forming that excess mucus in the body.

But, the thing about sugar, it elicits an adrenaline reaction, and the more the adrenaline glands work, the less you are able to control them. And the adrenaline glands are there for emergency situations where you need to react or run from a tiger or lift a car off you friend.

CB: On the other end of the spectrum it is very hot yang and we should eat yin, what are the fruits and vegetables doing for our bodies in the summer?

JR: The thing is when you talk about yin and yang and you compare it to food, it does not mean that you cannot eat a little bit of fruit in the winter, like apples as we said, and it also does not mean that you should not eat grains, nuts, and seeds in the summertime. It means that your diet should lean more towards or incorporate more fruit or fruit juices or salads for instance in the summertime. Where as in the wintertime you would incorporate more grains and vegetable juices. Vegetables are builders and fruits are cleansers. In the summertime you need to clean. In the wintertime you’re storing nutrients and carbohydrates are your furnace to keep your body warm.

So it isn’t that you shouldn’t eat any of the same foods in the summer or winter, but your balance should be more to one side or the other side. In the summertime, you want the diet balance to be more on the yin side because the winter is is yang so you need a larger proportion of fruit in the summer, and you can get away with a lot more fruit in the summertime than you could in the wintertime because that pendulum is greatly affected by the temperature outside.

CB: Summarize the cleansers and the builders.

JR: Vegetables are builders, and cleaners are primarily the fruits.

Detoxing

CB: I had some detox tea. What was in my tea?

JR: A lot of times it has red clover, dandelion root, and yucca. And it is important to detox no matter how good of a diet you eat just because the environment has so many toxins. That puts a new light on the picture of health; the environment side of the equation. Not living in the city where it is too polluted. Living where the air is clean. Not living to close to a high source of radio activity, by a nuclear power plant.

Or being careful about the pesticides or herbicides you eat, and the extremely potent toxins that cause a lot of cancer. There is so much cancer now, I believe that one out of every four Americans will get cancer sometime in their life. That is basically from my point of view from environmental contamination.

Alkaline vs. Acidic Diet, Their Balance Affect one Health

CB: You mentioned cancer, and earlier you were talking about balance, how does another type of balance, alkaline and acidic affect our health?

JR: That is really a very very important thing also. We can get into the specifics later on, like the lists of foods that are on one side or the other. But the thing is that the human body needs to be alkaline and not acidic. Most people that eat a typical American diet have acid balance and not an alkaline balance. A lot of the cancer research is beginning to show that the acid balance is not only a good balance for the creation of cancer cells, but also so far as arthritis and rheumatism, and really almost all of the other diseases thrive best in an acid condition.

CB: I have heard the term that, “as we age, we acidify.” What does that mean?

JR: Well, as you go through life, your habits are cumulative. If you eat bad food, your parents do not have a good diet, and you start eating flesh when you are a year old and you start getting colas when you are young and all of the other bad things that there are plus all of the environmental contaminants like pesticides and herbicides, those things accumulate in your body as you go through your life. If you do not do any detoxifying or fasting and you continue eating a bad diet then the affects become more pronounced on you as you go through life.

CB: What can I do in my diet in the big picture? What things should I eat to return the balance to be more alkaline?

JR: Well, the three grains that are super super good for you that all have over 20 percent protein are millet, quinoa, and amaranth. All three of those grains are a wonderful way to start getting more alkaline. But also, the fact that you stopped eating meat when you became a vegetarian; meat is very acidic to your body.

Things like white flour and white pasta have a very acid affect on the body. If you think about it, most people in an American diet eat white flour and meat every day. So that alone will really push you off to the end of the acid balance. So those are things that you want to cut out.

The thing is that with any issue of health, there are two sides of it just like going back to the unique principle of yin and yang. First there is what you are eating that you shouldn’t eat. And then there are those things you can do to counter act those affects to create a cleansing situation, to do fasting, eating less. And eating the proper foods, and not eating empty calories.

You know there are many things that you shouldn’t do, but there are things you should do. You have to look at both sides of the equation, when you start making dietary changes in your life.

Why Eat Organic, Danger of Chemicals

CB: You talked about contaminants, and the American public when they push their cart down the aisles of food that are mostly not organic. You read about it. Do you have any relevant personal experience beside what you read and studies? Do you want to talk about that and contaminants?

JR: You know, I am probably the best person in the world to ask that question because both of my parents got sprayed with pesticides and it killed them both within two months with a massive dose of pesticides. But normally pesticides kill people more slowly.

The fact of the matter is that the chemical companies have never admitted it that pesticides are harmful for you at all. And if you ever tried to go to court against the chemical companies for catching cancer from eating pesticides you could throw all the money you wanted at them and you would never win. They would still win because they put millions of dollars behind winning.

But the thing is, people are dying every day of cancer and no one really asks the question, “why?” And, the government certainly is not going to protect you. The government exists primarily to protect the interest of big business. The chemical companies are big business. And in our country, and I suppose in most of the world everything boils down to one world and that is, “greed.”

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