First and foremost, welcome to goodsugar.
It’s been a very long time since humanity stood in front of raw open wild nature and individuals within the tribe had to make choices on which direction to take us. There were many dangers ahead. Would there be rival tribes? Will we take shelter? What types of predators are out there? Can we handle the terrain with our elders and children and livestock? What will we eat? And of course, way back then there were questions about upsetting various types of gods.
Along the journey of humanity’s development, we made great discoveries when it came to food.
There were two very distinct paths to choose, animal foods and plant foods.
Some people learned how to eat by watching other animals. And others had plenty of plump bright fruit growing in their environment, and they were hungry enough and again they saw birds and bees and other insects reaching for the fruit and so they too reached for the fruit. And along the way anyone who ate the wrong fruit and got sick they were the guinea pig so to speak for their community. Another big invention was fire. Now we could eat tough meat and make other exciting concoctions.
Both meat and plant based foods pose their challenges to humans
Insects are easy enough to catch, but kind of disgusting. The Australian aboriginal loved grub worms for eons. People that lived on tropical islands were obsessed with coconuts, pineapple, mango pot, pineapple, dragon, fruit, etc..
Flesh foods require the dangerous pursuit of hunting to address hunger, but they fail to support the deeper nourishment of our body and mind. In contrast, plant foods provide essential compounds that enhance body-brain function and foster a relaxed, connected state of consciousness.
Learning the right vegetables, discovering aromatic spices, even going as far as figuring out things that had "medicinal" properties was a long time in the making for us. When we figured out how to hold the seeds of our favorite fruits, it was a technological revolution because now we could ensure by planting that we would have the foods we need. Passing on that information from one generation to the next was as important as teaching our descendants about fire and weapon making, and whatever stories we had about the beginning of time.
For millennia, eating was a no-nonsense endeavor. We ate to survive, and if we look at all the innovations that people made with food, they were just like things like discovering what you could make with maize, grains, nuts, sprouts, and even seeds.
In order to eat a plant-based diet successfully out in the open wild, the weather has to cooperate with you. In cold temperatures, very few things grow that are edible to us that have a substantial number of calories anyway. He might say that it’s obvious why our ancestors had to choose animal protein during the cold months of the year.
And if you look across the span of humanity from the beginning, we were all over the place in different regions. We can say that people that lived on tropical islands that had plenty of fruit would likely never eat animals from the jungle. They would go into the ocean and get fish and crabs. It could have been because of spiritual beliefs, vista, ism, and superstition.
But on the other hand, there were cultures that would eat bear, buffalo, and cultures that ate snakes, and many cultures that had wild delicacies with insects, scorpions, spiders, grub, worms, etc.
Another huge innovation in the human diet was the discovery of preservation techniques like drying beef and using salts to cure it so it would last for a long time.
Yet other innovations that came much later—though they seem like a long time ago to us, it's relatively recent—were the idea of irrigation and having much larger plots of land to grow things like wheat and other hardy grains. In Asia, they found incredibly innovative ways to grow rice, which is a staple even to this day for many cultures.
This leads us all the way up to 3000 years ago. Somewhere, at some time, someone came up with the idea of dessert. Someone figured out how to make things extra sweet, extra yummy, and the dessert industry became a thing.
Eating for pleasure was probably a thing long before that, but now we had something to really look forward to. In Europe—likely in Greece and Rome, and in places like Persia in the Middle East—people were very sophisticated with a lot of different technologies. Fancy foods were definitely one of them. Junk food didn’t really have a title back then, but I guarantee you it existed in one form or another. There was an evolution in junk food. By as little as 300 years ago, if you imagine the castles of France, England, and Spain, the types of opulent desserts they could make became sort of an artwork, if you will. They had white flour, which is processed and refined, they had refined sugars, and they had all kinds of fancy ways to make cakes, desserts, chocolates, and things like that.
Now, mix into the idea the advancement in alcohol production. Fancy wines go back thousands of years—so do rum and tequila. For thousands of years, we’ve had eating disorders that really are obvious progressions. Given the level of anxieties that people have had throughout the millennia regarding war, drought, earthquakes, floods, and disease—life was tough. So if we could find a way to get out of the pain of existence, it’s not really any different than it is today. Food is a necessity, but it could easily become an addictive behavior pattern, starting with overeating and then eating the wrong foods.
Another huge technology—which we will cover—is the realization that eating can become a disorder when we understand that lifestyle and eating patterns can create disease and suffering. That was as big a discovery as discovering fire for cooking. I don’t want to jump around too much, but what a discovery it was when people came in and figured out how to extract compounds from plants, tweak them in a laboratory, test them on some animals, and come up with drugs to treat pain, illness, and symptoms of all kinds. But why don’t we consider raw fresh juice to be a great discovery? That’s because we’re still ignorant.
Let me tell you this story. Several thousand years ago, human beings figured out that the safest way to live would be to condense ourselves into bigger cities. We became completely reliant on a form of tyrannical government to build an army, supply it with weapons and training, build our cities, and develop our war machines—our walls, our castles, our bows and arrows, and whatever war technology we had. Somewhere along our history, we said, "Hey, why do I have to bother growing stuff? My government will do it for me." We became reliant on centralized governments and domesticated ourselves no differently than we domesticate dogs and cats. Instead of living close to the land and having a deep sensitivity about what it provides for us, we no longer had to worry about that too much.
You might say that it’s a benefit for us to move away from the constant worry of survival in the wild and into a safer existence so that we can think about art and philosophy. Everything would be perfect if there weren’t corrupt human beings. Unfortunately, if you look back over the last 200 years, the foods supplied to societies have become corrupt. They are designed to line the pockets of the seller. The vast majority of food in your supermarket, even though it has calories and nutrients, not only supports your life but also robs you of vital energy. It ages us faster, affects our chemistry which in turn affects our moods, and is directly linked to the degenerative diseases that we would likely not encounter if we had access to pure foods. There are other problems, of course—such as a sedentary lifestyle, worry, and our genetic factors—but nothing has a greater impact on humanity’s future than our diet. In fact, our diet is so important that it affects the health and the shape of other creatures and the overall planet.
Juice is a new technology. It’s only been around in the format that you see it in for 90 years. I mean, we always extracted orange juice and lemon juice—no big deal. I’m sure someone figured out apple juice. They certainly figured out grape juice a long time ago, but then they would ferment it to make it into alcohol.
But let’s say a green vegetable juice and some kind of vessel being prized and covered the way we prize and cover a vintage wine or an aged scotch. You see, the mentality of humans is total nonsense. Alcohol is a toxin, and we covered it because of how it can make us feel in our consciousness. The way that juice makes us feel is much more subtle. You have to be more tuned in. And let’s just figure out what juice is so that we take away the myth.
First of all, the most important substances on this planet that we consume are oxygen and water. If nothing else, juice is water being filtered through the fibers of fruits and vegetables. In essence, juice is a very, very clean source of hydration and also contains macronutrients.
The first macronutrient we need the most is the carbohydrate. It is the primary source of fuel that we need, breaking down into glucose to feed the brain immediately. It gives us energy to move, it burns clean, and it doesn’t leave a lot of mess behind. When we drink juice, it is not intoxicating like animal protein can be—animal protein often leaves behind toxins. For example, when you eat the flesh of an animal, you have to remove the toxins that were present at the time of its death from your body. The body is designed to handle a certain amount of this process, but how efficiently it does so can determine how successful we are in outsmarting illness and death.
If you think about the pharmaceutical industry, its success is partly due to extracting compounds from fruits, vegetables, and all kinds of plant material and turning them into effective medicines. Juice is an extraction from the same sources. Everything edible contains a range of miraculous compounds that benefit our bodies. While it might be hard to see or understand because you’re not looking at your chemistry under a microscope, juice—just like eating the whole fruit—contains minerals and vitamins. These are the micronutrients we need in small amounts, along with other compounds that are not necessarily considered nutrients, such as vital chemicals and antioxidants. We can’t get those beneficial compounds readily from flesh. Flesh food does provide us with minerals, but where do those minerals come from? They come from the plants that the animal consumed. So, why not go directly to the source? The answer might be that while raw plant materials aren’t as stimulating or flavorful, and they may not provide the same heat production or memorability, juice offers a concentrated way to access these essential nutrients.
Which changed in the last century is the availability of food and the distortion of the human mind in understanding what food we’re supposed to eat. Now people walk around supermarkets completely confused. What’s happened is we have so much abundance and access to nonsensical, processed, packaged foods that it’s taken us back 100,000 years in our evolution—back to a time when we wandered around in the jungle trying to figure out which berries we were supposed to eat.
We are riddled with our own anxieties, so who has time to slow down and use common sense? When you drink a fresh, raw juice from goodsugar, you’re just eating big salads that have been liquefied in advance for you. You’re getting plenty of nutrients. Instead of staring at that juice like I’m serving you nails or peddling some kind of snake oil, just think of it as handing you salad in liquid form.
Everybody’s upside down about sugar—the panicking over sugar. They should be more concerned with animal protein being a problem. They should be more concerned about pesticides. Why isn’t society running around saying, "I must avoid pesticides," which are clearly poisonous substances that kill bacteria and insects, slowly destroy the earth’s soil, and impact your microbiome—the positive bacteria that lives within your digestive system? How could we be so foolish as to obsess over the wrong thing?
How did we become carnivores once again? Well, we have access to unbelievable produce—where did it happen? The first place is our doctors. In general, as a community, they probably know less about nutrition than my 10-year-old daughter who listens to me. In the juice business over the last 15 years, I must’ve spoken to 10,000 people undergoing some form of treatment, and they told me what their doctors advised for their diet. I looked at it and thought, who are you going to, Dr. Seuss? Literally, their doctors probably tell them to eat green eggs and ham more than they tell them to just drink pure juice, ease back on dense foods, give their bodies a chance to rest, leave out dairy, avoid processed food, steer clear of alcohol, and not consume candy. I’ve never once heard a doctor say anything like that—and that’s because they are in the dark as well. They have credentials and a thing called “academic snobbery.” If you follow Dr. Doolittle down the path of your diet, you ain't gonna make it, people.
And then the next group of idiots are the ones that come out of the gym—and I say that passionately because it’s usually the aggressive, anxious male who has dictated to society what we should be eating. And oh boy, what a dumb thing that is. I must say it like that to wake you up.
The gym person's mentality was that they were likely powerless as children, and they found something that would build their strength and power by consuming more calories—and not just more calories, but more of the wrong calories, more and more protein. Protein is highly stimulating; it increases the production of hormones like testosterone and stimulates muscle growth, which in turn makes a person stronger and helps them cope with that initial anxiety of feeling powerless and weak.
When we look at someone who goes to the gym in their youth, with a body chiseled like a statue—muscle on top of muscle, capable of lifting a car—we see them as the pillar of health. We believe they know exactly what they're doing, and we listen to their nonsense. All over the Internet, there are people talking about how they're eating these 2000-calorie protein burritos twice a day, and then you see them bench pressing 1100 pounds, and we think that must be the way. That path, my friend, will lead you into a dark alley to be mugged by chemistry, as it beats the living shit out of your metabolic processes.
I have to write a hundred articles to explain the problem with that kind of diet in terms you can understand, because the scientific community already knows that a high protein diet is a disaster—and certainly not natural.
I want you to look at juice as the cure to stupidity. When you don’t know what to consume, go back to juice and smoothies from a pure, reliable source of unpasteurized, unpoisoned-with-pesticides juice. Now, my new thing, of course, in the last four years is: I don’t want plastic in my juice either, so juice that’s not served in plastic is better. Juice that’s fresh is better—really fresh, made today fresh. You can’t buy that in the supermarkets or from my competitor. Juice is calories and nutrients. Should you worry about the sugar? Yes, you have to worry about everything in your chemistry a little bit. You can’t drink 30 gallons of fruit juice and then sit on your couch and expect to feel better. But that’s not really a likely possibility because people who turn back to fruit and vegetable eaters learn how to control their impulses. When you’re eating whole, fresh foods, there are companion nutrients that help regulate our hormones and our brain activity.
When you combine that with self-help like meditation, writing, and learning about our traumas—becoming more emotional and staying in the frontal cortex rather than living in the amygdala, which is where fight-or-flight resides—we will eat less addictively in the first place. We should not create extremes in our diet from the very beginning. If you choose to eat animal protein because you worry about calories and protein, then eat animal protein, but why not insist that it’s clean? Why not eat animal protein the way your ancestors did—catch, kill, eat? Now, there are a few things in between; there’s the farm. Does that farm have to be an industrial farm that has absolutely no concern for the well-being of the animal it slaughters? Do we have to be such a hungry group of people today, in modern times, that we have to mistreat cattle? Cows, although not as intelligent as dogs, don’t stay and sit the same way, but they have incredible emotions and they know when they’re in danger. Does our food have to be crying out in pain? Do we need to save so much money that animals have to stand in cubicles their entire lives? Do we have to allow animals to be slaughtered by psychotic people—people in slaughterhouses who deliberately abuse animals for their own pleasure? Not all of them, but many do.
Do we have to allow industrial livestock facilities to feed animals the wrong food, mistreat them, and keep them in such poor conditions that they have to pump them full of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick? Do we have to eat food that came from facilities where chickens were piled up and lived in their own excrement? Are we so hungry and nervous about food supplies that we have to accept that? We don’t. First of all, if you can afford it, buy better quality food. Unfortunately, in this day and time there’s a choice between terrible quality food and better quality food—which seems ridiculous. And whatever comes out cheaper, society pays for later in sickness, disease, and suffering.
So now we’re in a cycle similar to the one we’re in with energy sources like fossil oils as fuel. There are corrupt individuals who hold all the power, and the humans below them need the resource and are forced to tap into oil and gasoline. I’m not an activist—I do what’s easiest in my society so I can worry about my children’s education and my own little earthly problems. And that’s the problem. Because of our neediness and anxiety, it’s easy for tyrannical people to come into power and take advantage of us.
The next major development in food should be a revolution where the people get up and scream and shout with their pitchforks—just to be scary, of course, there should never be any violence. But we should shout, scream, and boycott products that are intoxicating to humans. We should protest outside of every supermarket. We should not buy water that’s been tainted; we should boycott sodas, candies, and refined sugary foods loaded with nasty chemicals.
And if we don’t, that’s obvious: disease and suffering will ravage communities that eat like that, and those individuals will die off. Hopefully, the next generation will come along with a different perspective. Slowly, over time, food people who are revolutionary and aren’t corrupt will come along, and they will show us how to serve food in a different way.
The sphere of influence will increase for positive thinking about food. One day our government will be uncorrupted, and they will come along and say, "Nope, sorry, you can’t sell this shit to people." It’s making them sick, and we have to pick up the bill.
You can blame the death of your great-grandparents, grandparents, and maybe even parents on the sickening food industry that was barely regulated for close to two centuries—an industry that, even today, favors corrupt and junk food products through regulations. If the fda had their way, they would outlaw fresh juice being sold anywhere. Meanwhile, tainted meat will continue on with absolutely minimal regulation on how the animals are treated; there is more concern about how their dead flesh is handled than how they were treated in life. The animals received no comfort—in fact, the opposite. The way we treat animals today is no different than a holocaust in humanity. There are death camps, mass murder, deliberate abuse, and inhumane treatment. The scale at which we have been mass murdering creatures in this manner is unmeasurable.
The most important aspect of our lives, which is our diet, has lost its honor. It’s lost its honor because we are swimming in an ocean of blood, and with each successive generation, we become more and more desensitized, more and more ignorant, and further away from the truth.
And if you don’t like the way that sounds, that’s your problem. I know it is objective truth: juice is an innocent food. The consciousness of the plants you consume is far different from the consciousness of the animals we consume. I can see the symptoms—can you?