Interview: David Wolfe

David Wolfe in the Raw and in Oz! By Vanessa Finnigan

Going raw doesn’t have to be boring or bland ….on the contrary….it might just be the biggest sensory sensation your taste buds have ever experienced!

Just ask David Wolfe aka David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe who is a raw food guru, best- selling author and international health consult to the stars. With home bases in Canada and Hawaii, he also tours the world sharing his wisdom and passion for real food and nutrition. Actually to say David is passionate about what he does is an understatement; he is a walking, talking encyclopaedia of knowledge and an example of what it means to be blissfully healthy.

David was born into a health wise family, with both parents practicing doctors. Although his personal journey with whole foods began when he was eighteen years old after discovering he had food allergies and more specifically, an issue with dairy products. Even though he was studying law and mechanical engineering at the time, nutrition went from being his secret hobby to eventually developing into a life long career and he’s inspired people all over the world now for nearly twenty years!

One of the reasons David is so popular is he is incredibly dynamic and insightful, he just has a way of making an orange sound like it’s the most fascinating thing you’ll ever eat and experience. So I was fortunate to talk to David this month about going raw and how he maintains vibrant health:

Vanessa: What advice do you have for people adding raw foods into the diet or starting a raw food lifestyle?

David: My number one recommendation would be to go organic and look at the quality of food you’re eating. We have come through an age of quantity with a lack of quality. Extraordinary quality is possible if you chose it. Organic food is where we can begin. Then secondly, we can start getting fresh organic vegetable juice into our body so that 20mins later we feel the charge. I’m a big fan of celery as the base of all vegetable juices. Then the next step would be more blended food and less eating of food. Make the shake or smoothie idea a part of your operating system. You can take coconut water and blend it with fruits to make a fruit smoothie and upgrade it by adding super foods and super herbs and that’s an amazing thing to completely remake yourself! Another thing is have a salad a day. These four things are a great way to start making the transition.

Vanessa: How do our thinking patterns, feelings and emotions influence our food choices?

David: If we eat high vibrational foods it’s easier to have higher vibrational thought patterns and emotions. These things feed into each other (pun intended) like an upward spiral or downward spiral.

The thing I like about food and our thoughts and emotions is you can control them. You can choose higher vibrational food and you can choose the thought patterns and emotions you have.

Vanessa: What does a day in the life of David Wolfe look like?

David: I start the day with a litre of water and that flushes the system out upon rising. I’ll live on liquid foods at home. If I’m travelling it’s easier to eat than it is to drink because there aren’t as many juices and not as many blenders available. If I’m in Hawaii, I’ll drink coconuts in the morning with Noni and passion fruit and a bit of honey and turmeric. If I’m in L.A , I’ll eat figs and oranges and have avocadoes. It’s totally dependent on the eco-system where you are at. I don’t believe in the extremism of eating locally because no one wants to eat a dandelion growing out of the sidewalk in New York City. I like the idea of eating climatically though, that makes sense to me and it’s more reasonable. So we can come off the extreme position and start looking at it more rationally. If you are in a high altitude place you need to eat things that will be supportive of being at that high altitude and eat within your climatic zone. So if you are in the Andes you can have Maca and Cacao in The Himalayas you can also have Shilajit or Snow lotus.

I do drink teas if I’m in a cold climate that’s just how you manage your body temperature. But I’ve lived for ten years without cooked food even throughout winter.

I believe in yin and yang exercise and I do both. Yin exercises are Yoga, Chi Gong and then the Yang exercise give you the quick, burst explosive types of training. I also believe in not overexercising, the research is showing if you exercise too much you can oxidise your body and that adds to your biological stress.

To ground myself I use earthing products which are great for travellers and you can even ground yourself at the 13^th level of a hotel. There are a lot of times where we can’t be bare foot on the ground. So you can eliminate jet lag and manage stress with earthing products and specific periods of dawn and dusk sun gazing.

David’s Five Fave Foods:

BLUEBERRIES! In the summer on the farm I might eat them three times a day. I think they are one of the greatest foods that have ever been discovered on this earth. I will mix them with local honey, spirulina, other berries and super foods and mash that all together and that’s one of my favourite meals.
HONEY! I’m a big fan of honey, I’m a bee keeper and we run an ethical bee environment, we go rescue bees from warehouses where they are going to be gased with pesticides.
CACAO! The chocolate nut!! I’m a chocolate farmer. You learn so much growing chocolate trees, this tree has a lot of mysteries there’s still a lot we don’t know about chocolate- it’s amazing! It’s the most widely eaten nut in the world but most of us are not eating cacao, the original nut so I’d like to get people back to eating the real thing rather than the processed version.
CITRUS! I love good quality limes and oranges. I have been growing them since I was seven years old and those citrus trees are still alive. So they are 36 years old and were grown at my Uncle’s ranch.
BROCOLLI! I love eating it raw. Research coming out now says broccoli can extend our life span and it’s a good cancer fighting food. I eat the marrow out of the stalks like a dog eats a bone.

For the last year, David has focussed on television as a medium to share his message and plans to do more so he can reach more people, be home more, travel less and farm more. We are excited to welcome David back to Australia in May. David loves Australia’s beauty and history and he says it’s exciting because we are in the early stages of the raw and living food movement so there is much education and inspiration to be shared. For more information about David and to find out about his much touted chocolate parties go to: