Comment on When raw gurus give dangerous advice by Veronica Patenaude.
Good article Sarah.
Did you read the copy of Raw Food Controversies we sent you?
Frederic has been blowing the whistle on bad health advice in the raw food movement since 2002.
A lot of the people who are interested in spreading health information mean well but just are not qualified and promote their dogmas too enthusiastically.
We’re pretty put off by the 100% strict raw food idealism and don’t recommend it to the majority of people or follow it ourselves. High raw is better and has many more advantages for us.
Recent Comments by Veronica Patenaude
A cautionary tale: the “Raw Vegan Village”
Also I would like to draw some attention to the ludicrous claims Storm has about his website being able to sell for millions of dollars or 16 times the amount of sales he gets in a year.
I looked up thegardendiet.com on alexa.com, a traffic ranking site. Remember they have had their website for YEARS!
This is what it ranks as (the lower the number the higher the ranking):
www.thegardendiet.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 594,572 Traffic Rank in US: 328,973
Here is my website:
www.LowFatVeganChef.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 540,288 Traffic Rank in US: 123,675
(I have only had traffic going to my site since November 2011!)
Other raw/vegan sites to compare it against:
www.RogerHaeske.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 201,258 Traffic Rank in US: 58,083
www.FredericPatenaude.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 128,955 Traffic Rank in US: 49,851
www.VegSource.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 70,193 Traffic Rank in US: 20,883
www.RenegadeHealth.com
Alexa Traffic Rank: 46,982 Traffic Rank in US: 14,348
So if the Garden Diet’s website is worse than all of these top sites, and those sites would only get twice as much money for the sale of their sites as what they generate in yearly income, there is no way Storm would get 16 times this amount as he claims in his letter Sarah was CC’d on.
My site www.lowfatveganchef.com is brand new and gets about 30,000 page views in a month and over 10,000 individual unique visits a month and my site still has WAY more traffic than www.thegardendiet.com.
I don’t think people should believe what he’s saying. None of it makes sense and the numbers are coming out of thin air.
A cautionary tale: the “Raw Vegan Village”
I had heard rumours of this. I wish people did not invest emotionally with people who are not business managers or investors. They should have asked how they could purchase such a large tract of land and to see more official paperwork.
Honestly, scamming and abuse happens all the time in the raw and natural health community. It’s really sad as you have people so emotionally invested into gurus and wanting to hang on their every word and live the dream lifestyle of having a tropical paradise for their own and they don’t realize it’s all too good to be true.
So many people are hurt by MANY of the raw gurus who take advantage of them or blatantly lie and it affects their health or their finances and they are too afraid to speak up, as if they are the only one who had a bad experience. Little do they know it keeps happening.
Someone has to speak up to stop the chain of abuse. There are many wonderful trustworthy people in the raw and natural health movement, but many of the big names people are familiar with are unfortunately self interested and take advantage of newcomers to the scene.
The dark side of raw
This is so true.
Raw foodists that have a hate on for anything that is not raw or not raw vegan and then they do drugs or eat cooked or non vegan foods themselves and then gang up on people who publicly admit this.
It’s like to be a successful rawfoodist you have to actually lie and pretend you are always 100% perfect and no cooked food or condiments have touched your lips ever, or else your glass tower will come crashing down.
It is really sad, but we know of many leaders that perpetuate the myth that they have been raw for decades and never eaten cooked food.
Just because you ate some cooked food does not mean you are going to #1 die #2 get fat #3 get sick or #4 not care about your health.
The majority of successful people are like ex raw foodists, or ones that don’t like the title of raw foodist but still eat a lot of raw fruits and vegetables.
It’s not just raw food forums, it’s on the internet in general. People gang up on youtube, blogs, and forums to spread hate against those that disagree with like 5% of what someone else says, so they draw a line in the sand and put them on the enemy side and start attacking.
Really it just shows how threatened they feel and they are not happy in life so they are lashing out at others to feel better and more “normal”.
