Jeff Nelson: A Legacy of Plant-Based Advocacy and Health Insight

What does it take to shape a movement? For Jeff Nelson, it’s taken decades of passion, persistence, and purpose.

In this enlightening episode of The Glen Merzer Show, Glen sits down with Jeff Nelson—plant-based pioneer and co-founder of VegSource—to reflect on the evolution of veganism, the power of community-driven health events, and how personal experience fuels powerful change.

“It was a lot of fun,” Jeff recalls of the early days organizing plant-based events. But more than just fun, these gatherings created the foundation for a global movement—uniting experts, curious eaters, and health seekers alike.

Jeff shares his own plant-based journey, the profound health transformations he's witnessed, and his evolving views on nutrition, including the ongoing debate about nuts. From managing autoimmune conditions through diet to advocating preventive health practices like fasting, Jeff emphasizes that nutrition isn't just about deficiency—it's about vitality.

This conversation also touches on the future of plant-based living, with Jeff offering hope and perspective: “I always enjoy working on some other projects,” he says, hinting at the next wave of advocacy and innovation.

If you’re looking for inspiration grounded in real-world wisdom, this episode is a powerful reminder that the plant-based message continues to grow—because it works.

🎧 Listen now and discover how decades of advocacy have paved the way for a healthier, more compassionate future.

📌 Watch the episode here: Jeff Nelson: Decades of Advancing the Plant-Based Message

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DISCLAIMER: Please understand that the transcript below was provided by a transcription service. It is undoubtedly full of the errors that invariably take place in voice transcriptions. To understand the interview more completely and accurately, please watch it here: Jeff Nelson: Decades of Advancing the Plant-Based Message

Here's the transcript:

Welcome to The Glen Merzer Show. can find us across all your favorite podcast platforms. You could find us on YouTube. And please remember to subscribe. You can find us at RealMenEatPlants.com. My guest today is an old friend of mine. I'm guessing, Jeff, we've been friends, what, maybe 20 years or so? Yeah, at least. Jeff Nelson is the founder of VegSource.com.

He also was the founder of something called the Healthy Lifestyle Expo, where I used to go annually. It was a big annual event with the leaders in the plant-based movement. And he's become something of a video journalist, particularly on all things plant-based. Jeff, welcome to the show. Hey, Glenn. Thanks. Happy to be here.

You know, back in the day when you were doing your healthy lifestyle expos, and often they were located in Woodland Hills, you would have experts like Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. McDougall, Dr. Barnard, Dr. Furman come to speak. I was so grateful that you set this in Beverly in Woodland Hills because that's where I lived. I could walk there.

Yeah, that was a good hotel. We actually had it in different areas over the years. We started it out in Woodland Hills. That was our very first one. And then we moved down by the airport for a few years. were down by the beach. We went to Burbank for some years, and then we ended up coming back. Actually, the last ones we did were up in Valencia. But yeah, we did that for about 20 years. And that must have been a tremendous amount of work putting those together. How many speakers would you have?

We usually have about a dozen speakers. We'd have somebody speak Friday night and then all day Saturday and Sunday we'd have speakers. And so yeah, was a little bit of work to put it together. We would videotape it and turn it into, you know, put it up on the internet and sell them as DVDs and that kind of stuff as well. But it was a lot of fun. Well, what was great about your events is it really helped create a community because the first night, I think it was usually a Friday night, there would be a dinner.

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and you had some really upscale catered vegan dinner and people got to know each other. It wasn't just going there. know, some of these events I've been in other cities where people just go for the vendors to see who's selling the vegan donuts and the, you know, the vegan shakes or whatever. And people don't get to know each other. But at your events, the first thing you do

you have dinner together, you get to know 10 of the 200, 300 people who were there. But over the course of a weekend, you get to know a lot of people and hear a lot of experts and mingle with them. Those were the best events I've been to. I don't know if anyone is doing events that good now. Well, it was a lot of fun. I always looked forward to seeing the people coming back year after year because we had a hard

like you, group of people who were always there, never missed one, a couple hundred people basically who showed up and they knew each other, they met each other, many of them kind of communicated offline. But also just the speakers were so jolly and so friendly, McDougal and people like that. Jeff Novick, know, people who would hang out and chat and they were there usually for the whole weekend. So even though they were just giving a talk Sunday morning at 11,

they would fly in Friday night or Saturday and then they'd be there. They'd be there for all the meals. And so it was a lot of accessibility. And we were among sort of the first to do these kinds of things. Now there's more, they've grown. But it was an opportunity to kind of go in and spend a weekend. We would discourage our speakers from going out to dinner on Saturday night. No, no, no, because people wanted to hang out with them and get to know them better.

social aspect was definitely an important part, I think. I think so. I had been a vegetarian since I was 17 and a vegan since my mid-30s, but it was, think, going to those events that made me first feel that I was part of the plant-based community. I got to know some of these people and they got to know me. was a different day back then. Today, vegan is common. You can go pretty much anywhere in the world and people know what a vegan is.

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right, you can usually find something you know, to eat that kind of stuff. But back then, yeah, back in the 90s. It was tough. It was tougher. Yeah, kind of stood out and you were, you know, the oddball as the vegan and when you meet a big group of vegans and spend the weekend with them, then that was cool, especially when there were all these doctors, Dean Ornish and Neil Bernard and different people who came and gave it their time and, you know, we're cool guys and our cool guys.

Now, I first became a vegetarian when I was 17 back in the 70s. And again, I was, to use your words, an oddball to be a vegetarian. But I never got the gene for caring if I was an oddball. You know, it just didn't matter to me, which I think has been probably the most productive protective gene or lack of gene that I have, because not caring if people think you're an oddball.

is really, I think, a healthy thing. Now, am I right that your journey to the plant-based movement began with this book, Diet for a New That's right. That's right. Back in 1990, I think, and I was listening to the Tom Likus show. You remember, though, it was a KBC talk show, and John Robbins was on and he was talking about this book. I think Tom Likus was vegan himself, at least at that point.

was promoting it. And so you know, I heard John on this show, and I thought, well, this this makes this interesting. So I stopped, I remember I stopped at the Bodhi tree, you know, the Bodhi tree. yeah, I remember the Bodhi tree on Melrose, a very incense filled spiritual, Eastern philosophy, mysticism, that kind of thing. So it was appropriate that that was a place of enlightenment, in all the flickering candlelight and so on.

So I bought the book there and I went home and I read it and the health reasons really resonated with me. The book was about health, about animals and about the environment. But I had already become a chickenitarian by that point before I'd read the book. I'd given up red meat because I had a job where I had to go out and entertain people a lot. I produced TV commercials back in the 80s.

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when I was starting out. One of my jobs was to help entertain the clients, the agency guys who came in from New York or Chicago. They were on vacation, so they wanted to go out to the most expensive, famous LA restaurant. This was basically an occupational hazard for me. would take them out to Spago or La Scala or Chasen's or one of those places.

know, I kind of figured out after some years of doing it that just eating all this rich food is not all that great, you know, for your health. And so like I said, given up red meat. So when I read the book, you know, I realized, well, you know, animal products in general, this is something I really I don't think I want to be doing. So I went vegetarian. After reading that, and then I gave it to Sabrina, who was not yet my wife, but she read the book. And for her, the animal reasons are what resonated she had raised chickens.

when she was a little girl and each chicken had a name and they would wait to lay their egg until she came home from school. so in her mind, the chickens that we eat versus the chickens that were her pets, you know, they were different. They were not the same. But reading the book kind of made her realize, no, they're the same. They're just terrorized. And you know, the ones we eat there are like, like the one so she gave up. She became vegetarian for animal reasons at that point. Whereas for me, the book, you know, the health argument.

was the strongest. So that's what that's what got us going into the vegetarian world. Vegan world. That was when Sabrina got sick. She got very sick about five years later, her ears turned red, and kind of bubbled up like a terrible sunburn very painful. She bounced around to different doctors, ended up in the office of this rheumatologist in Beverly Hills, you know, who was like, Whoa, you know, what is someone so young like you was all blue haired old

people with arthritis in the waiting room and then Sabrina who was maybe 29 or something. And he diagnosed her with an autoimmune disease called relapsing polychondritis. And this is where your body's immune system attacks cartilage. In her case it started in your ears but you got cartilage in your nose and your throat around your heart. And this is a disease we found out that has like a 50 % mortality over 10 years. That's if the drugs they gave you didn't kill you.

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first. she the doctor said he could help her live with it. But you know, there wasn't any known cure. And so she lived with it. And for about a year, she would have these flare ups periodically. And when that happened, she would go to bed, she would, you know, take these drugs, steroids, protease inhibitors, just different, you know, serious drugs. And somebody had given her john McDougall's book.

McDougall program. And of course, you know, John McDougall is a doctor, was a doctor in Northern California. And so we were coming back from a vacation, we were in Hawaii, and she had a relapse. So she picked up this book that someone had given her and read it. And in the book, he talked about the role of dairy proteins that they can play in autoimmune diseases like lupus, and relapsing polygondrituses in the lupus family. So Sabrina said, Oh, wow. I I remember the day when we were in the kitchen.

was in the kitchen, she came downstairs and she'd read this and she read this portion about dairy and lupus. And she said, I'm going to eat this vegan diet. I'm going to try this vegan diet. And I started like, well, you know, if you're going to go vegan, then I guess, okay. So that's how we started. And she had a monthly appointment at her rheumatologist. a couple of weeks after she started the diet, she went in and for the first time her sed rate

was below five. Normally, it been 50 or above for the past year, and she had no antinuclear antibodies in her blood, which is an indirect measure of the disease and its activity. So she went back after three months of going back and getting the same results. The rheumatologist said, Hey, you're in remission, and your cholesterol is 135. Good job. And he wasn't really that surprised that her diet had helped. said that

most people won't change their diet, they want a pill, they wouldn't change their lifestyle. And Sabrina was like, you know, are you kidding? You know, why didn't you tell me if I would have eaten cardboard to get rid of this disease? What was his answer to that? I don't think she actually said that to him. think that was her reaction. I don't think it was in his face, because he was actually very vegetarian, vegan friendly, Dr. Bluestone. And he'd done some paper, he was the head of the Southern California Arthritis Foundation.

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and he had done some papers around diet and lupus. So he was sort of in the know. yeah, mean, why didn't he say, change your diet? Maybe it'll work. So that's basically how we became vegetarian and then later became vegan. So Dr. McDougall helped save Sabrina's life without even at that point meeting Sabrina.

Right? Just from reading his book. reading that book and getting that information and trying it. And then, you know, he saved her life. I mean, 30 years later, she hasn't had any more flare up. She hasn't had any more problems. It seemed to us pretty direct evidence that, you know, McDougal is right. The diet did play this very big role. Yeah. If the that disease

relapsing polychondritis is in the lupus family. Is sunlight a factor, too? Is sunlight difficult for Sabrina? You mean getting a tan or whatever? When people have lupus, my wife has struggled in the past with lupus-like conditions, and the hot sun of the valley was difficult for her. I mean, it might not be.

coincidence that when we were in Hawaii getting a lot of sun, she had a flare up. It's possible there was a relationship there. I'm not really sure that kind of what we weren't told stay out of the sun, I don't think. But she did have, she went to Hawaii and got a terrible occurrence of it. And she was already seeing, yeah. And then she even called the doctor from Hawaii, what should I do? And that kind of thing. so I think the sun may have played a role in that particular flare up. All right. Now some people go vegan for the animals.

Some go vegan for health, some go vegan for the environment. It sounds like you went vegan in part for your wife to go along with your life. absolutely. I wasn't going to have two different, you know, the ice cream is here and the, whatever we were still eating then when we were vegetarian, which was ice. She also, you know, we gave up any sodas at that point. Right. She was did some kind of stress relief stuff. You know, she's working on

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would do knitting and things like that that were some, you know, repetitive kind of calming sort of thing. So she did a few things. But I we really think the diet was the major feature of what helped her. Right. Right. And did your health change when you went vegan as opposed to vegetarian? To be honest, I didn't really notice I wasn't paying attention, you know, as long as we were able to be happy and eat that way, then I was good. Okay, so yeah.

But I've seen pictures of you on your website, vegsource.com, and you used to weigh about 30 pounds more than you do now. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so when did that weight come off? That weight came off around 2016 or so when I made ... What happened was Nina and Rand, my daughters, who you know, had terrible cystic acne.

and they did everything they could. saw dermatologists and took antibiotics, everything, and they kept getting told that they should try what's it called? The drug, the very powerful acne drug.

forgetting what it's called.

I'm forgetting too, but I think I know what you mean. Yeah, you know what I mean. Anyway, very helpful. that's got some risk involved with it and it'll come to me in a second. And so they didn't want to do that because they had a relative who had gone on it and gotten some terrible digestive problem and had to leave school for a period of time and so on. And they had another friend who got very depressed on it.

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Why can't I remember? Hang on. I mean, I got to find this out.

We'll take a brief pause as Jeff looks up the name of the drug. Everybody's going to know it, of course. No, no, no, All right, we're back. It's three hours later and Jeff has found the name of the acne drug. ahead, Jeff. What's the name? So the girls were told to take Accutane and Accutane is the name. Right. So they didn't want to take it. And

one day driving up to San Francisco, I remember they checked the Dr. McDougall's website because I recalled he had stuff about acne and he talked about a very low fat vegan diet, just take all overt fats out. And what was interesting is that they had gotten their first major breakouts when Sabrina and I were traveling, we're in Hawaii, and they were sick and they were at home and they were eating peanut butter and toast. So eating a lot of peanut butter and toast and so sort of like, Whoa, man, that's that's

McDougal is saying is not to eat, know, not a lot of overt fats. So they decided to try McDougal's anti-acne diet, basically. And it worked. It worked for them like crazy. But as they were doing it, I said, I'll do it with you. You know, I'm going to go super low fat. so you went vegan for your wife and super low fat for your daughters. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. And I I dropped about 30 pounds. So I was

I was also bike riding a lot. So I was getting a good amount of exercise. And you're a jogger, right? I do a lot these days. Yeah. Which you probably do for your dog. No, I do half marathons, but my son, he's the one that got me into that. He's a marathon. Oh, okay. So you do it for your son. Yeah. Yeah, we're doing that together. So yeah, so that's the girls changed their diet and got rid of their acne. They ended up writing a bestselling book.

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called The Clear Skin Diet about it. And I didn't bring up my copy here next to me. And McDougal wrote the foreword for that book. And that was huge. When they got rid of their acne very quickly over the course of a few months, and it was very severe. You've seen the before and afters. They made a few videos on their YouTube channel that went viral. They got millions of views, and that led to a book deal and so on. So that's basically when I

lost that weight and have kept it off since then, because that's pretty much how I eat anymore. Yeah. And I saw a video you did on your YouTube channel, which people can find either by Googling your name or putting in on YouTube, veg source, right? Yeah. You show what you eat in a day. Right. And it's what you say that

Sabrina calls the boring diet, where you have mixed frozen vegetables that you cook up with some parboiled rice and some lettuce and meals that some people might find boring, but you find delicious and satisfying, right? They're very satisfying to me. Yeah. But it's a very basic way of eating just, you know, veggies and rice or potatoes or starch and lettuce and beans and

I vary it, I work it up, change it around here and there, and I go out sometimes, that sort of thing. But that's my basic utilitarian diet. It just does what I need, keeps me in the shape I want, keeps me happy, and try and keep it organic for the most part. So yeah, that's, got what I eat in a day video up there. That's right. Now, let me ask you some more questions about your diet now. Do you eat bread? Sometimes.

sometimes Rita will make homemade bread. Otherwise I don't, but she makes homemade bread, I'll eat some of that. Yeah. Okay. And what about nuts and seeds? Very occasionally, you know, I will sometimes, not that much. Right now, I'm trying leave off the more calorie dense food, the richer foods, you know, no oil, I don't eat oil. I mean, maybe if I go to a party and there's something crappy, and I'm hungry, I might eat something that has a little oil in it. But generally, I avoid that.

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completely and try to keep the salt level lowish. You know, I'm not SOS, but I'm aware of that. Yeah. Now, famously, you made some videos about nuts because there are a lot of prominent vegan doctors who are often brilliant people who have a lot of information, but they have

been big supporters of nuts, claiming that nuts have a lot of nutrients and that people who eat nuts live longer. And they cite a number of published studies to that effect. And you found that a lot of those published studies were, in fact, funded by the nut industry. So tell us about that and what your feeling is about whether nuts are, in fact, healthy food.

Well, I mean, I think they are healthy foods. I think they're good foods. I don't single them out as, you know, amazing foods or superfoods. I don't think there's any superfoods out there. But nuts are good. Broccoli is good. There's a lot of good, you know, fruits and veggies that are out there. Yeah, I think I have five or six videos that I've made on the nuts topic. And a lot of them are going through research which has been produced and paid for by the nut industry in most cases. And in some cases,

conducted by people who've made a lot of money off from the nut industry. And you know, you can take any study whether you're trying to make milk, dairy milk look healthy, you know, you can make any food look good, you can take a drug and you know, set up a test that shows it's a miracle drug or whatever. It's unfortunate, I Google talked about this a lot how really in the last 30 years or so kind of science has become captured, it's kind of a

extension of marketing and advertising and a big part of the budgets of companies nowadays goes to fund research to try and make their products look, you know, better to look good. So that, you know, that's how people sell stuff. That's the new advertising today. And so yeah, there's a lot of subpar research out there a lot of weak research.

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research that's conducted in a way that, you know, I question. And that's that's what I've gone through in that series is to get down to the specifics down to naming this six or eight researchers whose names you see again and again and again on all these studies, because they're part of the Walnut Council, they're part of the almond board or you know, whatever it is that they're doing. And just so that people can see that, hey, you know,

that the super food moniker is not deserved. It's not earned. You're not going to live longer if you eat this food than that, you know, in terms of nuts. And, you know, I happen to think that people eat too more calories, know, too much rich food. And that that's as you especially as you age and become, you know, more fragile or whatever. That's not in your interest. Your interest is keeping light, keeping slim, keeping trim.

you don't need to, you want to kind of avoid a calorie dense diet. You know, know Michael Greger, who's loves nuts. as you know, I've sparred a little with some of the research he's put up there are a lot of it, actually. You know, I know that at some point, he had to figure out how to become more active to, you know, prevent from putting on too much weight. And I know he adopted the

what do you call it? The thing that he walks on during the treadmill, he has a treadmill, he's on a treadmill during most of his videos. That's right. He's on a treadmill and so on. And that arose, my understanding through my people I know, from his desire to, you know, keep his weight down. So one way to keep your weight down is to be exercising a lot. And exercising is good for you. And you know, I'm all in favor of it. But another way is six miles a day, right? How many? Six.

you run six miles. run six miles. I thought you're saying yeah, yeah. I generally run about six miles a day. Yeah. that but also just you know, if you focus on calorie density, that even above nutrient density, in my opinion, that's a better that's a better focus. And if you're not if you're eating an extra 200 calories a day, because you're eating your your healthy nuts, you know,

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that's 200 calories more than you're eating if you didn't believe that nuts were going to save your life. And then you may not have to be on the treadmill as long. Well, it's possible that the fallacy involved with nuts is the fallacy of chasing nutrients that we're, we always need more and more nutrients. So there's protein and there's calcium and there's different nutrients in different nuts.

And there's selenium in Brazil nuts and so forth. And I tend to have one or two nuts a day. But I know that if I eat too many of them, I'm going to put on weight. And the reality is that we don't need to be chasing nutrients that much if we're eating a whole food plant, plant strong diet. Isn't that how you feel?

I definitely feel that way. And I think that

people are easily frightened by potential nutrient deficiency. And that's probably hardwired in us because back in the day for millions of years, could you get enough calories? Could you get enough of anything? Are you going to dry up and die, blow away? But I mean, that's not the problem today, I don't think, for most people at all. It's way too many nutrients. It's too many calories. It's too much of everything.

and the focus on am I getting enough of this enough of that is not the right focus because if you're eating a healthy plant based diet, you are generally going to get everything you need your body can recirculate a lot of nutrients. So people don't necessarily know about that that your body can reuse and recirculate nutrients that you've consumed. And you know, we talked about calorie restriction being able to extend life. I mean, I've read a study

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that I talked about one of the videos where they think it's nutrient restriction is what's causing extension of life that, you know, you're stressing your body in a way just like you stress the muscle, you get stronger, you stress your body, it can adapt to a way where it's going to need to survive longer so that it can be sure to reproduce, is, know, our prime objectives, one of them, to where, you know, nutrient restriction could be a good thing. So this idea that, we need to get

as much nutrition as possible and you know, maximize nutrition. I don't I don't buy that you need to get adequate nutrition. And then that's probably the best. I saw in one of your videos, you compared that to the Okinawans and their longevity. Right diet that was not very rich. That's right. Yeah, well, the Okinawan diet, the Okinawan women were the longest living women on the planet there for quite a long time.

think the Loma Linda people have slightly edged them out, and also the Okinawan population is eating a less healthy diet over time as a- McDonald's has come to Okinawa, Exactly. KFC, they're big. So yeah, mean, it was a very basic diet, and they had excellent dietary records of what the Okinawans were eating back in the 40s and 50s. And even earlier than that, they've had different

studies at that time of what they were eating. And they're eating a very basic diet, a very low fat diet, maybe 6 % of calories from fat, 9 % of calories from protein. The vast majority of what they eat are starches, sweet potatoes. And they tend to live outdoors and their diet even

creates a natural sort of calorie restriction. I think that they were eating something like 180 calories a day, fewer than mainland Japanese were eating during the same time period. And that's just a function of you can get fuller, you know, if you have more potatoes or, you know, that kind of food that you can achieve fullness and stop eating, you know, sooner. But yeah, the Okinawans are a great example of people who eat a very simple

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basic diet and have little or no diseases. Those who are centenarians are living independently and, you know, in their gardens at 102 and have a lot of, you know, they're not in wheelchairs or they don't have dementia. And so I think they're a good advertisement. Yeah. Now you mentioned that your view is that there aren't superfoods. I have a slightly different kind of quirkier view on it.

I think there are superfoods and they're all purple. That's my view of it. So, for example, purple sweet potatoes, which they eat, by the way, in Okinawa. Of course. sweet potatoes, purple potatoes, purple grapes, blueberries, dark blue, Japanese eggplant. I love anything purple. And so for me,

those are the super foods. have absolutely no scientific evidence for that. But that's just my, my, it's probably true. mean, they probably are excellent foods for a variety of reasons. And the purple, you know, the color may have something to do with it. It's responding to sunlight, it's defending the plant, and it turns out to be something useful when you eat it. They've got anthocyanins in them, antioxidants. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So back in the day, back when you were

producing the Healthy Lifestyle Expos, you were really, Jeff, as central to the plant-based movement as anyone, because you produced these events. It's where everybody got to know each other. They were sort of the events of every plant-based year, from my point of view anyway, were the Healthy Lifestyle Expos. And so that goes back now 20 years or so. How have you seen the movement

change since then? Do you feel the movement is as more or less coherent now as it was then? Are we winning or are we losing? Let me just take a minute to describe where we were back when we started this and then give some contrast to where maybe we've gone at this point. Back in 96, that's when Sabrina put her relapsing polychondritis into remission.

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she, we felt like, you know, she had dodged a bullet. We went on the internet, that was early days on the internet. And we found very little about the vegan diet and health and or even about diet and health in general. And so we decided we made our website, VedShorse.com and we dedicated it to John and Mary McDougall as well as to John and Dale Robbins. And the website was really our form of kitchen activism for Sabrina and me. It was, you know,

we'd been blessed to get this information. Sabrina dodged a bullet, so we wanted to try to help spread the word. And we ended up contacting doctors, beginning with Dr. McDougall, and experts and different people who were also working to spread the good plant-based, the reasons to go plant-based. And for example, I contacted McDougall to thank him basically for saving Sabrina. And I offered to have our designer, we had a guy working for us then, update.

his website, McDougal had a very kind of crude website, and to help drive traffic there and to host a discussion board for him that we would moderate and McDougal said, Hey, that would be great. So we ended up doing this for a lot of people and a lot of organizations, we made the first website for PCRM, we did the farm sanctuary website, Howard Lyman EarthSafe, we did Jewish veg for PETA, we did Dr. Clapper with Hydric, know, we did Gregor's early sites and we gave free hosting.

back in the days when you had to pay for bandwidth and we gave, you know, web service and technical help and design help if people needed that. And then yeah, in 2001, that was the first expo. I don't know if you came to our first one that was at Woodland Hills. But that was we decided to do a dinner at a local hotel. I mean, a local restaurant, Buddhist restaurant here. And we had people sign up and we had like within a week, we had 120 130 people sign up. So that's when we moved it to the hotel.

And that's where we ended up making Process People, the movie from that. We took a weekend, we interviewed all the experts there. I took them off privately for half an hour and interviewed and asked them all the same dozen or so questions, turned that into a documentary. We just sold it via word of mouth on the internet. so that was kind of fun. One of the things, we made a few documentaries.

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But that particular one, once we woke up one morning and we had made $25,000 in sales of the documentary, we were like, my God, what happened? And we found out that Jillian Michaels had watched the video, and then she'd made a Facebook post saying, this is a really good video or something. And it just, I mean, went through the roof. So that movie, in and of itself, reached a lot of people. so, you know, we did those for

annually for a bunch of years. And as we did more people, know, rip started his program rip Esselstyn, for example, and then he bring experts in and do his McDougall started his McDougall was the first one who came to me and said, Give me these speaker, you know, contact things, and he started doing them. So there's, you know, all kinds of sprung up over different places and organizations over the years that have come up of doctors and so on, the Plantrition Project, and that kind of thing, who do these

things now, and they do them for credit and they aim them more at a medical audience than what we were doing. We're more of the layman audience. So how have things changed? I mean, in the early days too, we went to a lot of festivals and events to just go hang out and see our people and be there. Sometimes we would have a booth to promote whatever we were working on and doing.

It's a very different day today than it was in 1996 when we got on the internet. There's a lot more people who've gone vegan. It's not quite so edgy as it was then. It's just people can be vegan. Oh, okay, not necessarily a big deal. There's still I don't like when I see, you know, the cult leader, vegan cult leader, you know, killed three people or something like or whatever, there's still a little bit of that that they're trying to put on

put on veganism, maybe the the kookiness aspect. But, you know, there's so much vegan food that's come online and vegan products, they tend to differentiate themselves and call them plant based to kind of just separate from whatever picture you might have a vegan of what vegan means. So there's a lot of plant based foods out there, which is great. And some of them, they're great, but I'm not going to eat them because they're full of oils and you know, coconut oil. Exactly. Yeah, stuff that

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I'm going to avoid. But you know, how has it evolved? How has veganism evolved? Or what's your question exactly? Well, do you think that we're winning? Do you think the lesson is, you know, people are getting healthier and moving towards a healthy, whole foods, vegan diet? Or do you think that

the vegan movement has been co-opted in part by the food companies who are putting out all this food with coconut oil, and people aren't really getting healthier, and the percentage of vegans in the population, or at least healthy vegans, isn't really growing. I think it's grown a lot, and we've made huge progress and big strides, and I'm glad that it's all happening. I don't think that, as I say, that it's

earth shattering, you know, there's always going to be the pushback and the carnivore and that that sort of thing. That's kind of natural. But I see a lot of people who are, you know, reversing, getting off medications, reversing problems through the diet. And that's kind of, to me, the strongest evidence, the thing that I'm most excited about. And

I think there's a lot of people. Look at what RIP is doing. Do you know Jim Clacken? don't know if you've met him. He's come to our event many times and so on. He's been with a couple of different big companies and those companies have brought in their own programs, whether it's through McDougal, through Esselstyn, where they get, just as Whole Foods did, getting employees well, offering them the opportunity to learn dietary change and

becomes a win-win-win all the way around because these are companies that are self-insuring and as people get sicker, it gets more expensive. If they can teach them to use diet and lifestyle to get themselves off meds and reverse problems, everybody wins. So- companies that self-insure to use that program? That's right. Yeah. They've done that with a few different ones. I think

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Whole Foods early on did that. They used Berman, McDougal, and RIP, those three programs to send employees to that they had the option. And they had to use vacation time or something like that. But then they got a full 12-day program or an eight-day program, whatever it was, and it had big impact on those people that have done that, I know. And in Los Angeles, would you say there are more or less

vegan restaurants now than there were 20 years ago? And are they better or worse? No, there's definitely more. There's definitely more. It's it's been on the way up. Are they are they worse? I mean, I love a good vegan restaurant. That doesn't mean I'm going to go there all the time. You know what I mean? There's there's some that are very rich. But no, I think I think that's great. I know my kids can always find something in pretty much any part of town, wherever they're working. And so, yeah.

I mean, we...

part of with our health system becoming so expensive and with a measure of corruption, I think that people are aware of. Yesterday was it the head of the CDC, head of drugs, the drug chief, the top drug chief at the CDC left in January, and yesterday it was announced she's gone to work as the top medical officer of Pfizer.

So you have, you know, it's pretty obvious if you're looking at the government, even looking at, you know, medical associations to tell you how to be healthy. Often those places have different objectives, you know, which is making money. And these are the people who are the Michael Clappers, the firmans, the McDougals and people like that that have been teaching this have not been primarily motivated by trying to get rich, they're trying to get good information out that people

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know, benefit from and get their lives back. know, I think there's a that we're making progress, it's always three steps up and one step back kind of thing, because that's the nature of the world. And, but, you know, I just know so many people in my universe over decades, and whether it's close friends or acquaintances or people through the internet, that sort of thing.

get this information and it changes their life and they're hooked, you know, and they're out there trying to help other people get it too. Yeah. What do think? is your approach to medical care? Some people like to get their blood work done often, get all kinds of scans, keep up with their vaccinations, you know,

to the doctor regularly and other people skeptical of vaccinations. Don't go to the doctor unless there's a problem. Don't do a lot of testing. Where do you fall on that? Well, I haven't had a physical for, I don't know, 15 years or something. So don't go see a doctor. you're not going to the doctor regularly? I don't go to the doctor. If I get sick, if I break a bone, which I've done, then of course I'm to go to the

orthopedic or whatever and get it set. And if you have an emergency, then I absolutely want to go see a doctor. But I don't see doctors haven't seen my my main doctor died, unfortunately, last year, John McDougall, the guy who was my, you know, go to guy. Basically, what I do is I get blood tests every year, and I go to a place called life extension.com. And you can order any type of blood test you want. I get a you know,

a panel, I get some basic tests that I want to have done. And you order it and then you get a, you know, within the next day, a doc, an ordered thing, you can take it to the lab, and they'll draw the blood and then you get an email within a week with all your results. And then if I have something in there that I'm not sure about, I have a lot of friends who are doctors, who, you know, who I can talk to and who I do send something to, what do think about this or whatever, just to bounce it off.

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But I'm not into scans. I'm not into, you know, checking out things. not into, I'm into prevention, which is my way, which is try to be as healthy as I can and eat healthy and have a live, get sleep and sunshine and take vacations when I can. So I'm guessing you didn't believe in the idea of doing a preventive colonoscopy. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the same way.

And my argument on that is that, you know, there may be convincing evidence, I haven't studied it closely, but there may be convincing evidence that colonoscopies save lives of Americans who are eating a very unhealthy diet that generates polyps and cancers in their colon, and that it may be that the benefits outweigh the risks for those people.

to get themselves scoped as it were and see what's going on. But I feel, and I'm not a doctor folks, but I feel just my opinion that if you're eating right and you're eating healthy, then the risks of the colonoscopy are going to outweigh the benefits. you know, I'm old enough that pretty soon they'll be recommending that I not do a colonoscopy.

Yeah. Buyer beware. mean, I'm not looking for any tests. I don't want to go looking for anything. That was kind of McDougal saying, why go looking for trouble? You know, if you got trouble, it'll find you then you deal with it. Right. But I do the the someone that I knew growing up lived down the street. She went into the hospital for one and she died. She never came out of the hospital. They perforated the colon or something. There's they had some accident and she died. I mean, he's a colonoscopy. Yeah.

these things are not completely risk-free. Things can happen. But like I say, feel like most of those tests, what they can tell you is like, should you get a calcium score or something like that? No, I'm not going to get a calcium. Why? Because what if it says you've got a bad score? I mean, I'm going to do the same thing. I should eat the healthy diet, whether you've got a good score or a bad score. If you've got a bad score, what does that just motivate you to do it more or something?

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But so yeah, there's I can't, you other than as I say, you break a bone, you crack a rib, you need to see a doctor, something that you get very sick, you know, then yeah, you got to go in and see a doctor. Otherwise, I don't want to see those guys. Not at all. I feel the same way. And we both have a lot of friends who are doctors. Yes, yeah. And who I respect a great deal to those doctors. I'm not you know, I don't necessarily include them in that, in that number. But you know,

I don't want to need a doctor. So I'm not going to need a doctor unless and until I do. I'm not going to go looking for trouble. Right. I tend to go for an annual checkup just to see how he's feeling, you know, make sure he's okay. the tires and right. And then if he's feeling okay, I say good. I'll see you next year. My aunt, died at 99 years old. She went very occasionally. Who was this? This is my aunt. Your aunt.

My aunt, yeah. She didn't believe in doctors, but she did see a doctor about every 12 or 15 years for something, and she outlived them all. So the doctor- Now, you had a good experience with fasting at True North, didn't you? Yes. Yes, I did. How else about that? Twice. Well, I did it 20 some years ago, the first time, just kind of for fun. And I decided to do it when about a year ago, I

little more than a year ago, I had kind of slipped off, I had took some my blood tests, and I was enjoying Thanksgiving too much and all that sort of thing. So I decided to go up and do a 10 day water only fast. And it was a great experience. Ain't cheap, cost a little bit of money. But you go up and you're out. Have you been to true life? not even for any good food. That's right. The food is good when you start eating. Believe me.

food tastes amazing when you start eating again. so yeah, so I went up and I did a 10 day supervised water fast. And you know, it was just part of what they want you to do is not be active, not be exercising, not be going on walks or anything like that, because you want to preserve muscle mass. And so I found myself sleeping a fair amount, you kind of your energy gets lower, and you start taking naps, which is kind of nice.

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And then you break the fast and they have a way that you add different foods back just liquids the first day, know, juices and that kind of stuff and and so on. And I dropped, what did I drop 15 pounds, I think, during the fast, I ended up with a net loss of about 10 pounds that I've kept off. But yeah, I mean, do feel light? Do you feel good? Do you got to be careful because you can be a little light headed if you get up too fast when you're

you've ever done any kind of long term fasting, but completely you're with experts up there who know what they're doing. They fasted over 25,000 people. They've never lost one. Dr. Alan Goldhammer, who I interviewed on this channel, he has a remarkable story. You know, when I was 15, 16, I think I probably wanted to one day become center fielder for the New York Yankees.

Did you have something absurd like that that you wanted to do when you were 15 or 16? Yeah, not quite, but I wasn't looking to be on any ball teams. Something else? Musician? Rock star? I kind of wanted to go work in film and TV, which is what I did. Perhaps a film director? I was a producer. Okay.

But what your dream was to be a producer? Yeah, I guess. All right. Because here's the point I'm trying to make. When Dr. Alan Goldhammer was 15 or 16, what he wanted to do when he grew up was have a clinic where he would water fast people and improve their health. He really wanted that when he was a kid? I mean, who has a nutty dream like that at 15 or 16 and then does it?

That's that to me is mind-boggling. Yeah. Well, Alan's a mensch. He's the he's the best. Yeah, he's a remarkable fellow. And so would you say that what are your goals going forward, particularly as regards to your place in the plant-based movement?

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I mean, I'm here. I'm still around. Longevity is the first goal. And you know what I like to comment on things from time to time. That's on YouTube when I have something I want to comment on. I always enjoy that. And I'm working on some other projects on right now. You know about some of that. Yeah, that I'm that I'm launching. But yeah, I mean, we will probably come back and do another expo again. get you will?

Yeah, we get a lot of interest. We get a lot of people who write us about that at different times. So we'll probably put something together, whether it's going to be here in LA, whether we're going to go to a beach place somewhere beautiful and do that, we're going to figure out. So yeah, mean, that's kind of my kids, they got their lives. We're doing other things and projects and stuff that we're working on. We're not as busy on

Vedge source, for example, at one point, Vedge source, you when we first launched, had, I don't know, 60 or 80 discussion boards, was before social media, and all people use discussion boards. So we had a lot of busy busyness and things that went on there that we'd managed over for years, until the advent of the Facebooks and the Instagrams where everybody tended to collect. And so yeah, we'll we'll we do, you know, little things here and there a documentary idea may

come up around something plant-based. And as I say, we'll probably do another expo again at some point. Let me know when you do, Jeff. Yeah, you bet. All right. It's been good speaking with you. Good seeing you again, my friend. for having me. All right. Take care. people can find you at vegsource.com and on YouTube at VegSource, right? That's right. All right. Here I am. Take care. Thanks,