Ageless man eats only Plants for 30 YEARS- John Kohler’s backyard Garden interview 2025

John Kohler, who’s channels “GrowingYour Greens”, “Okraw” and discountjuicers.com is a primarily raw vegan raw food plant based wfpb diet person who promotes growing your own food if possible and living off minimally processed plants for optimal health and healing, and he’s been doing so for 30 years! Here is our annual interview in his beautiful backyard garden as John Kohler discusses his whole food plant based diet and why others say they don’t do well when attempting the same diet.
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This guy is meaning nothing but plants for the last 30 [Music] years. Welcome back everybody. We’re I got it. This is my yearly trip that John Kohler is here. We’re in his backyard. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s the ageless man who basically eats only things that he mainly eats from his backyard and all of it is plants. And he’s been doing that for 30 years now. Started in 95. Wow. So you eat just plants? I eat all plants. The whole internet is now flooded with this brainwashing that plants are full of anti-nutrients and that if you eat plants, you’re going to be nutritionally deficient and you’re going to wither away. You don’t look like you’re withering away after 30 years away yet. So, there’s two things. One is you don’t get nutrition if you eat plants. And I’m getting these people saying on the comments section, “I used to eat nonprocessed plant foods and plants wrecked my gut and as soon as I went carnivore, all my problems went away.” Well, you know, Marcus, I get the same comments on my videos that I think there’s trolls just trolling our channels telling people like in the comments like, “Plants didn’t work. I went carnivore and I feel better than ever.” Well, you know, that that’s going to be interesting because my personal opinion is that short-term carnivore may work for some people, but the long term you’re going to you’re going to lose your life earlier than later. But that’s up to you, you know. So, you know, here’s the thing. Plants have uh you know, you could say you could call them plant toxins. I like to call them phytonutrients because on the same flip side, you could look at them as bad, but you could also look at them as good. Nothing in life is always right, wrong, good, bad. It’s always like a spectrum of good, bad, right, wrong, right? It depends. It’s on a continuum. And plants have a lot of nutrients we actually do need. And yes, some plants contain some amounts of anti-nutrients, if you want to call them that. That’s what, you know, carnivores like to call them, such as oxalates. This plant right here is spinach. It contains oxalates. It’s actually one of the highest in oxalates in my garden. Another one that’s really high is actually right behind me. It’s a Swiss chard. These are super high in oxalates. And you know, here’s the thing, guys. When you if you eat seasonally, which nobody does because everybody goes to the grocery store and every day of the year they have spinach you could buy in the 2 lb organic pack at Costco, right? Every day of the year in my garden, this spinach is bolting. It’s going out. It’s going to end. I won’t have it in another month. It’s going to be gone until next year when I’m growing it in the winter time, right? And guess what? I’m rotating my diet based on the seasons, which is something most people never do because they don’t eat what’s in their garden. They eat whatever they can buy in the store. And in the store, they import things from all over the world where it’s where it’s some season anywhere. It’s like 5:00 anywhere. It’s some season anywhere. So, you could always have, you know, all the different kinds of foods. And unfortunately, most Americans also or even many raw vegans go to the store and every week at Costco, they buy this organic spinach. The same thing. Every week I always buy spinach, lettuce, romaine, some bananas, and oranges, and whatever else. Dude, eat locally. Eat seasonally. Eat out of your garden. This way, your diet is always changing. You’re never going to get too many plant toxins of any specific toxin. Visit your local farms. If you don’t grow your own food, grow your own sprouts and microgreens, and don’t always grow the same microgreens. Grow different ones. I mean, another thing I look at traditional cultures. Men have been living on greens since we since we emerged from wherever we emerged from. You know, we’ve been eating greens and we and our bodies have become uh used to dealing with them. And this is traditional people. So, for example, in traditional African societies and cultures where they’re not eating processed junk food, fast food, actually a lot of their greens are high oxalate greens. They digest them just fine. Maybe this is partly genetic, but also partly they’ve tested them and they have higher amounts of beneficial bacteria such as what is it? Uh oxalabact formaginis foragises, right? That could digest more oxalates, right? That’s one thing. The other thing is that traditional cultures have learned how to cook their food or process their food properly to reduce the oxalate levels. And most Americans are dumb, you know, and they just like they just think they can eat everything wrong. But for example, if you take this spinach and you and you boil it, which then it’s not raw anymore, but if you boil it and you throw away the water, all the soluble oxidates get thrown away in the water. You’ve really reduced the the oxalates in here by at least, I don’t know, 50 60%. Now, if you want to do this in the raw format, how you would do this is you would chop it up, create more surface area, and then soak it in water. Of course, you’re not cooking it. Some of the oxalates will leech out into the water, the soluble ones, maybe only 10 to 20%. So that’s not that significant. But now what you do is you basically take tahini or sesame seeds, blend it up in the blender with some lemon juice and miso, make a lemon tahini dressing, or even you could use chia. These foods are very high in calcium. And what happens is now you premix your soaked spinach that you maybe dried off a little bit with the sesame seed dressing. You let it sit there for a while and then eat it. What happens is all the soluble oxalates then basically attach to the tahini due to the higher calcium content and then they go right through you. They don’t get absorbed. This is like some redikio. Here’s lettuce. These are very low oxalate foods. So you don’t always need to eat high oxalate foods. And when you eat them, eat them smartly, you know, so you don’t get high levels. I mean on on another side there’s a lot of studies that show some levels of oxalates may be healthpromoting. That being said um the other thing is that our bodies make our own oxalates internally even if we don’t eat them and each person can basically um get rid of naturally or detoxify a certain level of oxalates. Of course consult your doctor because basically if you’re normal and healthy you we can excrete excrete olets every single day a certain amount. Also, our bacteria could digest a certain amount if you have those bacteria. But the problem is if you’re an American and you have like diabetes or other some other kind of predisposition, you know, if you’re already like overweight and you know have metabolic disease and all these things, then you’re probably going to not be digesting them as or eliminating them as well as somebody that’s normal that’s used to eating these traditionally like a traditional person that lived in uh you know, Africa that ate high oxalates or somebody like me that you know I eat oxalates and I process them properly so I never get too much. I’ve never had kidney stones. I don’t intend to have kidney stones. And I mean that that’s that’s just my story. Most people in this modern world eat bread, pasta, cereal, cookies, crackers, pizza, refined carbs and sugar. So they get sick and when they get sick, what do they do? They take antibiotics. What does the antibiotics do? It kills the oxalate digesting bacteria. Your gut is 70% of your immune system. So they say oxalates are bad for you. Not all foods even have a lot of oxalates. I mean, just don’t eat the spinach. There’s so many foods to eat that grow in nature. They’re just looking for excuses. I mean, people have been eating plants forever. It’s just something that healthy people can handle. But most people are not healthy. I think that’s the key, Marcus. Most healthy people can handle. And when you’re coming from a standard American diet, then you’re immediately going to like vegan or raw vegan, trying to eat all these plants, and then you’re like, “Oh, spinach is healthy. I’m going to eat a ton of it because more is always better in America, right?” No, it’s not. And then you have problems because you already had metabolic damage that you’re trying to heal from and then now plants mess you up and then you go carnivore thinking that’s the answer and then maybe that might work for a while but then sooner or later you’re going to start having problems from that. You know I think once again it all comes down to balance and not overeating any any specific food. The other thing, you know, I also recommend is actually I re while I do sell juicers for a living. I actually don’t recommend juicing uh spinach and chard because that can concentrate the oxalates and you could have even higher uptakes of these things. So if I juice I juice like one sprig of chard every other week or something. But you know if you find me I’m actually juicing mostly lettucees which is what I love to juice the most. My juice is actually uh you know based around lettuce which actually has very low if any oxalates and it actually has not too many other toxins in there. So what do you mainly eat? What’s your normal diet? Every day I usually have a green juice. So this week’s green juice is basically um Roma uh hearts uh with cabbage um green cabbage and then I do uh ashhataba stems from my garden and then I do usually some kale in there. Yeah. And then I drink like a quart. Oh, and then this this time I also use cucumbers because I kind of needed a little bit more volume. I like to do mostly greens and vegetables without any fruits in there and I don’t put any kind of sweet fruits in there. So I did one quart of that so far. Uh next, actually after this video, I got some um cucumber hikimma juice that I made. So this is very important to stay hydrated and I’m not I mean while I do drink water, I would prefer to drink juice with structured water and also a lot of nutrition in there. I might have a meal on fruits. Actually earlier I had three mangoes and then later on I have actually my raw uh soup prepared. So it’s based around pepper juice and then I come around in my garden. I pick this this this. I picked one leaf of almost everything or things that I need to harvest. This week’s has bok choy that was over there that’s I cut out and it went into my raw vegan soup. It has some heat processed ingredients in the raw vegan soup. episode has like cooked mushrooms and cooked beans, but it has raw olives, raw capers, um shredded cucumber, shredded carrots, uh shredded zucchini, uh sun chokes from my garden, and basically just a hodge podge mixed in juice, the pepper juice that I blend up with nuts and seeds, herbs and spices. And then I eat that. And then if I’m still hungry, then I might have some heat processed foods that I cook in the Instant Pot so I don’t create carcinogens such as uh acryumide. And it could be some like I got some I was at my friend’s garden. I got some locally grown artichokes that are amazing. They have like such like a deep rich like mineral flavor. Um I might cook that in Instant Pot. I could have some purple potatoes or purple sweet potatoes. I might have some uh you know beans or rice in addition like smaller amounts. So I eat primarily raw vegan with I added started adding in some heat processed foods since actually you were here last time. People always say where do you get your protein? you said nuts and seeds and there’s even a little bit in some of this stuff. So, it’s not like you’re pounding the heavy protein. You’re not wasting away. You’re not a skinny anorexic typical raw vegan like you see out there. But, they’re futarians mainly. And I eat some fruit and actually I learned Marcus that I needed to reduce my fruit consumption that it was not serving me well actually. So, like I eat beans. So, for example, like soybeans are one of the highest in protein for beans, but then I don’t like those because they’re like GMO and all this stuff. But there’s another one called tari beans from South America or lupini beans. Uh they they are quite toxic if you eat them raw. They’re going to kill you because they got alkaloids. But if you soak them and cook them properly, they’re very high in protein. Like as high as soybeans, even more than meat, actually. Look at him. Look at his arms. He’s not skinny. Yeah. I mean, I’m I’m not like I’m not like I don’t like work out. I like lift buckets and I’m lifting bags of compost and But you’re not shriveled up. 30 years of eating. Look at this. Everything you see here is green leafy stuff. He doesn’t have a lot. You don’t have like big nut trees and No, I have a couple fruit trees. No nut trees. I think Gundry really messed up the health world so much with his lectins and his, you know, all the anti-nutrients and people I mean everybody’s buying into that. The meat thing I’m like I don’t like killing animals and stuff, but I always say what as long as you find it in nature, it’s a lot better than if you get it, you know, junk food, processed food. In the old days before we had civilization, people would eat stuff that only what they found in nature. And animals is part of that. And I’m not saying it’s good or bad. If you don’t like killing animals, fine, then eat plants. People do fine on that. I don’t judge either way. But when people say that eating plants made them feel worse. I think they’re coming from a place where they were already messed up by eating pasta, bread, cereal, cookies, crackers, pizza, you know, where they’re they’re they took antibiotics, the alcohol, you name it, you know, coffee every day. And then their gut was messed up. Oh, and then they also say fiber. Uh we can’t digest fiber. Of course not. We’re not our stomach. It’s supposed to go through the stomach because the fiber is the main food source of probiotics, right? Your gut bacteria. And it’s supposed to go through your stomach to get through your small intestine and where the bacteria can feed on it. And those are your your partners in life. And if you don’t feed them, what are you going to grow down there? And you know, a lot of mediators say, “Well, I don’t I don’t eat any fiber at all and I’m fine.” I’m like, “Wonder what your prostate’s going to be like?” I think there should be a balance. Like, eat stuff you find in nature. Like you said, a little bit of everything. I’m not saying you have to go kill animals, but I think variety is a big part of it. People go to the grocery store, they buy the same six things over and over and over all the time. You don’t have to eat meat. I mean, look at them. He’s not shriveled up and gaunt. And Marcus, what I think it is, you need balance, right? And unfortunately, in our society, people want the easy message. Lectins are bad. People gravitate to that message because they can latch on to it. Yeah, that’s the bad guy. I’m going to do what’s good. And no, what I’ve learned looking up so many studies and living on this earth for so many years is that life and health is so nuanced, right? It’s not this or not that. Fruit, while it is so healthy, it’s not the ideal food and we should only ever eat fruit to the exclusion of greens and other healthy plant foods, right? I think this is where or or like, you know, we should only eat meat in to the exclusion of every other food. Yeah. You know, and like you talked about like Yeah. If you eat a standard American diet, you messed up your gut and you’re not you’re eating a fiberless diet. Actually, if you’re eating standard American because they process all the fiber out of it, so you don’t need to deal with it. You’ve been eating that diet for 10, 20, 30 years. You’re you don’t have the microbes that digest fiber. You eat fiber, you get a stomach ache because you you you your body can’t deal with fiber because you’ve never eaten it. Then you eat meat has no fiber. Oh, your body’s just fine because you’re not eating fiber. You’re not challenging your body. You’re not going to create the good microbes. You probably got bad microbes in there that are going to shorten your life, cause more disease in the future. But you know what? That’s for you to decide. I recommend that everybody should get a microbiome test to see where you’re at so you could optimize your partners in health. Even many raw vegans don’t believe in the microbiome. Microbiome science is pretty solid these days that they know there’s so many diseases connected with the microbiome. And if you get a good microbiome test, it’ll say, “Hey, eat these foods. increase your beneficial bacteria that you’re deficient in and slowly but surely, you know, don’t just go raw vegan overnight or go any crazy vegan. Eat your normal I mean, this is what I say to people if they want to make turn their health around and if they’re eating processed junk food for their whole life, continue to eat processed junk food, 80%. And then slowly slip in 20% of the healthy stuff along with your junk food, but then slowly but surely decrease the junk food and increase the healthy food slowly. Don’t just like go overnight. Then you’re going to be, you know, a person that says, “Oh, going healthy, eating plants didn’t work for me because you tried to do it too fast, too quick.” And your body can’t change. Especially as you get more mature on the planet, your body can’t adjust as quickly as we used to. Yeah. Another thing people say is like, “Oh, plants have feelings, too. If if you if you kill them, they feel the pain.” You think they that’s why they have the anti-nutrients to repel you so you don’t eat them. So, first thing I say, oh, so we’re not supposed to eat anything then because everything nothing wants to die. Okay. I say, here’s my answer to that is you’re not killing the plant. You’re cutting off the top of it and the rest of it is still alive. And what happens when you cut off a piece of a plant? It grows back twice as big, twice as strong. It’s giving you more. It actually thrives more from having from you having cut off some of it. And it’s almost like saying, “Thank you. And now I have a purpose. Here’s twice as much. So the plant is celebrating life because you ate half of it. It’s giving you more. It’s not dead. It’s it it it’s thriving more. If you cut off an animal’s legs, it’s dead. It’s like maybe plants feel pain. I don’t know. But I think it’s like getting a haircut. It comes back twice as big, twice as strong. Offers you more food. It grows faster. It It’s like it’s it wants to be picked. Like you’re not pulling the whole thing out by the roots. You’re just eating the top part. Like this. I can just pop off the top. And this is actually the most tender, delicious part. Eat it. And now, right where I cut it off, right here, this chute is going to produce a a new outgrowth here and a new outgrowth right here and get even taller. I mean, you can see what happened to this lettuce that we that we bent over, right? It got cut and then it basically shooted out in multiple places. Now, it’s going to seed, so it can now reproduce, right? There’s also ways you could harvest the bottom leaves and just pick a little bit off the bottom leaf. The top grow is still growing. Of unfortunately, most people in like traditional like uh a lot of vegetables that they harvest, they just cut the whole plant down. Like lettuce, if you buy lettuce, but if you buy like kale leaves or collard leaves, they usually just harvest off some off the side so the plant keeps growing. I eat plenty of roots. I think they’re a good crop and we should be eating them quite often. They’re actually quite healthy because they could concentrate a lot of nutrients. carrots, beets, you know, sweet potatoes, purple potatoes. But if you pull out a potato plant, eat the potatoes, for some reason there’s still some more growing. It’s like somehow there’s they always like spread out more, you know? Yeah. And then you could of course start more yourself and stuff. So, and then also too, the other thing we have to remember is nature’s abundant, right? You plant one potato and then it turns into like 20 potatoes. And when I dig them up, I maybe dig up 18 of them and two of them I never find cuz they’re somewhere I never found them. And then they come up next year, right? Like my Jerusalem artich chokes, like I can’t get rid of them. I I pick up I pick 20 of them and then there’s like 10 more that comes up. Yeah. Some plants are are you can’t once you plant them, they were like Yeah. Like this this mint I’ll never get rid of. I tried to empty all the soil out, take everything out, put it back in, and it still came back. Yeah. Your your rosemary plant became a monster. The plants just want to grow and continue to grow. And I mean, plants have evolved with us and with animals on the planet. These plants know that deer is going to come and eat it, right? I mean, they’re they’re they’re designed to do that to get eaten by deer and then they just shoot out more plants or some plants even even if you cut them into the ground, they’re still going to come back because the roots are still alive. Plants do want you to eat them because in nature, the deer is a good example. Animals eat plants, including the seeds, right? They eat the fruit and stuff and then they go 2 miles away and poop out the seeds in a pile of fertilizer. It can sit there for a hundred years until it rains. The rain wets the seeds. Enzyme inhibitors get melted off the seeds. It mixes with the fertilizer and grows. The plant could not spread if it wasn’t for the animal eating it, digesting it, pooping it out 2 miles away. This whole thing about ants, plants don’t want to be eaten. I think I think the antiutrients are only strong enough to repel bugs, but it doesn’t really affect us very much. I think I think it’s too low of an amount to really make a difference to us. Plants don’t want to be eaten by bugs because if they were eaten by bugs then nothing there’d be no plant left and then we couldn’t eat it. So I think the design of the antiutrients is to keep the little guys away, not the big guys. So I think the anti-nutrients it depends on the plants. So like I in in the back of my garden I’m growing this stuff called chia or tree spinach, right? If you eat it raw it you you could it could kill you, right? Cuz it has too many alkaloids that are toxic. But if I steam it or just even I I usually steam it, it cooks them off and then I could eat this plant in higher quantities, right? So it’s very important to know your plant and what you’re eating. Most common vegetables in American supermarkets you could eat raw without any problems um in proper amounts, but then there are definitely some of more tropical foods, you know, especially with animals, right? You’ll find deer always eat these if you grow them in your garden. and deer will never mess with, you know, these plants because animals inherently know what’s toxic and what isn’t and they won’t eat them whereas we’re we’re dumb. We’ll eat whatever’s in front of us. Yeah, that’s actually another good point is is some people say um you know, I always say bitter is good for digestion, right? Swedish bitters and all that. People say, “Well, no, we’re not supposed to eat bitter. That’s why plants are bitter because they don’t want you to eat them. They and that’s why sweet stuff is I go, “Oh, well, poison hemlock is sweeter than sugar.” You know, bitter foods has been proven to improve your digestion and clean your liver. The grocery store thing, that’s another thing that that triggers people. They say, “Oh, did you know that all the foods you buy in the grocery store are not really natural anyway, that they’re all hybridized and that they’re they’re they’re not really healthy because they’re man-made and you would never find them in nature.” All during history, man has been basically selecting for certain traits in foods. Whether you want to call that hybridization or just you know man selection we’ve selected for fruits and generally in fruits they select for the sweetness and you know being sweeter also they they select for being uh shippable so they don’t spoil in shipment. As for greens maybe they they select for this one grows faster and it’s the same lettuce. We could plant it. It grows in half the time as this other lettuce so we could flip more lettucees in the year and make more money. Um, you know, they they grow for so many different reasons. Unfortunately, the reason that I like to grow for is for nutrition. So, you know, what people don’t understand, Mark, is that, you know, plants make, you know, for tomatoes, for example, they can make up to 200 different plant metabolites, or I would call those phyto nutrients. You could call them phytochemicals. And the plants don’t necessarily make it for us. They make it for itself so it could defend itself from nature. For example, this lettuce here is like nice and purple. This lettuce here is more green. Which one is more resistant to sunburn? The one that’s a light color or the one that’s a dark color? Yep, you guys are geniuses. It’s the one that’s a dark color. Like dark skinned people are, you know, not as likely to burn as somebody that’s nice and fair, right? So plants make all different kinds of nutrients. And you know, my goal is to get the plant to express all the different nutrients so that when it grows, I could eat these nutrients and even grow, you know, more purple lettucees instead of green ones to have these things, you know. So that’s that’s my focus, but unfortunately when you go to the grocery store, that’s not necessarily their focus. So that’s why I think it’s very important to grow your own food. Check out a company, rare seeds.com, Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. You can just get their free catalog and see all the amazing colors of foods. I encourage you guys to eat the rainbow. Buy different foods each time you go to the grocery store, even if you are limited to what the grocery store sells. So, you’re getting a wider variety of nutrients. And of course, when you eat a wider variety of foods, you’re decreasing the anti-nutrients in any one particular food because you’re getting a greater diversity. And you’re getting a greater uh, you know, depth of different nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and these phyitochemicals that in my opinion are so critical for our health, right? Greens especially are very high in phyitochemicals compared to calories. Whereas fruit, especially bananas, I like to pick on bananas, are very high in calories and have very few phytonutrients. Not that they’re phytonutrient deficient like white bread. But nonetheless, compare them against like some red lettuce, you know, the red lettuce or even if you if you want to get some fruit, get some blueberries, some wild blueberries. You know, my goal is to eat high phytonutrient food versus like just low phytonutrient food, you know, which I would consider filler food. So that’s why, you know, I juice the greens to concentrate the phytonutrients so I can actually get them more into me and be healthier because, you know, phytonutrients in some of the studies I’ve seen are correlated with a longer life and actually having less, you know, disease and actually in in many cases healing from many different situations. And this is something also not really discussed, Marcus, is that, you know, the greens are much more in my opinion, uh, you know, I don’t want to say healing food, but a food that’s going to get you healthier in the long run. Not to say that fruits are bad cuz I eat plenty of fruits, but we want to have the right balance. And I think unfortunately in raw vegan lifestyle, most people have too heavy of a fruit balance without enough greens and other vegetables. And I would even, you know, say you should eat other plant foods, including grains and beans and things. You know, if you want to keep your raw label, I have ways on my channel how you could keep those raw and still eat them. Some beans can be sprouted and eaten. You know, some rice you could you could soak those and you know, whatever sprout them, but they don’t normally sprout and eat them. You know, grains could be sprouted and eaten too. You know, I I eat iron corn, which is like an ancient grain lower in, you know, gluten. So, you know, I eat a very diverse diet, so I spread all the anti-nutrients out. And then I eat a little bit of everything. So, I get a diverse diet. And my diet’s always changing, of course, based on my season. So, you know, I want you guys to strive to eat more diversity, eat more seasonally, and expand the different plant foods you’re eating because I think in the in the long run, you’re going to be more resilient because of it. Not only because of the nutrients, but also because all the unique fibers, especially in beans that feed your gut microbiome. So, you know, you can be more resilient when something may happen to you in the future. Because once again, our microbiome is at least 70 to 80% of our immune system and can help fight many different, you know, diseases that can occur and are literally our are our partners in health. And unfortunately, many people in the raw vegan movement still don’t take them into consideration. Um, especially doing a juice fast, which I do sell juicers. Even if you go on a vegetable juice fast, that will modulate your microbiome. And I don’t recommend long juice fasts because literally you’re you’re feeding a little bit of fiber from the juices that have the soluble fiber, but you’re removing all the insubable fiber. You know, it’s interesting the uh the people that say uh plants are hybridized, right? Well, so so is everything or the meat are the cows that they breed for for to grow faster and have more fat and meat. Yeah. I mean, so it’s it’s the same no matter what food you have. You can find heirloom animal meats, but of course you can also find heirloom vegetables and fruits. You know, I do have a book called uh the free food and medicine edible plant guide book. I mean, wild foods are the ultimate because these foods are are the least hybridized. They’ve been hybridized by nature. And most people just even here in the desert there, you walk outside your your door and there are wild plants growing everywhere in this world where most people they think it’s just a weed growing through the cracks. But if you knew what the properties were of those plants, that’s why I created the book because you are surrounded. And we even walked James Sloan out to the desert and he pointed out where where people go to die like the desert. There are plants that can be used for all kinds of reasons. And uh so you know people think they see plants they they have no clue that it’s a if it’s edible b what it’s used for what the beneficial properties are uh and how to prepare it or anything. That’s why I created the book. Wild plants don’t get watered. So they grow roots really deep because they have to survive. So they have more concentrated stronger nutrients uh things that make them alive than the rather than the the wimpy farm plants which just get watered every day. They don’t have to grow deep roots. Um so the deeper the root is the more nutrients it pulls out of the ground. And so the wild plants are the way to go if you can at least mix some of them in. The more variety the better. And you got a good head start with your garden here. You’ve got like this like you you eat how much of your diet would you say you grow per calorie? It’s actually quite low because obviously greens have very few calories. Yeah. But I eat greens out of my garden every single day. Whether it’s in my juice or whether it’s in my soups or my salads or whether I steam my greens. I steam my greens, too. It’s like you get more of them in me cuz you know my my goal Marcus is to eat primarily first out of my garden. Now, I don’t grow everything I need. I mean, I did buy three acres in Puerto Rico, so I’m going to be growing a lot more there. And maybe one day I’ll be growing like 90% of all my food in my property, which is 3 acres there. But nonetheless, at this point, I grow all the greens, you know, and some other fruits. And my goal is to eat out of my garden first. And then secondarily, then I go to local farms in the area. Uh, pick other local foods that are in season. So, actually this week, I got some local beets that are just so tender and so much different than the stuff you’d buy in the store. And then I’ll go to buy organic, you know, fruits and vegetables and other plant foods, you know, to fill in. So, I mean, that that’s how I live. And I would encourage more people to live like this where it’s like eating more local foods. I’m not like one of those local war people that say I only eat what’s local because I think that’s not maybe as wise because once again being in a certain geographic location is limiting the foods you are eating. Whereas I you know in this world where we have commerce and people bringing things in and importing things. I want to eat all different kinds of foods and have a greater diversity. To me that’s more important. But if you know local is your thing I I highly respect that. Every year that goes by, you look the same. Thanks, Mark. So, it’s working obviously. So, you can live and thrive and be healthy eating nothing but plants. I think you just got to do it smart. And unfortunately online, a lot of people in our in our space markets try to dumb it down. Just eat fruit, you’re going to be the healthiest. Like, no, that’s not accurate. I mean, I think the main message is diversity. And then each person needs to find for themselves what ratios of what works for them and then also work with your microbiome. Get a test to see where you’re at and what your microbiome may need to dial it in. Of course, also get standard, you know, blood test to make sure all your markers are in line. And you know, don’t eat supplements because you think you need them. E focus on eating whole foods to get all your nutrients so you don’t have to take a supplement because your dad’s deficient in something, right? If I’m deficient in a nutrient, I’ll be like, “Hey, what plant has lysine in it?” For example, hey, beans have lysine. So then I’ll eat certain kinds of beans that are higher in lysine. So I get some lysine in me instead of taking a lysing supplement. Quick, people mention B12. B12 very important. I just interviewed a raw vegan on my channel who thought that we could make our own B12. And now when I hold up my hand next to his hand in the video, his hands totally shaking. And he had B12 damage. He’s now more chemically sensitive and all these other things. So, you know, I think that getting B12 is is critical that we don’t recycle it. I have also had other friends that are gardeners that basically dig up their dirty plants and eat the dirty plants and all these things and they were B12 deficient. Um, you know, while it is true there is bacteria in the soil that do make B12, the question is, you know, is it going to get into us? I don’t rely on my plants for B12. I do take a supplement. However, there are foods that are vegan that have B12 in them. So, like I recently was at the natural products expo and there’s a nutritional yeast unfortified from Germany designed to have B12. You take like I don’t know, I forget the amount, but it was like a small amount of this basically uh yeast that contains B12 because of the way because the way it grew and then you got your B12. So, if you don’t want to take something, you could eat this yeast now. So, how do you feel about people saying, “Well, that that proves right there that you’re not that you have to eat meat because otherwise you wouldn’t get your B12.” So I mean we got to look back to nature. So in nature like man did man take B12 supplements. I mean even these days not all animals have B12 right? If animals are being fed on a cafo and being fed or you know GMO corn and soy those animals don’t have B12 in it anyways. Right? So you know B12 is from the bacteria. If if the animals eat like the grass with the roots and then chew it all up they’re going to have that bacteria. they’re going to make the B12 and then it’s going to get distributed in all their meat, right? In nature, if we were out in nature, if we drank from like dirty streams, which you can’t drink from streams anymore cuz now they have PAS and other pollutions and toxins in there. Like thousands of years ago, if we drank from streams, dirty streams could have had some, you know, some B12 bacteria and that we could have gotten, right? And of course, everything these days is totally sterilized. Sterilized to kill everything, including the good bacteria that may make B12. And, you know, thousands of years ago, it was a totally different place. And the other thing I would say is that like Marcus, you know, I want you guys to eat as many plants as you feel comfortable with. My opinion and based on the science that, you know, you everybody should be eating at least 80 to 90% plants. I mean, some people would say 95% plants. If you want to eat 5 to 10% of high quality animal products, I you know, like you could be healthy doing that. If you eat more than 10% of animal products, I I don’t think you’re going to be optimally healthy. But the whole thing is we need to have a a diet based around real foods that you could find in nature, not things that are man-made. That’s what it comes down to. Eat things you find in nature. These days, we are not living in nature. Like none of you guys have like hardly any of you guys have a garden. You’re not connected with nature. You don’t go forest bathing. We’ve we’ve lost our connection with nature. And I think that’s really the problem with B12 is that we’ve lost our nature connection. Every food you buy in the store has been sterilized. They don’t want have any bacteria because you’re they’re going to have the next E.coli outbreak on cantaloupe which was caused by cow poop that had bad bacteria on it. Actually, there was I read about actually November there was like organic carrot had had some kind of like it was recalled which I was like whoa organic carrots that sucks. But like it’s because contamination problems due to animal products, right? And when you eat animal products, guess what? you you could be potentially eating the contaminated stuff and get the E.coli. I mean, there’s more outbreaks from meats than plant foods because you’re directly eating the animal products that could have the bad bacteria in them in the first place. That’s why, of course, you should be cooking on your meats. Well, I think that pretty much covers it. I think we’re doing we got quite a bit of coverage here. These are the most common questions I think that people ask. You’re obviously doing good. Thanks, Marcus. You’re living proof and we’re going to come back every year and he’s not going to change ever. The same John. Actually, we shot this 20 years ago. All the videos were shot and we’re just releasing one every year. So, Oh, well, thanks, John. It’s been a pleasure as always. And, uh, it’s always such a It’s so It feels so good to be sitting in this. This is like this feels real. This feels nature, you know? This is real. It’s not like I’m sitting in a field of white bread or something. Well, thanks, John. And we’ll see you guys in the next video. Bye, everyone. [Music]