Eats of Eden

December 11, 2006

What is it about this article that makes me feel uneasy? SHELBY - Sharon Surratt Robbs' heart is full of the Holy Spirit. Filling up her belly takes a little work. For the past several weeks, Robbs has been following a faith-based, strict vegan regimen: 85 percent raw food, 15 percent cooked. No meat, no seafood, no dairy, no animal products of any kind. No refined sugar, no white flour or white rice. Most Americans would find this hard to stomach, but George H. Malkmus, founder of the "Hallelujah Diet," says that as many as 2 million people around the world are trying to adhere to the plan. The Hallelujah Diet is based on a single Bible verse and promoted by a multimillion dollar company that's about to launch a major expansion of its headquarters in this town in the North Carolina foothills. "I was the hamburger queen, honey. A diva, actually," confesses Robbs, who uses

the nickname "Shay" and who has driven past the Hallelujah Acres headquarters for years on her way to Shelby's nearby fast-food restaurant row. "I was eating Big Macs every other day, french fries, KFC. ... I went to McDonald's on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for my family, and it was nothing to go back at lunch and maybe again at dinner. "I loved the way I was eating." But not the way she was feeling. Though she exercises 60 to 90 minutes five to seven days a week, she couldn't lose the 25 pounds or so she had added to her 5-foot-6 frame since she got married 10 years ago. She had constant digestive troubles. Her doctor has told her that, at age 33, she has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in a family with a history of heart problems. He wrote her a prescription for a cholesterol-lowering drug and told her she'd probably be on it for the rest of her life. "I said, 'There has got to be better a way.' And there is a better way, and

that's God's way," Robbs says. Now, if she could just get others to try it. The biblical basis That evangelical urge is how the Hallelujah Diet has gone from being the kooky idea of a small-time Baptist preacher to the great hope of legions of followers, most of them Christian, looking for a way to heal or prevent disease. Malkmus, who attended Moody Bible Institute in the 1960s, graduated from Elohim Bible College in New York and was ordained by a small Baptist church in that state, was introduced to the vegan lifestyle in 1976, at age 42. He had just lost his mother to colon cancer, after watching her suffer through chemo- and radiation therapy, when a "baseball-sized tumor" showed up under his own rib cage, he says. Though he never went to an oncologist or had a biopsy, Malkmus thought the tumor was cancerous and sought alternative treatment. A fellow evangelist, Lester Roloff, told him to change his diet and feed his body the

way God intended. Roloff cited Genesis 1:29: "Then God said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.' " Malkmus completely changed the way he ate and, over time, he says, the tumor went away. As he met others who claimed a vegan diet had cured their ills as well, he came to believe God had given him a message to spread -- that God initially meant for man to live only on what was provided in the Garden of Eden, and that the addition of meat to man's diet after the great flood had introduced a host of illnesses because the human body has trouble digesting it. In addition, Malkmus says, cooking food destroys its nutritional value. Preservatives and other chemicals -- including medications -- accumulate in and poison the body, he says. "Being a preacher, I started trying to take it to my pastor friends," Malkmus says. "They didn't want anything to do with

me. They so much as said that what I was teaching was quackery, even though what I was teaching was in the Bible. "It frustrated me, because I had had this personal experience, and I was starting to get others to have similar experiences, and here I thought I had the solution to all the physical problems that we were praying about in our churches, and yet they totally rejected it." Spreading the word So it went for 15 years, Malkmus says, during which time his first wife left him. Eventually, he relocated to Rogersville, Tenn., where he began offering free seminars in a hotel lobby on the benefits of the diet. One of his early converts was the woman who would become his second wife and the co-founder of Hallelujah Acres. Rhonda Malkmus says the diet cured her of debilitating arthritis. The business started in 1992 with $1,000 of borrowed money, a collection of health-food supplements and other products, along with the seminars. The couple

moved the company to Shelby in 1997, renovating a former Bible college into its headquarters. Hallelujah Acres has brought a welcome flow of visitors to the Cleveland County community, which once relied on cotton farming and textile manufacturing, but has converted to a service and retail economy. What used to be the Bible college's gym is now a carpeted, track-lit conference room where up to 500 people can gather for lectures and PowerPoint presentations. Malkmus and his wife still offer free seminars once a month. Hallelujah Acres charges for its other programs -- a series of lectures titled "Get Healthy! Stay Balanced," several food-preparation classes and a "Health Ministers Training" course that instructs people on how to teach others the benefits of the Hallelujah Diet. Malkmus says there are 7,000 trained Health Ministers in 42 countries, who also serve as sales representatives for Hallelujah Acres' extensive line of books, vitamin and mineral

supplements, electric fruit- and vegetable-juicers and the company's flagship product, BarleyMax. It's a dehydrated, ground-barley powder that Hallelujah Diet adherents are encouraged to mix with distilled water or eat with a spoon up to four times a day. After a few days to two weeks of "detoxification," during which some followers of the diet experience headaches, odd rashes and other symptoms, many say they are able to lose excess weight, regain energy and alleviate the symptoms of about 170 illnesses. What's missing In response to revelations that a vegan diet is deficient in vitamin B-12, Hallelujah Acres now recommends a daily B-vitamin supplement, which it sells for $15 for a two-month supply. There are other criticisms of the diet. That it is hard for many people to follow long term because it is so restrictive. That with all the supplements and organically grown produce, it's expensive. And that all that raw food keeps people in

the bathroom. At Hallelujah Acres, speakers have even been installed in the restrooms so that conference participants don't miss the lectures during frequent breaks. Though Malkmus says that 46 medical doctors and more than 300 registered nurses have gone through training at Hallelujah Acres, most in the medical community would discourage patients from taking themselves off prescribed drugs in favor of a steady diet of salads, nuts and smoothies. Harold G. Koenig, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is founder and co-director of Duke University's Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, tried the Hallelujah Diet a couple of years ago. "For about a half a day," he says with a laugh. "It involves drinking a lot of that barley stuff, that green, gicky stuff." Koenig says he and his wife tried it because a lot of their friends at church were doing it. Any lifestyle change, he says --including a diet

-- will be easier to follow if it's taken on with a community of believers such as a church. John B. Anderson, professor emeritus in the department of nutrition at UNC's School of Public Health, says many cultures around the world thrive on vegan diets. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a vegan his whole adult life. The key, Anderson says, is to be vigilant about filling in the nutrients that fruits and vegetables alone cannot provide. "By and large, it's very intelligent people who follow the vegan diet, and they know what they need and they try to overcome that by taking supplements or eating other items," Anderson says. He objects to the notion that meat is the cause of most human illness, as Malkmus has claimed, or that refined sugars are like poison to the body. "What they do is add extra body fat," he says of these foods. "But they're not poisonous. That's a lot of crap." In February, on the company's 15th anniversary, Malkmus plans

to break ground on a $30 million, 72-room hotel on a 102-acre site across the two-lane highway from the existing Hallelujah Acres facilities. That will be followed by a 250-seat restaurant that will replace the current cafe, which is basically a salad bar set up daily in a hallway of the conference-center building. The last phase of the expansion, Malkmus says, will be an enlarged health-food store and bigger auditorium on the new site. Though the company is privately held and doesn't release sales figures, Malkmus says Hallelujah Acres now has 60 full-time employees. The company owns more than $2 million worth of property at its site in Cleveland County. Malkmus and his wife, who say their sole income is from the sale of books they write and from "love offerings" taken when they travel across the country to tell church congregations about the diet, live in neighboring Caldwell County in a home valued for property taxes at $347,000. Malkmus, who lived

for a time early in his ministry in an unfinished basement with a tarp stretched over it for a roof, says, "It's amazing how God has supported us." At a Health Minister training program last month, more than 100 people arrived on a Wednesday night for a get-acquainted session that had each course participant go on stage to give his or her testimony about the Hallelujah Diet. This was followed by two days of lectures on biblical and empirical support for the program. Putting it into practice The Food and Drug Administration limits what the producers and distributors of health-food products and the creators of diet programs can say. Essentially, a company can make no claims about what the diet will do for any particular condition, but it can allow others to talk about their experiences, including what they say are healings from diabetes, arthritis, stomach problems, fibromyalgia, all kinds of cancer and dozens of other diseases. So

Hallelujah Acres depends heavily on testimonials. These have a powerful effect in the community of Christian evangelicals, who may be more likely to try a Bible-based diet than people of other faiths. Testimonials also appeal to people who eschew medical treatment or who have tried medical and other approaches without success. Hazel Hobbs was trained as a Hallelujah Acres health minister in 1999 and says there are two kinds of people most receptive to the diet plan: those who already shop in the natural-foods section of the grocery store, and those who have major health problems from which they haven't been able to get relief. "Anybody else, they look at you like, 'OK, here's another one just fell out of the sky,' " Hobbs says. Hobbs, who lives in Rolesville, had problems of her own a decade ago. "My body was just starting to break down," she says. She suffered from osteoporosis and two bulging discs in her back. No wonder, she now says.

She grew up on a farm and ate lots of meat. She smoked for more than 30 years. She gave up smoking, started taking calcium and other supplements, and got some better. But she says she didn't really turn things around until a friend told her about the Hallelujah Diet. She cleaned out her kitchen cabinets of all the foods with ingredients she couldn't pronounce, and she started making her own fruit and vegetable drinks and distilling her own water. Now 66, the red-headed, fast-talking Hobbs says she has the bone-density of a 25-year-old woman. She has a small but growing business selling jars of BarleyMax and Celtic sea salt, as well as other staples from the Hallelujah Acres product line. In her job as an in-home care assistant primarily for elderly patients, she constantly preaches the benefits of a raw-foods diet. She hopes to rent a small space in Wake Forest in early 2007 where she can offer classes on why the Hallelujah Diet works and how to follow it. Hobbs says she has come to believe that all pharmaceuticals are poison, and she only goes to the doctor nowadays for tests that she says confirm the curative effects of a raw-food diet. Just as Hallelujah Diet proponents say they are annoyed by the barrage of TV advertisements for drugs and appeals for money for research into the causes and cures for disease, many doctors, they say, don't want to hear patients' arguments that their bodies have healed themselves after being fed a raw-food diet. Shay Robbs, the recent Hallelujah Diet convert who lives in Shelby, understands. Trying to tell some people that the body has been healed of disease by something as simple as a change in diet would not be unlike trying to prove that accepting Christ as a savior is transformative. It's a matter of faith. Peter H

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December 12, 2006

I don't know, Peter. What is it about this article that makes you feel uneasy? I can't see anything in it that should. peace, sharonpeter VV <swpgh01 wrote: What is it about this article that makes me feel uneasy? SHELBY - Sharon Surratt Robbs' heart is full of the Holy Spirit. Filling up her belly takes a little work. For the past several weeks, Robbs has been following a

faith-based, strict vegan regimen: 85 percent raw food, 15 percent cooked. No meat, no seafood, no dairy, no animal products of any kind. No refined sugar, no white flour or white rice. Most Americans would find this hard to stomach, but George H. Malkmus, founder of the "Hallelujah Diet," says that as many as 2 million people around the world are trying to adhere to the plan. The Hallelujah Diet is based on a single Bible verse and promoted by a multimillion dollar company that's about to launch a major expansion of its headquarters in this town in the North Carolina foothills. "I was the hamburger queen, honey. A diva, actually," confesses Robbs, who uses the nickname "Shay" and who has driven past the Hallelujah Acres headquarters for years on her way to Shelby's nearby fast-food restaurant row. "I was eating Big Macs every other day, french fries, KFC. ... I went to McDonald's on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for my family, and it was nothing to go

back at lunch and maybe again at dinner. "I loved the way I was eating." But not the way she was feeling. Though she exercises 60 to 90 minutes five to seven days a week, she couldn't lose the 25 pounds or so she had added to her 5-foot-6 frame since she got married 10 years ago. She had constant digestive troubles. Her doctor has told her that, at age 33, she has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in a family with a history of heart problems. He wrote her a prescription for a cholesterol-lowering drug and told her she'd probably be on it for the rest of her life. "I said, 'There has got to be better a way.' And there is a better way, and that's God's way," Robbs says. Now, if she could just get others to try it. The biblical basis That evangelical urge is how the Hallelujah Diet has gone from being the kooky idea of a small-time Baptist preacher to the great hope of legions of followers, most of them

Christian, looking for a way to heal or prevent disease. Malkmus, who attended Moody Bible Institute in the 1960s, graduated from Elohim Bible College in New York and was ordained by a small Baptist church in that state, was introduced to the vegan lifestyle in 1976, at age 42. He had just lost his mother to colon cancer, after watching her suffer through chemo- and radiation therapy, when a "baseball-sized tumor" showed up under his own rib cage, he says. Though he never went to an oncologist or had a biopsy, Malkmus thought the tumor was cancerous and sought alternative treatment. A fellow evangelist, Lester Roloff, told him to change his diet and feed his body the way God intended. Roloff cited Genesis 1:29: "Then God said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.' " Malkmus completely changed the way he ate and, over time, he says, the tumor went

away. As he met others who claimed a vegan diet had cured their ills as well, he came to believe God had given him a message to spread -- that God initially meant for man to live only on what was provided in the Garden of Eden, and that the addition of meat to man's diet after the great flood had introduced a host of illnesses because the human body has trouble digesting it. In addition, Malkmus says, cooking food destroys its nutritional value. Preservatives and other chemicals -- including medications -- accumulate in and poison the body, he says. "Being a preacher, I started trying to take it to my pastor friends," Malkmus says. "They didn't want anything to do with me. They so much as said that what I was teaching was quackery, even though what I was teaching was in the Bible. "It frustrated me, because I had had this personal experience, and I was starting to get others to have similar experiences, and here I thought I had the solution to all the

physical problems that we were praying about in our churches, and yet they totally rejected it." Spreading the word So it went for 15 years, Malkmus says, during which time his first wife left him. Eventually, he relocated to Rogersville, Tenn., where he began offering free seminars in a hotel lobby on the benefits of the diet. One of his early converts was the woman who would become his second wife and the co-founder of Hallelujah Acres. Rhonda Malkmus says the diet cured her of debilitating arthritis. The business started in 1992 with $1,000 of borrowed money, a collection of health-food supplements and other products, along with the seminars. The couple moved the company to Shelby in 1997, renovating a former Bible college into its headquarters. Hallelujah Acres has brought a welcome flow of visitors to the Cleveland County community, which once relied on cotton farming and textile manufacturing, but has converted to a service and

retail economy. What used to be the Bible college's gym is now a carpeted, track-lit conference room where up to 500 people can gather for lectures and PowerPoint presentations. Malkmus and his wife still offer free seminars once a month. Hallelujah Acres charges for its other programs -- a series of lectures titled "Get Healthy! Stay Balanced," several food-preparation classes and a "Health Ministers Training" course that instructs people on how to teach others the benefits of the Hallelujah Diet. Malkmus says there are 7,000 trained Health Ministers in 42 countries, who also serve as sales representatives for Hallelujah Acres' extensive line of books, vitamin and mineral supplements, electric fruit- and vegetable-juicers and the company's flagship product, BarleyMax. It's a dehydrated, ground-barley powder that Hallelujah Diet adherents are encouraged to mix with distilled water or eat with a spoon up to four times a day. After a few days to two

weeks of "detoxification," during which some followers of the diet experience headaches, odd rashes and other symptoms, many say they are able to lose excess weight, regain energy and alleviate the symptoms of about 170 illnesses. What's missing In response to revelations that a vegan diet is deficient in vitamin B-12, Hallelujah Acres now recommends a daily B-vitamin supplement, which it sells for $15 for a two-month supply. There are other criticisms of the diet. That it is hard for many people to follow long term because it is so restrictive. That with all the supplements and organically grown produce, it's expensive. And that all that raw food keeps people in the bathroom. At Hallelujah Acres, speakers have even been installed in the restrooms so that conference participants don't miss the lectures during frequent breaks. Though Malkmus says that 46 medical doctors and more than 300 registered nurses have gone through

training at Hallelujah Acres, most in the medical community would discourage patients from taking themselves off prescribed drugs in favor of a steady diet of salads, nuts and smoothies. Harold G. Koenig, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is founder and co-director of Duke University's Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, tried the Hallelujah Diet a couple of years ago. "For about a half a day," he says with a laugh. "It involves drinking a lot of that barley stuff, that green, gicky stuff." Koenig says he and his wife tried it because a lot of their friends at church were doing it. Any lifestyle change, he says --including a diet -- will be easier to follow if it's taken on with a community of believers such as a church. John B. Anderson, professor emeritus in the department of nutrition at UNC's School of Public Health, says many cultures around the world thrive on vegan diets. Mahatma Gandhi,

for example, was a vegan his whole adult life. The key, Anderson says, is to be vigilant about filling in the nutrients that fruits and vegetables alone cannot provide. "By and large, it's very intelligent people who follow the vegan diet, and they know what they need and they try to overcome that by taking supplements or eating other items," Anderson says. He objects to the notion that meat is the cause of most human illness, as Malkmus has claimed, or that refined sugars are like poison to the body. "What they do is add extra body fat," he says of these foods. "But they're not poisonous. That's a lot of crap." In February, on the company's 15th anniversary, Malkmus plans to break ground on a $30 million, 72-room hotel on a 102-acre site across the two-lane highway from the existing Hallelujah Acres facilities. That will be followed by a 250-seat restaurant that will replace the current cafe, which is basically a salad bar set up daily in a

hallway of the conference-center building. The last phase of the expansion, Malkmus says, will be an enlarged health-food store and bigger auditorium on the new site. Though the company is privately held and doesn't release sales figures, Malkmus says Hallelujah Acres now has 60 full-time employees. The company owns more than $2 million worth of property at its site in Cleveland County. Malkmus and his wife, who say their sole income is from the sale of books they write and from "love offerings" taken when they travel across the country to tell church congregations about the diet, live in neighboring Caldwell County in a home valued for property taxes at $347,000. Malkmus, who lived for a time early in his ministry in an unfinished basement with a tarp stretched over it for a roof, says, "It's amazing how God has supported us." At a Health Minister training program last month, more than 100 people arrived on a Wednesday night for a

get-acquainted session that had each course participant go on stage to give his or her testimony about the Hallelujah Diet. This was followed by two days of lectures on biblical and empirical support for the program. Putting it into practice The Food and Drug Administration limits what the producers and distributors of health-food products and the creators of diet programs can say. Essentially, a company can make no claims about what the diet will do for any particular condition, but it can allow others to talk about their experiences, including what they say are healings from diabetes, arthritis, stomach problems, fibromyalgia, all kinds of cancer and dozens of other diseases. So Hallelujah Acres depends heavily on testimonials. These have a powerful effect in the community of Christian evangelicals, who may be more likely to try a Bible-based diet than people of other faiths. Testimonials also appeal to people who eschew medical treatment or

who have tried medical and other approaches without success. Hazel Hobbs was trained as a Hallelujah Acres health minister in 1999 and says there are two kinds of people most receptive to the diet plan: those who already shop in the natural-foods section of the grocery store, and those who have major health problems from which they haven't been able to get relief. "Anybody else, they look at you like, 'OK, here's another one just fell out of the sky,' " Hobbs says. Hobbs, who lives in Rolesville, had problems of her own a decade ago. "My body was just starting to break down," she says. She suffered from osteoporosis and two bulging discs in her back. No wonder, she now says. She grew up on a farm and ate lots of meat. She smoked for more than 30 years. She gave up smoking, started taking calcium and other supplements, and got some better. But she says she didn't really turn things around until a friend told her about the Hallelujah

Diet. She cleaned out her kitchen cabinets of all the foods with ingredients she couldn't pronounce, and she started making her own fruit and vegetable drinks and distilling her own water. Now 66, the red-headed, fast-talking Hobbs says she has the bone-density of a 25-year-old woman. She has a small but growing business selling jars of BarleyMax and Celtic sea salt, as well as other staples from the Hallelujah Acres product line. In her job as an in-home care assistant primarily for elderly patients, she constantly preaches the benefits of a raw-foods diet. She hopes to rent a small space in Wake Forest in early 2007 where she can offer classes on why the Hallelujah Diet works and how to follow it. Hobbs says she has come to believe that all pharmaceuticals are poison, and she only goes to the doctor nowadays for tests that she says confirm the curative effects of a raw-food diet. Just as Hallelujah Diet proponents say they are annoyed by the barrage

of TV advertisements for drugs and appeals for money for research into the causes and cures for disease, many doctors, they say, don't want to hear patients' arguments that their bodies have healed themselves after being fed a raw-food diet. Shay Robbs, the recent Hallelujah Diet convert who lives in Shelby, understands. Trying to tell some people that the body has been healed of disease by something as simple as a change in diet would not be unlike trying to prove that accepting Christ as a savior is transformative. It's a matter of faith. Peter H Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.

Everyone is raving about the all-new Mail beta.

December 12, 2006

Maybe its the religious angle, you know "its gods way stuff"? who decided it was gods way? just because its based on a single verse out of the old testemant ( which to me is just a book of stories, with little or no physical proof, and seems to deny evolution ). Each to their own and everything, but it just makes me feel uneasy. Sorry for my insecurities. The Valley Vegan................Shhhhh <compassion2grace wrote: I don't know, Peter. What is it about this

article that makes you feel uneasy? I can't see anything in it that should. peace, sharonpeter VV <swpgh01 (AT) talk21 (DOT) com> wrote: What is it about this article that makes me feel uneasy? SHELBY - Sharon Surratt Robbs' heart is full of the Holy Spirit. Filling up her belly takes a little work. For the past several weeks, Robbs has been following a faith-based, strict vegan regimen: 85 percent raw food, 15 percent cooked. No meat, no seafood, no dairy, no animal products of any kind. No refined sugar, no white flour or white rice. Most Americans would find this hard to stomach, but George H. Malkmus, founder of the "Hallelujah Diet," says that as many as 2 million people around the world are trying to

adhere to the plan. The Hallelujah Diet is based on a single Bible verse and promoted by a multimillion dollar company that's about to launch a major expansion of its headquarters in this town in the North Carolina foothills. "I was the hamburger queen, honey. A diva, actually," confesses Robbs, who uses the nickname "Shay" and who has driven past the Hallelujah Acres headquarters for years on her way to Shelby's nearby fast-food restaurant row. "I was eating Big Macs every other day, french fries, KFC. ... I went to McDonald's on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for my family, and it was nothing to go back at lunch and maybe again at dinner. "I loved the way I was eating." But not the way she was feeling. Though she exercises 60 to 90 minutes five to seven days a week, she couldn't lose the 25 pounds or so she had added to her 5-foot-6 frame since she got married 10 years ago. She had constant digestive troubles. Her doctor has told her that,

at age 33, she has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in a family with a history of heart problems. He wrote her a prescription for a cholesterol-lowering drug and told her she'd probably be on it for the rest of her life. "I said, 'There has got to be better a way.' And there is a better way, and that's God's way," Robbs says. Now, if she could just get others to try it. The biblical basis That evangelical urge is how the Hallelujah Diet has gone from being the kooky idea of a small-time Baptist preacher to the great hope of legions of followers, most of them Christian, looking for a way to heal or prevent disease. Malkmus, who attended Moody Bible Institute in the 1960s, graduated from Elohim Bible College in New York and was ordained by a small Baptist church in that state, was introduced to the vegan lifestyle in 1976, at age 42. He had just lost his mother to colon cancer, after watching her suffer through chemo-

and radiation therapy, when a "baseball-sized tumor" showed up under his own rib cage, he says. Though he never went to an oncologist or had a biopsy, Malkmus thought the tumor was cancerous and sought alternative treatment. A fellow evangelist, Lester Roloff, told him to change his diet and feed his body the way God intended. Roloff cited Genesis 1:29: "Then God said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.' " Malkmus completely changed the way he ate and, over time, he says, the tumor went away. As he met others who claimed a vegan diet had cured their ills as well, he came to believe God had given him a message to spread -- that God initially meant for man to live only on what was provided in the Garden of Eden, and that the addition of meat to man's diet after the great flood had introduced a host of illnesses because the human body has trouble digesting

it. In addition, Malkmus says, cooking food destroys its nutritional value. Preservatives and other chemicals -- including medications -- accumulate in and poison the body, he says. "Being a preacher, I started trying to take it to my pastor friends," Malkmus says. "They didn't want anything to do with me. They so much as said that what I was teaching was quackery, even though what I was teaching was in the Bible. "It frustrated me, because I had had this personal experience, and I was starting to get others to have similar experiences, and here I thought I had the solution to all the physical problems that we were praying about in our churches, and yet they totally rejected it." Spreading the word So it went for 15 years, Malkmus says, during which time his first wife left him. Eventually, he relocated to Rogersville, Tenn., where he began offering free seminars in a hotel lobby on the benefits of the diet. One of his early

converts was the woman who would become his second wife and the co-founder of Hallelujah Acres. Rhonda Malkmus says the diet cured her of debilitating arthritis. The business started in 1992 with $1,000 of borrowed money, a collection of health-food supplements and other products, along with the seminars. The couple moved the company to Shelby in 1997, renovating a former Bible college into its headquarters. Hallelujah Acres has brought a welcome flow of visitors to the Cleveland County community, which once relied on cotton farming and textile manufacturing, but has converted to a service and retail economy. What used to be the Bible college's gym is now a carpeted, track-lit conference room where up to 500 people can gather for lectures and PowerPoint presentations. Malkmus and his wife still offer free seminars once a month. Hallelujah Acres charges for its other programs -- a series of lectures titled "Get Healthy! Stay Balanced," several

food-preparation classes and a "Health Ministers Training" course that instructs people on how to teach others the benefits of the Hallelujah Diet. Malkmus says there are 7,000 trained Health Ministers in 42 countries, who also serve as sales representatives for Hallelujah Acres' extensive line of books, vitamin and mineral supplements, electric fruit- and vegetable-juicers and the company's flagship product, BarleyMax. It's a dehydrated, ground-barley powder that Hallelujah Diet adherents are encouraged to mix with distilled water or eat with a spoon up to four times a day. After a few days to two weeks of "detoxification," during which some followers of the diet experience headaches, odd rashes and other symptoms, many say they are able to lose excess weight, regain energy and alleviate the symptoms of about 170 illnesses. What's missing In response to revelations that a vegan diet is deficient in vitamin B-12, Hallelujah Acres now

recommends a daily B-vitamin supplement, which it sells for $15 for a two-month supply. There are other criticisms of the diet. That it is hard for many people to follow long term because it is so restrictive. That with all the supplements and organically grown produce, it's expensive. And that all that raw food keeps people in the bathroom. At Hallelujah Acres, speakers have even been installed in the restrooms so that conference participants don't miss the lectures during frequent breaks. Though Malkmus says that 46 medical doctors and more than 300 registered nurses have gone through training at Hallelujah Acres, most in the medical community would discourage patients from taking themselves off prescribed drugs in favor of a steady diet of salads, nuts and smoothies. Harold G. Koenig, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is founder and co-director of Duke University's Center for Spirituality, Theology and

Health, tried the Hallelujah Diet a couple of years ago. "For about a half a day," he says with a laugh. "It involves drinking a lot of that barley stuff, that green, gicky stuff." Koenig says he and his wife tried it because a lot of their friends at church were doing it. Any lifestyle change, he says --including a diet -- will be easier to follow if it's taken on with a community of believers such as a church. John B. Anderson, professor emeritus in the department of nutrition at UNC's School of Public Health, says many cultures around the world thrive on vegan diets. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a vegan his whole adult life. The key, Anderson says, is to be vigilant about filling in the nutrients that fruits and vegetables alone cannot provide. "By and large, it's very intelligent people who follow the vegan diet, and they know what they need and they try to overcome that by taking supplements or eating other items," Anderson says. He objects to the notion that meat is the cause of most human illness, as Malkmus has claimed, or that refined sugars are like poison to the body. "What they do is add extra body fat," he says of these foods. "But they're not poisonous. That's a lot of crap." In February, on the company's 15th anniversary, Malkmus plans to break ground on a $30 million, 72-room hotel on a 102-acre site across the two-lane highway from the existing Hallelujah Acres facilities. That will be followed by a 250-seat restaurant that will replace the current cafe, which is basically a salad bar set up daily in a hallway of the conference-center building. The last phase of the expansion, Malkmus says, will be an enlarged health-food store and bigger auditorium on the new site. Though the company is privately held and doesn't release sales figures, Malkmus says Hallelujah Acres now has 60 full-time employees. The company owns more than $2 million worth of property at its

site in Cleveland County. Malkmus and his wife, who say their sole income is from the sale of books they write and from "love offerings" taken when they travel across the country to tell church congregations about the diet, live in neighboring Caldwell County in a home valued for property taxes at $347,000. Malkmus, who lived for a time early in his ministry in an unfinished basement with a tarp stretched over it for a roof, says, "It's amazing how God has supported us." At a Health Minister training program last month, more than 100 people arrived on a Wednesday night for a get-acquainted session that had each course participant go on stage to give his or her testimony about the Hallelujah Diet. This was followed by two days of lectures on biblical and empirical support for the program. Putting it into practice The Food and Drug Administration limits what the producers and distributors of health-food products and the creators of

diet programs can say. Essentially, a company can make no claims about what the diet will do for any particular condition, but it can allow others to talk about their experiences, including what they say are healings from diabetes, arthritis, stomach problems, fibromyalgia, all kinds of cancer and dozens of other diseases. So Hallelujah Acres depends heavily on testimonials. These have a powerful effect in the community of Christian evangelicals, who may be more likely to try a Bible-based diet than people of other faiths. Testimonials also appeal to people who eschew medical treatment or who have tried medical and other approaches without success. Hazel Hobbs was trained as a Hallelujah Acres health minister in 1999 and says there are two kinds of people most receptive to the diet plan: those who already shop in the natural-foods section of the grocery store, and those who have major health problems from which they haven't been able to get relief. "Anybody else, they look at you like, 'OK, here's another one just fell out of the sky,' " Hobbs says. Hobbs, who lives in Rolesville, had problems of her own a decade ago. "My body was just starting to break down," she says. She suffered from osteoporosis and two bulging discs in her back. No wonder, she now says. She grew up on a farm and ate lots of meat. She smoked for more than 30 years. She gave up smoking, started taking calcium and other supplements, and got some better. But she says she didn't really turn things around until a friend told her about the Hallelujah Diet. She cleaned out her kitchen cabinets of all the foods with ingredients she couldn't pronounce, and she started making her own fruit and vegetable drinks and distilling her own water. Now 66, the red-headed, fast-talking Hobbs says she has the bone-density of a 25-year-old woman. She has a small but growing business selling jars of BarleyMax and Celtic sea

salt, as well as other staples from the Hallelujah Acres product line. In her job as an in-home care assistant primarily for elderly patients, she constantly preaches the benefits of a raw-foods diet. She hopes to rent a small space in Wake Forest in early 2007 where she can offer classes on why the Hallelujah Diet works and how to follow it. Hobbs says she has come to believe that all pharmaceuticals are poison, and she only goes to the doctor nowadays for tests that she says confirm the curative effects of a raw-food diet. Just as Hallelujah Diet proponents say they are annoyed by the barrage of TV advertisements for drugs and appeals for money for research into the causes and cures for disease, many doctors, they say, don't want to hear patients' arguments that their bodies have healed themselves after being fed a raw-food diet. Shay Robbs, the recent Hallelujah Diet convert who lives in Shelby, understands. Trying to tell some people that the body

has been healed of disease by something as simple as a change in diet would not be unlike trying to prove that accepting Christ as a savior is transformative. It's a matter of faith. Peter H Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger. Everyone is raving about the all-new Mail beta. Peter H

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December 12, 2006

Well, Peter, veganism IS God's way, we all know that! If I did not believe in the Bible, I think something like this would lead me to say ... well, at least they got one thing right! peace, sharon peter VV <swpgh01 wrote: Maybe its the religious angle, you know "its gods way stuff"? who decided it was gods way? just because its based on a single verse out of the old testemant ( which to me is just a book of stories, with little or no physical

proof, and seems to deny evolution ). Each to their own and everything, but it just makes me feel uneasy. Sorry for my insecurities. The Valley Vegan................Shhhhh <compassion2grace > wrote: I don't know, Peter. What is it about this article that makes you feel uneasy? I can't see anything in it that should. peace, sharonpeter VV <swpgh01 (AT) talk21 (DOT) com> wrote: What is it about this article that makes me feel uneasy? SHELBY - Sharon Surratt Robbs' heart is full of the Holy Spirit. Filling up

her belly takes a little work. For the past several weeks, Robbs has been following a faith-based, strict vegan regimen: 85 percent raw food, 15 percent cooked. No meat, no seafood, no dairy, no animal products of any kind. No refined sugar, no white flour or white rice. Most Americans would find this hard to stomach, but George H. Malkmus, founder of the "Hallelujah Diet," says that as many as 2 million people around the world are trying to adhere to the plan. The Hallelujah Diet is based on a single Bible verse and promoted by a multimillion dollar company that's about to launch a major expansion of its headquarters in this town in the North Carolina foothills. "I was the hamburger queen, honey. A diva, actually," confesses Robbs, who uses the nickname "Shay" and who has driven past the Hallelujah Acres headquarters for years on her way to Shelby's nearby fast-food restaurant row. "I was eating Big Macs every other day, french fries, KFC. ... I went to

McDonald's on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for my family, and it was nothing to go back at lunch and maybe again at dinner. "I loved the way I was eating." But not the way she was feeling. Though she exercises 60 to 90 minutes five to seven days a week, she couldn't lose the 25 pounds or so she had added to her 5-foot-6 frame since she got married 10 years ago. She had constant digestive troubles. Her doctor has told her that, at age 33, she has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in a family with a history of heart problems. He wrote her a prescription for a cholesterol-lowering drug and told her she'd probably be on it for the rest of her life. "I said, 'There has got to be better a way.' And there is a better way, and that's God's way," Robbs says. Now, if she could just get others to try it. The biblical basis That evangelical urge is how the Hallelujah Diet has gone from being the kooky idea of a

small-time Baptist preacher to the great hope of legions of followers, most of them Christian, looking for a way to heal or prevent disease. Malkmus, who attended Moody Bible Institute in the 1960s, graduated from Elohim Bible College in New York and was ordained by a small Baptist church in that state, was introduced to the vegan lifestyle in 1976, at age 42. He had just lost his mother to colon cancer, after watching her suffer through chemo- and radiation therapy, when a "baseball-sized tumor" showed up under his own rib cage, he says. Though he never went to an oncologist or had a biopsy, Malkmus thought the tumor was cancerous and sought alternative treatment. A fellow evangelist, Lester Roloff, told him to change his diet and feed his body the way God intended. Roloff cited Genesis 1:29: "Then God said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.' " Malkmus completely changed the way he ate and, over time, he says, the tumor went away. As he met others who claimed a vegan diet had cured their ills as well, he came to believe God had given him a message to spread -- that God initially meant for man to live only on what was provided in the Garden of Eden, and that the addition of meat to man's diet after the great flood had introduced a host of illnesses because the human body has trouble digesting it. In addition, Malkmus says, cooking food destroys its nutritional value. Preservatives and other chemicals -- including medications -- accumulate in and poison the body, he says. "Being a preacher, I started trying to take it to my pastor friends," Malkmus says. "They didn't want anything to do with me. They so much as said that what I was teaching was quackery, even though what I was teaching was in the Bible. "It frustrated me, because I had had this personal experience, and I was starting to

get others to have similar experiences, and here I thought I had the solution to all the physical problems that we were praying about in our churches, and yet they totally rejected it." Spreading the word So it went for 15 years, Malkmus says, during which time his first wife left him. Eventually, he relocated to Rogersville, Tenn., where he began offering free seminars in a hotel lobby on the benefits of the diet. One of his early converts was the woman who would become his second wife and the co-founder of Hallelujah Acres. Rhonda Malkmus says the diet cured her of debilitating arthritis. The business started in 1992 with $1,000 of borrowed money, a collection of health-food supplements and other products, along with the seminars. The couple moved the company to Shelby in 1997, renovating a former Bible college into its headquarters. Hallelujah Acres has brought a welcome flow of visitors to the Cleveland County community, which once

relied on cotton farming and textile manufacturing, but has converted to a service and retail economy. What used to be the Bible college's gym is now a carpeted, track-lit conference room where up to 500 people can gather for lectures and PowerPoint presentations. Malkmus and his wife still offer free seminars once a month. Hallelujah Acres charges for its other programs -- a series of lectures titled "Get Healthy! Stay Balanced," several food-preparation classes and a "Health Ministers Training" course that instructs people on how to teach others the benefits of the Hallelujah Diet. Malkmus says there are 7,000 trained Health Ministers in 42 countries, who also serve as sales representatives for Hallelujah Acres' extensive line of books, vitamin and mineral supplements, electric fruit- and vegetable-juicers and the company's flagship product, BarleyMax. It's a dehydrated, ground-barley powder that Hallelujah Diet adherents are encouraged to mix with

distilled water or eat with a spoon up to four times a day. After a few days to two weeks of "detoxification," during which some followers of the diet experience headaches, odd rashes and other symptoms, many say they are able to lose excess weight, regain energy and alleviate the symptoms of about 170 illnesses. What's missing In response to revelations that a vegan diet is deficient in vitamin B-12, Hallelujah Acres now recommends a daily B-vitamin supplement, which it sells for $15 for a two-month supply. There are other criticisms of the diet. That it is hard for many people to follow long term because it is so restrictive. That with all the supplements and organically grown produce, it's expensive. And that all that raw food keeps people in the bathroom. At Hallelujah Acres, speakers have even been installed in the restrooms so that conference participants don't miss the lectures during frequent breaks. Though

Malkmus says that 46 medical doctors and more than 300 registered nurses have gone through training at Hallelujah Acres, most in the medical community would discourage patients from taking themselves off prescribed drugs in favor of a steady diet of salads, nuts and smoothies. Harold G. Koenig, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who is founder and co-director of Duke University's Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, tried the Hallelujah Diet a couple of years ago. "For about a half a day," he says with a laugh. "It involves drinking a lot of that barley stuff, that green, gicky stuff." Koenig says he and his wife tried it because a lot of their friends at church were doing it. Any lifestyle change, he says --including a diet -- will be easier to follow if it's taken on with a community of believers such as a church. John B. Anderson, professor emeritus in the department of nutrition at UNC's School of

Public Health, says many cultures around the world thrive on vegan diets. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a vegan his whole adult life. The key, Anderson says, is to be vigilant about filling in the nutrients that fruits and vegetables alone cannot provide. "By and large, it's very intelligent people who follow the vegan diet, and they know what they need and they try to overcome that by taking supplements or eating other items," Anderson says. He objects to the notion that meat is the cause of most human illness, as Malkmus has claimed, or that refined sugars are like poison to the body. "What they do is add extra body fat," he says of these foods. "But they're not poisonous. That's a lot of crap." In February, on the company's 15th anniversary, Malkmus plans to break ground on a $30 million, 72-room hotel on a 102-acre site across the two-lane highway from the existing Hallelujah Acres facilities. That will be followed by a 250-seat

restaurant that will replace the current cafe, which is basically a salad bar set up daily in a hallway of the conference-center building. The last phase of the expansion, Malkmus says, will be an enlarged health-food store and bigger auditorium on the new site. Though the company is privately held and doesn't release sales figures, Malkmus says Hallelujah Acres now has 60 full-time employees. The company owns more than $2 million worth of property at its site in Cleveland County. Malkmus and his wife, who say their sole income is from the sale of books they write and from "love offerings" taken when they travel across the country to tell church congregations about the diet, live in neighboring Caldwell County in a home valued for property taxes at $347,000. Malkmus, who lived for a time early in his ministry in an unfinished basement with a tarp stretched over it for a roof, says, "It's amazing how God has supported us." At a Health Minister

training program last month, more than 100 people arrived on a Wednesday night for a get-acquainted session that had each course participant go on stage to give his or her testimony about the Hallelujah Diet. This was followed by two days of lectures on biblical and empirical support for the program. Putting it into practice The Food and Drug Administration limits what the producers and distributors of health-food products and the creators of diet programs can say. Essentially, a company can make no claims about what the diet will do for any particular condition, but it can allow others to talk about their experiences, including what they say are healings from diabetes, arthritis, stomach problems, fibromyalgia, all kinds of cancer and dozens of other diseases. So Hallelujah Acres depends heavily on testimonials. These have a powerful effect in the community of Christian evangelicals, who may be more likely to try a Bible-based diet than people

of other faiths. Testimonials also appeal to people who eschew medical treatment or who have tried medical and other approaches without success. Hazel Hobbs was trained as a Hallelujah Acres health minister in 1999 and says there are two kinds of people most receptive to the diet plan: those who already shop in the natural-foods section of the grocery store, and those who have major health problems from which they haven't been able to get relief. "Anybody else, they look at you like, 'OK, here's another one just fell out of the sky,' " Hobbs says. Hobbs, who lives in Rolesville, had problems of her own a decade ago. "My body was just starting to break down," she says. She suffered from osteoporosis and two bulging discs in her back. No wonder, she now says. She grew up on a farm and ate lots of meat. She smoked for more than 30 years. She gave up smoking, started taking calcium and other supplements, and got some better. But she

says she didn't really turn things around until a friend told her about the Hallelujah Diet. She cleaned out her kitchen cabinets of all the foods with ingredients she couldn't pronounce, and she started making her own fruit and vegetable drinks and distilling her own water. Now 66, the red-headed, fast-talking Hobbs says she has the bone-density of a 25-year-old woman. She has a small but growing business selling jars of BarleyMax and Celtic sea salt, as well as other staples from the Hallelujah Acres product line. In her job as an in-home care assistant primarily for elderly patients, she constantly preaches the benefits of a raw-foods diet. She hopes to rent a small space in Wake Forest in early 2007 where she can offer classes on why the Hallelujah Diet works and how to follow it. Hobbs says she has come to believe that all pharmaceuticals are poison, and she only goes to the doctor nowadays for tests that she says confirm the curative effects of a

raw-food diet. Just as Hallelujah Diet proponents say they are annoyed by the barrage of TV advertisements for drugs and appeals for money for research into the causes and cures for disease, many doctors, they say, don't want to hear patients' arguments that their bodies have healed themselves after being fed a raw-food diet. Shay Robbs, the recent Hallelujah Diet convert who lives in Shelby, understands. Trying to tell some people that the body has been healed of disease by something as simple as a change in diet would not be unlike trying to prove that accepting Christ as a savior is transformative. It's a matter of faith. Peter H Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.

Everyone is raving about the all-new Mail beta. Peter H All new Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine

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