Since my first juice company, Juice Press, which I started in 2010 on East 1st Street, I've held a very straightforward approach to nutrition. When I started Juice Press, I just believed in eating healthy, but I had no significant knowledge on the topic. I knew basic stuff from reading and talking about it a lot.
A couple of months after I opened, a great man named Fred Bisci started shopping with us. He saw me moving in and out from back of house to front of house the way that I do, with a drill in my hand or something like that, and he said, you're the owner of this place. I said, yes sir, I am. He said, you're doing a good thing, and I said thank you very much. Then he told me his name, and I didn't know it.
He and I sat on the bench outside and we started to talk, and he told me what he had been doing in the field of nutrition. When I met him he was in his 70s, and he was a beaming example of aging mindfully. At the time I'm writing this he's 97 years old, and he's been 100 percent vegan for 60 plus years. He had a nutritional practice in Staten Island, and his life's mission was to help people with their diet and lifestyle, and he was dedicated to it.
It was Fred who taught me about food. He put me onto the right books, and we used to sit for hours and go through this stuff, and I used to drive him crazy with my incessant questions. Over the years, when people would come to me with various physical ailments, Fred was on speed dial. I'd call him up and say, what do you think of this case. I was really into studying this stuff.
Later on I became very friendly with Dr. Jeffrey Mechanick, the lead endocrinologist at Mount Sinai in New York and the author of a book on molecular nutrition. Besides his impressive awards and authorship, he's a very intelligent person who holds the Hippocratic oath in the highest value. I contrast the things that Fred taught me about food with what Jeffrey speaks about, and they overlap in the most significant way, because Fred's number one rule was to eliminate processed foods first and foremost, and Jeffrey agrees.
Now, Jeffrey keeps a very different lifestyle than Fred, but Jeffrey will always tell the truth about diet even if he doesn't practice what he knows. He almost tells you, I don't eat exactly like this, but this might be the right way. Fred really practices the diet of the decades. As I've written before, I was in his life when he did a 40 day water fast. I remember when he did a bunch of 10 day water fasts. He really had command of his mental health, a very wise man.
To him I owe a great deal of gratitude, because he modeled for me what I really wanted to be, which is a person who can serve the public with something good while making some money, because I have to pay bills, you know, just like you. I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't make an oath to the public the way a doctor is required to when they get their license to practice. The oath is to protect life and to help people become free from suffering.
I don't think I'm on a mission, and I'm not a Messiah complex kind of person. I like to create. I enjoy that a lot. I'm not here to save people and I don't have any special magic gifts, except that I'm practicing what I preach every day, so I can talk about it because I've gotten better at it over the years.
So where do you begin with your diet? Simple. Eliminate processed food. Start with that. Don't make it any more complicated. Don't count calories yet. Don't start getting paranoid. You get calories from pure whole foods and you eliminate processed foods, and then come talk to me in 18 months. You've got to give it a really good solid long time so you can work through all the emotional stuff that happens when you change your diet radically. You've got to make it through a couple of winters, and you have to figure out how your emotions move around now. Have you switched to another addiction of any kind? Pay attention to this stuff so you don't waste your life chasing it and trying to fix it. Let's get the work done and move on to bigger and better things.