Robert Crayhon, M.S.
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 Robert Crayhon, M.S., has been called “one of the top 10 nutritionists in the country” by Self magazine (8/93). He is author of four books including Robert Crayhon’s Nutrition Made Simple (Evans 1994) and The Carnitine Miracle (Evans 1998). Crayhon coauthored Dr. Atkins Vitanutrient Solution (Simon and Schuster 1998). He is associate editor of totalhealth magazine and has a regular column in the Townsend Letter for Doctors. He has been published in The New York Times, the peer-reviewed literature and has produced a comedy educational CD called Junk Food Nation. He has produced over 30 hours of educational tapes for healthcare practitioners on the latest findings in nutritional biochemistry and their clinical applications.
Crayhon is a frequent guest on radio and television programs nationwide. He has appeared many times on the Fox News Channel and CNN and other nationally televised programs. For three years he hosted a national radio show and for two years a national television program on health and wellness.
He is president of The Designs For Health Institute in Boulder, Colorado, an educational institution that since 1989 has trained hundreds of healthcare practitioners in the latest findings in clinical nutrition. Crayhon is also on the scientific advisory board for Miami Heart Hospital, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation and the Wellness Sciences Institute in Philadelphia. He also serves on the board of directors for the Society of Certified Nutritionists and is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Following is an interview with Robert Crayhon.
TH: How did you get interested in nutrition?
RC: In the early ’80s I became aware that food could heal and prevent disease. At the same time I was also undergoing a spiritual awakening and became interested in attaining optimal wellness on all levels. I began to see optimal health as a birthright, an outgrowth of Jefferson’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Optimal health must be there, or there is no life, no joy of liberty and no happiness in its fullest expression.
TH: Aren’t we healthy as a nation?
RC: Medicine defines health as the ability to walk out of the doctor’s office. Optimal health is much different than that. The medical authorities would say that we have less heart disease and that we are living longer. But we are tired runners, barely making it to the finish line of life’s end and we’re enjoying the second half of the race less and less. We are living longer but more of our life is spent dying, too. Many people undergo dangerous procedures and are on toxic medications that are anti-metabolic: they fix a symptom but cause a disease. I have seen many people whose lives have been utterly ruined by the side effects of medications. Chemotherapy causes cancer. Antihypertensive drugs cause heart problems. Asthma medications are associated with an increase in asthma deaths. It is easier for a nation to go insane than a single person, and we’re almost there. Read the side effects of a medication you are taking and odds are that it can cause what it claims to heal. Drugs and surgery are useful but overused. Recent published data shows that prescription medications used according to instructions kill over 102,000 American per year. To the man with the hammer, everything is a nail and modern medicine is one big, dangerous, omnipotent hammer. Human metabolism is a delicate Rolex watch. We smash the watch and wonder why the watch doesn’t run like it used to.
TH: Many nutritionists go through all sorts of phases, recommending high carbohydrate diets, then low carbohydrate diets, until one does
not really know what they believe. Yet in your 15-year career your message has been the same: optimize protein, don’t overdo carbohydrates and be more concerned about fat quality than quantity.
RC: Simple, isn’t it?
TH: What is it based on?
RC: The Paleolithic diet, what humans ate for most of human history. It’s the most ignored area in nutrition, which still mystifies me. We had no heart disease, cancer nor virtually any degenerative diseases on our historic diet of wild game, fruits and vegetables. It is a diet that has helped many regain health. And those who say that grains are the basis of a healthy human diet are completely at odds with 99 percent of human history.
TH: How did you begin to gain national recognition as a nutritionist?
RC: My partners, Jonathan and Linda Lizotte, convinced me in 1992 that I should host a radio show. With their help and the financial support of our company, Designs For Health, I embarked on a radio show, “The Voice of Wellness,” that eventually ran nationwide on over 80 stations for two years. I was also asked to write a few books. I moved to television, then back to radio. Now my number one focus is training healthcare practitioners in nutrition.
TH: Why?
RC: The need is tremendous. On radio I learned that there are few practitioners in North America who are well versed in nutrition. I would tell people who called in to see
a nutritionally-oriented practitioner and found there was usually no one to see. After hearing this for three years, I decided (along with Linda Lizotte, R.D., whose idea it was to do training in the first place) that we needed to train other practitioners to heal with nutrition. Other nutritionists actually asked us to do it and gave us the idea.
TH: Do you see nutrition being used increasingly by physicians in the 21st century?
RC: It will have to be. Ultimately, if you don’t give the body the very nutrients it is made from, it cannot heal. There is no drug yet discovered that can replace the role of nutrients in the body, though pharmaceutical companies keep looking. And food and nutrients can heal chronic illness more powerfully than drugs. The Lyon Heart Study just showed that second heart attacks could be completely prevented if the fats in the diet included more omega-3s from flaxseed oil. The fat content of the diet in this study remained around 32 percent, and the diet was very easy to follow. Few practitioners are applying this simple, lifesaving information. We hope in some small way to change that.
For more information on Robert Crayhon’s seminars and the Designs For Health Institute, (303)415-0229.
——— www.dfhi.com
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