“As beings of light we don’t have to run from darkness” – Fully Raw Kristina

“Being full of shite, you have to run from reality” – Plant Based Savage

I am woman, hear me raw

I’m not saying that these raw vegan influencers are now completely indistinguishable or that they collectively look like one giant homogenous blob of namaste spouting insincerity. Nor am I claiming that their grift is so predictable you could set your atomic clock by it. That said, let’s get into this Fully Raw Kristina character because it presents us with a teachable moment. The human entity that began its life as Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram has an origin story strikingly familiar to a dozen other wellness social media behemoths. At the age of 16, she experienced significant health issues she blamed on her mammy and pappy’s traditional Lebanese and Latin American diet. In her case it was hyperglycaemia which saw her tip the scales at the concentration camp level of 87 lbs which, for a girl of 5 foot 7, would ring alarm bells quicker than a vulnerable woman alone with DurianRider.

Origin stories: never original Raw vegan, raw deal Here is the Jews All hippies: Nazis. Everyone’s an ambassador Scam? No thank you, ma’am Don’t make my brown eyes blue The Fash are gash

Clearly something had to change and change came in the form of a chance meeting in a Whole Foods store aged 18 in 1995 with a charismatic vegan advocate. John Rose had been raw vegan for 11 years and looked fantastic. Kristina was spellbound by this remarkable man, his wealth of knowledge and his dead fit arse. This raw veganism he spoke of seemed to be more than just a diet – it was a way of life, one that perhaps held the key to all of her problems. He may have looked and sounded like the Aryan Nation leader who takes the vulnerable whiteboy under his wing in every prison movie but he preached a oneness with nature only a crazy man could gainsay.

A mentor/mentee daddy/daughter relationship ensued. Before you can say “lebensraum” Kristina had jettisoned her existing diet and thrown herself headlong into raw dog, eating nothing but raw peaches for two weeks like her name was Al Swearengen. Over time she developed her obsession into a business, the grocery cooperative Rawfully Organic. She gained weight, self-confidence and was living her best raw life.

Kristina was not the kind of girl to be satisfied with that though. She assiduously cultivated her social media platforms with What I Eat In A Day videos, pumpkin pie recipes and indispensable inspo hacks like 8 Ways to Become an Empowered Woman (those insights in full: Know yourself, take responsibility, honour thyself, live by your inner compass, choose empowering relationships, keep learning, be independent, empower others). She placed a creditable 85th in The 100 Most Influential People in Health and Fitness and clocked up over a million YouTube subscribers. Tally her PooTube, Shitter, Crapchat and Instascam stats, in fact, and Kristina has 3 million stans hanging on her every word. So while we may want to ignore Kristina, that’s really not an option. Much like impending eco-apocalypse, she’s a thing.

Raw is poor

As noted previously, raw veganism is a gateway drug into former veganism taking in along the way psychotic water fasts, endless inane Instagram challenges and relentless shilling for the worst people in the universe. Beyond the obvious truth that it’s an eating disorder in all but name, the extensive claims of the raw food cult are contradicted by the available science and it attracts cranks and conspiracy theorists like a woman on the Internet attracts reply guys. When you don’t base your beliefs on evidence, it becomes open season on your soul and you are likely to fall for any amount of woo garbage. She believes in iridology, a discredited crank practice dating back to the Middle Ages which believes that the iris holds crucial information about systemic health. This was seen when she claimed that her raw food diet had changed her eye colour.

pH d(ummy)

How could she make such a rookie error? It’s really not so hard to believe once you realise that the majority of things she believes are stupid. You want receipts? We gottem! “No disease can survive in an alkaline state,” Kristina confidently told her audience, repeating the mantra of the alkaline diet movement. The statement is false although, being calamitously thick, Kristina is unlikely to realise this. Every single disease that humans can contract can and will survive in an alkaline state. How do we know this? Because our blood is alkaline and any malady will be spending a large proportion of its time chillin’ like a villain in our bloodstream. If the alkaline diet is ever healthy it is because it is based on unprocessed whole foods and absolutely nothing to do with pH levels.

There are plenty of dicey claims on her channel, such as her story about the time she got BITTEN BY A BLACK WIDOW SPIDER and eschewed traditional medicine, opting to treat it naturally with “raw foods, rest and natural healing methods”. Toxicologists would have fits reading this and it was spectacularly irresponsible of her to upload this in the first place and even more so to leave it up there (no doubt to chronicle her journey, the one thing that unites all scumbag influencers). No matter that arachnid enthusiasts jumped into her comments to tell her that it was very likely not a black widow she was bitten by, the video remains, more dangerous than an Australian funnel-web.

Fight for your Reich

So far, so farcical but like in all good horror films, things can always get worse. That raw food guru she met in the whole foods store all those years ago and with whom she has two gushing collaboration videos on her channel? A grotesque Holocaust denying Nazi piece of shit. “With an open mind within five minutes you can prove the Holocaust as a scam,” John Rose tells his followers in a video, continuing that “Hitler was pretty nice to the Jews after what the Jews did to Hitler.” He goes on to claim that Jews are Satanists, deliberately causing conflict between Christians and Muslims. Not only is it inconceivable that Kristina is unaware of this but she continues to promote him and gush over him in the most glowing terms, as late as December 2018.

In response to a question challenging her about 7 on YouTube she responded “Just because I know him and he’s been a part of my journey doesn’t mean I align with all of his beliefs and vice versa. We are all allowed to have our own platforms here and share the messages that we feel inspired to share. I’m not here to put anyone down. Blessings to you all.” Sounds like she’s against de-platforming Nazis. That’s… interesting. Maybe it’s because she promotes products from far-right psychopath Alex Jones’s InfoWars? Is there some Aryan kickback scheme going on here?

Incidentally, you may feel that a narcissistic dopey antiscience vegan influencer promoting a confirmed Nazi on her channel is just one of those weird inexplicable random things that life throws up but you would of course be quite wrong about that. The links between filthy disgusting hippies and filthy disgusting Nazis BIN strong for a century. As this excellent article demonstrates, astrology, dowsing, ley lines, alternative medicine, parapsychology, holism, psychedelics, practice of the occult, conspiracy theories are all Nazi traits. All hippies: Nazis. CONFIRMED.

Ambassador, you are spoiling us

Why does any of this matter? Think back to what it was that first attracted you to the vogon lifestyle. Let’s take it as read that you’re a semi-decent human being who always harboured reservations about the industrialised torment and slaughter of animals. That’s pretty much universal. Was there though, something unique to you that tipped the scales? Perhaps a portion of jackfruit pulled pork at that shitty hipster craft bar your friends dragged to you to, a meal that prompted you to say “that’s actually not too terrible”. Maybe it was the Meera Sodha‘s slow-cooked marrow borani or even, Ave Maria, the deranged rantings of caucasoid mentalist Freelee The Banana Girl.

Whatever it was, I bet you all your dough that being an unpaid ambassador for the wider movement did not feature heavily in your thoughts. Why on earth would it? Getting a handle on your own bullshit is a full-time job at the best of times – the very last thing you want is to spend time whipping yourself into some kind of paragon that cucknivores and vegans alike can be inspired by or at least impressed by.

It pays to advertise

Yet that is kind of what we all did. No there won’t be any dawn raids from the Thought Police if you slip up in this regard, nor will you be pelted with Easy Eggs at the next Vegan Fest for bringing the movement into disrepute. It behoves us all though to be some kind of walking advert for the plant-based lifestyle. I’m not saying it has to be a glossy $50 million nationwide billboard and Super Bowl halftime campaign, cited for decades afterwards. It can be a shitty Better Call Saul local cable effort or even a sex worker business card modestly stuffed behind the perspex in a telephone box. No one’s splitting the atom here. Just make an effort to make it look relatable, healthy, fun – the kind of lifestyle that a functioning human could see themselves in.

And if you happen to have a gigantic social media following that makes it all the more important. Fully Raw Kristina has failed on so many levels here, as a vegan, a role model and a human being. It’s bad enough that she churns out imbecilic anti-medicine videos, charges $5,500 a pop for a week-long retreat of yoga and food prep (“I personally believe that this event is priceless,” she says optimistically) and claims that brown eyes are a sign of toxicity (which went down with black folks about as well as could be expected). That she leaves up videos for her 1 million plus YouTube subscribers of her hugging and promoting a Holocaust denier who thinks Hitler went easy on the Jews, a man to this day she has never condemned is really quite something. Could there be a more grisly testament to her hubris and dimwittedness?

I’ve a feeling we’re going to find out.