Photo credit: zimbio.com The 52-year-old raw foods enthusiast, who lives with Alexei Yashin, her 39-year-old boyfriend of 14 years, told Micki Siegel, writing in The New York Post, how she is approaching the show, which is in production now:
"And I will talk about my raw food diet. People think it’s just raw carrots. I eat carrots, and I drink carrot juice. But I also eat ice cream, granola, cakes. I just know the right places to buy the right things. That’s why I wrote my books."
Following is a transcript of an interview Bill Maher did with Carol Alt (whose most recent book is "Easy, Sexy, Raw") once upon a time, and which we ran in 2002, when RawFoodsNewsMagazine.com was only one year old:
Supermodel Carol Alt proudly proclaimed her raw diet on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect on Tuesday, March 12, 2002.
We've included most of the transcript for context.
If you don't feel like reading it all, see especially the dialogue highlighted below in red:
Partial Transcript from Politically Incorrect 3-12-02
Featuring:
Bill Maher, host
Guests:
Carol Alt
Rob Frisbee
Michael Medved
Alexandra Wentworth
Carol: ...How many times do you go down Sunset Boulevard, and one week there's a billboard that says, "Dairy is terrible for you," and the next week, there's a billboard that says, "Eat dairy six times a week."
Bill: Those billboards are not from studies or independent groups. Those are advocates of those --
[ All talking at once ]
Alexandra: Why does the California Dairy Association --?
[ All talking at once ]
Bill: But listen -- here's something I've been saying on this show for as many years as we've been on. Obesity is harder on health than smoking.
Obesity exacts a higher toll on health and health care costs than either smoking or drinking.
Rob: Let's make brownies and combine the issues.
[ Laughter ]
[Applause ]
Bill: Anybody whose name is "Frisbee" --
[ Laughter ]
--Has got to have had a brownie once in a while.
[ Laughter ]
But we were talking about some issue on this last week, and Lenny Clarke said, "You don't like fat people." I said, "Of course, I like fat --" it has nothing to do with it. It's just what I've been saying all along. It's smoking and drinking have been the focus of research and policy work for years, yet obesity causes more serious health consequences.
Michael: This is what Richard Simmons says.
It is. He's got a big campaign. He wants more government education, and I think it's perfectly appropriate. Certainly, if you're gonna teach kids about public health, like the idea that it's good to brush your teeth once in awhile, it might be good to teach them about eating more responsibly.
Carol: And who's supposed to teach them this? The problem is is that all these advocates behind all these different genetic engineering of food and radiation of the food and all of this stuff that's going into our food these days have a monetary interest in what's happening, and they're not gonna teach our children how to eat correctly 'cause that gives them too much power.
Rob: The problem is you have to be so politically correct about talking about obesity. It's fine to educate about drugs and nicotine, but you can't tell little Johnny what to eat and what not to eat or that --
[ All talking at once ]
Carol: We cannot take responsibility for our health.
Rob: But as an educator, we can.
Michael: Nobody needs to consume tobacco. Nobody needs to consume marijuana. We all do, except for those of us who are models, need to consume food every once in a while.
[ Audience ohs ]
[ Laughter ]
Carol: I probably eat more than you do.
[ Applause ]
Michael: I doubt it.
Carol: I don't.
Alexandra: Carol, that was an attack on me.
[ Laughter ]
Bill: That argument --
Carol: Thank you, Mike.
Bill: That argument doesn't go anywhere because, of course, we all need to consume some type of food. It's the type of food that we are eating.
Carol: Exactly.
Alexandra: Listen, listen. If you're not making a big salary and you're living in a trailer, you're gonna eat a Big Mac. You're gonna eat Cheez-Whiz. I mean, I do as well. But you know how expensive it is to get a tofu burger or to get organic meat?
Bill: Oh --
Alexandra: Oh, no, no, no.
Bill: So there's nothing between a Big Mac and a tofu burger?
[ Laughter ]
Those are our only --?
Alexandra: Tell me a meal you can get for $2.19 in America?
Rob: But I think you find more obesity in affluent America than you do in poor America, and so it really has nothing to do with the ability to afford tofu. It's just a choice issue, and it's hard to educate about that.
Carol: I just think that we're not getting nutrition from the foods we're eating because we're cooking it, we're processing it, we're radiating it, we're germinating it --
we're not germinating.
Michael: Okay, so --
Carol: We're not feeding our bodies, and the problem is we are hungry all the time.
Michael: But part of the answer is --
Bill: We're hungry all the time.
[ Laughter ]
Carol: All the time.
Bill: Not if you don't throw up after lunch.
[ Audience ohs ]
[ Laughter ]
Carol: I'm not taking that as an attack on me because I never did that.
Bill: I didn't mean you. I didn't mean you. But we're bloated all the time, hungry all the time.
Carol:We're hungry. Everybody stops at 4:00 in the afternoon and eats candy bars.
Michael: Being hungry all the time has to do with the marijuana.
[ Laughter ]
Rob: If smoking makes you forget, let's smoke enough so you'll forget to eat.
Alexandra: There's a little something I like to call the munchies, Michael.
[ Laughter ]
Michael: I've heard about that.
Alexandra: You know, you intake a little marijuana, and then you're pulling the legs of pheasants and --
[ Laughter ]
Michael: Well, see, there's something between that Big Mac and the tofu burger --pheasants. Or peasants, whatever.
Alexandra: Anything you can shoot yourself, you can eat.
Isn't that our motto America?
Rob: But the issue is -- I mean, you should be able to educate about obesity just as much about nicotine and drugs to children and everybody.
Bill: Right.
Carol: But nobody understands how it happens.
Alexandra: What if it's genetics?
Bill: What do you mean?
Michael: There's a genetic predisposition --
Bill: Let me explain to you how it happens. They market McDonald's to 2-year-olds. That's how it happens.
Carol: No, but I mean, the problem is that nobody understands that when you cook fat, you transhydrogenate it, and your body can't molecularly read it. So all of a sudden --
Bill: You're right. I don't understand that.
Carol: That's what I'm talking about.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Bill: But wait a second.
Carol: My point exactly.
Bill: Yes, but why do I have to -- I do understand that if I eat --
Carol: You choose the foods you eat, and you need to choose the correct food, and if you don't understand how this food goes into your body.
Alexandra: But it's also --
isn't it portion, too? I mean, I know that chicken is good for you. No, you know what?
Carol: I sat with more people who look at me at the amount of food that I eat and go, "How do you, as a model, eat like that?" Because I eat the right food.
Alexandra: It's the only meal that you, in fact, have to eat.
[ Laughter ]
Bill: No, no. But come on. It's a little bit of genetic luck, too.
Carol: It's not genetic luck. My younger sister's a large-size model.I was heavy.I had to lose weight to model, and it was devastating to me because I was starving all the time because I didn't know what to eat that fed my body but would maintain my weight.
Alexandra: But how are you so thin now, and you eat a lot?
Carol: I eat raw food.
[ Laughter ]
I eat raw food.
Alexandra: Only raw food?
Carol: That's all you want, but I'm gonna look like this when I'm 90.
Rob: Honestly, I think it's part of your profession, though, and in fairness, you have to consider this on a proclamation.
Carol: What part of my profession?
Rob: Stay in shape.
Bill: All right. And now a message from tofu burgers --
[ All talking at once ]
[ Applause ]
Bill: All right. We were talking about how you can pick your poison in this country, but if you pick the wrong one, you go to jail, but if you overeat yourself to death, that's okay. Now just to show you how much -- you were making this point, right, that you can't attack food. Just to show you how much you can't attack food, we actually sell in this country drugs that are way more powerful than marijuana, legally.
Alexandra: You mean antidepressants?
Bill: No, I'm talking about the stuff that suppresses appetite. Have you tried --I won't say the name of it because I take it sometimes, and I know it's bad for me. It will kill you.
It's evil.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Bill: And it says on the bottle you can take up to eight a day. I've taken two, and I'm not a person who gets high easily on, like, speedy things and I was flying --
[ Laughter ]
Michael: This is celebrity endorsement.
Bill: No, no, no.
I'm telling you I take it every once in a while because, as an adult, I can make that decision.
I am hurting my health, and I'm okay with it because I want to be thin like you.
[ Laughter ]
But it is a serious drug. It is legalized speed, and you get it in the health food store.
Alexandra: I have a friend who has an akita who ate eight of those --
Rob: Oh, man.
Alexandra: Eight of those drugs.
Bill:The dog ate it?
Alexandra: The dog ate it. She left it on the counter, and he spun out, pulled the chandelier off and died instantly.
Carol: He died?
Alexandra: And I said, "Does that not tell you anything?" I wanna be thin, though.
Michael: If this particular unnamed drug --
Bill: But the dog looked fantastic.
[ Laughter and applause ]
Rob: Live fast and leave a beautiful corpse.
Bill: He had a shoot the next day.
Alexandra: He lost 20 pounds in 5 minutes and looked fabulous.
Michael: So I'm not sure if I understand, Bill. If this drug, unnamed drug, is a bad idea, does that make marijuana a good idea? Bill: No, I'm just saying we're very inconsistent about what --
Michael: Sure we are. Sure we are. Of course we are. We're inconsistent because we allow tobacco, and we allow alcohol, and we don't allow marijuana.
Bill: And your idea would be we don't allow any of that?
Michael: No, my idea would be -- the conservative position is you only change things very, very carefully, and right now, if we legalize marijuana, more people will smoke marijuana. I don't think that's a good thing for society.
Carol: Yeah, but then there would be more control and less violence surrounding it.
Michael: There's not a lot of violence surrounding marijuana.
Alexandra: I think the people that smoke marijuana will continue to smoke marijuana whether it's legal or not.
Michael: Yeah, but don't you know people, because I do --
Alexandra: Of course I do.
Michael: There are people --
[ Laughter ]
No, don't you know people who don't smoke now but if it we're legal, if you could go ahead --
Bill: No, I don't know one person --
[ Talking over each other ]
Name one person in the United States who can't get marijuana if they want to.
Michael: No, no. They can get it if they want to, but people are discouraged from getting it because it's illegal. That's what something being illegal does.
Bill: No one has ever died from it and yet thousands, hundreds of thousands, die from these other things. I keep saying, until people start dying from marijuana, it's gonna stay illegal.
[ Laughter ]
You apparently have to die from it.
[ Applause ]
All right, I gotta take another commercial.
We'll be back.
Bill: All right. I want to find out what raw food is first. But also, one more thing about the food thing -- where in America do we put pictures of our kids?
Carol: The refrigerator.
Bill: Exactly. The refrigerator.
Life revolves around the refrigerator.
[ Applause ]
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