Is A 30 Bananas a Day Diet Healthy? Ben Greenfield interviews Durian Rider.

Foreign.

Folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and I am with Harley Johnstone, aka Dorian Ryder, aka the 30 bananas a day guy. And today we're going to talk all about Harley, about the 30 bananas a day diet and everything they're in. So, Dorian, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Thanks for having me, mate.

So now the audience. I think some people in the audience might be familiar with you and your story, but I'd love to hear your story and kind of your background. So tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what kind of brought you to the point where you started eating. I guess what's basically like a low fat, raw vegan diet. You know how you became to be known as the 30 bananas a day guy?

Yeah, basically started when I was a kid, just really sick with like asthma, Crohn's disease.

Bad mood, bad sleep and insomnia, chronic fatigue, just, just really failing to thrive as a kid. In and out of hospital, getting drugged up all the time, always digestive issues, just feeling really bad, but always wanting to be. Always admiring the kids at school who are fit and vital and had endless energy and always want to be one of those kids.

But just never could be because when you're sick, you've got no energy and just going to change years. Things got worse and then started getting the drugs and usual teenage stuff in my sort of hometown. And then when I moved out of home, just started riding a bike for transport because I had no other way of getting around, couldn't afford the buses and didn't have enough money to buy a car. Then you started meeting cyclists and learning a bit about diet and things like that. I just sort of stumbled into the vegan lifestyle when I hit rock bottom and went, went from there. Gotcha.

Gotcha. So, so when you, when you kind of hit rock bottom, what was it that. That kind of pulled you out of rock bottom? Like, what kind of changes did you make? Or did you, did you like read books or did you just. Or did you just kind of start eating the way that you eat now?

I was just basically really poor student and all I could afford was like rice and tuna and cereal and I wouldn't even drink milk that much because fruit juice is a little bit cheaper. So I would have milk occasionally, but I sort of just started changing my diet just by default, not really by choice, and just started to feel a little bit better. And then I'd get more money and I'd buy more meat and stuff like that and I'd feel worse. I just started Playing with diet a lot and just tweaking it and just eventually started to actually make the conclusion of what I put in my mouth is based on how I want to feel. And that was pretty. A lot of us can relate now, but back then I was like, I never understood that what you eat determines how you feel. And I didn't learn about glycogen or carbohydrates really. I just sort of stumbled across that. And then eventually some, some, you know, well known cyclists, I said, yeah, you got to get your carbs in, blah, blah, blah. Went from there.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I just got really sick in year 2000, 2001. And I was like, well, I've got to do something, I've got to take some bigger changes. And that's where I went from. So.

So where'd you go from there?

That's when I went vegan was April 2001. I was really sick. I had like, glandular, sort of chronic fatigue. Just, just really. I would have a bit of fitness for a few months and then I'd get burned out and just getting fevers and I was just really like, just so frustrated. You know, I'd train really good on the bike and get sick and burn out. I'm just like, you know, it's just so frustrated, you know, especially in summertime, getting sick and weather's perfect, everyone's out riding. I just, I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired and then went vegan.

Yeah, so. So when you went vegan, what, what did you do first? Did you just start to eat plants and fruits and vegetables, or did you have like a specific diet that you followed?

I was eating a lot of rice already because rice is just so cheap.

Right.

And all the cyclists locally that were better than me were just loading up on the rice. That was sort of back before gluten free was a bit of a trend, like it is now. I just cut out the tuna and chicken I was eating and switched from milk to sort of soy milk and 100% no dairy. And straight away my asthma just went away. And I remember the first day I went out riding, I was like, man, something just feels different today. And I'd ridden the same hill for, you know, hundreds of times. And I said to my friend at the time, I can just breathe better today, man. Something's going on. It's this diet. He goes, it's nothing to do with your diet, mate. It's just. I don't know what it is, but it's nothing to do with diet. And I thought, yep, in my head I thought, you're wrong, man. It is because I've ridden this hill all the time and today was the easiest time ever. So I just started feeling better.

Yeah, yeah. It is pretty amazing like how quickly you can see diet changes make a difference in the way that you perform. Like one of my boys used to have exercise induced asthma playing soccer, you know, like three and four year old soccer league. And we actually cut like commercial dairy, like milk out of his diet and within a week his exercise induced asthma symptoms went away because he wasn't dealing well with the protein allergens in commercial dairy. So it is pretty amazing the link there. So when did you. So 12 years ago at the time of this recording, you started to make those changes. So how did you, how did you make the conversion into kind of becoming known as the 30 bananas a day guy? Because at some point, I mean, you've got a pretty big following on the Internet and now you do a lot of videos. How did all that come about?