John Robbins walked away from the Baskin Robbins fortune to pursue health and consciousness work. His uncle Burt Baskin died of a heart attack at 54, which made Robbins question whether the ice cream business itself was harming people. He refused his inheritance and wrote A Diet for a New America to promote healthier living.
Chapters
I would love for you to explain your story, the connection with Baskin Robbins, and how that ultimately led to you writing one of the greatest books on nutrition and health, A Diet for a New America. I'd love for you, for people here who don't know you, to paint that story and draw those lines together.
Well, thank you. My dad and my uncle founded an ice cream company. And it was small at first, but it grew at a level. It skyrocketed. It became a billion dollar company. It became the world's largest ice cream company. And my uncle died at the age of 54 from a heart attack. And he was a big guy, and he ate a lot of ice cream, and he was young when he died. When that happened, I asked my father, do you think there's a connection? Could there be any connection between the amount of ice cream that he would eat, my uncle Burt Baskin, and his fatal heart attack? And my father said, no, don't ever ask that question again. And I could understand why my dad would not want to consider the possibility even because by that time, he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any human being who had ever lived on the planet. And he didn't want to. He couldn't bear emotionally to think that the family product was harming people. And I understood that he couldn't consider that possibility. But I wanted to. I felt I needed to. Karmically, you know, there's been a lot of debate about whether sugar is the bad guy in heart disease or whether it's saturated fat. Well, ice cream has got both of them. But I didn't want to sell a product that I felt might be undermining people's health. Now, I'm not saying an ice cream cone is going to kill anybody or hurt anybody, but the more ice cream you eat, the more likely you are to have a heart attack. That's what happened to my uncle. I'm glad I made the choice. And by the way, when I made that choice, when I walked away from Baskin Robbins and the ice cream, I also told my dad I don't want to have any access to his fortune. It was a considerable fortune. And I didn't. If I'm going to be in integrity with the choice I made, if I'm not going to follow in his footsteps, as he had groomed me to do, then I should, out of respect for him, not take any of his money. And I didn't, and I haven't. So I went from being the heir or the presumed heir to a colossal fortune to living very simply. And, you know, actually, people ask, how could you leave that financial security? And the answer is, I felt more emotionally secure, spiritually secure, when I did, because now I was living an authentic life. I wanted to contribute with my energy and my gifts and my service to helping people live healthier lives, to helping people know what they can do, the choices they can make in their lives that will lead to vitality and clarity of mind and emotional resilience and enable them to be the powerful person they're meant to be. Sa.
