Eats of Eden

SHELBY -- Sharon Surratt Robbs' heart is full of the Holy Spirit. Filling up her belly takes a little work. For the past several weeks, Robbs has been following a faith-based, strict vegan regimen: 85 percent raw food, 15 percent cooked. No meat, no seafood, no dairy, no animal products of any kind. No refined sugar, no white flour or white rice.

Most Americans would find this hard to stomach, but George H. Malkmus, founder of the "Hallelujah Diet," says that as many as 2 million people around the world are trying to adhere to the plan. The Hallelujah Diet is based on a single Bible verse and promoted by a multimillion dollar company that's about to launch a major expansion of its headquarters in this town in the North Carolina foothills.

"I was the hamburger queen, honey. A diva, actually," confesses Robbs, who uses the nickname "Shay" and who has driven past the Hallelujah Acres headquarters for years on her way to Shelby's nearby fast-food restaurant row. "I was eating Big Macs every other day, french fries, KFC. ... I went to McDonald's on Sunday mornings to get breakfast for my family, and it was nothing to go back at lunch and maybe again at dinner.

"I loved the way I was eating."

But not the way she was feeling. Though she exercises 60 to 90 minutes five to seven days a week, she couldn't lose the 25 pounds or so she had added to her 5-foot-6 frame since she got married 10 years ago. She had constant digestive troubles.

Her doctor has told her that, at age 33, she has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, in a family with a history of heart problems. He wrote her a prescription for a cholesterol-lowering drug and told her she'd probably be on it for the rest of her life.

"I said, 'There has got to be better a way.' And there is a better way, and that's God's way," Robbs says.

Now, if she could just get others to try it.

The biblical basis

That evangelical urge is how the Hallelujah Diet has gone from being the kooky idea of a small-time Baptist preacher to the great hope of legions of followers, most of them Christian, looking for a way to heal or prevent disease.

Malkmus, who attended Moody Bible Institute in the 1960s, graduated from Elohim Bible College in New York and was ordained by a small Baptist church in that state, was introduced to the vegan lifestyle in 1976, at age 42. He had just lost his mother to colon cancer, after watching her suffer through chemo- and radiation therapy, when a "baseball-sized tumor" showed up under his own rib cage, he says.

Though he never went to an oncologist or had a biopsy, Malkmus thought the tumor was cancerous and sought alternative treatment. A fellow evangelist, Lester Roloff, told him to change his diet and feed his body the way God intended.

Roloff cited Genesis 1:29: "Then God said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food.' "

Malkmus completely changed the way he ate and, over time, he says, the tumor went away. As he met others who claimed a vegan diet had cured their ills as well, he came to believe God had given him a message to spread -- that God initially meant for man to live only on what was provided in the Garden of Eden, and that the addition of meat to man's diet after the great flood had introduced a host of illnesses because the human body has trouble digesting it.

In addition, Malkmus says, cooking food destroys its nutritional value. Preservatives and other chemicals -- including medications -- accumulate in and poison the body, he says.