"Thank you for watching. It's Randy Kreill. I want to do a quick video about a somewhat humbling experience. On Monday, I went down to the Community Blood Center. It had been quite a while since I've donated platelets and plasma. I typically do the apheresis."

"I ran three 100-mile endurance runs this year. With the training, the running, the recovery, I felt like I needed to back off of doing apheresis blood donations. However on Monday November 30th, I went in and went through the entire process as a vegan ultra distance runner. I've had to learn to adapt to make sure that my iron levels are high enough and you can see here that my hemoglobin score, which is a measure of iron, was 14, substantially higher than it needed to be. Blood pressure: 116 over 64 - that looked good. It says zero pulse. I know that's not true. I'm not sure what that's about."

"So one of the things I had learned to do was to not over hydrate before having the blood draw done to test the iron level and then before I hook up to the apheresis machine which tends to be for an hour, I would drink quite a bit of fluid. So after loading up on spinach and almonds -- high iron plant-based foods, everything went smoothly. I was hooked up to the machine and after a short time, it stopped and the staff gathered around that."

"They all knew about my diet — almost five years on a completely plant-based diet. so essentially a vegan diet for nearly five years. And what they were concerned about was that my plate plasma was so cloudy that the machine actually shut down! And typically what that means is the person has had way too many cheeseburgers or whatever high-fat animal based foods. I got the free shirt and they probably had $150 to $200 worth of disposable equipment hooked up to the apheresis machine that they had to throw away. And I had put some effort into preparing for this in terms of the timing and food I was taking in and so forth. I had to get rested. And so she wrote her note in here: "plasma was lipemic". So what is lipemic? Lipemia is simply an excess of fatty substances in the blood."

"So I had to stop and really think about what I've been eating. So it's been nearly five years since I've had any meat, dairy or eggs, yet the plasma that I could see in the clear plastic bag was so cloudy that they wouldn't take the platelets or the plasma. I realized that it had a huge handful of almonds that morning because almonds are a good plant-based source of iron. I had had a plate full of food that included half of an avocado which is a high fat source base of plant-based food — well described as butter that grows on trees I guess. And I had tabbouleh that morning for breakfast which had less oil than the recipe called for but it had grapeseed oil in it. And it was just a few days after Thanksgiving when loved ones make special vegan stuffing for you that includes say Earth Balance or oils, you know. I enjoyed it and there were other foods but I think I've kind of got into a bad habit of overloading on comfort foods and eating cashews in the evening to aid my sleep because cashews have tryptophan and as well as mass quantities of fat."

"So after maybe getting a false sense of security after successfully completing three hundred mile races, it's getting cold outside, I think my body's just craving comfort foods and with the holidays letting my good habit slide a little bit. It was sort of scary to see just how cloudy the plasma bag was!"

"Now Dr Ruth Heidrich and Dr John McDougall are big advocates of an oil-free, all plant-based diet. While I generally consider my personal diet to be probably top 1%, my plasma sure didn't look like it. That was a first but it was an eye-opener."

"Now I see just how fast and how much plant-based oils and fats can get right into the bloodstream. I'm assuming my liver, possibly the kidneys, were kind of working overtime to clean that up. I don't think I want to do that again. It's time to get back into some good habits now that the gardening season is over. Maybe I need to restart my sprouting routine and cut way back on say chips and hummus which both have plant-based oils added to them. And just when I kind of felt like I've figured out this whole apheresis business, hopefully I can get back in there maybe next week and try the process over again."

"I've got 66 lifetime blood donations! Would like to keep going with that. Well I feel it's very important to donate these products to help save lives. I think these videos that I've been putting together will hopefully convince a few people to change their lifestyle habits and that would in the future prevent people from needing some of these blood products for their health concerns by simply preventing those problems."

"Kind of amazing how when we put things into our body that are really not very good for us in excess, our bodies crave even more of those negative influences. So evidently no matter how healthy we think we might be, we got to stay vigilant! Thanks again for watching." -- Randy Kreill