'This interview first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Elephant Magazine.'

DO SOMETHING
Conversation with Howard Schiffer

Waylon H. Lewis, for elephant journal: Hello and welcome to elevision. That’s not my normal voice. It’s an honor. First time we’ve met. [Waylon goes to shake hands, Howard offers his fist] You were ready for the rock, I saw. Let’s do the rock. [They pound fists] Howard Schiffer: [Laughs] And here’s a vitamin rock. [Howard proffers a rock with the Vitamin Angels’ insignia carved into it.]

ele: Oh, that is your logo. That’s cool.

Schiffer: [Laughs] It’s yours. You have the rock now.

ele: Oh, okay. I have the talking rock. Better wrestle me for it in five minutes, when I’m still talking about myself. So, [elephant] actually featured Howard a couple years ago. And since then much has changed, both for elephant: we’re now 2% larger...[laughter] and Howard, I understand, your program—which essentially donates vitamins to people all over the world, including in our own backyard—is expanding rapidly.

Schiffer: We get vital nutrition to children in need around the world. People are starving. When we ask people in Haiti what the average caloric intake is, they’ll say 450 calories a day.

ele: So they are starving; you give them vitamins.

Schiffer: And what we find is that if you can get nutrients in there, you can have this miraculous thing happen— the human body gets nourished and starts acting as it should. You can avert vitamindeficiency diseases that cause kids to go blind with a quarter’s worth of Vitamin A. So it’s an easy solution to a big problem. And then you can start to look at the long-range solutions. 100 to 140 million children around the planet have Vitamin A deficiency. Not enough red, green, orange leafy fruits and vegetables. You know: tomatoes, carrots, greens, chard, spinach—

ele: And then you give [children] a quarter’s worth of vitamins and that saves them from going blind?

Schiffer: Yeah. You get a kid into a clinic. At nighttime, have their favorite toys around...If they are going blind from vitamin deficiency the first thing that goes is their night vision. You have their favorite toys around; they can’t get anything. You give them a high-dose vitamin A capsule, they come back 24 to 36 hours later and they can see. It’s quite amazing.

ele: We just had breakfast together at Boulder’s favorite incompetent diner [their slogan is actually something like: good food, sulky service], Burnt Toast, and we were looking at these [photos]. There’s children with distended bellies—not because they have too much food, but because they have so many worms—

Schiffer: Parasites, yeah. What we call chunky babies. This is a baby that has gotten vitamins. In the villages that we are working in now, you can go into the village and see the children and the babies who have gotten vitamins or the moms who have had prenatals and they look like entirely different beings. You’ll see a four-pound baby or a three-pound baby that will be struggling to survive—and then you come back and the baby is seven or eight pounds, is vital and going to make it and not have any problems. So this makes us really happy. This is a vitamin baby [for all photos, see video at iamelephant. com] in Honduras. And this young boy, I asked you when we were at Burnt Toast, “How old do you think this boy is?”

ele: And I was like, eight or 10 or 12?

Schiffer: This boy is 15 years old. It’s called stunting. It happens all over the world in countries where there is poverty. People say, “Oh, they are just small.” They are not just small. They have been chronically malnourished. This is not what a 15-year-old boy should look like: distended belly...could have 70 parasites in the body.

ele: These worms live in your belly, and consume 20 to...

Schiffer: ...20 to 30 percent of what you consume in a day will go just to feed the worm. Plus worms love Vitamin A, so your immune system gets shot at the same time that you are getting malnourished from these worms. This is something you can do twice a year, with the Vitamin A program. Again, it costs us a quarter per year to do the vitamin A and the anti-parasitic. Easy to do.

ele: With a $4.50 frappuccino, imagine [what you could do].

Schiffer: The parasites look like worms when they come out of the kid’s body, when they go to the bathroom if you give them the anti-parasitic. We did this, this is in August of 2006. We just got this photo last week, May of 2007, so nine months afterwards, you can see this boy’s belly is way down. The parasites have gone.

ele: It’s the same kid?

Schiffer: They are just starting to look healthier. This one’s quite dramatic [photos at left and below]. A grand-mom and baby came into a clinic in Haiti, a little over a year ago. This 15-month-old baby weighed six pounds—obviously not going to make it—

ele: I was born at 8 pounds, 2 ounces. So this kid—at 15 months —is at 6 pounds.

Schiffer: Six pounds. Mother and father have both died. Father died before the baby was born. Mother died after. Probably from AIDS. They did not think this child had much of a chance. They gave the child multiple treatments, they gave the grand-mom two months of nutrition and a year’s worth of multiple vitamins. They came back a year later, they were working in the clinic and the director, Mary Ellen, went outside and saw this older lady. “Boy, that woman looks familiar.” She realized it was the same grandma and baby. I show this to people and say, “There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is not something we’ve got to spend a billion on research. This is not something we got to spend decades finding a cure for. We know the answer today.” My work is to say, “Wait, we gotta do this. This baby, she deserves a life.” Not that complicated.

ele: Our first article that covered [your work] was called “One Dollar.” This is one area where you donate a dollar, translate that into vitamins, give it to a child or a family and the leverage, in terms of your giving, is miraculous. And your personal story: you were selling vitamins, you were successful, and at some point—

Schiffer: Yeah, I started off as a midwife. Delivering babies, in my early 20s. I learned about what nutrition can do. Got into the natural products industry, and got to a point where...you know, there’s a game people play in California where they write their own obituaries. Weird. But I thought, man, if they write mine today, it’s going to be, “He sold a lot of products.” And I thought, “That’s not what I want to do.” And I just realized that I had all this knowledge—I just needed to know how to get the product to the recipients. And in ’94 I learned how to do that, and that was the start of Vitamin Angels.

ele: So you were a successful businessman, and at some point you were like, “I’m going to dump this business and just start devoting my time, and you mortgaged your house several times—”

Schiffer: Yes. [laughs] I had success, I had a lot of contacts, and while I was in business we started Vitamin Angels, and it became more and more obvious...I got to a point, I was about 50, and I thought, “Wait, this is my life? What do I want to do with my life?” And that was the wake-up. “I’ve done business, that’s been fun—I have a family, that’s been wonderful—and now I’ve got to do service.” And that’s what’s brought a lot of people to Vitamin Angels: let’s make a difference, this is a doable thing—it’s measurable. You give kids two high-dose vitamin A, they don’t go blind. You give them vitamin D and calcium, they don’t get rickets. It’s pretty simple.

ele: And you’re helping kids in Tibet, and you are helping kids in South America...there are different problems everywhere, and you are all over the place.

Schiffer: The problem is starvation. The problem is that there is enough food to feed everybody and it’s not getting distributed.

ele: With the new Monsanto G.M.O. things, are they called food? We should have that problem of starvation solved.

Schiffer: It’s a great example of hype. It doesn’t work. The golden rice that would save children from Vitamin A deficiency. They’d have to eat 16 bowls of that rice every single day. We can give a kid two high-dose Vitamin A a year. Costs a quarter. You look at those two [approaches] and it’s like...wait a second...what’s their motivation? It’s to own rice production. Our motivation is to get the kids healthy.

ele: We were talking over breakfast about a Paul Hawken quote— he is this amazing environmentalist—where he’s traveling around the U.S. and he’s getting all these business cards from different entrepreneurs. And he’s just like: “Wow, so many people are doing so much.” Also you were talking about that quality of joy that you are experiencing [despite] working harder, and getting less back on [a concrete] level—[but] you are experiencing joy at this point. So on a personal level, I want to touch on that [comment]: “If I died, I sold a lot of product.” Do you feel good about what you’ve done?

Schiffer: I need to correct you there. I get so much more back. People say thank you and I say, “I gotta tell you the truth, what I’m getting back is more than I could ever have imagined.” Yesterday I was with this old lady, on her porch in Louisville, Mississippi. She’s telling me about her life and her kids who have died and about how much the vitamins mean to her. How would I ever get a window into that woman’s life? I was working with these kids, hearing their stories about what they want to be—they want to be a lawyer, they want to be a policeman. I could never have had that access before. I can go to Haiti, to the Dominican Republic, to India...how [else] would I ever get to make a difference in Tibet? We’ve gotten up to two million vitamins a month for the children of Tibet. That is something I never thought I’d be able to impact. I just had this one thing that happened to be my piece of the puzzle, what I didn’t realize at the moment was what a big deal it was. I thought, “It will be a good thing to do.” This book came out last year by the World Bank called Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development. They have two nutritionists and 1,000 economists on staff! Even the World Bank is saying that [we must] reposition nutrition: investments in micronutrients have higher returns than investments in trade liberalization, in malaria, or in water and sanitation. It says no other technology offers as large a return in such a short time.

ele: So how can we all help? I know you are trying to make relationships. Pharmaca has been very generous. I know you are trying to work more with Whole Foods...

Schiffer: Check our website out. Look at the videos, show them to your friends, tell other people about it. Supporting the folks who support us—Pharmaca, and Whole Foods is coming on now— supporting these companies in the natural products industry. And, if you are traveling, take some children’s vitamins with you, take a bottle of prenatals with you—you can go into any area of the world and have enough vitamins to get a woman through a pregnancy. That’s a big deal. So: support us, support the people that are helping us, and realize that this is something that you can also do. It is a major global health problem that we have the solution for, today. I come back and people say, “Wasn’t that heartbreaking?” I say, “You know...it’s heartbreaking that the problem is out there, but it’s really hopeful because we know what we need to do.”

ele: Good work.