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Can You Guess Her Age? — Raw Vegan Diet Is Woman’s Fountain of Youth

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A Miami-Dade grandmother has people convinced she’s lying about her age.

Annette Larkins spends her mornings the same way she has for decades: up before dawn, out in her Miami-Dade backyard, tending a garden that doubles as her grocery store. Reporter Tania Rogers profiled her for South Florida’s WPTV News as Annette approached her 70th birthday, and the footage of her clear skin and quick step next to a husband who looks a generation older set off a wave of “guess her age” disbelief. Annette has an explanation ready, and it isn’t cosmetic surgery.

• Annette Larkins, turning 70, credits an entirely raw vegan diet and her own backyard produce for her youthful appearance, in a report by WPTV’s Tania Rogers.
• She grows and juices her own fruit and vegetables, harvests rainwater for drinking and irrigation, and says she hasn’t needed prescription medication or dealt with common ailments.
• Her husband, Amos Larkins, never adopted the diet and takes medication for diabetes and high blood pressure — and says strangers regularly mistake Annette for his daughter or granddaughter.

The Garden She Calls Her Fountain of Youth

Every corner of the Larkins’ backyard is planted with something edible. Annette walks the rows pointing out sprouted seeds, leafy greens, and fruit trees, the same plot she’s worked for years. She collects rainwater both to drink and to water everything growing there, treating the whole setup less like a hobby and more like a pharmacy. “I am very vibrant, I have lots of energy,” she told WPTV. “I am up no later than 5:30 in the morning as a rule, and I am ready to go.”

A Diet Built on Raw, Unprocessed Food

Annette eats no animal products, nothing cooked, nothing processed. “My diet consists of fruits, nuts, vegetables and seeds. I do a lot of sprouting of seeds,” she said, gesturing to the garden as her evidence. She juices whatever’s ripe — pineapples, grapefruits, even spinach — and treats the sprouting and juicing as core rituals rather than occasional health kicks. It’s the kind of strict, whole-foods approach that regularly comes up when people discuss the problem with being a vegan in a culture built around convenience food, and Annette’s version leaves out even the cooked plant meals most vegans still eat.

The Husband Who Didn’t Follow Her Lead

Amos Larkins didn’t adopt his wife’s regimen. He takes prescription medication for diabetes and high blood pressure, a contrast that makes the age gap people assume between them even more striking to strangers.

“They will ask me ‘what am I doing with a young girl?’ or they will say ‘you’ve got your granddaughter with you,’ things like that.”

Amos doesn’t dispute how good his wife looks for her age — he just doesn’t credit himself for any of it. “She is an amazing person, she does everything,” he said. “She builds computers, makes all of her own clothes, grows her own food, speaks three languages, it’s amazing.”

Spreading the Word Through Journey to Health

The questions from friends and strangers eventually became constant enough that Annette decided to answer them in print. She published two “Journey to Health” booklets and produced an instructional DVD twelve years before the WPTV segment aired, laying out her raw-food and juicing routine step by step. “The Discovery Channel, they took sections of the booklet and translated them into Spanish,” she said, “which is, by the way, my second language.” The kind of raw-diet claims Annette makes tend to draw skepticism from nutrition researchers, the same debate that surfaces whenever aging and diet science gets tested against one person’s decades-long personal experiment.

Whatever the mechanism, Annette isn’t changing course. She’s still up at 5:30, still juicing pineapples and grapefruits from her own trees, and still handing out booklets to whoever asks her the same question Amos has been fielding for years.