Plant Based Diet - Weston A Price
Most of what I know about diet and nutrition comes from the Weston A Price Foundation. I discovered most of it on my own through my own experiences. I then found the local WAP chapter and was introduced to the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and found almost everything I’d learned myself plus a bunch of new stuff.
Weston Price was a dentist living in the 1930’s. This was a unique time, when industrialization of everything was happening. People were moving in large numbers to cities and working in factories. Food was changing. It was being industrialized as well, and what it was doing nutrition wise wasn’t being thought about. When you think about it, poverty was very common and not having enough to eat was normal. Optimal nutrition wasn’t thought about, eating and staying alive was. Weston Price was a part of the nutrition movement of the time, the Kellogg time. The nutrition ideas were as crazy as they are today, just different. Kellogg believed that we needed to purge ourselves of evil by eating lots of fiber and no sugar. He was one of the first vegans, done out of a desire to eliminate our sex drive. Weston Price went on a trip around the world to find healthy primitive diets, and his goal was to find a vegetarian one.
Weston Price went to around 30 primitive societies, living with them and observing their teeth, diets, and lifestyles. What was unique at this time was that some of the children had moved to the cities and were eating a more modern diet. He could observe how diet and nutrition affected the health of the people and he could remove genetics. He looked at the health of the parents who lived and ate a traditional diet and those of the children who were eating a modern one.
What did he find? That the modern diet destroyed health. The children of people eating processed foods had narrow mouths without room for their teeth and lots of cavities. The children growing up in the primitive societies would have teeth that were never brushed, never cleaned, but were perfect otherwise. They’d have more than enough room for all their teeth and no cavities. They also didn’t get sick like the people in the cities. Tuberculosis wasn’t a problem, but it was running rampant in the people in the cities. The people eating processed foods weren’t as healthy and didn’t live as long. The primitive people would live healthy lives well into their 90’s.
He looked at the diets to figure out what they had in common. These were very different diets from all over the world, some of them tropical, others from the Arctic. He found that the healthiest diets were the omnivorous ones, the ones that had the most variety. They all contained some raw animal products in them, either raw meat, milk or bugs, they all fermented or processed the grains they ate, and they all ate veggies. All meat or all vegetables wasn’t best, but a combination was. Is this surprising? When you think about it, humans like the taste of all of these things. My goats are vegetarians, they don’t want to eat anything but plants. My cats are carnivores, choosing only the meat and dairy to steal. My dogs are omnivorous, preferring meat, but definitely enjoying vegetables too.
What’s so bad about modern food? What are we doing so differently, because we have to be doing something terribly wrong for our health to deteriorate so quickly. Sally Fallon gives a bunch of ideas as to why she thinks this is happening and her cookbook is an attempt to provide a new way to eat using Weston A Price’s findings. The concepts are great but the recipes aren’t always the best. The concepts are based on eating grass fed meat, pastured poultry, free range eggs, raw milk, organic vegetables, and only breads and grains that are properly prepared through fermentation.
How do you do this? Look to traditional diets and recipes. A real Mexican mother would never serve her children tortillas made from corn that wasn’t soaked in lime and turned into masa. One of the major B vitamin deficiencies suffered by the freed African slaves was due to eating corn that wasn’t soaked in lime water. They weren’t taught how to properly prepare and eat corn so they didn’t know that they needed to soak it first. If you want to have bread that doesn’t deprive you of zinc, the you need to look to traditional French baking techniques to learn how to properly use pre-ferments to break down a lot of the compounds that bind to zinc. These are just two examples of knowledge that is hidden in our food history.
He also found that you really need some raw animal fat and protein to be really healthy. Notice I said raw, not just that you need some animal products, but that you need raw ones. To an American, the easiest to stomach is raw milk. Personally, I eat ¼ pound of raw red meat a day along with raw goat milk. I like my duck egg yolks runny, which is raw, and I enjoy eating raw fish. There’s something about cooking it that binds up some of the nutrients. If you have an iron deficiency, the fastest and easiest way to fix it is eat ¼ pound of raw ground beef a day. I learned this from a patient of Dr. Hertoge, one of the top European hormone docs. I took all kinds of iron supplements, even the only heme one available, and nothing worked. Doc was talking blood transfusions because we couldn’t get my iron to budge. Two months of raw beef and my iron levels were fixed.
You can eat raw animal products as a vegetarian, but not as a vegan. Drinking raw milk, eating raw cheese and eating raw egg yolks isn’t really different than pasteurized forms. If you are really adventurous you can look into eating bugs. The meal worms I get for my quail do smell pretty good. I still think I’d rather feed the worms to the quail and eat the eggs.
How your food is produced is very important as well. The animals need to be raised how they would live in the wild, eating what they would traditionally. Cows only eat the grain seed heads at the end of the season, and then it is only a small fraction of their diet. Their main food is grass, and they do best when they eat only grass. Their body chemistry changes when we feed them almost exclusively corn, and it is obvious from the smell. My cows didn’t stink, I would even tie up a cow to mow the front yard, letting the chickens break up the cow pies afterward. I had a mowed and fertilized lawn without much effort. My neighbors corn fed cows came for a visit one day and crapped all over my yard. It took a week for the smell to dissipate. That’s why people think cow poop stinks. Cows shouldn’t eat much corn.
Vegetables need to be grown with as much biodiversity as possible. Monocultures provide breeding grounds for bad bugs, requiring pesticides and chemicals to keep the plants alive. The best way to grow organic vegetables is on the small scale with as many different veggies and flowers as possible grown next to each other.
What’s the best diet? A diverse one tailored to your own genetic background. Look to your ancestry to see what types of diets to look at to see what might work best for you. My great grandparents were goat and sheep dairy farmers in Holland. Might that be why I do best on goat milk and lamb? Asians have larger pancreases to process the starches from rice and noodles better than those from Europe and Africa. A friend of mine was trying to find her food allergies and decided to try eliminating gluten. It took less than a week of eating rice replacement products to realize that rice was the problem. She’s of German descent and realized that she did best on wheat, rye, meat and sauerkraut. I learned to bake bread and make sauerkraut from her, learning about traditional fermentations and sourdoughs.
There isn’t a perfect diet, just the one that is right for you. Only through experimentation and observation can you find yours.