Who Says Good Nutrition Means Animal Fats? Weston A. Price
August 6th, 2008WAPF given fair treatment by the Washington Post???
Incredible, but true.
Via: Washington Post:
Fallon’s definition of “real” is vastly different from what many Americans who consider themselves health-conscious might describe. She advocates butter on bread “so thick you can see teeth marks in it,” plenty of meat and unpasteurized, or raw, milk.
Those are foods recommended by Price, a Cleveland dentist who traveled the world studying primitive diets. His 1939 book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” concluded that a diet high in the vitamins found in animal fats and untouched by “modern” innovations such as refined flour, sugar and chemically preserved foods was the key to preventing chronic disease and tooth decay.
Such ideas have been considered heretical by modern American public health policy that promotes a low-fat, low-sodium diet. But increasing interest in sustainable, local foods, combined with industrial health scares such as the recent salmonella outbreak, has put the spotlight on the foundation’s unorthodox ideas about healthful eating. Its membership is nearly 10,500 strong, and growing at a 10 percent clip each year. There are more than 350 U.S. chapters, plus international groups from Australia to Norway.
For years, these ideas were “as fringe as you could get, as politically incorrect as you could get,” says Fallon, 60. “All of a sudden, people are listening.”
That new audience is surprisingly broad. Some adherents are interested exclusively in nutrition. But more and more, the concept of returning to traditional foodways is pulling people in. New members include the expected “back to the land” types, for whom the foundation’s message provides yet another reason to support small organic farms, and those who oppose the government’s attempt to limit the availability of foods such as raw milk.
“This idea of real food crosses all demographics: red states, blue states, seculars, environmentalists, men, women and children,” says Nina Planck, a Weston A. Price member and the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why.” “What’s gone wrong with farm policy is something conservatives and liberals can all agree on.”
Research Credit: scholar33
I read in one of those “grab bag” newspaper columns years ago about a rural area in western Ireland where the population consumes virtually nothing but dairy products (from their own cows and chickens, of course). The population is also virtually illness-free. The only catch is that virtually all of them keel over from heart failure in their early 70s due to clogged arteries.
It’s a pretty well-known fact that meat-eating hunter-gatherer-herders were much healthier than later civilized farmers, and it’s also pretty well known that we evolved to be omnivorous meat-eaters. One of the major factors that makes meat in our society less healthy is that our livestock are fed maize-corn and wheat. Many of the animals we eat evolved to eat grass and foliage instead.
The first two comments betray both an awareness of the issues raised in the WAPF/Post article and a lack of self-study or direct experience with the material beyond peripheral reading. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the reference to “dairy chickens”, for starters… =)
I’ll probably piss them both off saying so; so be it.
The first perpetuates the Cholesterol Myth (and I use capital letters very intentionally) with it’s reference to clogged Irish arteries as a result of dairy consumption. Perhaps the chicken milk is responsible for their problems?
Depending uppn the depth of your own personal rabbit hole, this particularly insidious bit of mis/disinformation is either irresponsible corporate science or a strategy of the eugenics movement. As for me, I’m agreeable with both –and several others.
The truly grand irony is that cholesterol is a healing agent manufactured by the human body, used to “bandage” over lesions, scarring and damage to the inner arterial surfaces (and elsewhere). Build-up of plaque in the arteries, which is formed from cholesterol, is most likely there due to the systemic damage resulting directly from steady consumption of engineered industrial “false fats”, only rendered “edible” by virtue of their having been 100% de-natured, hydrogenated and deodorized.
Here’s an eye-opening edibility test: put some Crisco in a tub and see if your local flies will go after it.
As flies prefer a steady diet (which refers to INTAKE, not the latest fad) of decaying organic matter, in observing their lack of interest, we can draw certain conclusions about the stuff without performing a single chemical assay.
Peregrino (and anyone else who may not have for that matter), it would be well worth your while to take in the wealth of info available at the WAPF site, starting with the the section on the crucial differences between false fats and the manufactured sludge tearing up peoples insides — and generating vast amounts of profit for the industrial combines who depend the stuff for all their engineered “foods”.
The second comment is on-point, but focuses down on one aspect of the problem, dodging past what turn out to be the most likely causes of a multitude of “industrial diseases”.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but via a constant and rigorous self-study program over the last seven years, my German wife and I have been applying the principles at the core of the WAPF philosophy with ever-greater accuracy and skill. When we relocated to her ancestral family farm in rural western Germany, we decided to shift from members and became a chapter.
Quite honestly, for all the hugely obvious health benefits that were imparted to us at each stage of the steady process of elimination and replacement that is rejigging your eating habits, it wasn’t until we swore (completely) off refined sugars that all of the physical demons we brought with us from the states were finally vanquished.
That was by far and away the most difficult jones to conquer, as the stuff possesses the physical and psychological strength of heroin — just look at how they market the stuff: 100% PURE (“uncut”).
Purity is extremely over-rated. Consider for a moment, if you will, how much balance is to be found in something that is “100% pure.” None. It is imbalance personified. Our bodies are essentially statis machines, attempting to maintain systemic equilibrium no matter what we suck up.
And I’ll leave off with one last shot across the bow, aimed squarely at the flagship USS Vegan. AS far as I can figure, vegetarianism is a primarily a religious exercise with some health benefits.
Don’t get me wrong here. I eat plenty of veg and fruit, almost 100% homegrown, but the deeper you read into the history we have the more you realize that eliminating all foodstuffs from the animal realm is not only a serious historical aberration, it is usually unhealthy in the long run due to malnutrition.
The appeal of this “lifestyle choice” to the contrarian and holistic set is obvious, as it reflects aspects of the Buddhist “do no harm” principle, which is both well-meaning and wholly unrealistic. I find the American Indian approach to eating much more satisfying in every respect, for example.
Another truly revealing anecdote is where the modern vegan movement ends up having to go to get their protein: heavily processed (but unfermented) industrial soy products. Once you’ve seen the chemistry here, and in nearly every other industrial replacement ingredient isolated and/or developed over the last several decades, it begins to get very difficult to walk away from the eugenics arguments.
But that’s my rabbit hole. Please, by all means, get going on the necessary homework and decide for yourself. It means eliminating a great many thnigs you once sold as being beneficial and turned out not to be. Sound familiar?
holy cow, Miraculix, you summed up my thoughts perfectly. But you said it in a much more readable, awesome way. Thank you.
(bowing)
You’re quite welcome James. Just had to be said, that. Abd there’S plenty more where that came from, but it’s already been written by more talented researchers than myself — like Sally Fallon, Mary Enig and the circle of folks that revolve around the WAPF community.
Given the history of US “law enforcement” and “regulatory” activity over the last century, from the FDA to the CIA and No Such Agency, I expect they’ll earn their own mole before long (if they haven’t already), as their core messages are all decidedly non-corporate. Hence their appeal.
Also, courtesy of Typos-R-US, please note the following textual correction:
“Our bodies are essentially statis machines, attempting to maintain systemic equilibrium no matter what we suck up.”
s/b
“Our bodies are essentially STASIS machine…”
There are a couple others, but I’m just going to have to live with those.
The moral of the story: that’s what you get for typing a long comment in the reply window and not composing your thoughts in a separate text editor… =)
@Miraculix: “Another truly revealing anecdote is where the modern vegan movement ends up having to go to get their protein: heavily processed (but unfermented) industrial soy products.”
Check out: http://www.hippocratesinst.com/
The guy who runs it would probably have even more bad things to say about soy than you do. And he’s in phenomenal shape.
———
“The appeal of this “lifestyle choice” to the contrarian and holistic set is obvious, as it reflects aspects of the Buddhist “do no harm” principle, which is both well-meaning and wholly unrealistic.”
In response, something to consider: most people consider humans the only animal on earth to really have the power of choice. What if some humans thought that by choosing a meat-free diet, based on “do no harm”, that they were doing the right thing even, perhaps, at the expense of their own health? Further, they might reason, if enough people did it, and it was carried on long enough (for many, many generations), it is not unreasonable to assume (via “natural selection”/”survival of the fittest”) that those with a predisposition for being healthier with a vegan diet would survive and propogate, thus increasing the numbers who would do well with such a diet. Eventually, the world would be full of vegans in excellent health, and it would have been achieved by what might be the only time in history any animal had consciously chosen a specific evolutionary path. Another “eugenics argument” that’s hard to walk away from — but, I’ll grant you, it does require a lot of faith.
Last thought: as the man at the Hippocrates Institute has shown, it is quite possible to live a healthy life as a vegan; but it’s extremely inconvenient (I will freely attest) in a carnivorous society. Make that “convenience-addicted carnivorous society”. And, like most societies do, it portrays its most cherished attachments as objective truths, thus setting up an orthodoxy that, like most orthodoxies, is passionately defended by its adherents. Although in this case, since the vast majority are carnivores, the adherents can afford to be more blithe than passionate.
Peregrino,
I bet the article didn’t mention that the heart-attack victims’ diets most probably changed (“improved”) from the raw dairy & poultry that they would’ve been consuming for most of their lives to modern (“better”) foods later in their lives. Maybe this change caused their heart-attacks?
Check out the Weston Price site – you will most likely experience some cognitive dissonance at first, but you’ll soon come to see that almost everything we’ve been taught to believe about health & diet is bullshit.
The food trade, with the help of their on-the-take authorities and watchdogs is every bit as – actually more – diabolical (and powerful) than the arms, drug and oil industries put together. Probably more letter alphabet agencies involved, too.
Read the article, “The Oiling of America” by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon on the WAPF site and you’ll see it’s all business as usual!
Miraculix,
I wish I could give up refined sugar. I know it would be the key. But dammit, I can’t. It worries me, too – aside from knowing that it clouds my brain and keeps me 20kg overweight, I’ve come to believe that sugar and cancer most definitely go hand-in-hand (Sally Fallon, Mary Enig, Tullio Simoncini).
Was it just willpower, do you think you could have done it if you hadn’t moved away from the Land Of The Free?
@anothernut
What if some humans thought that by choosing a meat-free diet, based on “do no harm”, that they were doing the right thing even, perhaps, at the expense of their own health?
They’d be kidding themselves, at the expense of their own health.
See: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2002/Mar02/vegan.htm
@il,
Are you getting the quality fats that WAPF talks about? I used to consume a lot of sugar (in its worst possible vector, soda, Coke, etc.). That was killing me.
Now, I have about two tea spoons of raw sugar (still not good) in a cup of coffee in the morning and some raspberry jam on bread. That’s about it! I haven’t eliminated it, but that’s maybe 1% of what I used to consume. I credit the reduction of cravings to the high quality fats I’ve been eating since I moved to NZ.
Becky eats no refined sugar at all, but you should see her put away the fat! People wonder how she’s managing to breast feed a baby boy who’s at the top of the charts in terms of length and weight… Quality fats, and lots of them.
Kevin,
Yeah, I do – I make a point of a weekly trip to a bio-dymanic/organic butcher to buy not only bones for stock but kg’s of organ fat to render down. Full-fat yoghurt, kefir and heaps of butter (sometimes even, if we can get it) as well.
I think my saturated fat intake is the only thing keeping me semi-healthy. Even when I gorge myself on fat to the point of nausea, I can still manage to down a coupla cans or packs of sugar jubes or something! And don’t let me near bread or pasta. Won’t stop. I think it’s more of a mental addiction.
Maybe my subconscious trying to kill me…
I meant:
(sometimes even RAW, if we can get it) as well.
I read the article about the Oregon State scientist that Kevin linked to, and he makes a very good point about crop-production that I hadn’t even thought about – the mass killing of field fauna by the modern cultivation of crops.
I live in area that a mere decade ago had lots of pheasants. It was a common sight, and a treat, to hear them make them their distinctive crow and see them sprinting across a road or field. But I haven’t seen or heard a pheasant for years now. And thats because the no-till farming has exterminated them. That is too high a price to pay for cheaper corn.
Oh god, pasta. Oh god. Even thinking about it is making my mouth water…
Yeah, we eat regular pasta about twice a year now. The only reason I don’t eat it more often is because Becky won’t eat it.
I know it makes me fat and gives me constipation, but I’d eat it more often anyway! Crack addicts probably sounds something like pasta addicts.
She went out of town with her mum a while ago. You know what I did?
I drove to town and bought the stuff to make a big pasta feed. HAHA (We don’t have pasta in the house at all.)
The pasta is a tough one to give up for sure.
@Kevin: really?
http://www.jgmatheny.org/matheny%202003.pdf
Now that’s dedication – I hear petrol is over $2 a litre there now! Would’ve cost more than the pasta!
Think it’s great that Becky’s walking the walk (and you, as well) in regards to sugar=no/fat=yes. Obviously as much for Owen’s benefit as her own. I shudder when I see pregnant women shoving down all sorts of food and drink, except for the stuff that mums-to-be should be shoving down. It’s sad – the kid will basically be doomed to some sort of disability or life-long deficiency.
Friends of ours recently told me that they’re planning on bringing life into the world in the near future.
Like most people, they watch TV religiously and glance at the article titles in bright, glossy clolourful health magazines and have fallen for the low-fat, high-sugar, high veg oil, aspartame laced diet. I’m over trying to verbally nudge people I care about on these issues – it doesn’t seem to work – so I bought them a copy of Nourishing Traditions, with a request that they at least read the introduction and sections on the importance of mothers’ diets.
Well, as soon as they read about saturated fat in the blurb on the back of the book, they didn’t know where to look. Obviously they thought the book was nuts and I was nuts for even knowing about it!
When I was at their place last, I wanted to show them a recipe in the book, but they didn’t know where it was! Probably burned at the stake. In its place on the book table were monthly issues of Channel 9’s Good Health or something like that, featuring such articles as, “How to lower your fat intake – NOW!”, “In this issue: 10 Low-fat yogurts taste tested.”
People have been hoodwinked.
Anyway, sorry to use the post as a chat room!
I have systemic candidiasis, so you certainly don’t have to convince me that sugar is bad for you! I take a nutritional supplement to mitigate my relatively mild case of this affliction, because eating the full pure candida-diet would feel really limited. It doesn’t help that the food industry dumps a fucking ton of sugar into damn near everything. That said, I’m reasonably sure that I eat vastly less sugar on a day-to-day basis than the vast majority of my fellow employees at the Narcissistic Grocery Store (so nicknamed by me because of the corporate CEO who put his picture on all the store’s bags both paper and plastic).
Another thing about the purported humanitarianism of veganism and vegetarianism: Relying on a vegetarian diet means that you have to make up the calories you get from meat somewhere, and that will necessarily be from cereal grains, the cultivation of which, of course, became the basis of this misbegotten (to my way of thinking anyway) enterprise known as civilization. The continually expanding cultivation of these cereal grains has been pretty damn harsh on the rest of the animal kingdom.
The food trade, with the help of their on-the-take authorities and watchdogs is every bit as – actually more – diabolical (and powerful) than the arms, drug and oil industries put together.
Nobody here will be surprised to read that the WAPF is on the demonology list of control-freak skeptizealot Dr. Stephen Barrett’s “quackwatch” website. (I don’t consider fundamentalist websites worth linking to, and it’s easy enough to find with any search engine.)
Oh Sweet Goddess of the Waxing Moon have mercy! NutraSweet/aspartame is vile poison! I’m probably pretty lax in how I manage my health compared to a lot of the regulars here (at least judging by the comments for this post), but aspartame is the one thing that I will not put inside me! Around the time my candidiasis starting getting really obnoxious, I was guzzling down massive quantities of Crystal Light (Blight?), which contains massive aspartame. I wouldn’t be surprised if that made my candidiasis into something I could no longer ignore. Candidiasis patients who can tolerate small amounts of Splenda (sucralose, which isn’t exactly good for you) without becoming heavily symptomatic will experience massive flairs of their candida symptoms if they have even a little bit of aspartame. And it does one little good for weight-control because of the massive carbohydrate cravings it brings on.
My wife is chapter leader for WAPF in our little town in rural Wisconsin, and we regularly get 20+ people to our meetings. Sally Fallon was surprised, since many large cities only get that many. But that’s the nature of this place.
Anyway, what was really interesting is that we brought Sally Fallon out here last Fall to give one of her presentations (“Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry”), and we had a good 150 people attend! I doubt more than a couple actually signed-up for our WAPF chapter, and many of them don’t even agree with the strong meat-basis of WAPFs philosophy — the common thread, though, was a general recognition that the FDA/USDA/etc. and the corporate foods industries are really working AGAINST proper health and nutrition.
WAPF is not for everyone, and indeed there are varying philosophies which in their own separate ways all advocate going back to basic, local, family farming and food production. But regardless, this groundswell is a real powder-keg, and I use that word intentionally.
I think you’d agree that the cultural revolution that’s underway is very much rooted in reclaiming our autonomy through local economy (hey, that’s should be a bumper sticker!), and as many in this cultural revolution have realized, everything comes down to the food we eat and the earth we grow it on.
In regards to sugar…don’t forget that you can often substitute raw honey for sugar in a great many things. It’s a real food, so it affects the body in a completely different way.
And anyone who has a nagging sweet tooth should absolutely know about “stevia”, which is a pure herbal extract. My wife always keeps a couple bottles of it in concentrated liquid form (you can also get powdered). It only takes a couple drops in most things — indeed, too much becomes overly sweet — and unless you use too much it has no aftertaste whatsoever.
In fact, there there has supposedly been a major underground push by the artificial sweeteners industry to quash stevia from the market, since it’s a far better no-calorie sweetener than anything Modern Chemistry has come up with. But because it’s a natural plant extract it can’t be “controlled” without government regulation. My wife claims stevia has been a major goal behind the corp-gov push to extablish regulation over herbal medicines & vitamins. Once people get turned on to stevia, what the hell’s the point in accepting chemical-sweeteners at all?
If you want to avoid refined sugar/carbohydrates, and the additives aspartame (sugar-replacement) and MSG (salt replacement/taste enhancer), you cannot buy 90% of the products in the average supermarket. I’m actually trying to do that and never enjoyed preparing and eating food like that before (and I have a history of being obsessed with food).
In that respect I can recommend the book ‘In defense of food’; http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php
He also devotes considerable space to Weston Price.
@anothernut
A couple of things. “Do no harm” is what you said, and that’s typically what I hear from vegans. The Davis piece, demonstrates that there’s no such thing as “do no harm.”
So, “Do Least Harm” then.
In the Matheny piece, he writes:
“In one year, 1,000 kilograms of protein can be produced on as few as 1.0 hectares planted with soy and corn…”
Woh. Yeah, well, a lot of things CAN be produced if enough genetically engineered seed, toxic pesticide and synthetic fertilizers are used.
So, in the Davis piece, his arithmetic is wrong. And in the Matheny piece, I’ve got assume Monsanto’s green deserts of GMOs and RoundUp, which are resulting in ecocide, dead zones in the oceans, pollution of native species of corn, destruction of cultures, etc. If that’s the “least harm” option… Well, that’s pretty damn grim.
@Kevin
As I was responding specifically to Miraculix, I was using Miraculix’s term, “do no harm”. I thought that was clear. Yes, “do no harm” is a impossibility, since simply by existing each and every human is responsible for the death of some living creatures, hence, “human existence” ==> “harm > 0”. Being such an obvious impossibility , I thought everyone reading it would realized it’s an ideal (unattainable, yes, but that is often the nature of ideals). Thanks for clearing that up for anyone who might have thought otherwise.
But if you’re going to take the time to clarify truisms, then I’s surprised to see you let Davis off so easy. “So, in the David piece, his arithmetic is wrong.” The Davis piece IS arithmetic — that’s the crux of the debate, no? So what does that say about his thesis?
And then to bring the name “Monsanto” into the argument (with all its sinister implications), without any real supporting evidence (other than your assumptions), implying that it’s either Davis’s way or Monsanto’s way, nothing in between… well, I’ll let that little whirlwind speak for itself.
To attain perfect health, humans should eat only fresh, whole, raw, ripe fruit and tender greens — as well as getting lots of exercise, fresh air, and sunshine, and plenty of restful sleep.
See here, here, here, and here, and here for details.
You want to be an omnivore? Then do like the other omnivores in nature do, and eat your meat raw…right along with the bones, the organs, the blood, and the guts.
I apologize, Kevin, for barraging your site with lengthy comments, but there’s one other thing I feel driven to share. For many people, diet is akin to religion, so I often find it’s best not to challenge theirs. But similarly, I also find it so interesting to learn from people out on the dietary “fringes”, so to speak, so I wanted to share a couple personal experiences.
First of all, like others here I also crave pasta and grains, and for the last 7 months our family has been on the GAPS diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) to restore our “intestinal microcosm” to better health (“All diseases begin in the gut” is supposedly attributed to Hippocrates, the Greek father of modern medicine). The GAPS diet eschews grain, bread, pasta, etc. altogether, along with potatoes, sugar and any uncultured dairy products. It has supposedly aided or healed a wide variety of childhood disorders, even supposedly neurological ones (hence Gut and Psychology Syndrome), by linking those disorders with toxic biocultures and imbalances in the intestinal flora.
But the point is that a year ago or so I’d never have even considered grain and bread as being problematic in our diet — I assumed those were the very staples of human culture. Yet there are a small number of nutritionists who argue that grains are not natural to us. They might be considered one of the first processed foods, since their essential benefit is that they store and keep so well, and contain so many easy calories. Some people claim that it was similar to the later introduction of sugar into the human diet, giving people a ready source of easy energy. And just as there are so many social dysfunctions which can logically be linked to refined sugar, is it wrong to question whether many of the peculiar dysfunctions we can associate with modern culture (i.e. the thirst for power and control, the worship of achievement and success) might not be linked to nutritional imbalances…the result of widespread grain cultivation? Many vegetarians already blame these dysfunction on meat-eating as it is, but perhaps it’s the grain? Just a question…
But even having adopted a grain-free diet — which most mainstream people seem to feel is freakish enough — once you journey down the rabbit hole it only seems to get deeper and deeper.
One of the members of our WAPF chapter is a man in his 30’s who struggled with Crohn’s disease all through adolescence. A very smart, very well-adjusted fellow. When conventional medicine failed him he began to explore dietary treatments and, long story short, he has been completely free of his problems for many years now — thriving in fact — since he started eating only raw foods, and primarily raw meat!
It’s been fascinating watching my own and other people’s (already on “the food fringe”) reactions to the clear fact that, here’s a healthy, vibrant guy who hasn’t been poisoned by eating raw chicken (as any restaurant inspector claims will happen), who doesn’t have trichinosis (sp?) from the volumes of raw pork he’s ingested, who convincingly claims that cooking ruins not just the quality of the meat but also the taste of it…!?! In fact, he doesn’t season it at all, although when he makes dishes for our potluck chapter meetings he knows enough to “popularize” them with spices and raw sauces and such.
Now, after about a year and a half of knowing him, almost all of us have become far more accepting of raw meat, and most of us have grown comfortable eating it in moderation. Some good friends of ours now eat probably 90% of their meat raw anymore, and they say it’s because they come to prefer the taste of it to cooked meat, even with things like raw hamburger. I probably shouldn’t even mention the shed-building party we had a couple months ago at their farm where for supper they killed a goose, drained it for a short time, then cut it up and passed it around…
So now
And one last observation that I marvel over. The fellow who started all this has also admitted to another little dietary peccadillo he has. He feels it’s important and helpful to “innoculate” his system, to strengthen it, so he generally keeps a bit of meat in a jar up in his warm cupboard, and after a month or so he takes a bite or two of it regularly. He brought one of these “aged” meat jars to a WAPF meeting, but was tactful enough not to open it up. He knows enough to introduce such wierd and “fring-ey” ideas only very slowly…
@lagavulin, WRT cereal grains:
We’ll make a primitivist sympathizer out of you yet! 😀
Good to see you all posting to this article. Lately, Weston Price’s site I think saved my like in some respect in their discussion about vitamin D3. The white stuff, like potatoes, rice, etc. as well as natural sugar from fruit juices etc. sends me into a coma. As long as I ingest them while sitting sedentary at work behind the glowing screen of my computer.
Otherwise, when active, I feel little need to eat at all. But then again I smoke little cigars
Hmph. I was a octovegetarian for several years long ago.
In my experience to date, I don’t think there is any way to balance the cravings for sugar unless there is a high quality source of protein from meat in ones diet.
Oatmeal before 8 or 9 a.m. an egg before noon, meat at 11 or so and I’m energized and don’t want much else to eat. I want a salad too.
My problem with sugar is in my craving for it through wine drinking.
Sweet potatoes and/or yams are the just desserts.
Lagavulin said:
“I apologize, Kevin, for barraging your site with lengthy comments, but there’s one other thing I feel driven to share. For many people, diet is akin to religion, so I often find it’s best not to challenge theirs. But similarly, I also find it so interesting to learn from people out on the dietary ‘fringes’, so to speak, so I wanted to share a couple personal experiences.”
What a great anecdotal story about a SERIOUS raw foodie, Gav. An eye-opener for the wife and me, as we look over similar ideas. Especially the goose. The religious aspect you note above is also exactly what I was angling at with my earlier statement regarding the “Vegan religion”. Now it’s my turn to “pile on”… =)
For what it’s worth, my take on intake reflects the WAPF approach NOT because I find it fashionable — or due to a lack of a spirituality in my modern non-sectarian life that I must somehow replace. I’ve seen both serve as the basis of others’ adoption of the “pseudo-righteousness” that nearly always accompanies their shift. And while I do find this development sad and unnecessary, I can also relate. I too have marched away from the mainstream view, and the sense of isolation from friends and family is palpable as the distance grows.
Ultimately, the wife and I settled into the WAPF ideas slowly, trying hard to refute what we were learning even as we were discovering it, at least in part because much of it was so “counter-intuitive” as compared to what we had been internalizing over the years — via a multitude of official and unofficial channels. We shed layer after layer of old habits as we adopted and adapted. What won us over in the end was the acceptance and understanding of locality and culture on the feeding habits of indigeneous people around the world.
At this point, you’re going to have show me a vegan eskimo before I’ll even begin to take the religion seriously. Short of such a ludicrous possibility, I remain quite put off by the pitch from the Hippocrates Institute, for several reasons worth some additional detail, so as to clarify my own piss take on all of this.
First up, considering the origins of this thread, let’s have a gander at what the folks at the “Hypocrites Health Institute” have to say about the WAPF:
“What are your thoughts on the Weston A. Price movement?
Weston Price’s initial research was a landmark contribution to the field of nutrition. The original scientific revelation that was born out of his studies on cats and raw food consumption was fundamental in much of the subsequentglobal work in living nutrition. As he aged, the clarity and precision that he was known for faded away to be replaced by speculation and personal opinion. There are those today that take some of this misguided data and further embellish it to create a dangerous concoction of pseudo-science. Over the last 51 years of conducting daily clinical research, Hippocrates Health Institute has established an irrefutable framework for living food diets for human consumption. After monitoring hundreds of thousands of participants over several years with blood tests and nutritional health evaluations, we have never found a single case where animal food consumption was necessary. Additionally, we have extensive evidence (tens of thousands of blood lipid studies) that is matched by other renowned research (The China Study – Dr.Colin Campbell) showing that these flesh-based foods are in fact harmful across the board and a catalyst for a wide array of common and not-so-common diseases.”
The above demonstrates that the author (who represents the Institute by virtue of writing this for their high-gloss color quarterly overstuffed with supplement and cosmetic ads) hasn’t even bothered to read Price, let alone understood his body of work. For starters, the statement…
– is factually incorrect at a fundamental level.
– confuses Price and Pottenger.
– misstates the fundamental thrust of Price’s work and theories.
Maybe it’s just me, but when an author is going to refute something, I figure they could at least bother to read and understand the material they’re supposedly laying bare before they get rolling. The horrific inaccuracies above reveal an uninformed opinion. As such, they call into question those who would publish it as gospel.
Now, let’s repair the most glaring of the blatant errors.
1. Price did NOT work with cats (that was his contemporary Francis Pottenger), he studied and photographed an extensive cross-section of indigeneous peoples across the globe, by way of understanding and documenting the differences between those consuming traditional diets and those consuming the emerging “western diet”.
2. Price was a dentist seeking answers relative to the structural components of the human corpus in a comprehensive way, with a strong focus on his area of personal expertise, cranial and jaw formation.
3. Price was not PRO or CON relative to any particular diet; rather, he was seeking answers relative to which traditional foods would create and sustain a strong and well-formed body — generation after generation. Of course, he did have an operating theory: that the rise of de-natured industrial “foods” was responsible for so much of the malformation he was personally witnessing in his dental practice stateside. This jives quite nicely with much of the Hippocrates philosophy. How ironic.
What Price actually discovered was that an extremely broad range of foods would produce similarly good results, so long as specific components were present in the appropriate amounts — whether they came from veg, fruit, dairy, insects, etc. Preparation was also crucial, especially relative to eliminating detrimental effects and releasing the maximum amount of nutritive value in an easily digestible form.
Sixty years after Price and in the wake of Pottenger’s illuminating experiments with cats and raw versus de-natured foods, others are performing similar experiments with cats and soy versus raw milk. The results are pretty damning. The health of the raw milk cats echoed Pottenger’s work; the cats fed the soy milk products were infertile in the following generation.
This is one of those places where the vegan priests fall flat on their face. As much as they do have right, which in my rough assessment is at least 90%, where they suffer is in the attempt to deny the nature of locality, its effects on available food choices and the chance that there may be more than one way to do the right thing. Their contemporary pseudo-Buddhist mix is an appealing blend of semi-asceticism, good information and modern techno-babble.
That they still trumpet the medico’s cholesterol propaganda alone would drive me away, but it is the claim that responsible animal husbandry and the products that sustained life for the full run of human history have no place in the modern world that reveals the rot at the heart of the matter.
How can anyone advocate a qualitative approach and then warn folks off of refined sugars, but not differentiate between “table salt” and “sea salt” or sea solids. I see page after page of expensive supplement ads and acres of irrigated Florida lawn, but not a lick of information about the importance of growing your own fruit, veg, and whatever else you’ll need on your own patch.
In the end, it all feels like a snazzy sales pitch: You too can be healthy, so long as you buy their books, and can afford visits to their plush West Palm Beach “retreat” and the various bottles of capsules, powders, “concentrated superfood extracts”, et al. Do they have a rational explanation for the presence of saturated fats in mothers’ milk?
Their pseudo-religious approach is a direct by-product of — and wholly dependent upon — the modern life and lifestyle enabled by the very systems of economic coercion and control we express such skepticism about in every other item posted at Cryptogon. I find this glaring lack of recognition off-putting at best and tragic at worst. So much good information about cleansing ones’ system and fasting and the like harnessed to the chariot of exclusivity. When the UPS man stops showing up, where will you get your sea green algae supplements and spirulina popsicles?
In the end, their worship of food as “technology”, just like the evil bastards at Kraft and Nestle, leaves me wondering if they’re complicit. Perhaps. Hippocrates’ founder, Ann Wigmore, was an early leader in the whole food/macrobiotic movement, and the history of social movements being undermined in the states is long and distinguished.
“Ann Wigmore (1909-1994) was a holistic health practitioner, nutritionist, whole foods advocate, and a doctor of Divinity. With Viktoras Kulvinskas, she co-founded the Hippocrates Health Institute (rated as one of the top health resorts by the International Spa Industry). She was an early pioneer in the use of wheatgrass juice and living foods for detoxifying and healing the body, mind, and spirit.
According to her autobiography, Why Suffer?: How I Overcame Illness & Pain Naturally, she was first exposed to herbs and natural remedies as a child in Lithuania, by observing her grandmother. When Western medicine proved unable to solve her health problems as an adult, she began researching and testing various whole foods and diet approaches which, she says, not only cleared up her medical problems but changed her life.”
I would agree with most everything she was doing, and as such find myself in agreement with much of the data underyling the Hippocrates approach, right up until they deny the reality of locality and the possibility of a multitude of correct answers.
There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Now, on the subject of sugar, or more accurately, evicting the monkey:
For those who were curious, my means for getting out from under the sugar jones can actually be summed up pretty simply: pain is by far and away the best teacher.
Like most everyone in the west, I was a lifelong sugar junkie. Born near Seattle in 1966 and raised by “normal” folks, though my mother did have some farmer’s market tendencies, I was saving my pennies for nickel candy at the corner store for as long as I can recall. I had been weaning myself off the stuff for five of the last seven years, but could never quite bring myself to completely kick it. What was interesting to observe was how sensitive I became to even the slightest amounts once I was down to the occasional dose. Then, every once in awhile, I would rationalize away a few gummi candies on offer in a bowl, and feel my joints tighten directly afterward.
To wit, I have accumulated a lifelong history of “mysterious” medical issues that began as minor inconveniences in my youth, but that in hindsight were just the earliest stages of what manifested so brutally later on. All were malnutritive effects, I now realize. I have also been a lifelong athlete, skiing from age three, a serious cyclist, backpacker and climber and a participant in all manner of other athletic activity. My problems mysitified all but one of the traditional physicians from whom I ever-more-desperately sought answers to my questions from, including some leading lights in the field of sports medicine on the west coast. I have surgery scars to show for it.
My “final episode” with the cane was a sustained period of rationalization over the holidays in 2006/2007, when I partook of those fragrant and spicy false-fat and sugar bomb windmill cookies that are my fathers’ undoing, triggering a rheumatic-type flare-up the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in several years. Given the choice between pain, suffering and radical medications that hammer my immune system OR pain-free strength, flexibility and a powerful sense of well-being, I made the easy choice. An easy lesson as it turned out. Though I had to learn it several times before it sunk all the way in… =)
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For all the raw milk groupies out there, this just in:
“Love of Milk Dated Back to 6000 B.C.” – domesticated milk production, perhaps even culturing of milk, butter and cheese, etc. pre-dates grain agriculture.
http://www.livescience.com/history/080806-milk-history.html
Hmm. Lots of cultures around the world have had, long-term, dramatically different diets. Many do fine. Many might have susceptibility to certain ailments because of it – for instance U.S. in late 20th century and the emergence of early diabetes and obesity. The problem is that it is easy, via self-experimentation, to conclude that something worked. My dad’s family is christian scientist (so was Mark Twain until he turned on it) and indeed, they typically did recover via faith healing, except when they didn’t set my dad’s broken arm or they finally died of cancer.
“raw milk groupies” ???
That was timely enough to earn a screen-spew with the morning tea. Brilliant.
Being a rock music “groupie” of sorts (serious long-term fan, friendly w/band members & crew) since my formative years, as well as dedicated raw milk groupies for the last few as well, this one conjured some pretty ludicrious images when first processed.
Buck Dharma with a moo-stache. Ack. Thanks for the BIG sunday morning snort Gav. Is that a preference for Scotch we see there in the handle — or just a statement of nation origin?
(“Miraculix” is the long-bearded, gold-sickled druid always harvesting mistletoe to brew the Gaul’s ‘magic drink’ in Uderzo & Goscinny’s “Asterix & Obelix” books, by way of equitable disclosure… =)