Before jumping into this article, please be sure you have read Part 1 and Part 2. While the traditional wisdom presented here can stand alone, it is much more meaningful in the context of the previous parts.
At this point, you may feel overwhelmed by how far we’ve fallen from our ancestors. While traditional societies rarely had mental illness, crime, or disease, modern society has new diagnoses popping up every day. How are we to close the gap?
While you can’t change the world, you can change yourself. Let’s see why you must apply traditional wisdom, and then what exactly you need to apply.
The Best Time is Now
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Better late than never.
Maybe you’ve spent your whole life eating modernized foods. Maybe you have the typical facial and arch deformities. Maybe you didn’t fulfill your highest physical potential.
I’m no exception. As a child, my favorite thing in life was sweets. Before tooth extractions and braces, I had an overbite and my teeth were crowded from my narrow dental arches. I wore eyeglasses and currently use night contacts for my nearsightedness. During adolescence, I malnourished myself for my body image. But life moves on regardless.
Humor me for a moment and let me quote something from my autobiography. “The best cure for regret is to love where you are currently. And if you can’t love where you are right now, take action so that you can.”
You must find a way to let go of the past and move forward. I know it’s not easy. You can blame your parents for their lack of knowledge and health before conceiving you. You can blame the corrupt food and healthcare industries. You can blame soil depletion. You can blame just about anything in this modern civilization, and you’d have a point.
Or, you can acknowledge whatever has happened in the past and do your best in the present.
Your body can and will heal if you give it the proper nourishment. Your diet can change your DNA. Nothing is written in stone. Below is just one example of many.
During the mother’s first pregnancy, no special effort was made for her nutrition. During her second pregnancy, she had adequate nutrition in accordance with traditional principles. The first child required 53 hours of labor while the second required just 3.
Wisdom Over Science
Why rely on traditional wisdom for health when modern health science can prove everything definitively? Let’s take a look.
For thousands of years, primitive cultures have existed with health and vitality. Clearly, their knowledge, wisdom, and way of life have worked. Otherwise, they would've gone extinct long ago. Traditional wisdom has stood the test of time, and in the case of the Aboriginals, a test of 75,000+ years.
On the other hand, modern health science has existed for only a few generations, during which we’ve degenerated rapidly. But for some reason, we trust health science so much more.
We trust a stranger in a lab coat, who we’ve never met and will likely never meet, to spoonfeed us answers. Such answers are backed up by experiments we’ve never witnessed and don’t understand.
Yet we hesitate to believe the words of our dear elders and ancestors; to have faith in the knowledge that millions have relied on for thousands of years; to acknowledge something as the truth if it hasn’t been proven 100% in double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials.
Do you need 100% scientific proof and certainty for everything you do in life? Isn’t the vitality of the thousands of past generations enough?
When you take the traditional wisdom approach, you realize that health science is merely confirming and catching up to the wisdom of the ancients. Many health headlines are a just slight variation of “breaking news: science confirms what the ancients knew thousands of years ago.” Here’s what I mean.
Science: importance of circadian timing for aging and longevity and new insights into the circadian rhythm and its related diseases. Traditional wisdom: TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) and Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine) have known the importance of the body clock for thousands of years.
Science: neuroprotective effect of chicken bone broth in a model of migraine mediated by early life stress, the nutritive value of beef heart, kidney, round, and liver in growth, reproduction, and lactation, and use of cod liver oil during the first year of life is associated with lower risk of childhood-onset type 1 diabetes. Traditional wisdom: ancient cultures consumed all parts of the animal, including the meat, bones, organs, skin, fat, tendons, etc.
Science: depressed attainable wheat yields suggest declining soil productivity, soil degradation as a reason for inadequate human nutrition, and soil factors associated with zinc deficiency in crops and humans. Traditional wisdom: primitive groups recognized and maintained the balance between soil productivity, plant growth, and human population.
Science: margarine consumption associated with allergy in children and margarine consumption in relation to Crohn’s disease. Plain common sense: consuming fake foods is bad for you.
Other aspects of ancient wisdom, like meditation and the use of ancient herbs, are also being confirmed. But it will be centuries before science confirms all of traditional wisdom. And we’ll get many things wrong along the way, like what happened with margarine, and cause great consequences for those who listen.
It’s hard to get things correct when you analyze the human body from a modern scientific perspective. Each person has 37.2 trillion cells. Within each cell, there are millions of different reactions happening simultaneously. The number of processes in the human body is incomprehensible.
Despite this, modern health science takes everything at a micro level. It breaks down foods into carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. It analyzes a molecule’s effect on certain processes and cells, which then cause other effects. But there are way too many effects to keep track of.
We focus so narrowly that we lose perspective of the whole. For this reason, while modern medicine or treatment may cure one thing, it has many side effects.
Whereas, traditional wisdom takes things at a macro level and treats things as an inseparable system. It doesn’t attempt to analyze each little detail but instead relies on experience. While traditional wisdom may not be able to say that it was the vitamin C in the moose’s adrenal gland that prevented scurvy, it knew that consuming the moose’s adrenal gland prevented degeneration.
So far, we’ve been assuming the scientific news we receive is true. It often isn’t.
Corrupted Science
As with most things in life, following the money can uncover the truth.
Scientists are human just like the rest of us. They have families to feed too. Might it be possible they could be corrupted by money?
There are entire volumes written on the corruption in science and in society at large, but I’ll give a short, simplified history of just one example of scientific corruption, as covered in The Big Fat Surprise.
1907: cottonseed is a waste product of the cotton industry. Procter & Gamble (P&G) develops a method called hydrogenation to turn liquid cottonseed oil into a solid. They try selling candles made of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, but the candle market is on the decline due to electrification.
1911: the solid oil resembles lard, so they try to sell it as food and call it Crisco. Sales are low because everyone is used to cooking with butter and lard, not Crisco.
1924: the American Heart Association (AHA) is launched with hopes of understanding the rise in heart disease. The AHA is small and underfunded, with virtually no income.
1948: by now, the AHA has received $20 million in today’s dollars from P&G.
1952: despite no background in nutrition science, epidemiology, or cardiology, Ancel Keys is on the AHA committee. He proposes the diet-heart hypothesis: saturated fat intake causes high cholesterol, increasing the risk for heart disease. Conveniently, butter and lard are much higher in saturated fat than Crisco is.
1959: “nearly every major food corporation in the country, including the vegetable oil giant Anderson, Clayton & Company, Carnation, the Corn Products Company, Frito-Lay, General Mills, H.J. Heinz, the Pacific Vegetable Oil Corporation, and Pillsbury, among others” contribute to the studies of the AHA.
1960: the AHA now receives $30 million annually from food corporations.
1961: the AHA declares “Americans could reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes by cutting the saturated fat and cholesterol in their diets.” They also recommend the “reasonable substitution” of saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats, which Crisco, margarine, and vegetable oils of the food corporations just happen to be high in.
1962: there are numerous critics of the diet-heart hypothesis who “cautioned soberly about the lack of adequate scientific evidence.” Stefansson and Mann point out plenty of primitive groups who thrive on diets high in saturated fat. But Keys’s “talent for publicity, fiery language, and definitive-sounding solution were clearly more appealing to reporters.”
1967: as the diet-heart hypothesis gains traction, dissenting voices are silenced. For opposing researchers like Mann, finding journals that would accept his scientific articles becomes increasingly difficult. Even worse, Mann’s longtime research grant gets mysteriously canceled.
1977: in the Dietary Goals for the United States, the U.S. government recommends reducing the intake of total fat and replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats. Other nations take note.
1990: by now, the AHA and its partner organization (the NHLBI) give the vast majority of grants for all cardiovascular research, controlling the scientific literature in this area.
How odd that primitive wisdom prized foods high in saturated fat and cholesterol, like butter, eggs, and fatty meats. How odd that, under modern dietary guidelines, mother’s milk would be excluded for its high saturated fat and cholesterol content. It’s almost as if saturated fat and cholesterol were vital for human growth and health.
Only now are we beginning to reverse our demonization of saturated fat. Quite literally, the times have changed.
Was the demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol an honest mistake or an intentional ploy for profit?
Minerals and Activators
Because we are so used to modern science and breaking down food into its nutrients, let’s explore traditional diets with this lens and see how they hold up.
The scientific advances of Price’s time allowed him to analyze diets from a biochemical standpoint. In particular, he found that the body required essential minerals whose absorption depended on various activators, also known as vitamins.
Price used the term “activators” because there was limited knowledge of the whole group of vitamins. For instance, vitamin K hadn’t been discovered yet. I will also be using the term “activators” because there’s much that science still doesn’t know.
These activators can be divided into two groups: water-soluble and fat-soluble. Vitamins B and C are water-soluble and dissolve in water. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble and are present in fat.
Price recognized the distinction between the energy units of calories and the body-building units of minerals and activators. In general, we stop eating when enough calories have been provided, regardless of whether the body-building requirements have been met.
The various primitive diets can be grouped into four categories based on where they derive their minerals and activators.
- Dairy products: Swiss villages, African herding tribes, North Indians, Arabs, and Tibetans
- Land animals (especially the organs, fat, and bones) and bird eggs: Far North Natives, Great Plains Natives, and inland Peruvians
- Seafood: Gaelics, Eskimos, Melanesians and Polynesians, coastal African tribes, coastal Aboriginals, Torres Strait Islanders, New Zealand Maori, and coastal Peruvians
- Unique animals and insects: inland Aboriginals and African agricultural tribes
A universal characteristic of primitive diets was their abundance of body-building materials, especially fat-soluble activators. Without them, “most people cannot absorb more than half of the calcium and phosphorus from the foods eaten.” Price called this the “greatest breakdown in our modern diet.”
“It is possible to starve for minerals that are abundant in the foods eaten because they cannot be utilized without an adequate quantity of the fat-soluble activators.”
As an example, a four-year-old boy fractured his femur when he fell in a convulsion caused by the low calcium content of his blood. For mending the bone, the boy needed the minerals of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium.
His diet consisted of white bread and skimmed milk. All the minerals needed were present in the skimmed milk, but he hadn’t healed for three months.
After switching to freshly ground whole-wheat bread and whole milk, with the addition of a teaspoon of high-vitamin butter (from cows on the fast-growing grass) at each meal, the boy slept his first night without a convulsion. In one month, his fracture healed as the fat-soluble activators helped him absorb the minerals in the milk and bread.
Wise Diets
During Price’s time, the average American got 0.4 grams of calcium and 0.45 grams of phosphorus while the daily minimum requirements set out by the U.S. government were 0.68 grams of calcium, 1.32 grams of phosphorus, and 0.015 grams of iron.
Price quadrupled these minimum requirements, doubling it the first time to account for the lack of complete nutrient absorption and another time to provide a factor of safety during the overloads of infancy, adolescence, sickness, etc.
Let’s see how primitive diets fare with this 4x margin of safety. The table below compares the nutrients of primitive diets to the U.S. daily minimum requirements of the time. Note that mineral requirements can be reduced with an abundance of fat-soluble activators that help mineral absorption.
Though not included in the table, the water-soluble activators and the minerals of copper and iodine were also abundant in primitive diets.
To be clear, it is not because of science that their diets are healthy. Their diets were healthy in the first place, and this scientific analysis only serves to confirm that.
Wise Foods
Modern science yet again confirms traditional wisdom: the special foods of the primitives are some of the most nutrient-dense foods in this world.
Eskimos: seal oil is very high in vitamin A. The blubber of a certain species of whale is very high in vitamin C.
Inland Peruvians: the guinea pig is the most efficient animal in synthesizing vitamin D and hence has a high vitamin D content.
Far North Natives: the moose’s walls of the second stomach and adrenal glands are very high in vitamin C. Spruce tree shoots are also high in vitamin C.
During Price’s travels in the Far North, he rescued a prospector before the fall freeze-up. The prospector’s story is another example of the natives’ wisdom.
The prospector “nearly went blind with so violent a pain in his eyes that he feared he would go insane.” It was xerophthalmia due to a lack of vitamin A. One day, he ran into a grizzly bear and her cubs, but fortunately they moved away. The prospector sat down and wept in despair of ever seeing his family again.
As he wept, he heard a voice. It was from an old native who was tracking that bear. The native recognized the prospector’s affliction and led him to a stream. As the prospector sat waiting, the native built a trap of stones and caught a trout. He told the prospector to eat the flesh of the head and the tissue in the back of the eyes. Within a few hours, his pain went away. Within two days, his eyes were nearly normal.
Modern science now confirms that some of the richest sources of vitamin A are the tissues at the back of the eyes and the eye itself.
Wise Healing
Science is finally realizing the wisdom of ancient medicinal knowledge and borrowing its treatments. But it is much too late. Thousands of years of ancient medicinal knowledge have disappeared with the dwindling of indigenous groups.
Here are just a few scientific confirmations of traditional medicines: antiviral flavonoid from Pterocaulon Sphacelatum, an Australian Aboriginal medicine, Amazon traditional medicine and the treatment of Leishmaniasis wounds with Copaifera, and antioxidant activity and phenolic compounds of 112 traditional Chinese medicinal plants associated with anticancer.
These traditional treatments often result in better outcomes and fewer side effects. Who would’ve thought that natural remedies were better than synthetic ones?
In the Far North, natives used the root of devil’s club, a prickly shrub, to treat many ailments including diabetes. This material was found to be even better than insulin, which is destroyed in the stomach and must be injected. Whereas, the root could be taken orally and achieved the same effects. Devil’s club is now used to treat diabetes, tuberculosis, arthritis, cancer, and more.
Among the inland Peruvians, central Africans, and Aboriginals, Price routinely found balls of clay in their knapsacks. A little bit of it was dissolved in water into which they dipped their food while eating. In their words, they did this to prevent "sick stomach.” We now use this clay, known as kaolin, to treat foodborne illnesses and diarrhea.
Quinine, commonly used to treat malaria, was a gift of the Peruvians.
In Australia, Price witnessed yet another demonstration of the primitives’ wisdom. A mother died and her infant was taken care of by the grandmother. The grandmother’s “method was to make an ointment of the fresh bodies of an insect which made its nest in the leaves of a certain tree. This she rubbed on her breast and in a short time produced milk liberally for this foster child.”
Wise Upbringings
The vitality of hundreds and thousands of generations was maintained through the wise upbringing of primitive children. I’ll give a few examples of their training and education.
In African herding tribes, the boys must provide a certain number of cattle to the group for several years. To be a healer, the apprentices must train for many years as well.
In the Far North, the girls select the boys to marry. To be worthy of consideration by the girl and her parents, the boy must show he can build the winter cabin and provide adequate firewood and wild game for several weeks. Finally, the boy must kill a grizzly bear, after which he is accepted for a period of trial marriage.
The Far North girls (and the girls of other cultures) are taught how to make clothing, prepare food, care for children, and maintain the home. Price said he has seldom “seen such happy people as these forest Indians of the far North.”
Among the Aboriginals, the children’s early schooling includes the tracking of small animals and insects. The boys throw spears as soon as they can stand straight. They are taught respect for their elders and must limit their hunting to fast-moving animals, leaving the slow ones for the elders. To become a man, a boy must pass three tests of manhood.
First, he is tested for his ability to withstand hunger. He must march three days across the hot desert while preparing delicacies for the others and not eating any himself. Second, he is tested for his ability to withstand fear. Numerous tests, which he doesn’t know are part of the examination, place him under trying ordeals in which he must show he would accept death rather than flee. Third, he is tested for physical endurance with severe physical tests.
Though we may not need such difficult examinations of the primitives, learning some self-sufficiency skills never hurts.
Wise Preparation
All primitive groups carefully planned the nutrition of mothers-to-be. In some groups, special foods were also given to fathers-to-be. The special nutrition program started long before conception took place, with some tribes placing girls on a special diet six months prior to marriage.
Recall the four categories of primitive diets: dairy products, land animals and bird eggs, seafood, and unique animals and insects.
The dairy products groups gave high-quality dairy products to mothers-to-be. In the African herding tribes, girls were required to wait for marriage until the time of year when the cows were on the fast-growing grass. Only after months of using the milk from these cows were the girls allowed to marry.
The land animals and bird eggs groups gave special feedings of animal organs. In the Far North, most babies were born in June as the result of “both parents eating liberally of the thyroid glands of the male moose as they came down from the high mountain areas for the mating season, at which time the large protuberances carrying the thyroids under the throat were greatly enlarged.”
The seafood groups all used fish eggs as part of their special nutritional programs for mothers. Some seafood groups also gave special nutrition to fathers. Among the Eskimos, the milt of the male salmon was eaten by the fathers. Among the coastal Peruvians, the gland of the male angelote fish was given to fathers.
The unique animals and insects groups relied on other special foods. The African agricultural tribes gave water hyacinth, red millet, quinoa, and certain insects to mothers.
The spacing of children was also practiced. The interval between children ranged from two and a half years to four years. Among the Ibos of Nigeria, there was a three-year minimum gap. Among the Amazonians, two and a half years. Among the Fijians, four. In the Solomon Islands in Melanesia, the husband could not cohabit with the wife until the child could walk.
After the infant was born, it was common practice among primitive groups to wrap them in absorbent moss. They were only bathed a few weeks after birth. While this was regarded as uncivilized by modernized people back then, science is yet again confirming this practice.
Wise Soil Replenishment
In Loetschental Valley, the Swiss people that existed for over a dozen centuries took great care of their soil. They made sure every bit of replenishment got back to the soil. For instance, when livestock was sheltered during bad weather and manure couldn’t get back to the soil, they carried the manure back by hand.
In African agricultural groups, they cleared a few acres in the forest and cropped the land for less than a decade. The surrounding trees prevented wind erosion. Care was taken to not form grooves that could carry currents of water that would float away the valuable topsoil.
This replenishment is also carried out efficiently in other parts of the world. In China, in addition to the water overflows of the Yangtze and Yellow River that replenish nutrients, the people have replenished nutrients themselves. My mother recounts, how in her childhood, both human and animal excrement was saved to be used as fertilizer.
The replenishment from the overflow of water systems also occurs in other areas. Ancient Egypt was able “to sustain a population of greater density than that of either China or India” because of the annual spring overflow of the Nile River.
When natural and manual replenishment wasn’t enough, groups implemented birth control systems. The Aboriginals and Maori people did just that, preventing soil depletion and thriving for millenniums in places with low soil fertility.
A Special Note About Butter
Among the four categories of dairy products, land animals and bird eggs, seafood, and unique animals and insects, Price took a particular interest in dairy products, namely butter. It made sense: among the categories, the dairy products category was and still is the most familiar and palatable to the American audience.
In the early 1900s, the average American consumed 18 pounds of butter a year. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly one and a half sticks of butter per week per person. Correspondingly, Price did extensive analyses on butter.
He noted the “low melting quality of the butter produced in early summer when the cows have been put on the green pastures.” This butter “has the grassy flavor and the deep yellow to orange color” and was “several times as high in fat-soluble activators including vitamins A and D as butter produced from stall-fed cattle or cattle on poorer pasturage.”
This high-vitamin butter is not favorable for shipping, so “dairymen so frequently give the cows a ration that will produce less of these qualities,” using “cottonseed meal and cereals.”
Price plotted the curves for the vitamin content found in butter over the seasons, and this curve was the opposite of the mortality curve of that region. In the Northern Hemisphere, there was an increase in mortality in late winter and spring and a decrease in summer and early autumn (with the reverse in the Southern Hemisphere with its opposite seasons). It just so happens that grass grows the fastest in late spring and summer.
If possible, storing the high-vitamin butter of the late spring “will go far toward solving our problem of shortage of fat-soluble vitamins.” I do just this, getting my year’s worth of high-vitamin butter (~30 pounds) from my local Weston A. Price Foundation chapter’s annual bulk buy. It’s made from Jersey cows on the spring grass and never heated above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, keeping all the beneficial enzymes intact.
Price’s Recommendation
After all his research, Price recommended a diet with a lot of animal products (dairy, seafood, and animals and their organs), some vegetables, and properly prepared bread and grains. Salt should be used as desired as primitive groups all recognized the importance of salt and would go to great lengths to obtain it.
Price also highlighted the need for freshly ground grains when making bread. One of the best sources of vitamin E is the grain’s germ, but when the grain is ground, the germ and its vitamins are exposed to the air and start to deteriorate.
Price placed special importance on high-vitamin butter and cod liver oil. At all meals, he recommended taking half a teaspoon of the mixture of equal parts high-vitamin butter and high-quality cod liver oil. A simple way to make it is to gently melt butter and mix it with cod liver oil.
“It produces a product that is more efficient than either alone,” and science yet again confirms this. Cod liver oil is high in vitamins A and D, and high-quality butter is high in vitamins E and K. Together, they comprise all of the known fat-soluble vitamins.
A note of caution: it’s possible to overdose on cod liver oil. Except in the late stages of pregnancy, Price does “not prescribe more than half a teaspoonful with each of three meals a day.” The oil blend should be stored in small containers to minimize exposure to the air, as fish oil exposed to the air can develop toxic substances.
Success Stories
Price worked with 17 patients who, on average, had 49.7% of their teeth with cavities. They “were receiving frequent and thorough dental service, most of them twice a year and many of them more frequently.”
Price put them on a reinforced nutritional program. Only two new cavities developed in three years, representing a rate of 0.4% dental decay. It is “apparent that 250 times as many cavities developed in the period preceding the starting of the nutritional program as in the three years following its adoption.”
With another group of 50 people on the nutritional program, again, only two new cavities developed in three years. There are some striking cases among these 50 people.
“H. F. did not have a single cavity from October 1932 to June 1933, while taking high vitamin and mineral foods. From June 1933 to May 1934, while not taking the special vitamins, she developed ten new cavities.”
S. K. “was on the special nutritional program from December 1931 to June 1932, during which time caries was completely arrested. She discontinued taking special oil in June 1932, and did not take it again until October 1933, during most of which time she was taking viosterol under a physician's prescription to prevent dental caries. She came in October 1933, with fourteen new cavities. She was immediately placed again on the special program, from October 1933 to May 1934. During this period, the dental caries was completely under control.”
J. H. “had thirty-eight open cavities in June 1931” and “disturbing heart symptoms.” When put on the nutritional program, he did not develop a single cavity and was “not conscious of a heart limitation.”
At a clinic, Price worked with three children who had rampant dental decay. Their home diet consisted of “highly sweetened strong coffee and white bread, vegetable fat, pancakes made of white flour and eaten with syrup, and doughnuts fried in vegetable fat.”
He fed them one nutritious lunch for six days a week, while the care of the teeth was not changed nor were the home meals.
The lunch included “a teaspoon of equal parts high-vitamin cod liver oil and high-vitamin butter”, a pint of a “rich vegetable and meat stew made largely from bone marrow and fine cuts of tender meat”, “cooked fruit with very little sweetening”, “rolls made from freshly ground whole wheat which were spread with the high-vitamin butter”, and “two glasses of fresh whole milk”. The meal was varied by rotating the meat stew with fish chowder and animal organs.
In six weeks, the children’s tooth decay was completely halted. “Two different teachers came to me to inquire what had been done to make a particular child change from one of the poorest in the class in capacity to learn to one of the best.”
The End of Diets
The alkaline diet was popular during Price’s time. Nowadays, keto is all the rage. What’s more, these diets are all backed up by sound scientific research. The truth is, you can support just about any diet with scientific research.
How? It’s because modern health science takes everything at the micro level (as mentioned above), so you can always find a particular component of a certain food that causes your desired effect. Depending on whether you want to support or vilify that food, you can cherry-pick your evidence.
Like dairy? Use these research articles: dairy augmentation of total and central fat loss in obese subjects, dairy consumption lowers systemic inflammation and liver enzymes in typically low-dairy consumers with clinical characteristics of metabolic syndrome, and c9t11-conjugated linoleic acid intake from dairy fat reduces inflammation in collagen-induced arthritis.
Against dairy? Use these research articles: fatty acids found in dairy, protein and unsaturated fatty acids are associated with risk of pancreatic cancer in a case–control study, the association of milk consumption with the occurrence of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis, and possible connection between milk and coronary heart disease: the calcium hypothesis.
Like red meat? Prime Australian lamb supplies key nutrients for human health, the significance of pork as a source of dietary selenium, nutritional benefits from fatty acids in organic and grass-fed beef.
Against red meat? Potential health hazards of eating red meat, heme iron from meat and risk of adenocarcinoma of the esophagus and stomach, and the microbial gbu gene cluster links cardiovascular disease risk associated with red meat consumption to microbiota l-carnitine catabolism.
Like carbs? Against carbs? I think you get my point. If you believe every fad diet, you’ll have nothing to eat.
With a massive following of keto nowadays, I feel should address it specifically. No primitive group observed by Price was in ketosis. The Eskimos had the highest percentage of calories from fat in their diet, but even they weren’t in ketosis. Make of that what you will.
Well, isn’t Weston A. Price’s recommendation another fad diet? Not completely so. The key distinction between this diet and other diets is that this nutrient-dense diet is inclusive, not exclusive. No food group is banned. You just have to choose properly.
Choosing Properly
The four food groups are animal foods, seeds (grains, nuts, and legumes), vegetables and fruits, and fats and oils. Though no food group is banned, there are definitely guidelines to follow.
Across all food groups, choose high-quality, minimally processed, whole, and properly prepared foods. While primitive groups didn’t need to intentionally do this, as their only foods were high-quality foods, we must choose ever so carefully as “modern commerce has deliberately robbed nature's foods of much of their body-building material while retaining the hunger-satisfying energy factors.”
High-quality
“All forms of animal life are the product of the food environments that have produced them. Therefore, we cannot distort and rob the foods without serious injury.”
Animal foods: animals should be raised as naturally as possible. Cattle, lamb, and sheep should be primarily grass-fed. Pigs and chickens should be pasture-raised (they need more than grass to survive). Seafood should be wild-caught. It’s common sense that healthy animals mean healthy people. What do you think sick, fattened animals will mean for people?
Vegetables and fruits: fresh, local, in-season, and organic.
Grains, nuts, and legumes: organic.
Fats and oils: if the oil is from an animal, the high-quality principles of animal foods apply. If the oil is from a plant, look for cold-pressed, expeller-pressed, and organic oils made from traditional plant sources like olives and coconuts.
Whole
“Nature has put foods up in packages containing the combinations of minerals and other factors that are essential for nourishment.”
Animal foods: eat the whole animal. Use the meat, bones, organs, skin, fat, tendons, etc. The organs, bones, and fatty meats were actually the most prized among primitives. Some even gave leaner meats to the dogs. Among coastal tribes, the fish head and organs were prized, along with other seafood organs like those in crab and lobster. For dairy, use whole, full-fat products. It’s simple: just eat the whole thing.
Vegetables and fruits: eating whole in this category should be straightforward.
Grains, nuts, and legumes: eat whole seeds, but make they are properly prepared.
Fats and oils (and seasonings): anything you add to your food should be whole. This includes salt. Unrefined, whole salt comes with important minerals while refined salt has had those minerals stripped away. Opt for unrefined salts like pink Himalayan salt and Celtic sea salt, and avoid iodized salt and table salt.
Minimally processed
“Our modern process of robbing the natural foods for convenience or gain completely thwarts Nature's inviolable program.”
Animal foods: stay away from commercially processed meat and seafood products like conventional hot dogs and fish sticks. Traditional methods of drying seafood are better than canning seafood, as drying preserves the fat-soluble activators better. For dairy, choose raw, unhomogenized milk. Pasteurization kills the beneficial enzymes in milk and homogenization ruins milk’s natural structure.
Vegetables and fruits: avoid processed juices and supplements, even if made from natural sources.
Grains, nuts, and legumes: steer clear of refined products like breakfast cereals. Even if such products are made from whole grains, nuts, or legumes, these products do not properly prepare whole seeds, which increases the digestive burden and decreases nutrient availability.
Fats and oils: consume oils that are easily extracted and don’t require much processing. This includes all animal oils, tropical oils like coconut and palm oil, and traditional plant oils like olive and sesame oil. The modern oils of cottonseed, soy, corn, safflower, canola, sunflower, rice bran, hemp, and grapeseed are some of the worst foods you can consume. Margarine and fake butter spreads are similarly toxic.
Properly prepared
Animal foods: traditional cultures cooked most of their animal foods but ate a portion of them raw. This included raw or fermented shellfish, fish, insects, or animal meats. Some examples are raw oysters, Italian carpaccio, French steak tartare, and Middle East kibbeh. Dairy is probably the best-known (and most palatable) example. As long as the milk is kept below 110 degrees Fahrenheit, it is considered raw.
Vegetables and fruits: fermentation is a highly nutritious way of preparing plant foods, with some examples being sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi. Otherwise, vegetables should usually be cooked, and fruits may sometimes be cooked. Tropical fruits like pineapple, mango, and bananas have naturally occurring digestive enzymes and are fine raw, but other fruits like apples, plums, and peaches can cause problems for some people. Why? Plant foods contain indigestible compounds and we don’t have the gut of a gorilla or the four stomach compartments of a cow to break down tough plant material, so we must cook plants.
Grains, nuts, and legumes: traditional cultures always cooked (or baked) their grains. And before cooking, they soaked, fermented, or sprouted their grains beforehand. If you think about it, a seed’s purpose is to grow into a plant, not to provide nutrition for something that eats it. In fact, the seed has defense mechanisms in place to increase its chances of passing through undigested. To unlock the vital nutrients in the seed (that allow it to give birth to a new plant), the proper preparation of seeds is crucial.
Fats and oils: cook with stable oils like tallow, lard, poultry fat, tropical oils, olive oil, and butter. Do not cook with more fragile oils like fish, sesame, peanut, and flax oil. Those can be used as dressings. Of course, the stable oils can also be used as dressings. Add fats and oils to foods lacking in fat, like vegetables and grains. Primitive cultures ate their vegetables and grains with plenty of fat, a prime example being bread and butter. Science confirms that the added fat and its fat-soluble activators help you absorb more nutrients from naturally low-fat foods. Plus, the fat makes the food so much more delicious.
You Can Have It All
As I mentioned, the Weston A. Price nutrient-dense diet is an inclusive one. For this reason, I’ve never felt “on a diet” or deprived of anything while following Price since 2020. I exert little willpower when it comes to food.
On this “diet”, you can eat just about any dish. Note that I say “dish”, not “ingredient”. There’s a large distinction. Here’s what I mean.
Can you have bread? Yep, bread that is made with organic whole-grain flour (preferably freshly ground), a sourdough starter, water, and unrefined salt. This bread is allowed to slowly ferment for one to two days, making it more digestible. Whereas, commercial bread is risen in just a few hours with commercial yeast and is made with white flour, sugar, soybean oil, monoglycerides, calcium propionate, calcium sulfate, soy lecithin, citric acid, potassium iodate, and monocalcium phosphate.
Tortilla chips? Fry organic corn flour dough with a stable fat like lard or tallow and then sprinkle with unrefined salt. Three ingredients needed. Now, let’s look at the ingredients of modern chips. Among others, we have genetically modified corn, vegetable oil, maltodextrin, MSG, natural and artificial flavor, dextrose, artificial color (Yellow 6, Yellow 5, and Red 40), lactic acid, citric acid, sugar, disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate.
Potato fries? Fry organic potatoes in a stable fat like lard or tallow and then add unrefined salt. Whereas, in nearly all restaurants, pesticide-laden potatoes are fried in repeatedly heated vegetable oils. These unstable vegetable oils degrade rapidly when heated to such high temperatures and become even more toxic.
Enjoy hot dogs? Make it with a grass-fed beef sausage, an organic whole-grain fermented sourdough bun, and homemade fermented ketchup. Contrast that with a factory-farmed beef sausage loaded with preservatives, a pesticide-laden bun with added dough conditioners and toxic vegetable oils, and ketchup made with high fructose corn syrup.
Enjoy pizza? Make it with homemade whole-wheat sourdough pizza dough, organic crushed tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, and grass-fed cheeses. Store-bought pizzas are made with white flour, vegetable oils, sugar, modified food starch, maltodextrin, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, l-cysteine hydrochloride, ammonium sulfate, soy lecithin, and ascorbic acid.
How about bacon? Choose traditionally made bacon from pasture-raised pigs. Traditionally made means dry curing through hand rubbing with unrefined salt and sodium nitrite curing salts, leaving it to cure for anywhere from a day to a month, and slow-smoking it over a wood fire for one to three days. Contrast that with bacon from factory-farmed pigs fed an unnatural corn and soy-based diet. Manufacturers opt for fast and cheap methods which pump the meat with MSG and liquid smoke, a product produced by burning sawdust, condensing the smoke, and dissolving it in water. Studies suggest liquid smoke is more carcinogenic than cigarette smoke.
What about cheesecake? For the crust, blend organic dates, properly prepared soaked and dehydrated nuts, pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed butter, and organic vanilla extract. For the cream mixture, blend grass-fed cream with grass-fed gelatin, pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed cream cheese, and local raw honey. Now, let’s read the ingredients label of a store-bought cheesecake. Among familiar ingredients of cream, cream cheese, eggs, milk, and salt, we see carob bean gum, sugar, modified corn starch, carrageenan, xanthan gum, potassium chloride, enriched flour, corn syrup, soybean oil, milk protein concentrate, dextrose, sodium pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate, carrageenan, modified cellulose, citric acid, guar gum, sodium caseinate, agar, caramel propylene glycol, and sodium sulfite.
Even ice cream? Just use pasture-raised eggs, organic maple syrup, vanilla extract, and grass-fed cream. Not the sugar, high fructose corn syrup, mono and diglycerides, guar gum, cellulose gum, and carrageenan that commercial ice cream brands use.
One note of caution: be careful with sweeteners. Even if the sweeteners are high-quality and natural, like raw honey and organic maple syrup, it’s possible to overdo it. There “is very little of the body-building minerals” in sweeteners, but many satiating calories. Our ancestors likely indulged in just one tablespoon of honey per day when available.
Finding Your Foods
For many people, the nutrient-dense diet unlocks previously excluded foods. Maybe your milk intolerance is not as bad when drinking raw milk instead of pasteurized milk. Maybe your gluten intolerance is not as severe when eating organic, properly-prepared, sourdough bread. Maybe your spring allergies go away after eating local raw honey.
With such an inclusive “diet”, how are we to choose among the limitless foods of the world? Which foods are the best for our unique bodies? Clearly, an individual of Eskimo descent may do better with high-fat seafood, while a person of African agricultural descent may do better with starches.
A good starting point is the foods of your ancestors. Let’s take my Southern Chinese heritage as an example. I’ll approach their diet in terms of the four food categories: animal foods, seeds (grains, nuts, and legumes), vegetables and fruits, and fats and oils.
Animal foods: my mom only had meat on special occasions when the village slaughtered a pig. This puzzled me, as all traditional cultures regularly used animal products. I then remembered her telling me how delicious snake meat and cicada juice were, how grandpa was an expert in fishing with stones, and how they raised chickens. So, when it came to animal products, my ancestors had a little bit of everything (excluding dairy).
Seeds (grains, nuts, and legumes): rice composed the bulk of this category. They refined the rice, but it was nothing like the modern refinement of rice of today. Sometimes, wheat was eaten in the form of dumplings and Chinese buns. They also ate fermented soybean products and some nuts and beans.
Vegetables and fruits: they ate a massive variety of produce and cooked almost all of it, with the exception of some fruits. In the wintertime, they ate a lot of preserved vegetables. Fermented vegetables like suan cai (Chinese sauerkraut) were common.
Fats and oils: lard was used to cook almost everything. The labor-intensive tea seed oil and sesame oil were used in small amounts.
Similar to my ancestors, I need veggies. If I don’t get a daily massive serving, I get constipated. Laugh all you want, but it’s a serious challenge for me on vacation, as veggies aren’t convenient when you’re on the go. Making the problem worse, when eating at restaurants on vacations, the vegetable portions are about one-fourth of what I require.
And, these veggies must be cooked thoroughly. I cook my carrots until they’re slightly mushy, stew tough greens like kale for an hour, and even cook lettuce. My digestive system feels the best with this, and it’s just in line with how my ancestors cooked almost all plant foods.
If you have no idea of what your ancestors ate, start with Price’s recommendation.
After understanding your ancestral foods and preparation methods, experiment with the foods of other cultures and see if you like any.
Here’s my experimentation journey as an example. I started off experimenting with animal foods (dairy products, land animals and birds, seafood, and unique animals and insects).
Dairy products: though this category was completely foreign to my ancestors, I loved dairy and it’s now one of my staples, comprising at least a third of my daily calories in the form of milk, cheese, and butter.
Land animals and birds: though I was familiar with muscle meats and bone broths, I hadn’t tried organ meats. They were certainly less palatable than other animal products, or maybe I just didn’t cook them properly. Searching for more palatable options, I found cod liver by itself and animal livers blended with a bunch of butter in a pate to be delectable. I would recommend these as a tasty introduction if you aren’t used to organ meats.
Seafood: it was appetizing, but I didn’t enjoy it so much that I could eat it every day like I could with dairy.
Unique animals and insects: it was hard to access them, and I didn’t want to try them anyways.
The next food category is seeds (grains, nuts, and legumes). Since I was familiar with rice, most nuts, and most legumes, I experimented with grains less used by my ancestors, like wheat and rye. I loved traditionally made sourdough bread (typically made with wheat or rye) and now it’s mostly replaced rice.
Among the vegetables and fruits, I was familiar with most of the common ones, with the exception of a few tubers like cassava. I tried them but didn’t particularly care for them.
For fats and oils, I experimented with coconut oil, lard, tallow, schmaltz, and butter. Butter has been my favorite and I use it for almost all my cooking. I also take a daily teaspoon of the cod liver oil and butter blend.
I want to emphasize what Price said: “it is not necessary to adopt the foods of any particular racial stock.” Never force food down that you don’t enjoy, even if it’s what your ancestors ate, or even if it’s the most nutrient-dense food on the planet. For instance, though pork kidney is highly nutritious, I rarely eat it, except at restaurants with skilled chefs.
Of course, if your taste buds have been hijacked by modern hyper-palatable foods, you’ll need to slowly adjust your taste buds. This adjustment may require foods less tasty than you are used to. But even then, you should never be choking things down.
I hope you are beginning to see how easy it is to be on this “diet”, as you should be enjoying everything you eat.
Supplements
The only “supplement” Price recommended was the cod liver oil and butter blend. Nothing else.
He remarked that “great harm is done by the sale and use of substitutes for natural food.” These substitutes have only exploded in popularity since then, but they are not the answer to today’s health issues for three main reasons: absorption, isolation, and incompleteness.
Absorption
It should be common sense that natural organisms do best with natural nourishment. But if needed, here are some scientific articles confirming the low ability to assimilate synthetic nutrients: dietary inulin supplementation does not promote colonic iron absorption in a porcine model, prenatal iron supplements impair zinc absorption in pregnant Peruvian women, and changing the zinc to iron ratio in a cereal-based nutritional supplement has no effect on percent absorption of iron and zinc in Sri Lankan children.
Isolation
The fundamental unit of nutrition is food, not nutrients. By consuming isolated nutrients instead of food, you lose out on all the other benefits of the food.
But the very nature of the supplement industry encourages such a myopic micro-level view. People are left searching for the next magical nutrient that will cure all their health problems, instead of making lifestyle and diet changes on the macro level.
Rather than eating broccoli, we take a fiber supplement. Rather than eating an orange, we take a vitamin C supplement. Rather than fish, take an omega-3 supplement. As if the only thing valuable in broccoli was fiber; in oranges, vitamin C; and in fish, omega-3.
As mentioned before, “Nature has put foods up in packages containing the combinations of minerals and other factors that are essential for nourishment.” We must eat these “packages” of “combinations of minerals and other factors,” not isolated nutrients.
Why can’t we just eat the whole food and be done with it? Instead of using white flour enriched with niacin, folic acid, riboflavin, and iron, why not use whole-grain flour? Instead of eating nutrient-robbed foods from industrial farming practices and then taking supplements, why not eat nutrient-dense, high-quality foods?
Furthermore, these concentrated supplements make overdosing much easier. And even if you don’t overdose, eating things in isolation can be burdensome for the body, with a prime example being protein powders.
The high protein content of protein powders depletes your liver’s vitamin A stores, which can cause a wide range of problems. Had you eaten this protein in its natural state, with some fat and even organs, vitamin A depletion would not be an issue.
Incompleteness
Being inherently isolated and incomplete, supplements give you incomplete nutrition. Well, what if you combined supplements to ensure adequate nutrition? That would be nearly impossible. There are 30,000+ biochemical compounds in our food and we know only 1% of them.
Even among the compounds we do know, like vitamin D, there are many nuances. Price noted, “the medical profession and the public at large think of vitamin D as consisting of just one chemical factor, whereas, a recent review describes in considerable detail eight distinct factors in vitamin D and refers to information indicating that there may be at least twelve.”
“Clearly, it is not possible to undertake to provide an adequate nutrition simply by reinforcing the diet with a few synthetic products which are known to represent certain of these nutritional factors.”
Veganism
Another popular trend nowadays is veganism. Let’s see what Price has to say.
“I have found in many parts of the world most devout representatives of modern ethical systems advocating the restriction of foods to the vegetable products. In every instance where the groups involved had been long under this teaching, I found evidence of degeneration in the form of dental caries, and in the new generation in the form of abnormal dental arches to an extent very much higher than in the primitive groups who were not under this influence.”
Interestingly, Price was hoping to find healthy people who only had plant foods. His greatest disappointment was that there was no such thing. On the contrary, almost all the sacred foods fed to expectant mothers and young infants were animal foods.
With these facts, I could end this discussion about veganism here. Traditional wisdom didn’t condone veganism. End of story.
But because we need modern science and nutrient analysis to back things up nowadays, let’s analyze veganism from a scientific perspective. Again, it is not because of science that traditional wisdom’s perspective on veganism is true. Science is merely confirming what traditional wisdom has known for thousands of years.
The scientific analysis
It is more difficult to absorb nutrients from plant foods than animal foods.
Let’s take Price’s analysis of spinach as an example.
“The iron is not well utilized by infants and the feeding of spinach is of no value during early infancy as a source of calcium. Even though calcium is present in spinach children cannot utilize it. Data have been published showing that children absorb very little of the calcium or phosphorus in spinach before six years of age. Adult individuals vary in the efficiency with which they absorb minerals and other chemicals essential for mineral utilization.”
Not only are nutrients more difficult to absorb, but some nutrients like vitamins A and D are also completely absent from plant foods.
Huh, vitamin A is absent from plant foods? Aren’t carrots and sweet potatoes high in vitamin A? These foods are high in beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A. Your body has to convert beta-carotene to retinol, the true vitamin A. You need twelve molecules of beta-carotene to get just one molecule of retinol, due to limited absorption and the inefficiency of this conversion.
Those with less robust health, like the young and elderly, have a harder time completing the conversion. But if they ate just 100 grams of beef liver, they’d get over 700% of the daily recommended intake for vitamin A.
As a side note, I wouldn’t be concerned about the daily recommended intakes from the misguided American health policy. Still, it’s possible to overdose on vitamin A, as with anything, so have up to two 100-gram servings of liver a week.
Along with vitamin A, vitamin D is absent from plant foods too.
“There is a misapprehension with regard to the possibility that humans may obtain enough of the vitamin D group of activators from our modern plant foods or from sunshine. It will be noted that vitamin D, which the human does not readily synthesize in adequate amounts, must be provided by foods of animal tissues or animal products.”
Price cites Joseph Coffin: “with the remote possibility of egg yolks, butter, cream, liver and fish, it is manifestly impossible to obtain any amount of vitamin D worthy of mention from common foods. Vegetables do not contain vitamin D.”
Besides vitamins A and D, there are many more known nutrients absent from plant foods or inferior to those found in animal foods. And these are only the known nutrients.
A reconciliation
All this said, there were certainly differences in the amount of animal foods consumed between primitive groups. The Eskimos had more than 90% of their diet as animal foods, while some African tribes had just 10% of their diet as animal foods. But all of them had some.
If it helps, the animal foods recommended by this nutrient-dense “diet” come from animals raised in the best, humane conditions. There’s a large emphasis on choosing high-quality animal products, as the healthiest animals make for the healthiest people.
Vegetarianism is certainly possible, as dairy products and bird eggs are very nutritious. The traditional Swiss culture was nearly vegetarian, only having meat once a week and relying primarily on dairy.
The Best of Both Worlds
At this point, you may be thinking I would choose the primitive world over the modern world in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t. The modern world definitely has its perks.
Perks of the modern age
With electricity, we get light at the flip of a switch, washing machines and dryers, air conditioning, labor-saving kitchen appliances like toasters and pressure cookers, and the refrigeration and freezing of foods.
With natural gas, we get warm water, heating, and fire to cook with at just the right intensity.
With water systems, we get convenient access to water for hygiene, sanitation, and cleaning. With sewage systems, using the bathroom is nothing unpleasant.
With the Internet and modern digital technology, we can learn anything, talk to anyone, navigate ourselves anywhere, and so much more.
With modern health science, we can treat acute medical problems with ease. Though traditional wisdom can ensure overall health and freedom from chronic disease, it can’t compare to modern health science in reducing or numbing acute pain, mending fractures, and rescuing lives from serious accidents.
Imagine living in a world without our modern conveniences.
When you needed water, you would need to walk to the well and lug heavy buckets of water back. Washing clothes was a whole ordeal. Baths were rare as they required so much time to prepare. You could only bathe regularly if you were near a body of water, and that water had to be warm enough. In the winter, all the water you used would be freezing cold.
Cleaning the dishes meant scrubbing them in the water bucket as there was no such thing as running water from the faucet. My mom recounts the uncomfortable experience of washing oily dishes in the cold water of wintertime. Her hands were freezing and the oily dishes could never get clean, as the cold temperature made the oil hard to wash off.
To cook, you would need to start a wood fire, and it would be quite difficult to control the intensity of the fire. I’d imagine it took much longer to cook even simple meals.
To use the bathroom, you would need to go to the outhouse. In the summer, it’d smell disgusting and bugs would be everywhere. In the winter, it’d be freezing. Imagine needing to pee in the middle of the night and having to walk in the absolute darkness to the outhouse.
The list of inconveniences goes on.
With modern civilization and its technology, most people live better than past kings. Consider Nathan Rothschild, the richest man in the world when he died in 1836. He died of a simple abscess infection which could be cured by an antibiotic today for a few dollars.
Challenges of the modern age
With modern conveniences come modern challenges.
For instance, primitives never had access to our modern nutrient-robbed foods like factory-farmed animal products and hyper-palatable, addictive snacks. They didn’t need to choose between grass-fed beef and factory-farmed beef. They never had the choice of soda or sugar-laden desserts. They only had high-quality, nourishing foods.
Nowadays, we must be picky about our food. Being picky is not a bad thing if you’re picky for the right things. I’m the pickiest eater I know, opting for high-quality animal products over factory-farmed ones, organic produce over conventional produce, and raw milk over even the most high-quality pasteurized milks.
If you look around you, most supermarket foods are nutrient-robbed and almost all restaurant foods are too. Toxic ingredients like vegetable oils are in so many foods. It’s certainly more difficult to eat a nutrient-dense diet in this kind of environment. You have to maintain high standards and be picky.
But when you overcome this hurdle, you experience an abundance surpassing anything your ancestors had. Whereas the Swiss people only had dairy and rye, the island groups only had seafood and native plant foods, and the Far North Native Americans only had wild game and native plants, you have access to everything in today’s globalized world.
You may have to go out of your way to get these nutrient-dense foods, but it’s little compared to what the primitives had to do. “The Indians of the high Andes were willing to go hundreds of miles to the sea to get kelp and fish eggs for the use of their people,” and they didn’t have our modern transportation.
The mainstream media
Another challenge nowadays is the mainstream media. There are so many layers of funding and hidden interests behind the information presented to you. If you thought the AHA and diet-heart hypothesis was bad, that’s just the beginning. If we’ve been deceived about saturated fat and cholesterol for decades, what other things have we been deceived about?
Most recently, we’ve been lied to about COVID in so many aspects. Anything said against the mainstream narrative was labeled as “COVID misinformation”. Even reputable researchers like Stanford’s professor of medicine, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was blacklisted on Twitter after simply stating the possibility “that Covid lockdowns would harm children.”
The vaccines had a complete lack of efficacy, and the third most common side effect was COVID. Fauci misled Congress about the true origins of COVID and how the National Institutes of Health had funded the Wuhan lab. Pfizer was caught making new COVID variants in order to sell more vaccines and medicine.
I’m glad people are beginning to wake up to the numerous vaccine injuries and COVID lies. But during the pandemic years, anyone who wouldn’t get the vaccine was demonized and banned from school, work, and all forms of social gatherings. Many Weston A. Price followers, who knew the truth and resisted, were treated like the scum of the earth.
The Twitter files reveal that social media is highly censored, banning accurate and truthful information about COVID and the vaccine, decreasing the visibility of certain people (almost always conservatives), and colluding with government agencies to censor speech.
It’s safe to assume all major platforms have some sort of censorship, including search engines like Google. However, there is uncensored information out there from people like Russell Brand and from search engines like Brave and Rumble.
How does this have anything to do with Weston A. Price and traditional wisdom? Traditional wisdom (and common sense) is a safeguard against this modern brainwashing. Just like how you must be careful with what you put into your body, you must be careful with what you put into your mind. Listen to all viewpoints and decide which one makes the most sense.
For some alternative viewpoints worthy of consideration, look no further than the Weston A. Price Foundation. Below are just a few different perspectives to consider.
Raw milk: traditional cultures have relied on raw milk for thousands of years, but we are now cautioned against it. Real Milk, a project of the foundation, explains why we should embrace this sacred food.
Sunscreen: the only people Price observed using “sunscreen” were those of the tropical Pacific islands, and they were using coconut oil. No culture ever used our modern chemical sunscreens. Is sunshine or sunscreen to blame for skin cancer?
5G: while we have never lived with so much cell tower radiofrequency from 4G and 5G technologies, these developments have been touted as completely safe. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers: while we have sustained ourselves using natural pesticides and fertilizers, we now use “superior” chemical formulations. We try to fertilize the pesticide-destroyed land, and when the weak plants in this robbed soil can’t resist pests, we use more pesticides. Monsanto and its product Roundup is a striking example of how corrupt this industry is.
There’s more: geoengineering, fluoridated water, cows and the climate, etc.
Seeing all the censorship and destructive profiteering can be infuriating, but don’t let the justified anger and pessimism swallow you. It’s of no use to let things outside your control consume your energy and destroy your mood. Instead, live with the truth in mind, spread the word to those open-minded enough, and focus on productive activities.
Combining the two
Despite modern corruption, we can still live a life better than any of our ancestors did by combining traditional wisdom with modern convenience.
For topics like health, we must apply traditional wisdom. But for topics the ancients didn’t know much about, like the electricity behind modern technology and convenience, we can trust science.
To be clear, I am not against science. I am all for learning about the world around us. Only in topics like health and lifestyle, which the ancients knew much about, do I use their wisdom as the source of truth. It’ll be lifetimes before modern health science confirms everything the ancients knew, and I’m not going to live my life waiting.
Embrace modern technology and convenience, be wary of mainstream narratives, and trust in traditional wisdom.
Good, Not Perfect
I acknowledge the fact that not everyone may have access to high-quality foods or be able to afford such foods. That’s okay. Just do the best you can. Here are some guidelines on what foods you can “compromise” on.
Animal foods: animals store more toxins in their fat, organs, and bones than in their muscle meat. So, it’s safer to buy low-quality if you are interested in lean cuts. For organ meats, conventional calf liver is great as calves are raised on pasture. Conventional beef, lamb, eggs, cheese, and butter are also okay to buy. Chicken and pork are more adversely affected by factory farming.
Seeds (grains, nuts, and legumes): think about how many individual grain kernels you eat at a meal and the total surface area that could be exposed to pesticides. For that reason, buy only organic for grains, especially wheat. Almost all conventional wheat is sprayed with Roundup, a highly harmful pesticide. You can be a bit less strict with nuts and legumes.
Vegetables and fruits: the Environmental Working Group (EWG) publishes an annual report ranking the pesticide levels of common vegetables and fruits. It’s safer to buy conventional foods listed on the report’s “Clean Fifteen” than those on the “Dirty Dozen”.
Fats and oils: more than 70% of the extra virgin olive oil sold is fake, so don’t try to save with cheap olive oil since it may not be real. In general, plant oils are less stable so I would only buy high-quality plant oils. With animal fats, do not buy conventional as toxins are stored in the fat. The only fat to compromise on, if needed, is butter.
As for myself, I don't even consume the 100% optimal diet. Not all the dairy products I consume are raw. I eat out-of-season produce at times. The nut butters I eat come from nuts that are only roasted, while nuts are best prepared soaked and dehydrated. I eat out sometimes with friends and enjoy the unhealthy, free food at social events.
Even the best produce and animal products I get are worse than those of our ancestors due to soil depletion over time. In addition, industrial agriculture can spread acid rain and pesticide residue into small organic farms, hurting the soil’s health and damaging the food produced there.
While we may never have the nutrient density that our ancestors did, that shouldn’t stop us from doing our best.
If you slip up or have less-than-ideal foods, don’t stress, wallow in guilt, or beat yourself up. Doing so will only harm your health. Instead, savor every bite. Food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and you should live life having experienced all the delicacies and treats of the world.
Just get back on track when you can, as soon as you can start making delicious nutrient-dense meals, whether that’s the next meal, next day, or next week.
Making It Practical
Some people may think this nutrient-dense lifestyle is financially impractical. It’s just the opposite. Buying whole foods and cooking them is always cheaper than buying processed foods or eating out. Here’s a cost analysis if you don’t believe me.
When you eat high-quality foods, you save on huge health-related costs: prescriptions, medical visits, medical procedures, orthodontics, dental fillings, glasses and contacts, vitamins, supplements, etc. You also gain so much value from having a clearer mind, fewer sick days, and a higher overall functioning.
Think about it: how much raw milk, grass-fed beef, pasture-raised eggs, and organic sourdough bread could you buy with the cost of just one medical procedure?
When you’re resourceful, you can buy high-quality foods at an even lower price than conventional foods. At the very least, you can buy the best foods for cheaper than comparable supermarket options.
With my Weston A. Price East Bay chapter, I bought the best butter (local, grass-fed, and raw) for $6.00 a pound. Of course, this was in bulk 40-pound blocks, which I split with someone else. The next best option is the Kerrygold grass-fed butter at Costco for $7.245 a pound (as of this writing) in two-pound packs. At my nearby Trader Joe’s, the Kerrygold butter costs $7.98 per pound, sold in half-pounds.
Join buying groups, buy in bulk, and go to farmers’ markets. Cut out the middleman. Arrangements like community-supported agriculture (CSA) for produce, herdsharing for dairy, and cow-sharing for beef are great ways to connect with farmers and get the best foods for cheap.
Better yet, some nutrient-dense foods are regularly less expensive. The organs, fat, and bones are less valued compared to the more expensive muscle meats. Fish head and organs are less popular than filets.
Still, it’s wise to pay more for high-quality foods, as your health is the most important thing in your life. The Buddha once said, “Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering—an image of death.” Health is certainly not just physical health, but the physical aspect greatly influences all other aspects of health.
When the Dalai Lama was asked what surprised him most about humanity, he answered “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.” But no amount of money can bring back lost health.
In 1938, the percentage of our budget spent on food was 40%. It’s just 10% nowadays. Food is proportionally one-fourth as cheap as before, due to food giants whose only concern is output at the expense of quality. The cheap prices, among other things, have driven four million small farms out of business in the last 80 years. And when these small farms go bankrupt, big agriculture is ready to buy up their land and further consolidate power.
On the flip side, the percentage of our budget spent on healthcare quadrupled from 4% in 1938 to 18.3% nowadays.
Pay the ever-struggling local farmers and food artisans (those making high-quality foods like cheeses and bread). Don’t pay big agriculture or big pharma.
To Your Everlasting Health
I hope I haven’t made applying traditional wisdom too complicated. Applying it should be simple.
In the end, you can forget all the vitamins, minerals, and complicated health terminology. Forget all the proteins, carbs, and fats. Forget all the superfoods, supplements, and health gurus. Forget all the diseases, prescriptions, and vaccines. Forget all the fad diets backed by the ever-changing health research. Forget the mainstream narratives.
Just be open-minded enough to consider counternarratives, live by traditional wisdom, and eat according to traditional principles.
With this traditional approach, I don’t even think about calories and just eat meals until I’m satisfied at 70% full. I use as much unrefined salt and grass-fed butter as I want. My teeth are healthy, my weight seems to manage itself, and my mind is clear.
I couldn’t tell you which nutrient deficiency causes which disease nor which metabolic pathway causes which reaction in the body, but I can say with high probability that I maintain better health than the majority of people who know such things.
Whether you’re skeptical of traditional wisdom or not, I urge you to act on these principles for just one week and see how your body feels. You’re always welcome to discard all this if it doesn't work for you.
More likely though, I think you’ll look forward to every delicious, nutrient-dense meal. You’ll find healthy eating to be easy. You’ll live life to the max.