Take a Stand

Read this in: Czech

Dear Friend,

A health crisis is raging in America today: millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying needlessly. Why? Because most Americans are following a diet they have been told by their government and the advertising industry is good for them, while the shocking truth is that this diet is not only wrong, it's dangerous. That's because it is rooted in hundreds of lies, distortions and deceptions built up over many decades by the food industry.

America's diet is killing us! Did you know that heart disease and cancer were rare in 1900? And yet today, one of every two Americans will suffer from some form of heart disease and one of every three Americans will die of cancer.

Did you know that learning disabilities were extremely rare only a century ago? But today dyslexia and hyperactivity afflict 7,000,000 young people.

Can America call itself healthy when one of every three citizens, more than 90,000,000 people, suffers from allergies? When one out of every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage? When 250,000 infants are born with birth defects in this country every year? Why are the number of deaths from cancer, heart attack, stroke and other killers in America skyrocketing? Why is diabetes reaching epidemic proportions? Why is obesity out of control? And why are infertility rates rising so alarmingly?

My name is Sally Fallon Morell. I've spent the last 20 years exploring the relationship between nutrition and diet. What I have learned convinces me that our lives are literally on the line!

Unless you and I act boldly now, our food crisis will become even more serious. We know from many reliable studies that, if nutrients are lacking in our food, rates of disease will continue to grow. Our children will not develop properly and many of them will needlessly suffer illness, disease and premature death.

More and more couples desiring the joy of children will find themselves infertile. We will also see an alarming rise in emotional and behavioral problems because of these widespread nutritional deficiencies.

The problems is that the nutritional advice coming from the medical profession and government agencies is inaccurate, distorted. . . and just plain wrong.

The lie: Don't eat butter, eggs, whole milk and meat--the very foods that kept our grandparents healthy and strong.

The lie: Animal fats cause cancer and heart disease.

The lie: All we need to worry about is "macronutrients," the percentage of proteins and fats and carbohydrates we take in, not the quality of the food itself.

Worst of all, we're being told to feed low-fat foods to our children when we know that foods like whole milk and eggs provide the very nutrients they need to grow up healthy and strong!

How do I know that today's nutritional advice is killing us? Let me answer by telling you about a remarkable and brilliant man, a scientist whose findings helped me regain my own health many years ago.

Weston A. Price was a dentist and a researcher. During the 1930s and 1940s he traveled to the remote corners of the earth to study the dietary habits of isolated, nonindustrialized peoples. His goal was to determine what we need to eat to be in robust health.

Dr. Price was disturbed that so many patients he was seeing in his dental practice in Cleveland had serious health problems. He observed that they suffered not only from a lot of tooth decay but also had crowded teeth and poor bone structure. And these same patients were afflicted with infectious diseases like TB and chronic illnesses like cancer, arthritis and heart disease. Sound familiar?

Suspecting that many of the problems he was seeing were due to poor nutrition, he traveled to more than a dozen isolated communities around the world where people did not have access to modern foods--sugar, white flour and commercial vegetable oils--to see whether or not they were healthy.

His travels took him to the Swiss Alps, to windswept islands off the coast of Scotland, the hinterlands of Alaska and northern Canada, the back country of Africa and Australia, mountain villages in Peru and a number of very remote islands in the South Pacific. He was completely amazed by what he found. In communities where the inhabitants were consuming only their own indigenous traditional foods, they were superbly healthy. Even though they had never used a toothbrush, they had beautiful straight teeth--and no tooth decay! Most remarkably, these peoples did not suffer from obesity, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, infertility or birth defects.

What struck him most of all was the cheerful, sunny dispositions of the people living in these so-called primitive backwaters. They had an optimistic attitude in spite of the hardships they faced.

Dr. Price took many photographs of the healthy peoples he studied in these communities and published them in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. I've reproduced a few of these photographs in our informational brochure, which is included with this letter. Imagine visiting a community where everybody had beautiful, straight white teeth--even the old people. Dr. Price's book shows us how healthy people look--how we are all supposed to look!

Dr. Price's research also shows us how healthy people eat. He studied their diets and found that the foods they ate were very rich in vitamins and minerals. In fact, their foods had four times the minerals that were available in the typical American diet of his day. That's partly because these people didn't eat any empty foods, like sugar, white flour and vegetable oils. But it's also because they ate foods that were naturally rich in minerals--either seafood from mineral-rich waters or meats, dairy foods and vegetables from animals and plants that were nourished by mineral-rich soil.

The other thing that Price discovered was that the healthy isolated peoples put a very high value on certain nutrient-dense foods like butter and cream, eggs, organ meats, insects, fish, fish eggs, fish oils and shell fish. They went to great lengths to obtain these foods and considered them very important for having healthy babies.

That's why the situation is so serious today, because these are the very high-fat, high-cholesterol foods that our establishment nutritionists--I call them the "Diet Dictocrats"--are telling us not to eat. We've been led to believe that these vital foods cause cancer and heart disease.

What Dr. Price discovered about these special animal foods is that they are very rich in what he called fat-soluble activators, such as vitamin A and vitamin D, particularly when the animals they came from had been grazing on rich, rapidly growing green grass. These vitamins are actually catalysts. They help us absorb the minerals in our food. Without them our bodies have a very hard time assimilating minerals like calcium, phosphorus and iron. Many scientific studies show that these fat-soluble vitamins also protect us against diseases like cancer and heart disease.

So why have our "Diet Dictocrats" demonized these nutritious foods? Why have we been led to believe that the very foods Dr. Price discovered to be so important to our health are bad for us?

Because these ingredients are too expensive for food manufacturers to use in processed foods. The food industry can make bigger profits using vegetable oils instead of animal fats, particularly the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils that mimic the properties of mostly saturated fats found in traditional foods like butter, lard and coconut oil. Unfortunately, scientists have discovered that these altered fats can cause everything from cancer and heart disease to growth problems and infertility.

I want to emphasize as strongly as I can to you that what we are facing is far more than simply correcting a lot of dietary misinformation; what is at stake is a matter of life and death--the future of our children and grandchildren, not to mention our own health. How then do we turn around this dreadful situation and re-establish sound practices for achieving dietary health? We do so by heeding Dr. Price's dying words: "You teach, you teach, you teach!"

By enrolling as a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation today, you will be helping to orchestrate a worldwide campaign to teach the principles of sound nutrition and facilitate the return of nutrient-dense foods to American tables. We urgently need your help to help educate millions of Americans about the importance of traditional, whole foods.

Key elements of our strategy are:

• Putting you and other consumers in touch with conscientious farms that can provide meat and unprocessed dairy products from grass-fed animals
• Getting sound scientific findings into the hands of the medical community and government officials
• Alerting the public to the dangers of newfangled additions to our food supply--like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and soy protein powders.

Above all, we must make the implications and profound truth of Weston A. Price's findings known to millions of Americans. My personal goal is to make the name of Weston A. Price a household word and his visionary book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, required reading by all health professionals.

Although these are ambitious goals, I am convinced we can turn this situation around if we all pitch in with united energies. Our main teaching tool is the enclosed brochure. This gift to you was carefully assembled with the help of two devoted scientists on our team--Dr. Mary Enig, a renowned lipid biochemist, and Dr. Mike Fitzpatrick, a distinguished toxicologist. We've packed as much critically important nutrition information as possible into the few pages of this brochure.

If you share our belief that the challenge to correct this massive dietary misinformation campaign is an issue affecting you and your family--and all people--then I urge you to enroll as a member right now.

1. Enroll today for robust health! Our dues are a modest $40 per year, with $25 dues for students, seniors, unemployed people, and people with disabilities. Those of you who can give at higher levels--$100, $250, $500, $1000, or even higher--can help us keep dues as low as possible for everyone else. As a new member, you will receive Wise Traditions, our lively and informative quarterly magazine full of practical information for your health, including how to find locally grown whole foods. Our Shopping Guide, which names recommended brands and helps you make wise decisions in the grocery store, will be included in your membership packet.
2. Mobilize your community. Use the enclosed reply form to order brochures to give to your family, friends, colleagues, health professionals, food markets, libraries and local farmers. They are the perfect way to teach the principles of good nutrition in a non-confrontational way. We make them available to you for just one dollar, and that includes postage! So far we have distributed almost 80,000 of these brochures--you can help raise that number to the millions. Consider ordering 20, 50, 100, 250, 500 or more today. Health professionals can stamp their name and address on the front and give them to their patients. With your help, we can create a tidal wave of lifesaving information to defeat the forces that promote unhealthy imitation foods.
3. Consider setting up a local chapter. Our local chapters help people find locally produced nutrient-dense foods, including pasture-fed meat and unprocessed dairy products. They may also maintain a list of health professionals who are familiar with the work of Weston A. Price and who apply his findings in their practice. Local chapters can also represent us at conferences, shows and fairs. Our goal is hundreds of local chapters throughout the country. If you are the organizing type, why not add your name to the list? We can help you get started by providing you with organizing materials and putting you in touch with more experienced local chapter leaders.

I urge you to take a stand for your own dietary health--and the health of your family, friends and community right now! We, the people, must cut through the lies, deception, fraud and misrepresentation that is crippling the health of the American people, and inflicting the heartache of disease and premature death on so many men, women and children.

Yours in good health,

Sally Fallon Morell
President

PS. More vital information is available for you at our website www.westonaprice.org. You'll find additional Myths & Truths, many eye-opening articles to expand your knowledge on diet and health, local chapter information, book reviews and a calendar of upcoming events.