Letters, Fall 2008

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Our Future

I was reminded yesterday why we do what we do. I signed up for a cowshare. The farmers are a cute young couple, she is 26, he is 28. They are both from the city, she from D.C., he from L.A. They met in college, and fell in love with each other and with sustainable farming. After graduating with some very unrelated college degrees, they put everything they had into 22 acres of grass and some old, neglected apple trees. In two years they have managed to build a house, greenhouse, and barn, all from the ground up, all from scratch, on a shoestring. Their entire income has come from selling truly organic fruit and vegetables, and they now have two cows as well. They also have two very young children. She was out working in the orchard with her baby on her back when I pulled up, dirt on both of their smiling faces.

To the uneducated, they appear to live in poverty. Nothing is new, nothing is nice, and everything is lacking. But to me, I see nothing but hope, love and goodness. It’s obvious that they put every single last dime that they can spare into building their little farm. Their joy is equally obvious. Their love for the land, for the plants and animals, for their sustainable lifestyle, for their family and each other, radiates from them. They are our hope and our future: young people who are willing to sacrifice all to maintain what is probably our most important piece of heritage. They are a bulwark against all that is wrong in our society. They are living and being the message.

They had never heard of the Farmto- Consumer Legal Defense Fund or National Animal Identification System, and didn’t even seem to understand why they needed to have cow-shares. I suspect that they probably don’t have a TV or access to the internet, or if they do that they haven’t any time for such things. They were much too busy caring for and improving the land, and providing wholesome food for others. A single rogue bureaucrat, another layer of invasive regulation, a government official having a bad day, could ruin everything for them. They don’t understand the dangers that they face. They don’t understand that there are people in this world who literally hate everything that they stand for, everything that they do, everything that they are. That type of hatred and illogical behavior does not register with people whose daily task is to nurture the good land. But we understand. And it’s up to those of us who understand and care to do something about it, to protect them and fight for them even when they are unaware of this threat.

I was thrilled to be able to buy their milk and tomatoes. I would have paid triple. I even offered to milk their cows for them when they need time off. That seemed to really touch them, once the shock of realizing that there are lawyers in this world who can also milk cows wore off. But I feel very protective of these people, these new friends and business partners. I feel that I have a duty to my own values, to what I stand for in life, to protect and nurture them, just as they protect and nurture the land, and nurture me with their food. I had a bowl of yogurt this morning, which I made last night with milk from their cow. Such a simple food, a nutritious medium teeming with millions of beneficial little organisms. If you create and protect the right environment, life will flourish. Yogurt makes itself. I want to do that for our farmers. Create and protect an environment where they can flourish, nurture, and teach their children the values that they embody. They are our future.

Marc Stimpert
Hotchkiss, Colorado

Editor’s Response: Rather than send out our customary mid-year fundraising letter for WAPF, in August we sent a letter to all our members asking them to give financial support to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund or the Farm-to-Consumer Foundation. Legal support to defend our farmers is our most pressing need at the moment. Please be generous!

A Patient Of Dr. Price

I was a patient of Dr. Price when I was a teenager. I had a tooth that was out of place and Dr. Price fitted orthodontics to move it back to where it belonged. I remember him as a pleasant bald man who was very kind to me. It was during the Depression, my mother was widowed, had lost her house, and we were living in an apartment. We couldn’t afford to pay Dr. Price so he hired me at one dollar per hour (a very good wage in those days) to do filing and clean up his records. He kept fifty cents of it and I kept fifty cents of it. I am sure he never really got paid for the work.

Of course I got the lecture on nutrition and was told to take one tablespoon of cod liver oil per day. He gave me articles of his to read, which became part of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Charles Whitney
St. Augustine, Florida

Recovering

In 2005, at the age of forty-nine, I was diagnosed with severe ankylosing spondylitis (arthritis in the spinal joints). I was also diagnosed with severe sacroileitis and I had a frozen shoulder. My rheumatologist said I would need anti-inflammatories for the rest of my life. I decided not to take the medication and to learn as much as I could to heal these conditions naturally. Fortunately, I had the support of friends and family.

I learned that a low starch diet helps. (See the London Diet at www. kickas.org.) I also learned that it was important to supplement my diet with boron. (See www.farcourt.co.uk/Arntra/links.html.) ARNTRA is the Arthritis and Rheumatism Natural Therapy Research Association.

I learned about the Weston A. Price Foundation in May of 2007. The information has been extremely valuable. I have been following the Weston A. Price guidelines and my health has continued to improve. I am not completely well yet; however, I have made a great improvement and I do not need any medication. A big thank you to the WAPF for preserving and disseminating the information about traditional nutrition.

For inspiration I read the books by Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness and The Biology of Hope.

Michael Seymour
Melbourne, Australia

Natural History

Last week I was visiting the Canadian Museum of Natural History with my kids. They have re-done the entrance to the Polar World exhibit and there is now a video playing when you walk into the exhibit. The video documents an Inuit town in eastern Canada, which has received a couple of visits from the museum’s researchers, once in 1938 and again fairly recently. The video spent quite a bit of time documenting and discussing the issue of native foods versus modern processed foods for the people there.

As part of a special cultural education initiative in the Inuit schools, they are teaching the students how to process (butcher) native food sources. The older people in the town place a special emphasis on these native food sources, claiming that eating the new store-bought foods makes them weak and cold, and that their native foods help to warm their blood. The video mentioned that illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are on the rise since more people have started eating store-bought foods, which is interesting in light of the fact that native Inuit diet is nearly entirely meat and fat, often eaten raw.

Karen Wood-Campbell
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Formula For Success

Thanks so much for everything you do. The Weston A. Price Foundation has changed our lives in countless ways for the better. I am especially grateful for all the information on raw milk and raw milk infant formula. I could not produce enough milk and had to start supplementing with formula when my baby was four months old. Luckily, my great uncle (now in his eighties) sent me the link to the WAPF site, and I started making the homemade formula. Within two weeks on the raw milk formula, my daughter’s persistent cradle cap disappeared.

Ann Marie Michaels Los Angeles, California

Flat Feet

My husband Reinhold (from Germany) and I have been living here in Costa Rica for more than 13 years and we are members of the Association of Organic Farmers of Turrialba (APOT for its Spanish acronym) which comprises about 250 small-farm families.

We are fortunate that he has had the opportunity to help set up Turrialba’s organic farmers’ market more than four years ago, where every Saturday we sell organic full-fat yogurt, raw milk and cheese from our grass-fed, free-range Jersey cows. On our 25-acre farm we grow or raise organic chickens and eggs, coffee, bananas, pineapples, turmeric, ginger, oranges, cassava, malanga and many other useful plants. We also make our own sourdough bread, kefir, sauerkraut and our own soap simply made of lard, lye and water to wash everything including hair. In the past we have organized summer camps and right now are setting up to offer nutritional retreats.

I am from Haiti and wanted to share with you the fact that the only girls in my school who had collapsed arches were those whose mothers had lived in the US for a period of time.

Gina Baker
Turrialba, Costa Rica

Progress With WAPF Diet

I was in an accident ten years ago, rear-ended in a VW bus by a heavy-load semi-truck driver who fell asleep. I was given the diagnosis that I would never feel or move again below heart level—complete paralysis. I practiced movement / breath / sound therapy for years and had a fairly healthy diet and used herbs, but until I integrated the principles of the Weston A. Price diet into my life, I made very little progress.

Now I have recovered normal use of my organs; partial feeling and muscular control in my lower body down to my toes, ability to feel temperature, touch and discomfort, etc. In addition, I don’t have to visit the hospital at least twice a year with life-threatening ailments, as other paraplegics suffer regularly.

Kristie Smith
Olney, Illinois

Assumed Infertility

Thank you for all of the hard work you do in communicating with members and lobbying for raw milk! I am a customer of Pennsylvania farmer Mark Nolt, and I have first-hand evidence that his work benefits our community.

I was a ten-year vegetarian mostly because I refused to eat meat from confined animals. About seven years into my vegetarianism, I got married, and my husband and I planned for a baby. I was in my late thirties and after two heartbreaking years, we assumed infertility and adopted our wonderful son Garrison from Guatemala.

When Garrison was about two years old, we all came down with an upper respiratory infection that just wouldn’t quit. A friend had been nudging your material under my nose, and because of this infection, I knew our diet had to change.

I jumped on eatwild.com and found three farms close to me that now provide us with all of our meat, eggs and dairy products. Within three months of consuming raw dairy products and grass-fed meats, I was pregnant. Unfortunately, we miscarried the first one, but within another year I was pregnant again. I continued my farm-based diet throughout the pregnancy, and Benjamin was born on August 5, 2007, healthy, strong and beautiful. He is already enjoying cod liver oil, homemade butter from raw cream and farm fresh yogurt. All of his food is homemade, and he enjoys the puréed grass-fed meats from the farms. He is truly a Weston Price baby. And did I mention? He was born seven weeks before my 45th birthday!

Holly Smith
Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Yellow Fat

I was interested in the letter about yellow fat color in your most recent issue. The vast majority of grassfed animals harvested at less than three years of age have white fat unless they have Jersey breeding in them. Just as Jerseys have yellow milkfat, they also have yellow bodyfat.

The prohibition against yellow fat was not to discriminate against grassfed animals in general but against older animals, whose fat does indeed turn yellow, and against Jersey-crosses, which were considered inferior to beef breeds. Actually, Jersey beef is one of the most tender of all the breeds. It just will have yellow fat.

Grass-finished animals which have been correctly grazed at a high rate of gain—in excess of 1.6 pounds per day—will marble just like grainfed animals and some early maturing breeds, such as Angus, will actually grade USDA Prime. These animals will be two years old, which is only slightly older than grainfed. Producing such beef requires a great amount of skill but it is being done all over the USA.

Prior to World War II, there was little market price or consumer discrimination against grassfed beef. Grassfed was eaten in the late spring, summer and fall and grainfed in the winter and early spring. Now with the advent of refrigeration and freezing, we can eat grassfed year around. Personally, I find a well-finished grassfed steak to be far superior in taste to the grainfed product, but I understand there are those who disagree. That’s what makes a market.

Allan Nation, Editor
Stockman Grass Farmer
Ridgeland, Mississippi

A Grain Of Truth

We have been farming a long time, my husband all his life. He is very knowledgeable and finds it frankly insulting to have people who’ve read a book or attended a seminar tell him how they are raising their cow correctly on just grass. Then we watch as their animals get thinner and thinner, and sometimes die for the farmer’s lack of common sense.

Corn is actually a grass. The grain ripens in the fall and provides the animals with extra fat, what we call “condition,” to withstand the cold of winter. The Bible says, “Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn.”

Yes, we believe in grassfed and we know that while eating rapidly growing green grass, cows produce the best balance of fats and some other factors. But just because people are recently aware of the fat-soluble vitamins and Dr. Price’s Activator X (Vitamin K₂) doesn’t negate the reality of winter. Perhaps the fat balance changes with the season because of a factor we haven’t yet discovered.

Eileen Kelsey, Chapter Leader
Freeport, Illinois

Harassment

Recently I had occasion to speak with a dairy farmer who had been in the news and was the subject of harassment by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. I learned that a family member had been harassed by telephone when her baby came down with salmonella poisoning. The rest of the family had eaten chicken from a fast food restaurant and had drunk raw milk from this particular farm yet only the baby became ill. The baby had not consumed either food but was on formula—not breast milk, not raw cow’s milk, not store-bought cow’s milk. Yet the daily harassment by phone from the Pennsylvania health department had brought the mother to near collapse as she tried to care for her several healthy young children and this ill baby.

The health department tried to trick, cajole and bully her into saying that the baby could have or might have had some raw milk from this farm. Upon a call from the farmer asking them to contact the farm’s lawyer instead of harassing the family, the department desisted. However, other farm clients were also harassed. One patient said he had not been able to get milk because of an illness so he had not even had any raw milk in the house when he became ill with salmonella.

My experience with salmonella poisoning occurred when my own baby was about one year old. The state health nurse called me up and gave me a lecture on kitchen cleanliness and sanitation. When I told her that my family had been showing sheep that week at the farm show complex and had not had anything from my own kitchen that week, but that the baby had become deathly ill and near comatose 48 hours to the minute after consuming a hamburger all by herself at the local Burger King, I was informed that it didn’t matter, they couldn’t trace it to the restaurant so they would not even contact the restaurant to inform them of the fact, let alone inspect the establishment. Yet they told this farmer that the same salmonella strain was making all the affected people ill, and the farm must be the source since these folks were sometimes farm customers.

See the difference they make between a large corporate restaurant and a comparatively small farmer.

Name withheld

Ear Candling

I read with interest the letter from Alexis Morini from North Carolina (Summer 2008) regarding ear candling. She took issue with the Winter 2007 article, “Traditional Remedies for Childhood Illness” by Sarah Pope and states that the use of ear candles “…will truly clean out any excess wax.”

I had an experience with ear candles that would lead me to agree with Sarah’s position. My ears built up ear wax to the point where it affected my hearing. I started using ear candles to remedy the situation and as Alexis notes in her letter, I observed the accumulation of wax in the bottom of the ear candle and felt confident that I was improving my situation. My hearing returned to normal for several days but then I began to have difficulty again. This pattern went on for several weeks…I would have trouble hearing, I would use ear candles and my hearing improved, though temporarily.

This became frustrating so I conducted a test of the candles’ effectiveness. I lit an ear candle and instead of placing it in my ear, I held it against my finger as it burned. After the candle burned down, inspection of the unburnt end revealed the same residues that I had thought were being pulled out of my ear by the vacuum the burning candle supposedly creates. Since my finger does not contain wax, I came to the following conclusions: the heat from the burning candle softened the ear wax enough to cause it to change shape, thus allowing for sound to get around the wax blockage on a temporary basis. The burning candle itself is not enough to pull wax from the ear and the wax that accumulates in the candle is from the candle itself and not from the ear (or finger) it is placed upon.

Russ E. Conrad
Middlebury, Vermont

Editor’s Response: The wax would have to be analyzed to determine whether the candle pulls wax from the ear. The volume of wax in the ear is small, so obviously not all the wax that ends up at the base of the ear candle comes from the ear. But it is possible that some comes from the ear and that you are a person who rapidly builds up wax, hence the return of your hearing problems so shortly after the ear candling.

Vaccination Complications

In order for my thirteen-year-old son to attend Boy Scout camp, he was required to have a physical and had to be up to date on his vaccinations. He has been normally very healthy, in fact this was his first trip to the doctor in years.

He was given two vaccinations, the Meningococcal and the Tdap. I refused for him to have the other two that the pediatrician said he should have but were elective until school started. He was extremely sore at the injection site and within hours presented with headaches, body aches and fever; and by the next day he had these as well as feeling nauseated and hot, and he began to have body shakes that he could not control. When I reported problems to the pediatrician I was instructed to give him fever medication and unless his symptoms became violent, all he needed was rest.

On the fourth day, after a sleepless night and uncontrollable shaking I took him into the emergency room. There he had blood taken to check his white blood count, which they said was at an acceptable level. He was given Benadryl to control the shaking, and then sent home with the advice to continue fever medication and Benadryl as needed. They refused to believe that any of his problems were associated with the vaccination, claiming that it was more likely he picked up a “bug” at the doctor’s office. His discharge papers showed that he was treated for headache and fever, with no mention of any vaccination. How can there be a realistic record of risks or complications if medical professionals refuse to recognize any related symptoms?

Since his recovery he has had several unprovoked outbursts, leaving me very worried that there will be more problems yet to come.

Mary Olsen
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Editor’s Response: Hopefully our diet, complete with cod liver oil, will prevent any recurrence. But your frightening story should serve as a warning to all mothers!

Lewis And Clark

I’m an avid hiker and backpacker who enjoys reading about people who attempt to hike the entire Appalachian trail. The hikers who depend on high amounts of carbs for energy seem to get very sore body parts, especially knees and backs.

If you compare that diet approach with the food journal of the Lewis and Clark exploration, you will see a stark contrast. These early explorers depended on six to nine pounds of meat and fat (mainly from grass-fed buffalo) per day! They cherished the organ meats and the buffalo hump fat. As you read their journals, you never see any references to the soreness that afflicts the modern hikers.

Here’s what I’d like to propose to your Foundation. Sponsor a hike of the Appalachian trail for which you have an experienced backpacker eat a traditional WAPF diet prior to and during the hike. You could have local chapters along the route as this hiker’s support group to supply WAPF foods. Have a second experienced backpacker eat a modern diet prior to and during the hike. Then report the results in your journal!

Mark W. Cusac
Covington, Ohio

Diet In Okinawa

Regarding the diet in Okinawa, which you have discussed in your journal, my husband was stationed in Okinawa in the 1970s and he said the old timers there ate rice with fish, including dried and fermented fish, octopus, whale (which is very fatty), pork and some vegetables. Most of it was fried in lard, with the rice being used to soak up the excess fat and juices. In fact, he said an “old lady” befriended him and kept trying to get him to eat fish heads and rice. Being very adventurous, he ate that and many other unusual items—and liked them.

I also spent some time in Asia, and never found a shortage of fish and meats, while at the same time I never saw a soy product except soy sauce and a small amount of tofu, certainly not the extruded stuff everyone here eats while using their idea of the Asian diet as their justification.

One more side note: I live near Red Wing, Minnesota, which has a huge soy processing (refinery) plant on the edge of town. When they are cooking the soy, it smells so bad, we feel like vomiting. Just getting through the town fast enough to breathe fresh air is a challenge. I think the market for soy processed products would be greatly reduced if everyone eating it had to smell it being processed first!

Janice Blair
Red Wing, Minnesota

Disturbing Issues

I found two things about the most recent (Summer 2008) issue disturbing— one is the idea that chemotherapy and radiation are examples of “heroic medicine” that should be avoided. Chemo and radiation are not proposed treatments for invented diseases, nor have they been clinically proven to be ineffective against cancer, which killed 7.9 million people in 2007. I’m not a cancer expert, but since radiation is the most effective treatment when a resection surgery isn’t an option, and chemotherapy kills off cancer cells and prevents them from multiplying, it is irresponsible of WAPF to denigrate these treatments when they can and do save the lives of cancer patients.

My mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March of this year, and at first they told us that it had metastasized and was inoperable—but that radiation might shrink it enough to perform a Whipple procedure (which saves many lives every year). She would have gladly undergone radiation if it meant the possibility of being cured. The news that it had spread, however, came from a false positive test—thank goodness!—and it turned out the cancer was local and she could have a Whipple procedure. That resection procedure saved her life, and now she is undergoing chemotherapy to kill off any cancer cells that may have started to spread. Yes, chemotherapy is aggressive, but she thinks of it as her SWAT team going in to kill the cancer that would otherwise probably come back and kill her—in the meantime it’s making her sick and killing some healthy cells, but given the choice, we’ll take it. When modern medicine offers us these life-saving measures, I’m not content to leave it up to nature or G-d. She had maybe five years if we did nothing; now she will live a normal life, and some reorganized plumbing from the Whipple and chemo for six months is a very small price to pay.

The second thing I found disturbing was the article about homeopathy. No studies—that is, double-blind, published, repeatable studies, the gold standard—have ever found homeopathic remedies effective beyond a placebo effect. And for good reason: the substances chosen for “like cures like” treatments are not based on reason or evidence, and even if they were effective in normal doses, they certainly aren’t effective in the dilutions used in homeopathy, where not a single molecule of the original “curative” substance is normally present in the finished remedy.

WAPF fights the junk science used to vilify saturated fat and justify the use of statin drugs; it should likewise shun the junk science of homeopathy, lest the organization and magazine lose its scientific respectability. The studies surrounding saturated fat and cholesterol are mixed because there is much poor research regarding those issues, but the research is absolutely incontrovertible when it comes to homeopathy. You simply can’t design a bad enough study to find homeopathy effective that can still pass the publishing test. Even given the low standards respectable medical journals have when it comes to accepting studies “proving” that saturated fat causes heart disease, you won’t find a study proving that homeopathy cures disease.

The reason the homeopathy remedy boxes in the drug store say “no side effects” is because there is no active substance that could possibly cause any side effects! For effective symptom relief and curing disease, people should stick to traditional, proven herbal and natural medicine or conventional medicine—but for heaven’s sake, call a spade a spade—homeopathic remedies are placebo treatments, and expensive ones, at that.

Sarah Conte-Jacobs
Corte Madera, California

Editor’s Response: The fact that cancer killed almost eight million people in 2007 indicates that chemotherapy and radiation are not the solution! And the proposition that we need medicinal “SWAT teams” to kill cancer cells while hoping that the body manages to survive the treatment is a perfect description of heroic medicine. The real test is to follow two groups in the same condition (often only those in “good” condition, or even with false positives for cancer, get chemo and radiation, thereby weighting the results towards these interventions), one getting chemo and/or radiation, the other doing nothing or doing alternative therapies, follow them for five to ten years and then see which ones are still alive. Your editor knows of one group where this was done (although the study was not published). Seven of eight ovarian cancer patients in the group had chemo and/or radiation; the remaining woman refused these treatments. After more than eight years, she is the only one still alive. I would urge your mother to look into alternatives involving diet and Iscador (mistletoe extract), which is being used in Europe and, according to numerous published studies, has had good success compared to heroic treatments. We will be exploring this topic in a future issue of Wise Traditions. As for homeopathy, your editor finds that it is the only treatment that gets rid of her poison ivy, (to which she is very sensitive) and it certainly is not expensive.

A Better Understanding

“Traditional Remedies for Childhood Illness” by Sarah Pope (Winter, 2007) was excellent reading but I would like to respond to her comment that in her experience, homeopathic preparations were not very effective. I am a classical homeopathic practitioner and RN. Her lack of success with the remedy chosen is due to a possible lack of understanding of homeopathy, its philosophy and the remedies themselves. It is a common error to prescribe remedies according to the “disease,” as allopathic medicine does, rather than prescribing on the individual’s symptoms. A multitude of remedies could be used for whooping cough, but the remedy must match the individual’s symptoms.

I recommend the book Homeopathy: Beyond Flat Earth Medicine by Timothy Dooley for a better understanding of homeopathy and to help clear up misconceptions on how to use the remedies properly. When a homeopathic remedy is used accordingly, its results can be very dramatic.

Homeopathic philosophy fits very well with the Wise Traditions philosophies and with the many good suggestions given by Sarah Pope on childhood illness.

Linda Ronchetti, RN
Classical Homeopathic Practitioner
Aurora, Minnesota

Another Unnecessary Intervention

I appreciate the informative article “Traditional Remedies for Childhood Illness” by Sarah Pope (Winter 2007). Among the unnecessary medical interventions listed on page 38 of that article, I would have liked to have seen circumcision also listed as harm to be avoided. Circumcision is extremely painful for the baby and it results in the loss of a natural, sensitive, and functional part of the body. Parents can become better informed about this issue from the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. Website: www.nocirc.org.

Cookware Dilemma

The article “Mad as a Hatter: How to Avoid Toxic Metals and Clear them from the Body” by Drs. Kaayla Daniel and Galen Knight (Summer 2008) has me in a panic. Should I throw out all my expensive stainless steel pans? And if so, what should I cook in?

Beth Verity, Madison, Wisconsin

Dr. Daniel replies: We’ve had an overwhelming number of questions about this, and we wish we had a simple answer. Pots and pans of aluminum, Teflon and other non-stick surfaces—with the possible exception of an unblemished silicon ceramic—should be thrown out immediately. So should old stainless pots that have been scratched and pitted from use. High-end stainless products are widely advertised as risk free. However, only the 316 grade (as in the Saladmaster brand) is resistant to tomato juice and vinegar; but it can corrode with citric acid or salt. In terms of water bottles and plastics, take care to use the safer plastics (i.e, those identified with the triangles #1, 2, 4, 5 ) while avoiding the others (i.e. triangles #3 & 6+). Beyond that, each family must ultimately make its own decision based on tolerance for risk, health status and budget.

Here’s what we’ve done: Dr. Knight has overcome a myriad of personal health challenges caused by nickel poisoning due to exposure from nickel eyeglass frames, stainless watch backs, a teeth-straightening retainer when young, cookware and from otherwise healthy lunches eaten out of all-stainless-steel vacuum bottles. Now in perfect health, Dr. Knight has eliminated stainless as completely as possible from his life. He doesn’t worry about the occasional restaurant meal, but will not patronize restaurants with buffets, where food is not only cooked in stainless but sits around in stainless warming pans. At home his first choice for cookware is titanium camping gear, including a pan, plate and one-piece “spork.” He also cooks with a well-seasoned carbon steel paella pan and griddle, enameled cast iron skillets, Corning Vision glass stove-top cookware, lead-free crockpots and Pyrex measuring bowls. Dr. Knight buys thin, commercially pure titanium sheets and adds handles to make his own spatulas and choppers and uses bamboo utensils and chop sticks.

Dr. Daniel has substantially reduced her stainless exposure over the past year. She has given away a set of Revereware, purchased Corning glass pans and casserole dishes on eBay and a set of enamelware at www.mercola.com. The downside is that the Corning glassware burns some foods and the enamel pots turn cooking into a weightlifting experience. She also uses a glass tea kettle, cast iron frying pan, carbon steel cookie trays and a lead-free Hamilton Beach crockpot. For cooking utensils, she favors bamboo or wood and seeks titanium alternatives to her stainless spatula, tongs and knives. For cutlery, she mostly uses silverware. Whether the silver is safer than stainless flatware is debatable, but exposure is very brief, from plate to mouth. She enjoys some restaurant meals, even the occasional Indian buffet. She wears a Philip Stein teslar watch and believes that the energy balancing health benefits of the teslar technology outweigh any risks from the stainless case. She still wears some silver and gold jewelry, but only for dress up.

Sally Fallon cooks in cast iron skillets, uses Le Creuset enamel cookware and some lightweight speckled enamel pans (available from hardware stores). She still uses stainless steel cutlery, baking pans, cookie sheets and stainless steel pans for non-acidic cooking (such as vegetable steaming) but in light of the article, has switched to making stock in Le Creuset or lightweight speckled enamel. She is careful to avoid earrings with high-nickel-content posts.

As homemade broth is a key element in the WAPF diet, many members have expressed concerns about their large stainless soup kettles. To make broth properly, after all, vinegar is needed. This provides acidity and ups the risk from stainless. Large families that find glass or enamelware dutch ovens or 6-quart crockpots too small, might consider using two pots. Also stoneware inserts such as the Ohsawa pots offered by Gold Mine Natural Foods can turn big stainless pots and pressure cookers into double boilers and steamers, thereby isolating the food from the metal.

Regarding glass cookware, we must inject a note of caution. Debra Lynn Dadd, the “Queen of Green” gives it her stamp of approval, but the Green Living Q & A section of her website (http://dld123.com/q&a/index.php?cid=3156) includes sobering accounts from a few unlucky consumers whose glass cookware exploded and shattered, endangering people and pets. Over the past year, Dr. Daniel has dropped a few pans with no damage, yet lost a saucepan from the “karate chop” of a spice bottle dropped on it. It broke cleanly in two, with no shattering. Dr. Knight reports that Visions and Pyrex have a long history of safety in both laboratories and kitchens but would beware of the thinner Anchor brand products. To reduce the risk of explosion, never take a glass pan quickly from hot to cold or vice versa, do not burn it dry and never let children cook unsupervised.

Other questions have concerned water filtration systems. These often contain chrome and stainless parts, sometimes brass and copper, and even some silver and lead solder in older faucet units. The solution: water house plants first thing in the morning to purge metal leached into standing water from the lines before drawing water for drinking or cooking.

Dr. Knight and Dr. Daniel both consume a tablespoon of diatomaceous earth per 100 pounds body weight daily for maintenance as per the instructions in the article. They have also detoxed their bodies of heavy metals using supplement plans based on hard science and laboratory assessment and have extensive experience helping their friends, family and clients do the same.

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SIDEBAR

Sinbad, An Allegory

by Harvey J. Gardner

“Oh, Sinbad, you are a very lucky marmoset,” his new master chortled while overseeing the loading of provisions aboard his sleek Pearson sloop. “The finest fruits and herbs just for you. Never has a monkey’s palate been so indulged.”

They sailed the South Atlantic, Sinbad feasting on mangoes and bananas, sweet sorghum leaves and sugar cane, swinging joyfully from lines and boom. But within a few short weeks he became less playful, more fussy. Although he ate, his appetite slackened. Before long, he was overtaken by melancholy and lethargy.

His master cried out in despair, “Sinbad, for the love of God, please eat this fine ripe casava slice,” tendering the sweet fruit under Sinbad’s nose. Wearily the sad monkey took a perfunctory lick, then pushed it aside.

His mood and health worsened. Listlessness, apathy, depression overtook the once spry little fellow. When it appeared that Sinbad was near to dying his master hastily put into port to seek someone who might restore health to his beloved companion.

As the vessel slid into the slip and the hawser made tight to the mooring post a bold tropical cockroach clambered up the post, sped along the sisal line and flopped onto the deck. As he fell, the tap of his hard shell caught Sinbad’s ear, and in a most unexpected maneuver the sweet faced marmoset leapt upon the darting insect, lifted it with both hands, and, with great gusto, bit off its head.

As he eagerly munched on this seeming unusual prize, the once-lost gleam returned to Sinbad’s eyes. In virtually no time at all, he was again himself.

Moral: Unless you are a little monkey in captivity, don’t wait for others to figure out what you really need to be nourished.

 

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