The Liberation Diet
By Kevin Brown, CPT, NC & Annette Presley, RD, LD, CPT
Review by Tim Boyd
This book covers a wide range of topics—calories, lipid hypotheses, water, salt, soy, exercise, milk and other things. Many try to get the facts straight on all these subjects. Few succeed. This one actually succeeds, and succeeds well.
Some important histories are covered, including the history of the lipid hypothesis and the invention of Crisco. One of the most important keys to understanding what is really going on and what is wrong with nutrition today is understanding the history of how we got here.
There is a brief and very instructive section that explains how drugs came to dominate medicine. About one hundred years ago Carnegie and Rockefeller, who had a large vested interest in pharmaceuticals, established the accreditation system for medical schools. Only schools teaching a pharmaceutical approach to medicine received accreditation. Before that there was plenty of competition from natural, homeopathic and nutritional approaches. After that, there was very little competition.
Most Americans put a lot of faith in anyone with a degree and a lot of fancy letters after their name from an accredited school. It’s good to know exactly what that really means and how vested interests can appear to be philanthropic while influencing entire cultures and educational systems in ways that are not in our best interests.
Brown and Presley also cover what I call the birth control diet. Reverend Sylvester Graham was a preacher in the 1800s who had a thing against sex. He figured out that a vegetarian, grain-based diet reduced sex drive. He and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (also against sex) were instrumental in promoting the base of today’s government approved food pyramid.
Readers of The Untold Story of Milk by Dr. Ron Schmid will recognize a quick recap of the history of milk in the U.S. In the 1930s, salesmen went so far as to show prospective customers samples of partially digested homogenized milk and unhomogenized milk, claiming the homogenized milk was better digested. Of course, to obtain these samples, regurgitation was necessary at some point. This makes me suspect that Americans didn’t give up their raw milk due to science, safety or convenience. They were just desperate to put a stop to this sick Ralph and Earl roadshow. I give this one a thumb up.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2009.
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