The Nutrient Gap: Why Traditional Diets Nourish Us More With Sally Fallon Morell

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Traditional diets maximized nutrients. Modern diets minimize them. Our current health crisis stems from our departure from traditional food and health ways – both how we raise our livestock and grow our produce, to what we do to it before it reaches our plate.

Sally Fallon Morell, the President and founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, explains where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do to rectify it.

 

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Sally Fallon Morell.

What did traditional health ways consist of at one time? How can we incorporate them into our modern lives? This is episode 545. Our guest is Sally Fallon Morell, the President and Founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Sally explains exactly how traditional diets maximize nutrients, why they prioritize them, and how we today minimize them.

She gets into the nitty-gritty of how to shift away from our processed foods, MSG, refined sweeteners, and refined salt, and how to get back to bone broth, foods from fertile soil, and traditional ways of preparing them, so that they nourish us deeply. Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to follow the Wise Traditions podcast on the platform of your choice. This way you won’t miss a thing. Better yet, download our Wise Traditions podcast app to your phone. It’s available on iOS and Android devices. Thanks for tuning in.

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Welcome to Wise Tradition, Sally.

Thanks, Hilda. It’s always great to be back.

Weston A. Price Foundation’s Mission Of Nutrient Density

The crux of the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation is nutrient density. Help me understand that term.

People ask, “What’s the commonality in all these different diets of healthy people all around the world?” They were all different. The diet in the South Seas is not going to be the same as the diet in Alaska, but the commonality is nutrient density. They were very high in minerals, B vitamins, and vitamin C, but especially high in the fat-soluble activators, vitamins A, D, and K.

Dr. Price discovered this, not just because he traveled the world, but because he sent samples of the diets back to his lab in Ohio.

Yes, in Cleveland, and had them analyzed for vitamins and minerals.

The traditional diets were much higher in the fat-soluble activators and in the minerals than the diets of the people in the United States at that time.

The discrepancy would be even greater today.

I imagine so.

We’re talking about building this beautiful facial structure, beautiful, well-formed bodies, plenty of room in the sinus cavities, and broad palates with straight teeth. That’s all mineralization. You want lots of minerals in the diet, but you want to absorb those minerals. That’s because of the fats.

The healthiest people on the planet, you can tell by looking at them and their facial structure, if they’re well-nourished or not. I’ve had all those things.

If they’ve been well-nourished during the period of infancy and growth.

It needs to happen even in utero.

Yes, pre-conceptual. These diets were practiced before conception, during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the growth of the child.

How is it that in our developed world, in our developed countries, we’ve gotten so far from the idea of nutrient density? We’re not looking for nutrient density. We’re looking for the cheapest foods we can afford.

The cheapest and the most convenient. We’ve tried to make things very convenient, off the shelf. You don’t have to cook. They’re going to taste fine. We end up with nutrient deprivation in our food.

Depleted Soil: The Root Of All Unhealthy Food

It all starts with the soil, doesn’t it?

It does. We have this wonderful brochure. We’ve printed over a million of these brochures. On page 10, we have a nice little comparison of then and now, healthy primitives and not so healthy moderns. The very first one is that, in the primitive diets, the foods were grown on fertile soil. Our food is mostly grown on depleted soil. A perfect example of this is what the Africans did when they came to a place. They could see it was going to rain. They lit fire to the grass and burned all the old grass away. They also did this in Australia. When the rains came, the grass came up really green. They knew that that milk was much richer in nutrients. That was the milk that they drank before conception.

They had the practices that they knew would make the soil rich, which would make their animals, in turn, also nutrient-dense.

The milk, the meat, the blood, the organ meats, everything was much richer in nutrients. One of the things we do that’s depleting our soils is we’re using glyphosate. That’s a chelator. It binds up the minerals in the soil. They might be there, but you can’t get to them.

I knew that glyphosate was damaging to our health. I didn’t realize it was damaging to the soil’s health.

Yes, it depletes minerals.

Anything in contact with that depleted soil is going to be more nutrient-poor.

That’s exactly right. Most of the foods we eat come from that kind of soil, unless you’re making an effort to buy from farmers who are doing things to enrich the soil. The best way to enrich the soil is what we call managed grazing, which moves the animals across the land every day. They’re not depleting the soil by eating too much. They’re always adding manure to the soil.

 

Is that Allan Savory’s concept of holistic management?

Yes. This is what Joel Salatin does. We urge our members and our followers to purchase their milk, meat, eggs, and chicken from farms that operate this way.

It’s not just that traditional soil or traditional diets were based on this healthy, fertile soil, but some can also get food from places that are doing it right.

Yes, but it just doesn’t happen. You have to understand why. You have to go out and make an effort to purchase your food from these farms.

AJ Richards says, “Shake the hand that feeds you.” Find that local farmer and see what their practices are. Make sure they’re aligning with these traditional ways.

I like that. Shake the hands that feed you.

Yes, instead of bite. What’s another characteristic?

Finding Tons Of Nutrients From The Nasty Bits

The second one is really important. When they killed an animal in traditional practices, the first thing they ate was the most nutrient-dense parts of the animal. They ate the brain, the liver, the marrow, and the tongue. Those spoiled easily, so they ate those first. They are definitely the most nutrient-dense. Liver is 10 to 100 times more nutritious than muscle meats. This is one thing that always happens in traditional cultures. They don’t let anything go to waste.

Liver is ten to a hundred times more nutritious than muscle meats.

They have ways of making these parts taste better. I say ways of making awful taste good. They ate all these nasty bits first. We don’t eat them at all. In fact, they’re usually sold by the butchers to the pet food industry. The pets get them, but we don’t. There’s a crying need for ways to get these organ meats back into our growing children. We need what I call a super hot dog, where we’re putting the liver, the heart, the kidneys, and so forth back into the hot dog.

I’ve tasted hot dogs made this way. You would know the difference. They’re delicious. It’s much easier to get these organ meats in Europe because people still eat these kinds of sausage. Another thing they did not let go to waste was the blood. The blood has all the vitamins and minerals in it. We need blood sausage, blood pudding, the kind of foods that our European ancestors grew up with.

Some people are still eating these, but in the US, we’re so far removed from these.

You can’t even buy blood sausage.

If you say awful, people don’t know what you’re talking about. Janine Farzin told me that the term comes from off-bits. They were the off-bits or off-cuts.

Yes, just like Scrapple is the scraps. By the way, that is one thing that you can get that has all the organ meats in it. It’s delicious. It’s a cultural food in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s Scrapple. You read the label on it. It has liver in it and other bits and byproducts. That’s a very good way to easily get your organ meats. Just have Scrapple for breakfast.

Traditional diets are characterized by eating nose to tail and all of these nutrient-dense bits. What are modern diets characterized by, in contrast?

In contrast, the modern diets, if you’re even eating meat, a lot of people think they shouldn’t eat meat, but meat is a very good food. It’s usually the skinless chicken breast or the lean meat. The fats are important and have lots of nutrients in them, so you need those parts. If you’re eating a steak, eat the steak with the fat. If you’re eating a chicken, use a pastured chicken with all the skin on it.

Abandonment Of Animal Fats And Use Of Industrial Seed Oils

That’s the good part. I love the skin. Again, contrasting the traditional diet with a modern diet, what’s next on the list?

This is a huge change that’s come about in the last hundred years. That is the abandonment of animal fats and the use of industrial seed oils. The industrial seed oils have no nourishment for us. They have no vitamins. They’re harmful to our bodies. They’re not giving us what we need. The animal fats, especially if they’re from grass-fed animals, contain the A, D, and K, which were so high in the traditional diets that Dr. Price studied. We need to get our animals back on pasture. We need to eat the fats and the organ meats because they contain A, D, and K as well.

I guess it was the low-fat push in the ’70s that got us on this trajectory of adopting more seed oils as if those were heart-healthy.

Yes, and that was complete propaganda. A lot of people are realizing this now, but meanwhile, we’ve been starving. When that happens, when you’re not getting the nutrients you need, each generation gets weaker. We know this from the Pottenger cat experiments. The first generation shows what I would call adrenal problems, allergies, asthma, rashes, that kind of thing. The second generation shows chronic disease, heart disease, cancer, and so forth. In the third generation of these cats, the personalities of the animals changed. The females became very aggressive, and the males became docile. Does that sound familiar?

When you are not getting the nutrients you need, each generation gets weaker.

It does.

There was no fourth generation. They did not breed. We are on our third generation of using vegetable oils instead of animal fats. What do we have? Widespread infertility. The birth rate is plunging.

It’s like we’ve turned that experiment with the cats into a real-life study with all of us, because people are struggling with fertility and all this.

Yes. Very often, if they get back on our diet, lots and lots of butter, lots of egg yolks, cod liver oil for vitamins A and D, meat, and especially liver, they get pregnant. The man and the woman have to do this.

A friend of mine was like, “I’ve got to talk to Sally. This is working too well.” She’s on her fourth kid. That’s a good thing.

Yes, that’s what we want.

The Dangers Of Using “Marxist Agriculture”

Next on the list of traditional diets versus the modern diet.

This goes back to our farming techniques. Not only have we depleted our soils, but we also put our animals in confinement. They’re eating grains and dry grass. They’re never getting the nutrients of green grass or of the sun. They’re getting vitamins A, D, and K in their feed, but it’s the wrong form. It’s not a very utilizable form. Putting the animals into confinement is another step down, another step that depletes nutrients and usually adds a lot of toxins, too.

Why did we do that? Who gave us that idea?

I call it Marxist agriculture. This was Karl Marx, wanting the industrialization of agriculture, the end of small farms. Big industrial farms. That’s been imposed on us through the Department of Agriculture. I don’t think they would believe you if you told them that they were promoting Marxist agriculture, but they are.

The big guy gets bigger, and the small guy disappears.

Except that we’ve reversed this trend. We have lots of farms that put their cows back on grass and their chickens back on grass. Again, we encourage people to patronize these small farms.

I went with my daughter and husband to do a farm crawl in Montgomery County, Maryland. We went to this little museum, which I thought was so cute. They told us that there used to be 300 to 400 dairy farms in this area in Maryland. Now, there are only two.

Yes. There used to be 6,500 dairy farms in Maryland. Now, there’s less than 200.

Maryland as a whole, this is so sad. Like you said, the trend is reversing.

There’s actually a small increase in small farms. The farmers doing it this way are selling their products.

People are clamoring, as you said, for more dairy density.

What’s saved us is the internet, because now we can find these farms. On our website, Real Milk, you can go on and find raw milk anywhere. The farms doing the raw milk are also doing the managed grazing, the chickens on grass, and so forth.

All the platforms, social media, I think one time you said to me, it was the uprising of the crowd, which I thought was cute. We want to have our animals not in confinement because that was a traditional practice.

How Pasteurization Destroys Enzymes In Milk

We’re talking about going from nutrient-dense to nutrient-poor. These are just all of the things that have taken us away from a nutrient-dense diet. The next one is one of my favorite subjects, pasteurization. Raw milk, especially raw milk from cows on pasture, is a very nutrient-dense food. Every single vitamin and mineral in raw milk has a special enzyme that ensures 100% assimilation. No other food is like this. When you pasteurize, all those enzymes are destroyed. You only absorb maybe a fraction of what’s there. That is going from a nutrient-dense food to a nutrient-depleted food.

If not like a dead food, basically. All of those live enzymes are knocked out. At this museum, they were making it sound like a good thing to avoid TB or all these health issues. This is why pasteurization came about. This is what they said at the museum. What would you say to someone who’s like, “That was needed to get rid of the pathogens?”

I wouldn’t even say that. I would say that raw milk has components that kill pathogens. It’s a very safe food as long as it’s produced under conditions of fair cleanliness and the cows are outside on pasture and not cooped up in barns. They’re talking about the decline in dairy farms. That’s why. When they get into that pasteurization model, they don’t get enough for their milk to pay for their expenses. That’s why they’ve gone out of business. You can say pasteurization is a great thing, but it’s also destroyed the dairy industry.

As you pointed out to me as well, when people were concerned about TB or tuberculosis, saying that people were getting sick because of the raw milk that they were drinking from these animals, these animals were not in clean, sanitized conditions.

That’s not the point. It’s a false theory. What they call bovine TB is a completely different sickness from human TB. There’s no passage from one to the other.

That was the reason given for pasteurization.

They say it’s bird flu, salmonella, or whatever.

How Grains And Legumes Can Become Unhealthy

They keep up the propaganda. It’s so sad. Apparently, our ancestors knew what to do with grains and legumes.

Grains and legumes can be very nutritious foods, but they can be non-nutritious if they’re not prepared correctly. If you eat whole grains without preparing them correctly, there are a lot of mineral blockers and even protein blockers. Parts of them are indigestible. Traditional cultures always had special preparation techniques for grains that involved soaking, sprouting, fermenting, and making sourdough bread.

This was a long process that broke down all these anti-nutrients, released the minerals, made them easier to absorb, and increased the vitamins in the grains. You can make grains into a very nutritious food, or you can eat grains in a way that blocks the nutrition. Some grains are negative nutrition. Granola, muesli that hasn’t been cooked, and breakfast cereals that have been extruded are negative nutrition because they’re so bad for you.

Not only can you not absorb what nutrients are in there, but there’s stuff in there that’s harmful to your digestion.

Yes, especially to the bacteria in your gut.

How many people take hikes and grab a granola bar or think, “This is a healthy breakfast. I’ll have a little muesli?”

So hard to digest. Grains need to be soaked, and then they need to be cooked well. They need to be soft.

This is a lost art.

Yes, it’s a lost art, although it’s coming back. It’s just one other factor that reduces the nutrient density of our food and makes these grains like hollow foods.

How Soy Foods Are Destroyed By Industrial Process

What’s the next contrast?

Soy foods were used in some cultures in very small amounts and fermented for up to three years. Soy foods are extremely hard to digest. They recognize this. They use soy foods mainly for flavorings like soy sauce and things like that. Soy foods are industrially processed. It doesn’t get rid of the anti-nutrients. They’re consumed in large amounts. These foods are harmful to the pancreas, harmful to digestion, and harmful to the thyroid gland.

 

Even if you don’t think you eat soy foods or soybeans. I was at an airport and looking at the packages, thinking, “I’m hungry. What can I find?” A lot of different bars and things had soy lecithin in them. It’s an ingredient in all these different processed foods.

How MSG Messes Up With Your Hormones

That will fry your thyroid gland. Another characteristic, it’s interesting, we find this all over the world. People made broth with the bones. That broth was very nutritious. It was melted collagen. It feeds your own collagen and supports digestion. Broth supports a good mood. In processed food, they get that taste with MSG and artificial flavorings, which is a true negative. MSG is an additive that makes things taste like meat, but it’s harmful to the hypothalamus, which is the master gland.

The master gland is the seat of impulse control. It tells us when to make certain hormones. The hypothalamus is what produces oxytocin, the cuddle hormone that makes us feel affectionate toward our children, our neighbors, and so forth. That’s wiped out. If you’re eating a diet with a lot of processed food, you’re going to be getting a lot of MSG. It is extremely harmful, whereas if you were using real broth, you’d be getting all the nutrients in the broth.

Just to be clear, the little bouillon cubes, that’s not the broth you’re talking about.

No, that’s pure MSG.

There’s broth in cartons now in the grocery store, but that still doesn’t compare with the real deal.

No, and it’s very thin. When you put it in the fridge, it doesn’t gel. You want broth that you’ve cooked for a long time, and it gels when you chill it down. That means there’s a lot of collagen in there. That’s what you want.

I’m pretty sure Sarah Pope has done some videos that are on our website on how to make broth, and also on the YouTube channel. I’m hoping people can find that for tips on that.

Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth With Whole Sweeteners

Sweeteners. We’re not purists here. Many cultures had sweeteners. The American Indians had maple syrup and maple sugar. They traded that maple sugar all over the continent. Many cultures had honey, and a lot of calories in their diet came from honey. In the tropics, you had coconut sugar. There were sweeteners in these diets, but they were whole sweeteners with all of the minerals in them. Sweet foods tend to be high in minerals. Maple syrup is very high in minerals.

Coconut has magnesium, right?

Yes. We have sweeteners where all those minerals are taken out. That’s what it means to be refined. It’s not like we’re saying, “You can’t ever have a sweetener in your diet.” We have a sweet taste in our mouths. It has to be satisfied, but we want to satisfy with the sweeteners that are traditional and that are full of nutrients.

For things like stevia, agave, or even xylitol, what does the foundation think about that?

Those are not natural sweeteners. They were not in traditional diets. There can be some harmful consequences for those.

We’ve got to pay attention. Go back to the traditional sweetened things.

How The Fermentation Process Elevates Meat

Every traditional culture, without exception, did fermentation. Especially, they fermented vegetables to make sauerkraut. They fermented meat, too. The fermentation process increases the nutrients, but it also puts all those wonderful bacteria in there. They’re like nutrients, too. When they get in your gut, they produce vitamins and minerals and help digest your food. We have pickles in our culture, but they’re pasteurized, heated, and processed.

The fermentation process of meat increases nutrients and puts all kinds of wonderful bacteria in it.

Sometimes, pickles are just a cucumber set in vinegar, or something. It’s not the same thing as the fermentation process.

Exactly. We need to get back to the real sauerkraut that has not been heated and has not been pasteurized.

I’ve heard that it’s rich in probiotics and live enzymes, just like the raw milk, things that actually help our digestive system as opposed to hindering it.

I’ve heard of many miracle stories of digestive problems being cured simply by eating sauerkraut with every meal.

What’s that thing you always say about a tablespoon full of sauerkraut?

It’s got more probiotics in it than a whole bottle of probiotic pills.

It is because those usually just have one strain. Let’s get the live, real deal.

There’s much more in the sauerkraut.

Good word.

Why Soft Drinks Will Never Be Healthy

Beverages like soft drinks are a scourge. I see children drinking soft drinks. I think parents are crazy to let their children do this. We were never allowed to have soft drinks in our house. My parents knew better. The traditional peoples had soft drinks, but they were lacto-fermented. A good example is kombucha. Also in Africa, they were the masters of fermentation with these very sour, what we would call near beers, low alcohol, but high in lactic acids, and fermented beverages. We need to get back to these. A lot of people are, and making their own. We need to get the fermented grains. Beverages made with fermented grains, we need to get those back into the diet.

I love that you’re not negating the fact that people might crave something bubbly, like you said earlier, or crave something sweet. That’s natural. There’s a natural way to address that craving.

The traditional soft drinks were sour. They were full of lactic acid. They were full of good bacteria, full of B vitamins, and full of vitamin K. They were extremely refreshing because they were carbonated.

How We Have Ruined Our Salt

These vitamins that you’re talking about are good inside and out. I guess I’m thinking about how some people put on vitamin K topically on their skin to make it smooth. What if you were ingesting it? How much better would you look flowing from the inside out? What about the role of salt?

All traditional cultures had salt. We don’t tell you, “You have to eat a salt-free diet.” How horrible the food was going to be. It was unrefined salt with all of the minerals in it. What have we done with our salt? We’ve ruined it, just like we’ve ruined our sugar and our soft drinks. The salt is refined and has aluminum added to keep it from caking. We need to go back to the unrefined salt. That’s not hard to do. There are many brands available.

How Modern Cooking Techniques Destroy Nutritional Value

In the traditional diet, the vitamins were natural. They were in the food. They were balanced with all the cofactors. People are taking vitamins that are made in factories, isolated vitamins, not balanced by the cofactors. It’s not the same thing. We have cooking techniques. Typically, in traditional cultures, the cooking was slow and low. It was underground pits. It was in pots, but it was very slow cooking. Most people cook in the microwave, which destroys the food. It destroys the nutritional value. Not a good thing. The microwave is banned in Russia. They don’t allow them.

I didn’t know that.

They did studies. They found what they did to the food and what they did to the people who ate the food. They don’t allow them.

I’ll never forget talking to a scientist friend of mine. He was like, “Hilda, microwaving is just like cooking. When you cook food over a heat, it changes the composition of the food. It’s doing the same thing.” How is it different, Sally?

The microwaving changes the composition of the water, and regular cooking doesn’t do that.

It makes it so that it’s difficult to digest, I guess?

Why Hybrid And GMO Crops Are Lower In Nutrients

Yes. It’s like a foreign substance. Finally, the last thing is that they use traditional seeds and open pollination, which makes for far more nutrient-dense food. We now use hybrid seeds and GMO seeds. These typically result in a crop that is lower in nutrients than the traditional one.

Help me understand this. Let’s say I’m going to a farm, and they say, “We’ve got this wonderful variety of tomato.” Likely, it’s hybridized to look a certain way and appeal to me a certain way. Is that bad?

It’s not the worst thing you can do. Hybridization is not the worst thing you can do. The worst thing you can do is spray that tomato with Roundup or a pesticide, but there is more nutrition in the non-hybridized. I have a garden. I grow vegetables. You can get organic, non-hybrid seeds for any type of vegetable.

You can plant your own. Level it up. Don’t just go to the farmer’s market. Don’t just meet the farmer. You can be the gardener.

It’s not for everybody. Gardening is hard work. You take everything that the traditional people did. Maximize the nutrients in the food. Make the foods more nutritious and easier to digest. It is easier to assimilate those nutrients. Everything we do to our diet in the modern world minimizes the nutrients in the food and makes all the nutrients much harder to absorb.

We’re going in the opposite direction.

That’s the reason we have a health crisis.

Why You Should Drink Raw Milk

Instead of maximizing the nutrients, we’re minimizing them. This little pamphlet, the Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets, you can get by going to the Weston A. Price Foundation website. Click on Free Info Pack. We’ll mail this to you so you can find that chart and other valuable information. I want to ask you, Sally, the question I love to pose at the end. If the audience could just do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

I would probably recommend that they drink raw milk. It’s such a nutritious food. It’s a healing food. It heals the gut. It prevents asthma, allergies, and earaches. It tastes delicious. You don’t have to do anything to it. You just drink it. You’re replacing a food that is really hard to digest and highly allergenic. That would be the very first thing I would do.

 

I love it. Drink raw milk. Thank you, Sally.

Thanks, Hilda. Thanks for having me.

It’s been a pleasure.

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Our guest was Sally Fallon Morell. You can visit her website, Nourishing Traditions, to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. A simple reminder to follow this show on the platform of your choice. I also have a show review from Apple Podcasts from Lis14, who said, “I love all the natural living advice I get from this show.” Lis14, thank you. Thank you so much for leaving us a review.

Not everybody does that. If you do, and when you do, I will be happy to give you a shout-out as much as I can. We have thousands of reviews, actually, but I’m happy to give yours a shout-out if you do it soon. Go ahead, go to Apple Podcasts, give us a bunch of stars, tell folks why the show is worth reading, and read to the very end of upcoming shows to see if you get a shout-out. In the meantime, thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

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The content on this show is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for the advice provided by your doctor or other healthcare professional. It is not intended to be, nor does it constitute, healthcare or medical advice.

 

About Sally Fallon Morell

Sally Fallon Morell, MA, President, is best known as the author of the best-selling cookbook, Nourishing Traditions®: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. She also founded A Campaign for Real Milk (www.realmilk.com). At its inception in 1998, the website listed only twenty-eight sources of raw milk in the U.S. Today there are over two thousand, with many hundreds more not listed. Raw milk is the fastest growing agricultural product in the US; this growth has been largely stimulated by the information provided at realmilk.com.

She lives in Brandywine, MD, is the mother of four and has four beautiful grandchildren, all brought up according to Nourishing Traditions® principles.

 

 

Important Links

• Weston A. Price Foundation
• Nourishing Traditions
• Real Milk
• Stocks and Soups Video by Sarah Pope – The Weston A. Price Foundation

 

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