The “Tweakable” Wise Traditions Diet: Making an Ancestral Diet Work for You with Sally Fallon Morell

How much fat should you eat? What about salt? And broth? Sally Fallon Morell, President and Founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation, goes over today the 11 Wise Traditions dietary principles. She emphasizes how these principles are based on healthy traditional eating practices observed around the world…and how we can apply them wherever we live today!

She explains how these ancient practices are backed by science. She reviews the “sacred foods” of indigenous peoples and goes over why they were so revered. She concludes the overview with tips for eating in such a way that sugar cravings are reduced.

Tune in for practical advice on enhancing your diet for optimal health, rooted in time-tested traditions.

Check out Sally’s blog: Nourishing Traditions

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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.

We want to choose food that nourishes us the best for ourselves and our families. What does that look like? What are helpful guidelines when it comes to eating an ancestral diet? Is this even possible in this day and age of packaged and processed foods? What’s realistic? This is episode 498. Our guest is none other than Sally Fallon Morell, the president and founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Sally goes over the Wise Traditions 11 dietary principles that are a great starting place when it comes to making healthy, nourishing food choices.

She reviews the sacred foods that were most prized by indigenous people groups. She explains how the dietary principles are tweakable, meaning that you can make them work for you, and why the Wise Traditions diet is not a diet of extremes. She goes over all of the specifics on how to get the right balance of omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 in the diet, which is the best fat to eat, and so on. She reviews why we need salt, the type of salt that’s best, and how to reduce sugar cravings. Finally, she gives us a fresh look at the timeless principles of healthy traditional diets.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to let you know that we just wrapped up the annual Wise Traditions conference. If you missed it, don’t worry. You can get access to the recordings of many, if not all, of the talks and presentations by going to Fleetwood Onsite. Go there for details. I’ll put a link in the show description so you can find it easily. Order just a few of the talks or the whole conference full of presentations, and we hope to see you in person next time. This is Hilda Labrada Gore, and you’re listening to Wise Traditions.

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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Sally.

Thank you, Hilda. It’s always great to be back with you.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is celebrating 25 years soon. You’ve established it in 1999. That’s amazing.

We just stuck to it. That’s so important, persistence.

The 11 Dietary Principles Of Wise Traditions

I want to have us revisit the principles because these dietary principles are key to what the foundation is about, right?

Yes, and I always like to say, we don’t do this in soundbites. There’s more to it than just a little saying or something. There are details that are important. We’ve always talked about our 11 principles, but we have this beautiful booklet, 11 Dietary Principles, Wise Traditions Diet, beautifully illustrated. We’d love for people to read this booklet. All the references are there.

How many of the principles are from Dr. Weston A. Price himself, and how many are some that we did research on and realized we need to add to the list?

That’s a very good question, Hilda, because numbers 1, 2, and 3 were Dr. Price’s principles, and number 11 about healthy children. So, 4 through 10 are things that we added, and we can go through them, but they are also things that you find in pretty much all traditional diets.

What if people have sensitivities or would prefer to avoid certain things? Can they still follow the Wise Traditions Diet?

Yes. This diet is very tweakable, and one of the things we don’t do is say what the proportions of macronutrients in your diet should be. No diet should exceed 20% of calories as protein because no traditional diet did, but then you have the carbs and the fats, and that’s very adjustable depending on what works for you. I would say a lot of us do better on a high-fat diet, but some people really cannot handle a lot of fat, and so they would have more of a high-carb diet. But the key thing is to get those fat-soluble vitamins, and it’s a little bit harder if you have a high-carb diet.

Interesting. I know some people say, when I tell them the Wise Traditions Diet is an ancestrally-based diet, they think, “Do I need to look at my ancestry to know what to eat?” How much does that play a part in what our diet should be, Sally?

I think there is something to that. Just for example, if you had a lot of seafood in your ancestral diet, it would be very good to include it. If you had a lot of red meat in your ancestral diet, I think it’s very important to include it, because probably your body needs a lot of zinc. So I would definitely look at your ancestral diet, but there are also some people, we have a lot of people who can’t do beef, for example, which is a shame, but some people are just going to have to leave things out.

This reminds me, too, of the work of Dr. Jack Kruse, who says your genetic material may be predisposed to living in a certain part of the world. So that if, for example, a woman of Mexican ancestry is living in Canada, she may feel the cold more or need more sunlight, actually, than she’s getting in those northern latitudes.

That could be right.

We’ll have to pay attention to that. Let’s go through the 11 principles one by one. We’ll see what we can cover.

Principle 1: Avoid Refined Or Denatured Foods

The first principle is that there were no refined or denatured foods, and I think we can all agree on that. But we also know that this is very difficult in the modern age. It means you have to really think about what you’re putting into your mouth. It doesn’t mean that you have to home-cook all your meals, because we can get foods that are quick foods that traditional people always had. Cheese is one of them. I’m very partial to cheese. Things like salami and cured meats, that’s another one that people had. You actually can do this without doing a lot of elaborate cooking, but it will be a lot more interesting if you do.

What kind of refined or denatured foods did Dr. Price come across in his travels?

Number one was sugar and foods containing a lot of sugar.

Even back then, a hundred years ago?

Yes. This is the 1930s, but sugar was really there. Refined flour—that’s another one that he really looked at because they knew how to make fine white flour, and that’s what was coming into all of these stores and things in the isolated population, because it didn’t decay. You could make biscuits out of white flour, and they lasted. The other thing that he mentions, which we sometimes miss, is the vegetable oils.

We call them industrial seed oils. Vegetable oils is just not the right term because they’re not made out of vegetables. The industry at the time said, “It just sounds so much better to say vegetables.” Industrial seed oils were coming into the diet. They had never been in our diets before, and they were pushing out, they were replacing the animal fats with a campaign to demonize the animal fats.

Dr. Price noted that when people started to incorporate these displacing foods in modern commerce, he saw that their health deteriorated.

Very quickly in the teeth. He saw the cavities and the infection and so forth in the mouth. In the next generation, the teeth were not straight, there was not enough room for the teeth.

The teeth tell the tale.

The teeth tell the tale. If you see somebody with naturally straight teeth, it’s a sign that their whole body has been correctly nourished while they were growing and putting everything together. If the teeth are crooked, then it’s a sign that there was a lot missing in the diet, and other organs will be affected as well.

Wise Traditions | Ancestral Diet | Sally Fallon Morell — Ancestral Diet: If you see somebody with naturally straight teeth, it’s a sign that their whole body has been correctly nourished while they were growing and putting everything together.

We can’t even tell who has naturally straight teeth because a lot of people wear braces when they’re teenagers and then get them off, and they have that appearance, but maybe not really the strong body that would come with it.

They tend to have a narrow jaw, even though the teeth might be straight.

Interesting. Principle number one is pretty easy to understand, no refined or denatured foods.

By the way, pasteurized milk is a refined and denatured food. It’s very important to remember that.

It’s not at all how it is in its natural, raw state.

Exactly, and you might have a whole grain breakfast cereal, but that’s not a natural food.

It’s denatured.

It’s very denatured.

That’s where that word comes from. Interesting. When it’s overly processed, it’s probably not going to be good for us.

Honestly, Hilda, most people, that’s all they eat. The breakfast is cereal with pasteurized skim milk and sugar, and lunch would be a McDonald’s meal. The only thing slightly natural in that meal is the beef. Everything else is a denatured food.

It makes me so sad. I think people think organic or real food is so expensive compared to fast food or things on sale at Costco, but you either pay for your food, or you end up paying for your medical expenses. Let’s go on to principle number two.

Principle 2: The Importance Of Animal Foods

Number two. This is a very controversial one. It was Dr. Price’s greatest disappointment. There were no vegan or even vegetarian diets that he looked at. He’d hoped to find one, and he had to admit that all the healthy people he studied had animal foods in their diet. Not only that, they went to great risks to obtain the animal foods. They went to a lot of trouble. It would have been much easier just to have plant foods, but they knew they needed these foods. All the sacred foods, the foods so important for having healthy babies, they were all animal foods.

Liver and butter.

Liver, butter. Fish eggs were another one. Organ meats.

Dr. Price thought he would find some peoples who were focused on or whose diet was primarily plant-based, and he just didn’t find them.

He didn’t find them. Another important, very important food was shellfish. For example, in the islands of the South Pacific, the people that lived in the interior of the islands traded with the people along the coast so they could get the shellfish. Even when they were at war with each other, they still traded to have the foods they needed.

It was that important?

That important.

Fascinating. Animal products are important to include.

People have criticized us for taking such a strong stand about the need for animal foods in the diet, but it’s not just yourself you’re talking about. It’s your offspring. They need those animal foods, and children need a nutrient-dense diet as they grow. Plant foods are not nutrient-dense foods. It’s nice to have them in the diet, and they taste good and so forth, but compared to meat, what’s in apples is a pittance of what’s in meat.

That’s right, and you’ve stated before, if we thought, “I can get iron from spinach, for example, so I’ll eat that instead of red meat of some sort,” you’d have to eat quantities and quantities of it to even get what you would get from an ounce of liver, for example.

That’s right. When you’re eating all that spinach, you’re getting a lot of oxalates, which are very hard for the body to handle and might cause kidney stones. There’s a lot of toxins in plant foods.

Good point. What’s principle number three?

Principle 3: Focus On Nutrient Density

This is the most important principle, and basically, all the other principles can be fit into this principle, and this is the principle of nutrient density. The diets were very high in minerals, at least four times more of all of the minerals in the traditional diet compared to the diet of his day, the American diet. This includes calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, iodine, all of the minerals, and very high in what he called the fat-soluble activators, the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K. This is where we have put most of our emphasis. How do we get these vitamins to maximize them in the food? What kind of foods do we have to eat to get these three really important vitamins? Here’s the spoiler, it’s animal fats and organ meats.

Which actually are amazing. I feel like this kind of eating is so satisfying. As you’ve pointed out before, traditional diets maximize nutrients, and modern diets minimize them.

That’s exactly right.

We’re like, “We added a few vitamins and minerals to the cereal.” That’s nothing compared to what real food has.

Exactly, and also that they’re absorbable. There’s the same amount of calcium in raw and pasteurized milk, but when you pasteurize the milk, you kill all the enzymes that ensure that you absorb 100% of the calcium. For example, when you soak your grains, you liberate all the minerals. You make sure they’re easy to absorb so that they become a nutrient-dense food.

People say, “You are what you eat,” but you actually are what you absorb.

You are what you eat, but you actually are what you absorb and assimilate.

What you assimilate. Many of the nutrients in plant foods, especially grains, are blocked by various blockers, phytic acid, this kind of thing. When we understand the preparation techniques, we can turn these foods that are problematic into foods that are nutrient-dense and easy to digest.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Yeah.

What’s principle number four?

Principle 4: Raw And Cooked Foods

Number four has to do with cooking. Some animal foods were eaten raw in all cultures, whether it’s raw dairy, raw shellfish, which people still eat, or raw meat. Not all the animal foods were eaten raw. They ate both cookweed and raw. This is a segue into what we should cook and what we should not cook. We don’t cook dairy products because the proteins and the enzymes are so fragile in these foods. We eat animal foods raw and cooked. Vegetables should mostly be cooked because they’re very hard to digest. Grains need to be soaked and cooked. For each type of food, we need to understand how to prepare it so that we get the most from it.

It’s funny because I think most people would think it’s the other way around, eat your vegetables raw and eat your meat cooked.

We should eat some of our meat cooked because cooking makes the proteins more available in meat, but cooking destroys the B6, and that’s one of the big things we get from meat.

Fascinating. We don’t need to go all raw or all cooked. We have to have a mix.

Hilda, that’s a really good point. This is not a diet of extremes. It’s not an all-raw diet, not an all-cooked diet, not all meat, it’s not all plants. It’s in the middle. I think that’s good news. That’s the way people want to eat.

It’s true.

They want to have meat, veg, and carb on their plate. What we do is show them how to prepare these foods, to raise these foods. Of course, we’re big advocates of pasture-based farming, to raise them and prepare them and put good butter on them and so forth so that we get the most that we can get from these foods.

I love it.

That’s when they taste good.

What’s principle number five, Sally?

Principle 5: The Value Of Lacto-Fermented Foods

Principle number five is interesting. This is something that’s really catching on. This is the principle of lacto-fermentation. Every traditional culture, healthy culture, without exception, had one or more fermented foods in their diet. There are no exceptions to this rule, whether it’s the Eskimos with their fermented fish or the South Sea Islanders with fermented taro. These are raw foods. These are foods that have been fermented, and you get all the good bacteria and enzymes and so forth. It’s really fun to see how science has caught up with this principle.

Thirty years ago, the only good bacteria was a dead bacteria, and we’ve completely changed our view. Science has opened up new worlds for us, that the bacteria are our friends. We need to support and replenish those bacteria every day, and that’s what the fermented foods do. Just to give you an example, sauerkraut, if you eat a tablespoon of sauerkraut with every meal, there’s more probiotics in that tablespoon of sauerkraut than there is in a whole bottle of probiotic pills.

If you wild ferment, in other words, getting the bacteria from the atmosphere, there are even more strains, I imagine.

Yes, there absolutely are.

You’re right, this is catching on, which is really gratifying.

Somebody just sent me an email about how some big company, I forget, it might have even been Pfizer, I don’t know how they’re getting into fermented foods. This is the latest thing, like they just discovered it.

We know it’s a wise tradition.

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What’s the next one, Sally?

Principle 6: Proper Preparation Of Grains And Seeds

We get into grains and seeds. For so many people, grains are a big problem, very hard to digest. That’s because they’re not following the principles that traditional people did. Grains were always soaked and then cooked. It could be sourdough bread, or it could be soaked oatmeal that you cook the next morning, or soaked flour that you make into pancakes. Believe me, these foods will taste better, and they won’t be so hard to digest.

Didn’t you say that when you were a young girl you had muesli or oatmeal all the time and you didn’t feel well?

When I was a little girl, my mother made oatmeal, and I would get a toxic shock from it. I thought, well, I must be allergic to oatmeal, and then I learned to soak my oatmeal overnight, and it didn’t happen. There’s toxins in grains, and they need to be neutralized. But the other story I have about that was I went to a party, actually, and it was a friend of mine. They were serving granola, and I’ve never eaten granola before, and it was just delicious. I went home and started making granola, and I made it with butter and maple syrup. I got so sick, Hilda, and I didn’t realize what it was until I read a book about grains. It’s the granola. I stopped eating granola, and it took about two weeks to recover.

I bet a lot of people can’t quite put their finger on why they don’t feel well. It might have to do with this very principle, that they’re not properly preparing their grains, beans, nuts, and seeds.

That’s right. Somebody brought to our farm, it was soaked, like a coffee cake kind of thing, but it was sprinkled with oats on top, and I ate a piece. I ate a few of those little flakes, and I really did not have a good day. I didn’t feel well. If you don’t know what to look for, you can’t make those connections.

What principle are we on?

Principle 7: Choosing The Right Fats

We get into the principle of fats. What kind of fats did these people eat? There was a big range in how much fat they ate. It varied anywhere from 30% to 80% of the diet calories in the diet. The Eskimos had an extremely high-fat diet, and the hunters on the plains selected animals that were fat. They always ate the fat, but then you had the agrarian cultures in Africa, for example. It was a fairly low-fat diet.

We don’t tell you how much fat to eat, but we do tell you what kind of fat to eat, and that’s mostly saturated fat. That would be the fat of animals, the fat of birds. In Africa, they had palm oil, and in the southeast, they had coconut oil, and these are very highly saturated. The types of fats we need are mostly saturated fats, and this goes completely against what we’re being told, to avoid saturated fats.

These fats actually contain important nutrients for the body.

They’re the animal fats, not the palm oil or the coconut oil, but the animal fats are great sources of vitamins A, D, and K. Bird fats, duck fat, goose fat, this was highly prized, and that’s our best source of vitamin K2, which is Dr. Price’s activator X.

You can get the proper cognitive function and the proper digestive function, everything works better with these fats.

Exactly, and our latest challenge is the EMF, the 5G, and so forth. What we’re beginning to realize is this, your protection against this is having a lot of structured water in your body, and what structures the water is the hydrophilic surfaces of your cell membranes. If your cell membranes have a lot of saturated fat in them, that’s what they’ll be. You’ll be highly protected against the EMF. It hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of these people who are extremely sensitive to EMF are vegetarians. They’re not getting enough saturated fat.

Butter is better for everything?

Principle 8: Balancing Omega-3 And Omega-6 Fats

Yes. Number eight is about balance. It’s funny, Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats was the first book to introduce this concept, and a lot of people talk about it. The unsaturated fats come in two types, omega-6 and omega-3. We don’t need much of them. We don’t need to eat a lot of them, they’re in our food, but you want a balance of omega-6 and omega-3. For example, if you eat an egg from a pastured chicken, you’ll get that nice balance, but if you’re eating a conventional chicken, you’ll have way more omega-6, and same with if you’re eating a lot of industrial seed oils, they’re almost 100% omega-6. You have people who go the other direction and do a lot of fish oil, and they’re getting too much omega-3.

It’s funny because I used to make up a little mnemonic thing like “omega-6 makes you sick, omega-3 sets you free,” but it’s not quite that way.

As always, a little more complicated. You don’t want too much omega-3, and you don’t want too much omega-6.

You need the balance, and one time you told me if you balance your food from land animals and food from the sea, you’ll be fine.

That’s right. You want land and sea. In fact, Dr. Price noted that the people with the best bone structure had seafoods in their diet.

I’ll just think of it as surf and turf.

Surf and turf, perfect.

What’s the next principle?

This one is salt.

I love it.

Principle 9: The Importance Of Salt

All traditional cultures had salt. In fact, one really interesting thing, I just read that in the South Seas, the people in the interior grew the taro, and they traded with the people on the coast, and one of the things they traded was seawater. Some water from the ocean, so that’s how they got their salt, the one they cooked in it. All these cultures had salt.

One of the theories I have is why the Native Americans succumbed to so much disease was that the salt trade was disrupted. They weren’t getting salt because they did have a continent-wide salt trade, but we definitely need salt. We need a teaspoon and a half a day of salt to satisfy the sodium requirements, and one of the great things about modern life is that we can get salt when it’s cheap. What’s not so good is you have these people telling you not to eat salt.

We definitely need salt. We need a teaspoon and a half a day of salt to satisfy the sodium requirements. One of the great things about modern life is that we can get plenty of salt.

It’s such a recommendation. It’s like a mantra from the physician.

There’s a new additive called cinnamic, which people don’t realize is being added to the food so they can reduce the salt content. We have no idea what this does to the brain, this additive, but what I can tell you is if you’re not getting enough salt in your food, even though it tastes salty, your body knows better, and you will eat and eat until you get enough salt. I think it’s going to contribute to a lot of obesity, and the other part of this is we recommend unrefined salt that has all the minerals in it and a lot of trace minerals in salt that we don’t get anywhere else, and these have been taken out when the salt is refined.

Some people get worried if they get sea salt that it might have microplastics from the sea. I guess you can’t recommend a particular brand, but we need to pay attention to where we’re sourcing it.

We have a lot of brands in the shopping guide, and some of them are mine salts, but Celtic sea salt, which is from the sea, has tested their salt, and they, which is like a trace, hardly anything, plastic.

Which is good. We want to make sure to get the best source possible, so principle number ten.

Principle 10: Benefits Of Bone Broth

Number ten has to do with cooking bones. Making gelatinous bone broth. I won’t say it was in every culture we looked at, but it was in most of the cultures. The basic way people cooked is they had a big pot or a big shell or baskets lined with pitch, and they put water in there and either cooked with a fire or hot rocks. They put all the parts of the animal in, including the bones and the gelatinous parts. If it was a bird, it would be the head and the feet, and that way you’re not only getting protein when you eat meat, but you’re getting the collagen.

Collagen is popular.

Collagen is a big thing. The collagen balances the meat proteins because your body is 50% collagen or more. The proteins in your body are over half collagen, and collagen is what holds you together and gives you strong joints and tendons. There’s a membrane of collagen around the muscles, so we definitely need that collagen, and so I think a broth is melted collagen. What Western cultures have done is make broth into the key to gourmet cuisine and beautiful sauces. I’ve eaten sauces and soups.

Which is so delicious. I think it’s good to note that broth isn’t difficult to make, because I think I used to buy the little boxes in the grocery store, and it’s so thin and watery compared to what I can make on my own.

An MSG in it too. It’s easy to make broth. All you need is a slow cooker, and I alternate between beef broth and chicken broth. It’s just second nature to me. It’s not hard.

It’s so wonderful in the mornings on a cold winter day.

One thing that broth is really good for is the elderly. So, my husband’s not getting any younger, and I find that the elderly have trouble chewing meat, and when you give them broth, it stretches the protein, goes a lot longer, and it’s very satisfying for them to have a broth. Make a soup with broth and then chop the meat up really fine. That’s perfect.

Awesome. We’re on to the last principle. You said this is one that was also one that Dr. Price noted in his travels.

Principle 11: Preparing For Healthy Babies

Hilda, this is so amazing. These cultures were scattered all over the world. They had no communication with each other. They had no science, but they all knew that to have healthy babies, you need to prepare for them and that you need certain nutrient-dense foods. And when he looked at these foods, they were foods really high in, you guessed it, A, D, and K. Let’s just talk about vitamin A for a minute, because the science confirms this, and it’s just such a wonderful way. When you get pregnant and the embryo starts to grow, in the first few days, it’s just stem cells. Those are undifferentiated cells, and then the stem cells start to differentiate, and they become heart cells and lung cells.

What causes that differentiation? It is vitamin A. Vitamin A is the concert master of fetal development, and in traditional cultures, they would have been eating a lot of foods rich in vitamin A, like liver, fish heads, or whatever, butter, before you get pregnant. Once that process starts, you have a lot of vitamin A available, and there won’t be any birth defects. Everything will go according to plan. If you wait until you’re pregnant and then say, “I’m going to take a prenatal or something,” it’s too late. That differentiation, that building of the different organs, has already started. The first organ to start is the heart, and if there’s not enough vitamin A available, the heart will not develop properly.

Vitamin A is the concert master of fetal development.

That’s what happened to me, as you know. I think my mother’s vitamin A stores were low, and I was born with a hole in my heart.

It’s very common. Not only that, not only did they prepare for pregnancy and continue these highly nutrient-dense foods throughout pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the growth of the child, but they also understood that this was the time when you needed the most nutrition. You can improve your health when you’re older by changing things, but you can’t change your structure, that’s already happened.

That’s when these nutrient-dense foods are just vital. But the other thing was they spaced their children. It was considered shameful to have a child more than once every three years. If you were in a village in Africa or the South Seas, you couldn’t go anywhere else. You didn’t want to be shamed to fight your village when they’re pointing their fingers at you saying, “She didn’t care about having healthy children.”

Why do you think the spacing is important, Sally?

The spacing allows the mother to recover her nutritional stores and gives her time to build up with the preconceptual diet and so forth. And don’t forget, she’s also breastfeeding, and this is a big stress for the mother and nutritional stress, so she needs to get to the point where the baby is not getting so much of its diet from the breast milk, and then do the preconceptual diet to prepare again.

I didn’t know about this principle when I was pregnant with one kid and I was nursing another, and I was like, “I’m feeding three people right now,” and it did feel like a lot.

You don’t need to do that to yourselves. One thing I’m concerned about is this idea that we should be exclusively breastfeeding. Traditional cultures did, not all, but most of them breastfed for a number of years, or at least until they became pregnant with a second child, but they didn’t exclusively breastfeed. In fact, in some cultures, they started solid food at one month, and certainly by six months, they were all giving solid food.

Do you think there’s a resistance to giving the child food because we think breast is best?

Yes, so we’ve gone from one extreme to the other. We’ve gone from no breastfeeding to exclusive breastfeeding, and what happens is the babies become anemic because by six months that baby needs extra iron, and breast milk is not high in iron. It’s got a little, but not enough for this developing baby. The first foods for infants tend to be high-iron foods like liver or egg yolks or something like that.

How To Start Following The Wise Traditions Diet

As we start to wrap up, Sally, what do you think is important for people to keep in mind when they consider the wise traditions diet? What if part of it doesn’t appeal to them? If I’m like, “I don’t know about ferments,” or “I don’t have those in my diet,” or “I can’t balance the omega-3s and omega-6s”?

Just do the best you can. Start somewhere. I think the first thing is go from processed food to real food. Processed food to real food, and most of these will happen by themselves.

That’s right, over time. Number one is probably a good one to start with.

Get off the sugar, and it’s very interesting. I wrote an article about this. There was a study done where they got these rats addicted to sugar, had sugar water, and they kept going for the sugar water. They gave the rats a diet that was 40% large, and they didn’t want the sugar water anymore. The researchers were very upset about this. They called it a chronic high-fat diet. The rats didn’t want their palatable sweet foods, but most of us are struggling with sugar addiction, and it’s really good to know that if you just increase your fat content, these cravings will eventually subside.

Most of us are struggling with sugar addiction and it’s really good to know that if you just increase your fat content, this craving will eventually subside.

Very good to know, very encouraging in this day and age where sugar is ubiquitous.

It’s just ubiquitous, and it’s hard to resist.

Final Thoughts And Encouragement: Add More Butter

I want to ask you the question I love to pose at the end. It might be related to these principles or not, if the listener could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

Eat more butter. Don’t be afraid of butter. It’s the most perfect fat in nature. It is the fat for the growth and development of all mammals. It can’t be anything wrong with it for children or adults, and if it comes from grass-fed animals, so much the better. Most supermarkets carry grass-fed butter. This is another thing that’s new, and it’s really good. We should celebrate this. I couldn’t get grass-fed butter when my kids were growing up. Now, there are several brands.

That’s excellent. Thank you for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you, Hilda. Always great to be with you.

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Our guest was Sally Fallon Morrell. Check out her blog at Nourishing Traditions, and I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this podcast on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can find me at Holistic Hilda.

For a podcast review from Apple Podcasts, Nourish the Littles had this to say,
“This podcast is a gem and so needed in a world overloaded with misinformation about health and wellness. Everybody needs to listen to it and share it with your friends. Thank you for producing fabulous episodes week after week and bringing the message of the foundation to a wider audience.”

Nourish the Littles, it is our pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to write this review. I would love it if you too could leave us a review. I’m telling you, these make a difference for potential listeners. Thank you so much for listening, my friend. Stay well, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Sally Fallon Morell, MA

Sally Fallon Morell is best known as the author of Nourishing Traditions®: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. This well-researched, thought-provoking guide to traditional foods contains a startling message: animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels.

Sally’s lifelong interest in the subject of nutrition began in the early 1970s when she read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. Called the “Charles Darwin of Nutrition,” Price traveled the world over studying healthy primitive populations and their diets. The unforgettable photographs contained in his book document the beautiful facial structure and superb physiques of isolated groups consuming only whole, natural foods. Price noted that all of these diets contained a source of good quality animal fat, which provided numerous factors necessary for the full expression of our genetic potential and optimum health. Sally applied the principles of Dr. Price’s research to the feeding of her own children, and proved for herself that a diet rich in animal fats, and containing the protective factors in old-fashioned foodstuffs like cod liver oil, liver, raw milk, butter and eggs, make for sturdy cheerful children with a high immunity to illness.