Timeless Principles Of Healthy Traditional Diets (Part 2)

For the last few decades, the government has been telling us what to eat and what not to eat. Somehow their advice to eat low-fat, limit cholesterol, avoid red meat, and the like hasn’t done us any favors. We are less healthy as a populace than ever before. These principles have unfortunately led us in the wrong direction. Sally Fallon Morell is the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the author of “Nourishing Traditions,” “Nourishing Broth,” “Nourishing Diets” and more. Sally understands what it takes to nourish people well. The secret lies in returning to ancestral traditions.

Today, Sally contrasts the government’s guidelines with timeless traditions. Sally debunks the erroneous advice with ancestral wisdom and science to back it up. She reminds us how to maximize nutrients like our ancestors did to return to and maintain excellent health.

Visit her website: nourishingtraditions.com

Become a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Order our free info pack.

Check out our sponsors: Earth Runners and Paleo Valley.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Timeless Principles Of Healthy Traditional Diets (Part 2)

Episode Transcript

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

For the last few decades, the government has been telling us what to eat and what not to eat. Somehow their advice to eat low fat, limit cholesterol, avoid red meat and more haven’t done us any favors. We are less healthy as a populace than ever before. These principles and their guidelines have unfortunately led us in the wrong direction. This is episode 320 and our guest is Sally Fallon Morell, the President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the author of Nourishing Traditions, Nourishing Broth, Nourishing Diets and more.

Sally understands what it takes to nourish people well. The secret lies in returning to ancestral wisdom. This is part two of the series based on the Weston A. Price Foundation’s most popular brochure, the Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets. Sally contrasts what government guidelines have to offer and these timeless traditions. We’ve heard, “Avoid red meat, cut back on eggs, restrict salt,” and the like. Sally debunks each recommendation with ancestral wisdom and science to back it up. She reminds us how to maximize nutrients like our ancestors did to return to and maintain excellent health.

The Weston A. Price Foundation has over 12,900 members. We’re nearly at 13,000. Join us and help us get over that hump. Membership comes with its advantages. You get a quarterly journal. You get to be a part of some exclusive Zoom calls and much more. On top of that, you help support our work of research, activism and education like this show. Join now for only $30 a year. Go to WestonAPrice.org and click on the Member Yet? button. Use the code POD10 to join for only $30 for the year. Thank you in advance. Welcome to the family. I’ll let you know when we hit 13,000 so we can celebrate together.

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Visit her website: NourishingTraditions.com

Become a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Order our free info pack.

Check out our sponsors: Earth Runners and Paleo Valley.

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Welcome to the show, Sally.

Thanks, Hilda. Thanks for having me back.

This Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets brochure is so comprehensive. That’s why we had to do part two. We might even do a part three. Why do you think this brochure is so popular?

This is how we launched the Weston A. Price Foundation. We call it the main brochure and we felt it very important to put all our principles in writing so people could understand exactly where we stood on different issues. We’ve expanded it over the years and also there is a membership application in the middle. Once they read the brochure, they’ll be happy to join. This is our statement of facts and principles for the foundation.

We’re going to pick it up now with what’s wrong with politically correct nutrition? In other words, what are they telling us out there that is bad advice?

We have gone up against the dietary dogma of the medical profession and the dietary professions, which is backed by the processed food industry. We have five “What’s wrong with politically correct nutrition?” statements here. The first one is, “Eat lean meat and drink low-fat milk.”

When you say you’re going up against dieticians and the government, aren’t these the people that we should be relying on?

That’s what most people do rely on without realizing how compromised these agencies are. They were infiltrated by the edible oil industry and the food processing industry back in the 1950s and 1960s. They got people on their boards. In other words, the food processing industry had representatives on the boards of these organizations to make sure that what they said would promote process food. What we have is dietary advice that’s pushing people in exactly the wrong direction that they need to go.

Even if we didn’t know what’s behind it, we could observe that people following the guidelines aren’t doing well health-wise.

They try to follow what I call the puritanical diet, which is low fat, no salt and it’s a horrible diet. You can’t stay on it. That creates the cravings that push them into what I call pornographic foods. What we’re promoting is neither one. Not the puritanical diet and not the pornographic foods but just a good, wholesome, healthy, satisfying diet that includes the things that have always been in the human diet. It includes animal fat, salt, carbohydrates, meat, animal foods, all of the things that human beings have eaten for thousands of years.

Also, they have thrived on. Let’s talk about one of the first things. What are they saying out there that is off the most?

WT 320 | Healthy Traditional Diets — Healthy Traditional Diets: Your body needs saturated fat. If you don’t eat enough saturated fat, your body has a backup plan, which is to make it out of carbohydrates.

We’re at “What’s wrong with politically correct nutrition?” The first one is, “Avoid saturated fat.” Saturated fats are the fats that are solid at room temperature, butter, lard, tallow. These are the fats that compete with the vegetable oil industry, that competes with the margarine, spreads and shortenings that are used in processed foods and commercially fried food. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your body needs saturated fat. If you don’t eat enough saturated fat, your body has a backup plan which is to make it out of carbohydrates. If you’re not eating enough saturated fat, enough butter, cooking in lard using tallow, you will crave carbohydrates. It will be very difficult to stop that craving unless you give the body what it needs which are the right kinds of fats.

I see this trend among young people. They’re buying snack food after snack food, trying to fill or satisfy that hunger that only saturated fats can fill. Let’s talk about the next one. They say, “Limit cholesterol.” What’s wrong with that, Sally?

Cholesterol is found in animal fats, organ meats and all of these very healthy foods. The amount of cholesterol you eat has nothing to do with the cholesterol level in your blood. Even the most ardent proponents of lowering cholesterol will admit this. Limiting cholesterol is particularly harmful to babies and children because they can’t make cholesterol the way adults can. They need cholesterol for growth, for the development of their brain and hormones.

A lot of us have misunderstood the role of cholesterol. The fact that they say limit it when in actuality, nothing that we eat that has cholesterol in it increases our cholesterol levels is mind-boggling.

It’s all about promoting processed food. They can make processed food without using animal fats. What do they hone in on? The two things that we get from animal fat are saturated fat and cholesterol. They’ve made these into demons. We think it’s better to eat the foods with all the vegetable oils in them.

They cost more too. Don’t they?

Animal fats cost more to put into processed foods.

What I meant is it costs us more in terms of our health to eat the food that they’re giving us. They say, “Use more polyunsaturated oils.”

This is what’s in the industrial seed oils like soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil and safflower oil. Human beings have never consumed a lot of these polyunsaturates. They’re extremely dangerous. We need a little bit which we get from the foods we eat, and when they’re in the foods, they are safe, healthy and important for us. Once you start to take these polyunsaturates out of the seed through the horrendous heat-intensive industrial processing, then these oils become extremely dangerous for us. We say, “Don’t use them. Don’t eat foods that contain them.”

That’s practically every snack food on the store shelf. Another thing they say is, “Avoid red meat.” Now they’re saying this more than ever.

This has become very shrill that we should avoid red meat. You have to ask, what is the reason for this? Red meat is the most nutritious of any kind of meat. Red meat has more saturated fat, more cholesterol in it. I think that red meat is probably a very low-profit item for the industry. Also, it’s the only food where they haven’t captured it from beginning to end. Chicken, turkey, eggs and fish are all farmed from the day the animal hatches until when they slaughter it. Beef starts out on the open range. The first half of beef production is done by ranchers and they have not been able to seize control of that portion of the industry.

Are you saying it’s not very profitable for them?

It’s not very profitable for the food industry. There are so many problems and everybody recognizes, with the industrial processing of meat, the feedlots, the way it’s handled, everything is so filthy and cruel to the animals. We all agree with that but we need to patronize the farms and farmers who are doing it right based on pasture.

Didn’t the World Health Organization some years back say that there was a correlation between red meat consumption and poor health or a higher incidence of cancer?

They may have said that but it’s not true. They say that beef consumption is associated with colon cancer and those studies are completely fraudulent. We have written about them in the journal. What they were calling beef were vegetable oils. Vegetable oil consumption is associated with more colon cancer but beef consumption is not.

You told me one time that there are companies out there that will give you the results you want for any study you want to take on. Money talks to these companies and they can get the results that they want if they pay for it.

Beef is healthy, nutrient-dense food. It’s got lots of fat in it so it tastes delicious. It’s nourishing and satisfying. One of the hallmarks of a healthy free society is that they eat red meat. Also, studies have shown that children who get red meat show leadership ability. This is terrible propaganda against the wonderful food.

Speaking of wonderful food, eggs are next on the list. I love eggs and they say, “Cut back on eggs.”

Americans eat less than half the number of eggs that they ate in 1900. We didn’t have all these horrible diseases in 1900. Eggs are a powerhouse, especially the yolks. We should be eating more eggs and supporting the farms that raise the chickens appropriately outside on greens grass.

Eggs are great for families on a budget, aren’t they?

Even Weston Price said, “You can get all the protein that you need with one egg a day.” That’s true. What we need to emphasize are the fats. You add cream to your scrambled eggs and cook them in butter. That’s a wonderful breakfast for anybody.

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Another thing they say is, “Restrict salt.”

It’s so incredible. Human beings need 1.5 teaspoons of salt per day to satisfy the requirements for sodium and chlorine. In 1900, we ate three teaspoons of salt per day and we weren’t suffering from heart disease, cancer and all these diseases. We have a salt taste in our mouth for a reason and that is we’re supposed to put salt on our food. To not get enough salt leads to horrendous problems.

Including headaches.

Your body rots from the inside without enough salt. Nothing can work in your body without enough salt. You can’t digest your food. Your brain and cells can’t work. We need salt and we recommend the unrefined salt so that you’re getting trace minerals and magnesium at the same time.

Why did salt get maligned? I get why eggs did because they contain cholesterol. Why did salt get pushed aside?

You can only wonder. It’s hard to say because salt is so important for our health. It’s in the Bible, “You are the salt of the Earth.” It’s something that’s good and important.

People use salt in expressions like, “Worth your weight in salt,” and the word salary comes from salt also. Another thing they say is, “Eat lean meat and drink low-fat milk.” They are still saying this.

Children in schools only get low-fat milk. They get either skimmed milk or flavored milk which are loaded with sugar but they’re all low-fat milk. The idea is that if you give this fat to the children, they’ll get fat. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, in studies with pigs, which have a very similar digestive tract to humans. When pigs got skimmed milk, they gained weight and fat. If you give whole milk to pigs, they won’t gain fat. This is another terrible piece of advice. It’s genocide for our children when they’re not getting the fats they need from the milk and meat.

The next politically correct advice we get is to limit fat consumption to 30% of calories.

That’s too low for most people. That’s the absolute minimum that you find in traditional cultures. You might find a few African cultures that have only 30% of calories as fats, and then they have to eat lots of carbs so their bodies can make the fats out of carbs, the fats that the bodies need. The range of calories from fat in traditional cultures is between 30% and 80%. Most people do better at the higher range as a percentage of calories.

Surprisingly, this is one of the few things that people are starting to debunk across the board. At least that’s what I see in keto and paleo circles. People are starting to embrace fat and realizing how satiating it is and how nutrient-dense it is.

Traditional cultures never ate lean meat. They knew it was bad for them. When you eat meat, you need to eat meat with fat.

Another bit of advice we’ve gotten is to eat 6 to 11 servings of grains per day.

This comes from the dietary guidelines. It means that people usually end up eating lots of white flour. We’re not against grains. We think grain should be part of a diet but 6 to 11 servings are too much. It means if you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, you’re eating almost four servings of grain with each of those meals. That’s way too much. You need to eat some grains. That’s fine. They need to be properly prepared.

This makes me think of the food pyramid that was revised years ago to the MyPlate. Do you know if that recommendation changed with the MyPlate?

I don’t think they specifically say how many servings of grains you should get. The MyPlate is still something like 55% of calories is carbohydrates or probably even more. It’s still 30% fat and 55% carbs. That’s 15% protein.

“Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day.” What’s wrong with that? Most people would agree with that one.

You need to be careful that they’re mostly organic. Fruits and vegetables get lots of sprays. That’s not for everybody. Some people can only do one serving of fruit a day. It’s too sweet and too filling for them. It’s a very individual thing. This is not one size fits all. If you’re eating 6 to 11 servings of grain and 5 servings of fruit a day, that’s a lot of carbs.

There’s hardly room for anything else. Did I tell you about the time I went to Kenya? I was talking with a woman and she said that they had taken our guidelines. We’re trying to tell the people there to eat 5 to 6 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. She was like, “How could they? They don’t live that way. They don’t have the land where they’re doing that thing to grow these fruits and vegetables.”

If you had a banana a week, you’d felt lucky. Fruits and vegetables are luxury items. It’s great to have them in the diet but you can live without ever eating a piece of fruit or vegetable.

That makes me so happy to know because I’m not a big fruit or vegetable girl. “Eat more soy foods.” Do they say that?

There was a big push for soy foods. It’s died back because we have warned people how dangerous these soy foods are. They are loaded with isoflavones which is plant-based types of estrogens and they cause endocrine disruption. They’re also very hard on the thyroid gland and hard to digest also.

A lot of people go to soy without even this recommendation because they’re looking for meat substitutes.

For example, the Impossible Burger is made with genetically modified soy and full of Roundup. Soy foods have not taken off. They have not met the expectations of the industry and that’s a good thing.

Let’s wrap up with a little comparison of traditional diets and modern diets.

We have this on page 10. This is, “Everything we’re teaching in a nutshell.” Everything they did in the traditional diet is aimed to maximize the nutrients in the food and to make the foods more digestible, in other words, to make those nutrients more available. Everything we do in the modern diet minimizes the nutrients in the food and makes them have a longer shelf life or more convenient. We won’t do them all but number one is about the organ meats. When you go to traditional culture and they kill an animal, it doesn’t happen very often but they eat the whole animal, every organ and the fats. They cook the bones to make broth. They eat the blood. We need to figure out ways of making this acceptable to the Western palate. The Europeans are very good at this. They have organs pâté, sausage and things. We need to do this as well because organ meats are 10 to 100 times more nutritious than muscle meats.

We’re so focused on the muscle meats, “Give me that chicken breast. Let’s have the ground beef burgers.” That’s just muscle meat.

The muscle meat is fine as long as you’re eating with the fat, skin and make a broth with the bones but you do need that extra boost from the organ meats. You might eat chicken but have a little chicken liver pâté as well.

Let’s touch on also the soil. How is the soil different? In other words, the food that we grow now is not as nutrient-rich. Some say it’s because of the soil.

The soil is very important. They have nutrient-rich soil. If we’re doing agriculture in the right way, we’re constantly adding to the nutrients of the soil. The way we do modern agriculture is not doing that.

The mono-crops and all don’t revitalize the soil in any way.

Secondly on this list is the traditional cultures ate the natural animal fats, whereas we’re eating processed vegetable oils. Their animals were on pasture in the past and now we have animals in confinement, especially chicken, fish, turkeys and eggs. We are big promoters of dairy products, raw or fermented. Unfortunately, our dairy products now are pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized which makes the nutrients unavailable to the people drinking them. It turns the proteins in the dairy products into allergens that are very hard to digest.

No wonder so many people are allergic to dairy and lactose intolerant. Is there anything else on here that we should point out?

If the grains were soaked or fermented and made into sourdough bread, that increases the nutrient content of the grains several folds. It releases the minerals so they’re available and gets rid of all the difficult-to-digest components of the grain. We’re not against grains but grains need to be properly prepared.

What a contrast from how they ate and how we eat now, but because of the Weston A. Price Foundation, we are turning a corner.

I hope so. It’s nice to be able to go into a health food store and buy lard. Many people are following our 50% pledge, which is to spend 50% of their food dollar on direct purchases from farmers and artisans. I hope that that continues.

Thank you for this time. We’ll see if we get to part three on this.

We’ve been very slow going through this flyer or pamphlet but I do recommend that everyone read it. You can ask us to send you a copy and we’ve almost produced one million. We’re getting close to one million.

Help us make it to a million. Order yours now. Thank you again, Sally.

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For our review from Karen Downey. She says, “I am obsessed with this show. I am an ER nurse and I’ve struggled during 2020 in the culture of illness that has been created. I feel like the medical community is doing more harm than good sometimes. It’s so hard to be a part of that when I want to help my patients release fear, breathe and embrace their innate ability to heal. It’s refreshing to learn words of wisdom about health and nutrition. I have been implementing various things into my life and sharing episodes with others. It also helps me to take care of myself so I can better serve my patients and share bits of advice with them. I also just ordered from Ancestral Supplements. I can’t wait to get started. God bless you all.” Karen, thank you for this glowing review. It means a lot to us. We are putting this out because we want to make a difference for each and every person whether you’re in the medical field or not. Everybody from the farmer to the homesteader, to the teacher at school, we love you. Thanks for reading. Stay well. Hasta pronto.

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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. 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 Fallon Morell is founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and editor of the Foundation’s quarterly magazine. 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 is also president and owner of NewTrends Publishing, serving as editor and publisher of many fine books on diet and health, including other books in the Nourishing Traditions® series.

Her latest book, co-authored with Thomas S. Cowan, MD, is The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (including “Coronavirus”) Are Not the Cause of Disease (Skyhorse Publishing 2020).

In 2009, Sally and her husband Geoffrey Morell embarked on a new venture: they purchased a farm in Southern Maryland. P. A. Bowen Farmstead is a mixed-species, pasture-based farm that produces award-winning artisan raw cheese, whey-fed woodlands pork, pastured poultry and pastured eggs. The farm does not use corn, soy, GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, hormones or antibiotics.

Sally received a Bachelor’s Degree in English with honors from Stanford University, and a Masters Degree in English with high honors from UCLA. She speaks French and Spanish. Her interests include music, gardening, metaphysics . . . and of course cooking. She lives in Brandywine, MD with her husband Geoffrey Morell. She is the mother of four and has four beautiful grandchildren, all brought up according to Nourishing Traditions® principles.