FOREWORD

SALLY FALLON MORELL

Paleo and ancestral diets are in the news these days, with dozens of books on the subject, plenty of media attention, blogs, and conferences, and even special paleo labels and paleo vitamin pills! But confusion reigns as to what actually constitutes a paleo diet or ancestral diet. Is it the lean-meat, low-fat diet proposed by authors Loren Cordain and Robb Wolf? Or is it a high-fat diet that embraces bacon, liver, and lard? Should grains be included in paleo or ancestral diets? And what about dairy products?

The first researcher to describe the diets of nonindustrialized peoples was Weston Price, D.D.S., in his groundbreaking book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He called these diets “primitive” diets. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Price traveled to remote corners of the globe to study the health and diets of isolated groups. His investigations took him to remote Swiss villages and a windswept island in the Outer Hebrides. He studied traditional Eskimos, Indian tribes in Canada and the Florida Everglades, islanders of the South Seas, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, and Peruvian and Amazonian Indians and tribesmen in Africa.

He studied rates of tooth decay, which were invariably very low in isolated communities. He also described dental and facial structure, noting that primitive peoples universally had straight teeth and well-developed cheeks and jawbones. He noted the absence of chronic diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, and heart disease, and he marveled at the reproductive health of the people who lived in these villages and tribes, where women easily gave birth to sturdy children. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration provides a fascinating record of his findings, and includes the photographs he took.

The difficulty has been in making Price’s findings accessible to the public, for even those individuals who take the time to read his book come away with questions. All the primitive diets he described were so different from one another, they observed. How then could Price’s discoveries be translated into practical dietary advice for modern people? Some groups, like the Eskimos and northern Indians, consumed a very high-fat diet containing almost no plant foods. African agriculturists, on the other hand, lived on a plant-based diet; the animal foods they ingested were limited to insects and small fish. Dairy foods and grain provided the bulk of calories in the diet of the Swiss villager; Gaelic fisherfolk of the Outer Hebrides ate mostly seafood and oats. The most varied diets were found in the South Seas, where an abundance of fruit, vegetables, and tubers thrived in the warm climate. Despite this, however, animal foods formed the basis of the diet of these people—everything from shellfish to shark to pig. Some groups had lots of fat in the diet, others had plenty of carbs.

From these cursory descriptions, can we come to any conclusions about how we should eat today in order to be healthy?

The way to answer this important question is to look at the basic underlying principles of healthy ancestral or traditional diets. In the concluding chapter of his book, Dr. Price formulated four basic precepts; additional principles can be gleaned from other researchers. With all of these principles in mind, we as individuals can create a diet that works for us—one containing foods that are available to us, that we can afford, that we have time to prepare, and, most importantly, one that we like to eat.

The first principle is obvious: the diets of isolated primitive or traditional peoples contained no refined or industrially processed food—no sugar or white flour, no industrial seed oils, no partially hydrogenated fats, no extruded breakfast cereals, no pasteurized or homogenized milk, no canned or irradiated food, no artificial sweeteners or additives. Thus, the first step that anyone wishing to improve his or her health needs to take is to remove these items from the diet. Price referred to these foods as the “displacing foods of modern commerce.” They were devoid of nutrients—in fact they often deplete the body of nutrients—while displacing the kind of nutrient-dense foods the body needs to maintain good health.

The second principle was Dr. Price’s greatest disappointment: all primitive diets contained animal foods. A few diets were 100 percent animal foods, a few contained low amounts of animal foods, but most were somewhere in the middle. Dr. Price had hoped to find a culture that was healthy and lived exclusively on plant foods, but no traditional culture practiced a purely vegan diet.

The third principle is the most important. Dr. Price took samples of traditional foods home to his laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, and tested them for their vitamin and mineral content. The best way to summarize the main characteristic of traditional diets is “nutrient-dense.” Price found that these diets contained at least four times more minerals (calcium, magnesium, copper, iron, etc.) compared to the American diet of his day, and high levels of the water-soluble vitamins—vitamin C and all the B vitamins.

The real surprise, however, was the very high levels of fat-soluble vitamins found in ancestral diets—at least ten times more true vitamin A, vitamin D, and vitamin K₂ compared to the American diet of his day. Which foods provide these vitamins? Not the foods that modern man is used to eating. Certain seafood, such as fish eggs, fish liver oils, shellfish, and oily fish are good sources. In land animals, we get these vitamins from egg yolks, butterfat, organ meats, and animal fats—especially when these animals have grazed outdoors on green grass. Sunlight maximizes the level of vitamin D in our food, and green grass provides the precursors (carotenes and vitamin K₁) for animals to make true vitamin A and vitamin K₂. These three fat-soluble vitamins are key to every process that occurs in the body—from bone health to an optimistic outlook.

These vitamins are also germane to fertility and growth, which brings us to the fourth principle that Dr. Price described. Primitive peoples consumed special nutrient-dense “sacred” foods in preparation for pregnancy, during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and during the period of growth. These foods were particularly rich in the fat-soluble vitamins and included butter from cows eating rapidly growing grass in the spring (Switzerland), cod heads stuffed with oats and chopped cod liver (Outer Hebrides), fish eggs (consumed in many parts of the world, including Alaska and Peru), raw milk from cows eating rapidly growing green grass (Switzerland and Africa), shark-liver oil (South Seas), liver and other organ meats (wherever land animals are consumed), and fish-liver oils, such as cod-liver oil (Europe and America). These foods also support healing at any age.

Thus, according to Dr. Price, the key to good health is not just found by avoiding processed foods, but also by making an effort to include special nutrient-dense foods in the diet. That means overcoming the modern strictures against cholesterol and saturated fat, because most of the sacred foods are indeed high in these demonized substances. A politically correct low-fat diet will not confer good health, whatever the so-called experts may claim.

Additional fundamental principles can be gleaned from other researchers. One principle involves cooking. Should we cook our food? Some diet gurus claim we should only eat raw foods, but all human cultures cooked some or most of their food—especially plant foods like grains, legumes, tubers, and fibrous vegetables. It is also true that some traditional cultures ate some of their animal foods raw—as raw seafood, raw meat, and raw dairy. (Raw animal foods are our best source of vitamin B₆).

Furthermore, all diets contained “super raw” foods in the form of lacto-fermented vegetables, meats, fish, and dairy foods. Lacto-fermentation, a process of preserving foods, greatly increases vitamins, enzymes, and beneficial bacteria. One serving of genuine sauerkraut contains ten times more vitamin C than the equivalent amount of raw cabbage, and as many beneficial bacteria as a whole container of probiotic pills. Recent discoveries about human gut flora show us why lacto-fermented foods like sauerkraut, natural pickles, yoghurt, kefir, sour cream, and lacto-fermented beverages like kombucha are so important in the diet. They nourish our internal biology, thereby supporting good digestion, protecting against toxins and pathogens, and even enhancing mood and mental health.

What about grains and legumes? The paleo community insists that these have no place in the diet. But Price described several healthy cultures that consumed grains and legumes, and we now know that so-called primitive groups actually cultivated and harvested wild grains. Science tells us that grains and legumes are hard to digest. Primitive peoples knew this instinctively, which is why they subjected these foods to careful preparation methods involving soaking or souring. Soaking and souring are processes of fermentation that neutralize the nutrient-blocking and irritating qualities of these foods. Grains and legumes may best be avoided in those with compromised digestion, but foods like soaked and cooked oatmeal and rice, genuine sourdough bread, and soaked and long-cooked beans provide variety and nourishment to the modern diet.

Traditional communities that used milk and milk products—whether from cows, goats, sheep, water buffalo, reindeer, or camels—always consumed them raw, straight from the animal, or they fermented them into cheese, yoghurt, kefir, and similar products. These products came from healthy animals raised outdoors and fed on natural food—not confined to the indoors and an unnatural diet. These traditional milk products provide superb nutrition, and they are easily digested.

Traditional cultures also made good use of bones. The Eskimos ate the softened bones of fermented fish, and hunter-gatherers ground up the bones of small animals and added them to their food. But mostly, bones were cooked to make broth, which the American Indians considered superior to water. Today Asian cultures consume bone broth at every meal. Science validates the long tradition of broth as a healing food. Special amino acids and the components in broth help the body heal, support detoxification, contribute to good digestion, and provide the building blocks of cartilage and collagen.

Finally, all traditional cultures consumed salt—whether sea salt, mined salt, or the naturally salty blood and urine of their animals. Salt is crucial to digestion—the chloride component of salt is needed to make hydrochloride acid for protein digestion, and the sodium portion of salt activates enzymes needed for carbohydrate digestion. Salt is the basis of cellular metabolism, allowing us to have a different biochemistry on the inside and the outside of the cell. When traditional cultures could not find salt locally, they traded for it and/or travelled a long way for it.

Today, sixty years after the publication of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the name Weston Price has become better known. The first author to make his work accessible to the public was Dr. Ron Schmid, in an earlier edition of this book. Now enlarged and updated, Primal Nutrition presents the principles of healthy traditional diets along with Dr. Schmid’s vast clinical experience. A diet based on these principles should be the main focus of any therapy. These diets have worked for millions of years, and they continue to work today.

SALLY FALLON MORELL is the president and treasurer of the Weston A. Price Foundation. She is also the president and owner of NewTrends Publishing, serving as editor and publisher of numerous books about healing and nutrition. Her lifelong interest in the subject of nutrition began in the early 1970s when she read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. She is the coauthor 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 and necessary factors in the diet. Morell is also the coauthor of Eat Fat, Lose Fat: The Healthy Alternative to Trans Fats; The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care; The Nourishing Traditions Cookbook for Children; and Nourishing Broth: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for the Modern World.