THE STUDY OF traditional diets from around the world reveals the fallacy of modern diet plans—whether the low-protein, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet promoted by government agencies or the high-protein, low-fat, low-carbohydrate diets advocated by major spokesmen for “paleo” or “ancestral” diets. These and other approaches—raw food, vegetarian, juicing, blood type, metabolic typing, gluten-free* and other fad diets that come and go—are dietary schemes that share little with the way human beings have eaten for thousands of years.
Given the bewildering variety of traditional diets, is it possible to come to any conclusions at all about how to eat? In fact, we can—it is possible to formulate basic principles to guide us through the maze of modern food choices. And eating according to the principles of traditional diets does not mean we have to eat weird foods like insects, seal oil, fish heads and fermented bones. There are modern ways to obtain the nutrients we need using foods that appeal to us—and, more importantly, appeal to our children.
THE FIRST AND FUNDAMENTAL principle of traditional diets is that they contained no industrially processed or refined food. In Dr. Price’s day, the list of processed food ingredients included white sugar, white flour, canned condensed milk, canned foods and—just coming on the market—industrial seed oils made from cottonseed and corn. The list is much longer today. In addition to white sugar, we have various refined sweeteners including corn syrup, maltodextrin, sugar alcohols and high-fructose corn syrup; refined white flour appears in breads, pasta, crackers, cookies and pastries; and dangerously rancid industrial seed oils,* which form the basis of all processed foods—chips, crackers, bread, pastries, candy bars, cereals, fried foods, margarines, shortenings and spreads. The average Westerner gets a major portion of his calories from these empty ingredients.
We’ve also figured out how to process the life out of wholesome foods like milk—through pasteurization and homogenization—and grains—through the extrusion process to make breakfast cereals.
Add to these the thousands of additives that permeate everything from baby food to fruit juice to bread—many of them not labeled, and Americans consume about nine pounds of food additives per year, including artificial sweeteners, MSG and other artificial flavors, artificial colorings, dough conditioners, preservatives, starches, antifreeze† and fiber. These give taste, color and texture to insipid processed foods and lengther their shelf life. Also lurking in our foods are industrial and agricultural chemicals, pesticides and herbicides, including those inserted into seeds through genetic engineering.
To enumerate the harmful effects of industrial food ingredients is beyond the scope of this book, but the evidence clearly indicts all these products as bad for the human body, incapable of supporting good health. Healthy traditional people never ate these things, and as soon as these food-like substances were introduced into their diets—often by well-meaning missionaries—their health began to decline.
SECONDLY, ALL TRADITIONAL DIETS contained animal products. This was Dr. Price’s greatest disappointment. He had hoped to find an isolated culture living entirely on plant foods, but had to admit that all traditional people ate animal foods and, in fact, went to considerable trouble and risk to obtain animal foods.‡ Some groups, such as the Eskimos and Inuit of the far north, ate a diet composed almost entirely of meat and fish, while other groups, including agriculturists in Africa and the slave classes in the South Pacific, consumed only small amounts of animal foods.
Most cultures from around the world consume a diversity of animal foods—meat, poultry, eggs, fish, shellfish and insects, and have a particular advantage when milk products are included in the diet;* at the same time, most cultures also consume high-carbohydrate foods in the form of grains or tubers—in fact, is several cultures we have explored, the high-carbohydrate food is considered the “food” or the “meal,” while animal foods form the basis of the accompanying relish or sauce.
This is good news for modern peoples—we do not need to adopt an extreme diet to re-create the dietary habits of healthy traditional groups. A healthy diet contains both animal foods and high-carb plant foods, and avoids the fringes of too much animal food or too much plant food.†
One important point: the animal foods were always consumed with the fat—milk with its cream, eggs with the yolks, meat and birds with their fat and fatty organs, fish and shellfish when they were fattest. Fats and organ meats provide vitamin A and many cofactors needed for protein assimilation; too much lean meat leads to “protein poisoning”‡1 or, as the American Indians put it, “rabbit starvation.” Modern practices of consuming lean meat, skimmed milk, egg whites without the yolks, skinless chicken breasts or protein powders can lead to immune system dysfunction, fatigue, chronic pain, frequent infections, reduced visual acuity and many other symptoms of vitamin A deficiency—even cancer and heart disease.
Again, this is good news! Lean meat and skinless chicken breasts are inedible, egg whites without their yolks are disgusting, and skimmed milk is thin and insipid. Low-fat and fat-free foods, as well as protein powders, are processed with numerous chemicals and additives to make them palatable. Fortunately, we don’t have to eat any of these yuck foods to be healthy. Quite the contrary: full-fat foods are not only satisfying but also support good health in many ways; they should be the basis of any diet.
Animal foods provide nutrients that plant foods do not contain—vitamin B12 and the fat-soluble vitamins A,§ D, and K2. Moreover, minerals such as zinc, calcium, copper, magnesium and iron, as well as vitamin B6, are much more easily absorbed from animal foods. Zinc deficiency is usually the first deficiency to show up in those practicing vegetarianism—zinc is critical for reproduction and clear thinking, and helps form over one hundred enzymes, including enzymes involved in detoxification* and mineral metabolism. The best sources of zinc are red meat and shellfish.
Animal foods are also our best source of calcium; in fact, primitive peoples had only two good sources of calcium—milk products and bones. Those groups that did not have access to calcium-rich milk took pains to eat animal bones, either fermented or ground to a powder and added to their food. Milk products give human beings a distinct advantage if for no other reason than they provide abundant calcium in easily assimilated form. Plant foods do contain calcium but also compounds that block calcium absorption; and they are not as rich in calcium as milk and milk products; it takes at least forty carrots or over three cups of cooked spinach to match the 800 milligrams of calcium in five cups of milk.
NUTRIENT-DENSE: THESE TWO words sum up Dr. Price’s findings about traditional diets. Price took samples of traditional foods back to his laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, and analyzed them for vitamin and mineral content. He found very high levels of minerals in traditional diets—calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, potassium, iron and iodine—and equally high levels of water-soluble vitamins—vitamin C and the range of B vitamins. Levels of minerals and water-soluble vitamins were at least four times higher in the diets of nonindustrialized people.
Most surprising were the high levels of fat-soluble vitamins—A, D, and K2—which occur uniquely in animal fats, organ meats, fatty fish, shellfish and fish liver oils. Butter, cream and egg yolks are delicious sources of these vitamins, especially if the animals are raised outside on pasture. So-called “primitive” diets contained at least ten times more of these fat-soluble vitamins than the modern American diet—and that was in the 1940s. The discrepancy is certainly larger today with the advent of industrial agriculture and the practice of removing every bit of fat from our meat, poultry and dairy products.
Vitamins A, D, and K2† are sadly absent in today’s diets of processed foods based in vegetable oils, and yet they are key to virtually every process in the body—from protecting us against infectious disease and cancer to ensuring good eyesight and hearing. Without these fat-soluble vitamins, we cannot make hormones, including sex hormones and the feel-good chemicals that ward off depression. Most important, vitamins A, D and K2 ensure robust and harmonious bone and muscle development during the growing years; vitamin K2 supported by vitamins A and D creates bone density and prevents the sealing of the growth plates in the long bones too early, so that we grow tall; plentiful vitamin K2 in utero and during development ensures wide and strong development of the facial bones, so that the dental palate is large, the teeth are straight, the cheekbones wide and the face attractive. Vitamin K2 puts calcium in the bones and teeth, where it belongs, and prevents it from depositing in the soft tissues, including the arteries, where it does not belong. Plentiful vitamin K2 in the saliva, along with adequate dietary calcium and phosphorus, prevents tooth decay.
Vitamins A, D and K2 work together—vitamins A and D tell the cells to make certain proteins; vitamin K2 then activates proteins after signaling by vitamins A and D. Taking too much of one of these vitamins can lead to deficiencies of the other two; we need to obtain the fat-soluble vitamins from food, where they tend to occur together, and not from isolated vitamins or supplements.
These fat-soluble vitamins occur in weird foods like insects, intestines and seal oil, but also in delicious foods like pâté, liverwurst, scrapple, caviar, oily fish, shrimp, oysters, mussels, duck and goose fat, pork lard, butter, cream and egg yolks—the very foods the diet dictocrats tell us not to eat are the foods that supply these critical nutrients. Eating like our ancestors ate means including as many and as much of these foods in our diet as we can.*
Because we simply don’t eat as many organ meats and weird foods as traditional people do, a good practice is to include a natural cod liver oil in the diet to supply vitamins A and D, along with vitamin K2–rich foods like aged cheese, duck and goose fat, duck and goose liver, and butter and egg yolks from pasture-fed animals. Butter centrifuged to make a butter oil and emu oil (in capsules) are other rich sources of vitamin K2.
SHOULD WE COOK? Animals don’t cook their food, and neither should we, say the raw foodists. True, animals don’t cook, but neither do they wear clothes and shoes, live in houses, talk, write, create works of art, and fill their lives with ritual and process. We are not animals but human beings, and all human societies cook some or even most of their food, even the inhabitants of the frozen north, and even inhabitants of the tropics who do not need to build fires for warmth.
Many plant foods are indigestible or even poisonous to humans unless they are cooked, especially grains, legumes, many tubers and dark leafy greens—consuming a lot of raw vegetable juice is not a formula for good health. Cooking liberates minerals and other nutrients so that we get more energy and nutrition from plant foods. Gentle cooking unfolds the tightly wound proteins in meat, making them more available to enzymatic breakdown.
At the same time, every culture we have looked at consumes some of its animal protein raw—raw meat, raw fish and shellfish, raw dairy products. Cooking destroys vitamin B6, which is more plentiful and more available in animal foods. Heating of milk is particularly harmful; raw milk contains enzymes to ensure the complete assimilation of every single nutrient in the milk. The heat of pasteurization destroys all these enzymes, turning a food that is easy to digest and assimilate into a food that is very difficult to digest and likely allergenic.
Many cultures relished weird raw foods like muktuk and organ meats straight from the kill, but there are less challenging ways of getting our raw animal protein: steak tartare, carpaccio, oysters, sushi, raw milk and delicious raw cheese. At the same time, you do not need to subject yourself to raw kale or raw vegetable juices; rough vegetables only yield their goodness when well cooked and garnished with fat, especially butter.
ALL TRADITIONAL CULTURES consumed lacto-fermented foods. There are no exceptions to this rule. From the fermented fish of the Inuit and Eskimos to poi and similar foods in the South Pacific to sour beers in Africa to delicate pickles in the Asian diet, all traditional cultures took in plenty of healthy bacteria by eating these raw fermented foods. Only in recent years has science confirmed the role of beneficial bacteria in the gut, and raw lacto-fermented* foods help replenish that bacteria every day.
Lacto-fermented foods also provide enzymes that help with digestion, sparing our own bodies from energy-intensive enzyme production. As much as 70 percent of all our energy goes into digestion, and anything that can reduce that energy load translates to more energy for the human being. The Eskimos valued fermented foods for giving strength and stamina; the Africans drank lacto-fermented sorghum beer to give them more energy when working in the hot sun. The fact that fermented foods provide digestive enzymes explains the phenomenon of increased energy with raw, lacto-fermented foods and beverages.
Typically, lacto-fermented foods and beverages are consumed with rich cooked foods—a glass of sour kombucha is heavenly with a slice of quiche, and gherkins go perfectly with pâté. Sour fermented foods help with digestion of fatty foods, and also provide enzymes to make up for any enzymes lost in cooking. In fact, think of lacto-fermented foods as super-raw foods which more than compensate for any enzymes lost in cooked food.
It’s easy to include lacto-fermented foods in the diet. Many brands of raw lacto-fermented sauerkraut* and pickles are available today, as are probiotic drinks like kombucha and sparkling kefir beverages; these foods are also easy and fun to make. Raw cheese, traditionally made salami, yogurt and gravlax are other delicious lacto-fermented foods.
GRAINS ARE A HOT TOPIC these days. In fact, they seem to be the enemy du jour, shunned by paleo dieters and the gluten-free crowd. But as we have seen, all traditional cultures in the temperate regions of the world consumed grains—even the “Stone Age” Australian Aborigines. And archeological research has found evidence of grain consumption in Paleolithic campfires. Starch grains found on grinding stones dating back thirty thousand years have shown up in Paleolithic sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic.2
Widespread intolerance of grains is a recent phenomenon, and it’s probably no coincidence that these problems have followed several decades of insistence on large amounts of whole grains in the form of rough quick-rise whole wheat bread, granola, muesli, oat bran and extruded whole-grain breakfast cereals.†
Traditional cultures took great care with seed foods—grains, legumes, nuts and other seeds—by soaking, souring, culturing and fermenting, often for days. These seed foods are also cooked, at the beginning of the process or during, but usually at the end. All these processes release the goodness in grains, minimize irritants and antinutrients, and make them more digestible. Even gluten is broken down by the proper preparation processes. Researchers in Italy have found that even diagnosed celiacs can consume genuine sourdough bread without adverse effects.3
The sour grain preparations of Africa are an acquired taste for Westerners, but there are several ways of consuming properly prepared whole grains that are acceptable to our tastes—even to children. Oatmeal soaked overnight in slightly acidulated warm water and then cooked, served with butter or cream and maple syrup, is delicious; once you taste real sourdough bread, all other bread will seem insipid in comparison. Brown rice can be soaked several hours before cooking. If consumed only occasionally in the context of a nutrient-dense diet, white rice and bread made from white flour (preferably sourdough) are easier to digest and actually better choices than rough whole grains.
HOW MUCH FAT SHOULD WE EAT? We’ve seen a lot of variation in traditional diets. For the Inuit and Eskimo, fat can comprise up to 80 percent of dietary calories; for some groups in Africa, fat content is much lower, probably in the range of 30 percent. Whatever the level in the diet, these fats are mostly animal fats or highly saturated coconut or palm oil.
Some people do very well on high-fat diets—which stabilize blood sugar and maximize the intake of fat-soluble nutrients. Other people have trouble digesting lipids and feel better on a diet that is lower in fat. Most people do best when fat contributes between 40 to 60 percent of total calories. For a diet of 2,400 calories per day, that translates into about twelve tablespoons of fat, including the fat on meat, in egg yolk, and in whole dairy products, in addition to cooking fat and added fats like butter.
Our bodies definitely need the saturated and monounsaturated fat that we get from animal fats and traditional oils obtained from olives, coconuts or palm fruit—we need these fats for everything from our cell membranes, to mitochondria function, to energy storage, to hormone production. If we do not get enough of these fats from our diet, the body can make them out of carbohydrate foods. Since there is a limit to the amount of protein we can ingest—about 20 percent of calories—the remaining 80 percent of calories must be divided between fats and carbohydrates. If we lower the amount of fat we eat, the deficit must be made up with carbohydrates.
Getting our fat from carbohydrates can work in the context of a diet where the animal foods supply adequate fat-soluble vitamins. In many regions of Africa, animal food and fat consumption is low, but the animal foods they do eat are rich in nutrients—foods like insects, shrimp pastes and organ meats. These foods are not acceptable to Western palates, but fortunately, we have access to many sources of animal fat in the West—from the fat on our meat to whole dairy products to butter, cream and egg yolks.
As we have seen, the ideal diet contains a wide variety of animal and plant foods; the ideal diet also contains a wide variety of saturated and monounsaturated fat sources—meat fats including lard, tallow and bacon fat; poultry fats from chicken, duck and goose; egg yolks; butter, cream, whole milk and cheese; and olive oil, coconut oil and palm oil.
Traditional cultures consumed many sources of saturated and monounsaturated fats; what they did not consume were seed oils containing high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids. Unfortunately, most modern people are getting most of their fats from these unstable oils—which are completely new to the human diet. While we need small amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids in our diet, too much can lead to imbalances on the cellular level; and a surfeit of polyunsaturated fatty acids from vegetable oils has been implicated in most of today’s chronic disease, from heart disease and cancer to infertility and premature aging.
Polyunsaturated oils are major ingredients in all processed foods, in cooking oils, and in margarines, shortenings and spreads. They have no place in the human diet. We can get the small amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids (called essential fatty acids or EFAs) we need from animal fats and healthy traditional oils extracted from olives, coconuts and palm fruit.
YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT OMEGA-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. We need both in small amounts in balance, ideally about two to three times more omega-6 than omega-3. We get omega-6 from nuts, grains and seeds as well as from animal fats like butter, and omega-3 mainly from seafood, organ meats and egg yolks.
Unfortunately, most modern diets contain large quantities of omega-6 from industrial seed oils—these oils can be almost 100 percent omega-6—and not enough omega-3. However, too much omega-3 is not a good idea either—we’ve seen problems such as stroke and bleeding in the Inuit and Eskimo diet with too much omega-3, and that can happen in modern diets when people take too much fish oil or flax-seed oil.
A balance of small amounts of omega-6 and omega-3 is key, and easy to achieve by simply eliminating all industrial seed oils from the diet and including seafood and small amounts of cod liver oil.
ALL TRADITIONAL PEOPLES consumed salt—evaporated from salt springs or seawater, or mined from underground deposits. Salt was the original item of trade, not only in Europe but also in Africa, Australia and the Americas.* When salt was not available, traditional peoples consumed seawater, animal blood and even animal urine; or they burned sodium-rich plants and added the ashes to their food.
We need salt to digest our food—chloride to make hydrochloric acid for digesting meat and sodium to activate enzymes for digesting carbohydrates. We also need sodium for brain function, adrenal function, regulation of blood pressure, and production of a variety of hormones. Sodium is also key to cellular function, needed to maintain electrolyte and fluid balance.*
We need about one and one-half teaspoons of salt per day to satisfy the body’s requirements for sodium and chloride—more when working in the hot sun or when under stress. Again, that’s good news for modern people—we don’t need to forego salt to be healthy; quite the contrary—salt is vital for good health.
What’s different about modern salt is that it is refined to remove all the magnesium and trace minerals naturally present in salt; best to use an unrefined salt that has not been stripped of minerals through modern processing. Salt should be gray, pink or beige, not stark white. Fortunately, many varieties of unprocessed salt are available today.
SKIN AND BONES—TRADITIONAL cultures ate these parts of the animal, along with muscle and organ meats. Our bodies contain two main types of protein—muscle protein and collagen. In fact, we have more collagen in our bodies than muscle. Collagen is what holds us together, creates the framework for our bones, forms the basis of strong tendons and joints, surrounds our organs, lines the intestinal tract, interlaces our fatty tissue and undergirds our skin.
By “bones” we mean the collagenous portions, the gristle, joints and connective tissue. Traditional cultures consumed these portions, usually by cooking the bones, heads and feet of animals to make a nourishing broth. Think of bone broth as melted collagen, an elixir that provides the building blocks for your own collagen.
We can get collagen by boiling down rhinoceros skin to make a glue, or by eating muktuk, but a more acceptable way to nourish our collagen is to make gelatin-rich broth from chicken, fish, beef or pork bones (including the collagen-rich feet) and using that for delicious sauces, gravies, soups and stews. It’s also important to eat skin—crispy chicken skin or satisfying chicharónnes (pork rinds). That’s right, old fashioned foods like gribenes (crispy duck or chicken cracklings) and jellied pig’s feet are health foods!
TRADITIONAL CULTURES PREPARED for the next generation; this is the final principle of nourishing traditional diets. They recognized the fact that health was not just about feeling good in the present, but also about ensuring that future generations would be healthy and strong.
Dr. Weston A. Price is unique among early investigators in his practice of asking the people he studied about special or sacred foods they consumed to ensure healthy offspring. Dr. Price’s investigation showed that so-called primitive people understood and practiced preconception nutritional programs for both parents. Many tribes required a period of premarital nutrition, and children were spaced to permit the mother to regain her full health and strength, thus assuring subsequent offspring of physical excellence.* Lactating women, as well as the maturing boys and girls, also ate special foods in preparation for future parenthood. Dr. Price found these foods to be very rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K2—foods like liver, organ meats, animal fats, gelatinous soups, fish eggs, fish liver oils and whole raw milk, cheese and butter from grass-fed animals.
These practices put modern man to shame; we are very careless in the way we bring children into the world, and when something goes wrong, we blame it on one of the three G’s—germs, genes or God. Traditional cultures knew better; they knew that the responsibility for bringing healthy children into the world rested squarely on their shoulders.
EVERYTHING THAT TRADITIONAL peoples did with their food resulted in the maximization of nutrients—everything from their agricultural practices to their food choices to their preparation techniques. We can do the same with our modern diets—it just requires care in purchasing our food and attention to detail.
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Foods from fertile soil
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Foods from depleted soil
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Organ meats preferred over muscle meats
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Muscle meats preferred, few organ meats
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Natural animal fats
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Processed vegetable oils
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Animals on pasture
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Animals in confinement
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Dairy products raw and/or fermented
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Dairy products pasteurized or ultrapasteurized
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Grains and legumes soaked and/or fermented
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Grains refined, extruded, improperly prepared
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Soy foods, long fermented, consumed in small amounts
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Soy foods industrially processed, large amounts
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Bone broths
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: MSG, artificial flavorings
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Unrefined sweeteners
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Refined sweeteners
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Lacto-fermented vegetables
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Processed, pasteurized condiment
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Lacto-fermented beverages
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Modern soft drinks, coffee, tea
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Unrefined salt
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Refined salt, low salt
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Natural vitamins occurring in foods
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Synthetic vitamins, taken alone or added to food
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Traditional cooking
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Microwave cooking, irradiation
Traditional Diets Maximized Nutrients: Traditional seeds, open pollination
Modern Diets Minimize Nutrients: Hybrid seeds, GMO seeds
And healthy eating requires no renunciation. A traditional diet is satisfying and delicious; it is an inclusive diet, not one that excludes major food groups. A healthy traditional diet includes wonderful foods like pâté, caviar and butter; whole milk and cheese; grains and legumes; sauces and gravies; generously applied salt; refreshing lacto-fermented foods; healthy soft drinks; and even naturally sweetened desserts.
The rewards are great: freedom from aches and pains; increased energy and mental acuity; protection against chronic disease; optimism and the lifting of depression; a graceful and energetic old age; and, most important, healthy children to carry on wise food traditions for future generations.