Authors: Nina Planck
My mother wasted no time buying two copies of Fallon's cookbook,
Nourishing Traditions,
and sent me one in London. Many of the recipes were for classic dishes (pot roast, Dover sole with cream sauce), but it was
unusual in other ways. She cooked with sweetbreads, extolled fermented foods, and was keen on raw milk and raw liver. The
book had high praise for meat, poultry, game, organ meats, eggs, and dairy from animals raised on grass, as well as wild fish
and seafood including roe. Above all, Fallon was madly enthusiastic for saturated fats, especially butter and coconut oil.
Fallon, I learned, had founded the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the work of Weston Price. Chicken
broth sounded pretty good, but I wasn't so sure about butter and lard, so I decided to read the five-hundred-page study Price
published in 1939 to see for myself.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
is a classic work of anthropology, nutrition, and disease prevention. It's also quite a story, and it made me think again
about real food.
Weston Price was born in Ontario in 1870 and raised on a farm. He became a dentist and moved to the United States, where he
practiced, did research, and wrote respected dentistry textbooks. Price was dismayed at the health of his American patients.
Adults suffered from tooth decay and chronic diseases, including arthritis, osteoporosis, and diabetes. Kids had crooked teeth,
deformed faces, asthma, infections, allergies, and behavioral problems. The dentist suspected his patients were malnourished
on industrial foods, and set out to examine diets in isolated cultures, where people still ate what he called native foods.
Price went to preindustrial communities from Canada to Papua New Guinea, studying the diets of Gaelic fishermen, Ugandan shepherds,
and Swiss dairy farmers. All over, he found people with beautiful teeth, perfectly formed faces, and little or no tooth decay—
even though they had no dentists or toothbrushes. They were in fine overall health, with none of the chronic illnesses and
diseases he saw at home. When they changed their diets, however, and ate what Price called "the displacing foods of commerce"—
the sugar and jam, white flour and white rice, and refined vegetable oils that came on ships with European settlers— their
health declined sharply.
People who began to eat industrial foods had crooked, crowded, and cavity-ridden teeth and suffered from chronic and fatal
diseases including arthritis and tuberculosis. Children of parents who ate refined foods were born with poorly developed facial
structure and other deformities like clubfeet. The facial differences in the photos Price took are striking. The unhealthy
faces are narrow and asymmetrical, while the healthy ones are broad and shapely. In nature, symmetry is a signal of good conditions
( typically nutrition) during growth and development. The human face is no exception.
Price was curious: what did these people eat to stay healthy? First, they all ate local foods, which meant the diets in different
environments varied widely. The communities were roughly of three types: dairy farmers and shepherds; fishermen; and hunter-gatherers.
In Swiss dairy villages, they ate whole raw milk, cream, and butter; whole-grain rye bread or grains of roasted rye; meat
on Sundays; soups made with bone broth; and a few summer vegetables. In India and Tibet, they drank tea with milk and butter
from sheep and naks— the female yak. Mountain shepherds in Egypt ate butter, which they also traded for millet with farming
tribes from the plains. Herding tribes, such as the Masai in Kenya and the Muhima in Uganda, ate mostly meat, blood, and whole
milk.
In fishing communities in the Outer Hebrides, remote islands off Scotland, people ate fish, roe, broth, and whole oats. Baked
codfish heads stuffed with oats and chopped fish liver were especially popular. Alaskan Eskimo ate mostly seafood, including
roe, seal, and whale. They ate no fruit and few vegetables— just a little kelp, cranberries, flowers, and sorrel preserved
in seal oil. South Seas islanders and New Zealand Maori ate fish, shark, octopus, shellfish, and sea worms; wild pig and lard;
and coconut, manioc, kelp, and fruit.
Hunter-gatherers all over— from Canada to the Everglades, the Amazon to Australia— had the most diverse diet. They ate game,
including liver, glands, blood, and marrow; small animals, birds, and insects; and grains, tubers, and vegetables. Indians
in the Canadian Rockies, where temperatures fell to seventy degrees below zero, ate no grains, dairy, fruit, or fish. They
feasted on caribou and moose and prized moose adrenal glands. In the Andes, Peruvian tribes ate llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs,
potatoes, corn, beans, and quinoa, a native grain. Australian Aborigines scrounged anything they could from the harsh landscape:
roots, stems, leaves, berries, grass seeds, and a native pea; birds and eggs; seafood and freshwater fish; kangaroo and wallaby;
and a variety of small animals and insects, including rodents, grubs, and beetles. Price made no effort to disguise his admiration
for the resourceful Aborigines.
The dentist hoped to find people who lived on land-based foods alone, but he was disappointed. Even when at war, isolated
hill people traded (by night, with special dropoffs) with coastal tribes for dried fish roe. Price knew seafoods were rich
in iodine, which prevents goiter, mental retardation, and infertility, and vitamins A and D, which aid the absorption of calcium
and phosphorus, but he didn't know about vital omega-3 fats found only in fish.
Price concluded there were four factors common to all the diets: whole foods, especially grains; the lack of refined flour
and sugar; abundant meat and fish; and unrefined fats. Meat, fish, and fat were vital. Masai and Inuit were almost pure carnivores,
and even the few largely vegetarian groups he found ate insects, grubs, and fish when they could. Diets contained all three
types of the natural fats: saturated fats from butter, beef, and coconut oil; monounsaturated fats from bone marrow and lard;
and polyunsaturated fats in fish and game.
Though Price didn't draw attention to food preparation methods, they were important in traditional diets. Everyone ate raw
foods, especially meat, blood, liver, fish, and milk. Raw foods are rich in vitamins, enzymes, and beneficial bacteria. They
all favored fermented foods, including milk, grains, juice, and vegetables. Fermentation, a traditional form of preservation,
enhances nutrition and aids digestion.
When Price analyzed the foods in his lab, he found that the traditional diets contained ten times more vitamins A and D than
the American diet of his day and vastly more minerals, including calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iodine, and iron. The Eskimo
diet contained forty-nine times more iodine than the foods of the colonists.
BUT WE DON'T EAT GRUBS!
Hunter-gatherer diets (historical and contemporary) include foods we may find unappealing, like whale skin and salmon milt.
Many tribes eat fat and protein raw, including blood, liver, and fish. For calcium, they crunch through bones in fish and
small birds and savor pungent fermented foods. They eat these foods for vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Happily, we can get
the same nutrients from foods more familiar to the European-American palate. Caesar salad contains raw egg, fermented Parmesan
Reggiano, and anchovies, a fermented fish we eat whole, bones and all. Smoked salmon, steak tartare, and mayonnaise are three
famous dishes of raw fish, meat, and eggs. Classic eggnog is made with raw egg and raw cream. It's not necessary to eat
exactly
like a hunter-gatherer, only to obtain the nutrients they knew they needed.
Back home, Price set out to cure the unhealthy children in his clinic with good food. Their typical diet contained mostly
refined foods: black coffee with sugar, white bread and pancakes, donuts fried in vegetable oil. In one experiment, Price
fed malnourished kids one meal daily, six days a week, while they ate as usual at home. The therapeutic meals included liver,
fish chowder, or a meat stew made of broth and carrots; a buttered whole wheat roll made with freshly ground flour; tomato
juice with cod-liver oil; and two glasses of whole milk. The meat, dairy, and eggs came from animals raised on grass, which
Price had found contained more vitamin A than animals raised on grain. It was the American version of the traditional diets:
rich in protein, vitamins A, B, and D, omega-3 fats, and minerals. The children's health— and their performance in school—
improved sharply. "A properly balanced diet," Price wrote, "is good for the entire body."
THE FERTILITY DIET
In traditional diets, special foods were reserved for couples before conception and for women during pregnancy. Key nutrients
include calcium, iodine, zinc, vitamin A, and omega-3 fats. Peruvian tribes in the Andes traveled hundreds of miles to trade
with valley tribes for kelp and salmon roe, for iodine, vitamin A, zinc, and omega-3 fats. Alaskan Inuit ate dried fish eggs
for fertility, while in North America, Indians ate the iodine-rich thyroid glands of the male moose. In Africa, the largely
vegetarian Kikuyu fed girls extra animal fat for six months before marriage. In dairy villages, the fertility diet included
raw spring-grass butter for vitamins A and D.
Today doctors tell pregnant women to take folic acid to prevent the birth defect spina bifida, but few couples are advised
to eat a preconception diet. The first thing a woman needs to conceive is enough estrogen (in her fat) to ovulate. Men and
women who would be parents should eat plenty of foods containing zinc, omega-3 fats, and vitamin A (needed to make estrogen).
Eat cod-liver oil and butter, cream, egg yolks, and liver from grass-fed animals. Vitamin E is essential for sperm production;
deficiency can cause permanent sterility. Sperm health improves dramatically when vitamins A and E are taken together, probably
because vitamin E prevents oxidation of vitamin A. Protein and B vitamins, especially B
12
, are crucial for egg production, sperm count, and sperm motility. The omega-3 fat DHA is found in high concentrations in
sperm.
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
was comprehensive, monumental— and controversial. Dentists and anthropologists welcomed the work— at one time, the book was
on the reading list for anthropology classes at Harvard— but most medical professionals ignored it. Price himself noted frequently
that his approach to disease was unorthodox. His work did, however, inspire the nutritionist Adelle Davis. Davis had a masters
degree in biochemistry from the University of Southern California Medical School, but she wrote about nutrition in a friendly,
common-sense style. In the 1950s and '60s, titles like
Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit
and
Let's Get Well
became bestsellers.
Growing up on a farm in Indiana, Davis ate a traditional American breakfast of hot cereal, steak, ham, eggs, sausage, and
fried chicken with gravy, all washed down with grass-fed, whole milk— and that was exactly the food she recommended for a
diet rich in protein and vitamins A, D, and B. Davis extolled whole grains, unrefined fats, whole milk, and plenty of protein,
including beef, liver, fish, and eggs. She called for raw foods, including eggs, liver, and milk. Davis was ahead of her time;
she wrote that hydrogenated fats were dangerous and fish oil reduces cholesterol.
Like Price, Davis was controversial. "She so infuriated the medical profession and the orthodox nutrition community that they
would stop at nothing to discredit her," recalls my friend Joann Grohman, a dairy farmer and nutrition writer who says Adelle
Davis restored her own health and that of her five young children. "The FDA raided health food stores and seized her books
under a false labeling law because they were displayed next to vitamin bottles."
Price and Davis were pioneers in the field now known as nutritional epidemiology— the study of nutrition and disease— and
modern research confirms their work. The experts now agree, for example, that hydrogenated vegetable oil, not butter, raises
LDL. As we'll see later, heart disease is caused by a diet deficient in B vitamins, not by saturated fats. Researchers even
explore the subtle interplay between diet and how genes function. The omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, for example, activate the
expression of genes controlling fat metabolism, which may explain how they prevent obesity. Hippocrates gave us the essence
of nutritional epidemiology: "Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food."
After I read about traditional diets, it was clear how my vegan, fat-free ways had depleted my body. But one thing was nagging
me: whether eating saturated fat and cholesterol every day was really okay. Before I dived headfirst into traditional beef,
butter, and eggs, it seemed sensible to find out what modern science had to say about them. I started to do some homework
on real food.
Everywhere I Go, People Are Afraid of Real Food
AT THE UNION SQUARE GREENMARKET in New York City, an older woman was buying chicken. "I can't eat any skin," she told the
farmer firmly. "This is the best chicken on the market," I chimed in, "because it's raised on pasture. And the skin is good
for you too, full of healthy fats." She turned toward me, indignant. "I never eat the skin," she said. "It's bad for you,
all that fat!"
At Murray's, the oldest cheese shop in New York City, a young woman was asking for low-fat mozzarella. She prefers whole milk
mozzarella, she said, but feels "less guilty" eating the skim milk version.
At home, I serve my friends roast chicken, mashed potatoes with milk and butter, spinach salad with bacon, tart cherry pie
with lard crust, and raw whipped cream. "There goes my cholesterol," jokes one of them. "Don't tell my doctor!" Even as they
dig into this delicious and satisfying food, they cannot forget that it's going to kill them. "Heart attack on a plate," says
another. The tone combines fear, resignation, and guilty pleasure.
All these good people are wrong.
The woman at the farmers' market doesn't know that chicken fat is monounsaturated and polyunsaturated— two fats even the conventional
experts say are healthy. Why would she? According to the experts, the less fat the better, and chicken fat is no exception.
Schmaltz is a guilty pleasure. Here, the farmer is no help; he doesn't know what's in chicken fat, either. Chickens raised
on grass contain more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), an unusual fat which fights cancer and builds lean muscle. Chicken fat
also boosts immunity. The Jewish penicillin wasn't skinless chicken breasts; it was chicken soup, with droplets of golden
fat that also make chicken soup silky. But
someone
taught this lady that chicken fat is poison— not her mother, I'll bet— and she's sticking to it.