Author: Sally Fallon Morell

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Glennon Doyle Melton, an author who shares her struggles on coping as a mother at momastery.com. I got a bit of flack for making the connection of the typical American “healthy” diet with her difficulties, but in fact the Internet is teaming with moms sharing their heartaches dealing with depression and lack of energy as they try to care for children (often very sick children)—and with far fewer resources than Doyle Melton enjoys. These problems—in both the moms and the children—could be greatly alleviated by embracing a nutrient-dense diet that contains lots of butter, cream, whole raw milk, egg yolks and old-fashioned foods like liver and cod liver oil, and getting rid of processed foods, even so-called healthy processed foods like granola and almond milk. My remarks were not meant to be critical in any way, but to indicate a solution—the right diet really can help kids and their parents to be healthy and happy.

An article in the Washington Post (July 14, 2016) discusses the punishing major league baseball schedules, noting that players believe there is a relationship between “consecutive days played, game times, travel—and injuries.” They point to the one hundred sixty-two-day schedule, instituted in the early 1960s, as a factor in the greater number of injuries in recent times.

I had never heard of Glennon Doyle Melton until the Washington Post published an article about her, September 8, 2016. Ms. Doyle Melton is attractive and slender, lives in an upper middle class neighborhood, has a husband (although they are now separated), three good-looking children and more-than-adequate finances. She is the author of an extremely successful blog, momastery.com, which gets seven million readers per week, and two best-selling books, Love Warrior (Flatiron, 2016) and Carry On, Warrior (Scribner, 2012).

I learned a very interesting fact recently, one that can give us guidance on how to overcome the modern phenomenon of chronic fatigue: about 70 percent (!) of the body’s energy goes toward digesting our food. So the obvious first step in treating a condition of constant tiredness would be to consume food that is easy to digest.

We were in the local feed store recently and I happened to look at the ingredient list for milk replacer for calves. Imagine my surprise to find “animal fat” listed as the third ingredient!

Chinese medicine considers virility as closely aligned with overall vitality, specifically associated with life or “fire” in the kidney area. The kidney area of course includes the adrenal glands, which produce a variety of hormones that help us deal with stress; the adrenals also provide a backup to the testicles by producing small amounts of testosterone.

Twenty years ago, no one had heard about omega-3s—we may have thought they were a type of car or a variety of Greek column. Now omega-3 (omega-3 fatty acids, that is) is a household word, considered good little guys that we can’t get enough of. As usual, however, the truth is more nuanced.