Category: Nutrition

Have you ever wondered how animals without teeth chew up their food, especially hard foods like grains? They actually have an internal grinding apparatus, called the gizzard.

Kefir grains are a wonderful way to culture raw milk because they are not temperature sensitive—for yogurt and other cultures, the milk needs to be heated and kept warm for the culture to work.

In my last blog, I introduced the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Find Real Food app, the online version of our Shopping Guide. The Shopping Guide and App are unique in many ways.

Many years ago, a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation named David Morris, came to us with the idea of a shopping guide, which would only list foods that met our Wise Traditions guidelines. He even went out and found the funding for us to print the first issue—that was in 2003.

“Food before one is just for fun.” That’s the philosophy for feeding programs that place a few raw vegetables on your baby’s high chair tray; other groups do stress the important nutritional requirements for babies and toddlers, but follow this with recommendations to feed rice cereal and pureed vegetables. Dear parents, your growing baby needs much more than vegetable slices or rice cereal!

Recently I visited Whole Foods in Washington, DC and went upstairs to the cafe area to eat my lunch (cheese and homemade pate) before shopping. A woman with a baby of about eight months old came in and sat at the table next to mine. She ate a meal she had purchased at the deli. But what did baby in her high chair get? A few pieces of green pepper and cucumber on the high chair tray. When she left, those vegetable slices were scattered on the floor, with no evidence that baby had eaten much of anything.

In my last blog I began a discussion of infant feeding practices, addressing the question of when to begin solid food. In this instance, my views are in accord with those of conventional organizations, namely that for the majority of babies, four to six months is the right age for beginning foods other than breast milk or formula (that’s homemade baby formula, based on raw milk).

As for what to feed baby, here I am mostly in disagreement with conventional advice.

A recent online discussion that took place at NourishingOurChildren.org has made me realize the need to reiterate our (mine and those of the Weston A. Price Foundation) recommendations for infant feeding.

Dear Mr. Trump,

Congratulations on your election to the U.S. presidency. You campaigned on a slogan of “Make America Great Again,” proposing to create more jobs for ordinary Americans.

This is a laudable goal but unfortunately, it is not enough to make America great again.

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.