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My colleague Pam Schoenfeld, MS, recently put me onto an eye-opening article on vitamin A. Titled “Tissue Changes Following Deprivation of Fat-Soluble A Vitamin,” by S. Burt Wolbach, MD and Percy R. Howe, MD, the article was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine in 1925.
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I’ve been involved in the field of nutrition and alternative remedies since the 1970s, and I keep a collection of crazy statements I’ve heard through the years. These include:
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With the Covid vaccination program now in shambles, officials are focusing their fear porn on the measles, as evidenced by a December 27, 2022 front page article appearing in the Washington Post.
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I’ve been involved in the field of nutrition and health for many years, and I’ve seen various weird diets come and go. The weirdest ones tend to attract fanatical adherents who carry on with the eating program even when their health declines. Here are a few of the worst.
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Chocolate is all the rage these days, consumed by the health conscious as well as junk food junkies, because everybody “knows” that chocolate is good for you. In fact, fantastic claims for chocolate’s medicinal powers have accompanied its spread—from an exclusive beverage for the Aztec elite to sugary snack for the masses—right up to the present day.
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Many years ago, I visited a holistic doctor seeking help for my allergies, mysterious skin rashes and fatigue. I filled out a dietary questionnaire which he read carefully. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and pronounced: “I cannot help you unless you give up coffee.”
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Physicians and researchers have debated the cause of tuberculosis (TB) for centuries. In Book 1, Of the Epidemics (410-400 BCE) Hippocrates describes the cause of TB as a “weakness of the lung,” a view shared by the dentist Weston A. Price.
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My last post elicited a lot of comments, including some that raised legitimate criticisms, which I hope to address in this follow-on.
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With coronavirus dominating the news, we’ve seen a contagion of conspiracy theories—coronavirus is a bio-weapon invented by the Chinese, coronavirus lingers on paper money so governments are going to decree a cashless society, coronavirus has given the Italian and Iranian governments an excuse to crack down on dissidents, coronavirus is caused by 5G, which was rolled out in Wuhan—and outbreaks of worst-case-scenario thinking, like the claim that coronavirus will infect 80 percent of the UK population!
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Diabetes is on the rise, both type 1--in which the pancreas does not secrete insulin --and type 2--in which the cells’ receptors for insulin don’t work. Either way—and the likelihood is that most diabetics have some combination of type 1 and type 2--sugar can’t get into the cells (so they starve) and sugar levels in the blood remain high.
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The Europeans are way ahead of us in the art of making offal taste good, with many varieties of sausage containing liver and other organ meats, blood pudding, pate and terrines. But America does have one folk food that makes it easy to enjoy organ meats: scrapple.
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In 2009, my husband and I purchased a property in southern Prince George’s county in order to fulfill our crazy dream of having a pasture-based dairy farm and making raw cheese.
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Earlier this year I made a trip to Switzerland to give two talks on raw milk and to visit one of my boys, who lives in Geneva. Of course, the food in Switzerland received my special attention.
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One of the most versatile and successful recipes from Nourishing Traditions is the pancakes. Freshly ground flour (spelt, emmer or soft winter wheat) soaked overnight with equal parts of yogurt or kefir serves as the base for delicious, light tasting and highly digestible pancakes.
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So far we have looked at four “blue zones,” regions that have lots of long-lived people: Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica and Ikaria. What have we learned so far about the characteristics of these nonagenarians? Maybe the most important thing is to live in a place that ends with the letter A. Just kidding.
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Tourism in the Greek island of Ikaria got a big boost when scientists determined that Ikaria was a blue zone—an area with a large number of long-lived inhabitants
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The Nicoya Peninsula is a fertile rectangle of land on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the region has hosted herds of beef and dairy cattle. Many tropical fruits thrive there, including citrus, mango and papaya.
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In my last blog, we began a discussion of blue zones—regions with a lot of centenarians—as popularized by Dan Buettner in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. As we saw in his chapter on the Sardinian blue zone, he leaves out considerable information that contradicts his premise, namely that the longevity diet is one that contains a lot of vegetables and only small amounts of meat—that’s lean meat, not “processed meats that are filled with fat.”
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Often when I present information on the work of Weston Price, I get feedback that goes like this: native peoples on their native diets, high in animal foods and animal fat, may have been attractive and healthy when they were young, but they did not live into old age. If you want to live a long life, you need to eat a diet that is low in fat, low in salt, high in plant foods and rich in dietary fiber, in short, the penalty for a long life is adherence to the sad and unsatisfying diet foisted on us by the Diet Dictocrats.
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"Broth is the new juice," is the saying on the street. Indeed, interest in genuine bone broth is taking off, thanks not only to my book Nourishing Broth, but also to several other great books on the subject. And the number of artisan companies making broth is growing, as a quick look at the Weston A. Price Foundation Shopping Guide will show.
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Modern technocrats have found lots of ways to ruin our food—like rapid heating of milk to 160 or even 230 degrees, zapping with microwaves, irradiating with radioactive materials, spray drying at high temperatures, extruding at high temperatures and pressures and embalming with sugar. Now a new technology has come on the scene: ultra-high pressure applied to a variety of foods for humans, pets and babies.
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Chocolate is all the rage these days, consumed by the health conscious as well as junk food junkies, because everybody “knows” that chocolate is good for you. In fact, fantastic claims for chocolate’s medicinal powers have accompanied its spread—from an exclusive beverage for the Aztec elite to sugary snack for the masses—right up to the present day.
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We know that excess carbs like sugar and white flour can make us gain weight, but there are other culprits lurking in the food supply.
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Last year the Weston A. Price Foundation launched its 50% Campaign, urging consumers to purchase at least 50 percent of their food directly from farmers and artisan processors. This helps build a local food system, creates food security and ensures prosperity for our farmers. But there are many other reasons to avoid industrial meat and obtain the animal products you need directly from a farmer you know.
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As many of you know, the problem of toxic soy ingredients in prison diets has concerned the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) for many years. It began in 2003 in the Illinois prisons when Blagojevich became governor. He repaid his political debts to Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM) by eliminating meat from the prison diet and replacing it with soy—soy nuggets, soy patties, soy sausage and even soy flour in the baked goods. Since an Internet search for “soy dangers” immediately brings up the Weston A. Price Foundation, we soon began receiving desperate pleas for help from Illinois prisoners.
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Southern Maryland, where I live, used to be a premier tobacco-growing region. Then in the 1980s, as the risks of tobacco smoking became clear, the state of Maryland instituted a tobacco buy-out program. Tobacco farmers received a large payment for ten years in a row to never plant tobacco again. The problem is that what replaced the tobacco was mostly soybeans—a crop that is far more carcinogenic and dangerous than tobacco. Fields-of-lung-cancer became fields-of-every-kind-of-cancer.
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Years ago I wrote an article called “Be Kind to Your Grains. . . and Your Grains will be Kind to You,” noting that grains are very difficult to digest without proper preparation such as soaking and sourdough fermentation.
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A final fake meat product to hit the shelves recently is the Impossible Burger, made from genetically modified soy protein concentrate. Impossible Foods CEO and founder Pat Brown makes his commitment to GM soy and his long-term agenda clear in a recent press release:
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Recently I wrote about lab meat, a product that uses bovine fetal serum (BFS)--blood extracted from living fetal calves--to feed meat protein molecules grown in a laboratory. Now let’s turn our attention to two other imitation meat products new to the market, which the press has heralded as breakthroughs in fake meat: the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger. Will these new products overcome the observation that veggie burgers are “tasteless pucks?”
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The rhetoric for plant-based diets has ratcheted up to a shrill pitch in the EAT-Lancet report, released with much fanfare a couple of weeks ago. The document is the result of “more than two years of collaboration between thirty-seven ‘experts’ from sixteen countries,” lots of frowny faces telling us that we need to eat lentils because the earth is getting warmer and we are running out of everything.
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Flavored milks are highly sweetened beverages made with powdered skim milk—they are actually the dairy industry’s way of getting rid of all the skim milk left over from the production of butter and cream, mostly for ice cream. Since Americans are huge ice cream eaters (and since Americans are eating more butter these days), there’s an enormous amount of this waste product that the industry needs to get rid of.
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“Pasteurization of milk ensures safety for human consumption by reducing the number of viable pathogenic bacteria.” So begins an article published in the Journal of Food Protection, published in 2011.
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Friday April 1 was my husband’s ninetieth birthday, and among the many cards he received was one from our insurance agent, "In the year you were born. . ., " containing a chart of prices now and then.
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Farmers have a lot of things to keep them awake at night, and one of the things that made me lose sleep since we started farming in 2011 was chicken predation.
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One of the arguments for vegetarianism holds that killing animals for meat is just like killing human beings—that killing animals is "murder of the innocents."
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I had to laugh when I read an article in in the Washington Post, "D.C.'s mighty mouse is almost impossible to kick out of office." At home you can do what you like about mice, but in the office "there are widely different views on food handling and cleanliness, and then a lot of finger pointing when the rodents come sniffing for crumbs. Further, staffers who are terrified of mice often clash with those who want to protect them."
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