Has anyone here heard of Nutrition and Physical degeneration by Dr. Weston Price? The third and fourth chapters give a fantastic insight into the traditional diets of two isolated European communities (in the Swiss alps and the Hebrides).
For instance, of the isolated Swiss community, Dr. Price wrote ‘“It has been the achievement of the valley to build some of the finest physiques in all Europe. This is attested to by the fact that many of the famous Swiss guards of the Vatican at Rome, who are the admiration of the world and are the pride of Switzerland, have been selected from this and other Alpine valleys. It is every Loetschental boy’s ambition to be a Vatican guard.”’
The remainder of this post (sorry for the length) probably makes me sound like all of the other “I found the perfect diet” fad dieters out there. Bear with me; this isn’t some diet conjured up by some prof. (speaking of Cordain here), but is actually based upon isolated folk living in the 1920s and 1930s following their ancestral diet.
Lactase persistence is what gave the indo-european folk, the first horse herders from the Western steppes such great advantage in Northern, Central, and Western Europe. Given my heritage, it only seemed natural that I started adding raw dairy to my diet in the form of raw milk, yogurt, and cheese made with raw milk. In addition to learning to cook with lard and tallow, making scrambled eggs with copious amounts of butter mixed in, making home made fermented sauerkraut, eating home made sourdough bread topped with pate in the nordic and germanic fashion (made with pork fat and pork liver rather than butter and goose liver in the French style), and of course Norwegian style fermented cod liver oil has been transformative for me. I won’t go into it, but needless to say I feel youthful, among many other attributes that can be associated with the change in diet.
Currently I am reading The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care based upon the diet described above. I feel blessed, for the girl I just started seeing is all in.
Even worse is the modern corpus of appalling advice–a society that advocates lowfat or vegetarian diets, or endorses processed foods for pregnant women and growing children, is a society that has lost its way, has sacrificed the health of its young people to convenience, dogma and financial gain. [Not to mention the practice of putting Mountain Dew or Cola into the baby’s bottle and feeding the baby with it; do whatever you can to prevent this if you ever see it!]
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The production of healthy babies indeed constitutes a partnership between ourselves and the Creator; God provides the blueprint, the genetic code, while we, the parents, provide the building materials.
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Good nutrition for ensuring a truly healthy baby needs to start before baby is conceived. If you have been following a nutrient-dense diet according to the principles outlined in this chapter for some time, then your period of preparation need only be about six months. But if you have been consuming a stan- dard American diet, full of junk food, or alternative- ly if you have been following a so-called “healthy” lowfat, vegetarian or vegan diet, you should count on two to three years of preparation before concep- tion. This may seem a long time for those eager to have a family, but we would urge you not to rush. A malnourished or depleted body needs time to re-cover, and that recovery needs to take place before, not during, your pregnancy.
If anyone is interested, I can include the suggested dietary plan. I have also read about couples who had previously thought they were sterile or unable to conceive, but who were then able to conceive once switching to the traditional diet of his or her people.
If you take nothing else from this forum post, I urge everyone to return to cooking with animal fats (lard, duck/goose fat, tallow). “Vegetable” oil–mainly from soybeans–margarine, and even the canola variety of rapeseed oil has been disastrous for our people, especially for our women. A study by a group of plastic surgeons noted that those who ate vegetables oils compared with those who ate natural butter, looked older by 5-10 years (I don’t recall the exact number of years, but I wasn’t at all surprised when I originally read it).
Sorry for the long post, I hope it helps someone as it helped me. If anyone here would like to share an old world recipe, I would love to hear it.
Blessed are our kin,
Heryos
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