When I moved to Maine, I encountered a strong bias toward healthy, clean local foods and homeopathic help when needed. Living in Maine changed my life.
One of the first books given to me by a dear friend was Sally Fallon Morell’s Nourishing Traditions. It really changed my life. Morell is one of the founders of The Weston A. Price Foundation, an organization that sells no products beyond books and information based on research, often done by scientists who have specialized in how food works in the human body.
Price was a dentist who traveled the world to find groups of healthy local people in order to identify why they were healthy. He judged “health,” in part, by the condition of their teeth. What each healthy group was eating was a primary question for Price. He learned these groups of people ate healthy, clean, WHOLE foods present in their particular environments. AND, he noted that when they started eating “modern” foods, they became malnourished and sick. He left a most interesting archive of his discoveries.
The Weston A. Price Foundation has a terrific web site that anyone can use to research a food or health question.
Sally Fallon Morell is a nutritional researcher in her own right. In the formation of the Weston A. Price organization, Morell worked with Dr. Mary Enig, an internationally recognized expert on how various fats work in the human body. Enig had published work that said that trans fats were dangerous for humans–in the era when industry was seeking to substitute plant fats for the animal fats humans have eaten for thousands of years. The industry went after Enig, and she lost all research money and never got more. A few decades later, “science” had to acknowledge that trans fats were indeed dangerous for humans. But note that this story illustrates how powerful industries work to create room for their own products: they demonize what they want to replace.
Here’s an article that came into my internet feed the other day. It is based on an interview with Morell. You might find some surprises here that run counter to popular belief.
It should be no surprise to anyone these days that media bombards us with countless claims about what is healthy for humans, much of which is a departure from what has supported humans for thousands of years and much of which is based on “science” supported by industry to “prove” their claims are true.
Living in Maine, with all its farms and clean foods, transported me back in memory to how I grew up. My father was military, and we moved frequently, but lots of time was also spent with my mother’s people in rural Georgia, with access to local foods from the family farm and gardens. Family members gathered food daily, and much time was spent on food preparation and eating together.
After exposure to Morell’s Nourishing Traditions, I promptly reverted to eating the kind of traditional my grandparents ate. And I’ve never turned back from that practice. It is serving me well in so many ways as at 78 I am healthy and strong and have boundless energy and a zest for life. My food is my medicine, and I don’t need anything concocted by industries that do not have my best interests at heart.
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