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A frequent email request I receive from readers is to post a few days or a week of the Traditional Diet I eat or what my family eats. Seems like a simple enough request, right?
Just write down our meals for a few days and post it. No big deal.
I’ve posted my personal menu before when I was on the GAPS Diet and I’ve posted one of my children’s food logs, but I’ve never posted a food diary while eating a regular Traditional Diet.
With many people asking for this, you might wonder why I haven’t done it. Let me explain.
There are many Traditional Diets!
During Dr. Weston A. Price’s travels around the world in the early 1900’s, he studied 14 of them in detail. These cultures all ate quite differently. Some ate no plant foods, some ate a lot. Some consumed raw dairy, some did not. The variations go on and on.
The common denominator between these 14 cultures is that they all had at least one sacred food which was always from an animal, never from plants. A few of these cultures even followed a mostly carnivorous diet.
These sacred foods were discovered by lab analysis to be extraordinarily high in the fat soluble vitamins A, D, and Vitamin K2.
What’s more, these Traditional Cultures were consuming the fat soluble activators at a rate about 10x higher than Americans of the 1930’s!
These sacred foods were revered by the Traditional Cultures that consumed them for bestowing easy fertility and healthy babies. Ample quantities of these sacred foods were provided to growing children, pregnant mothers, and the elderly to maintain health including the prevention of tooth decay.
With so many different Traditional Diets, you can see why it could be misleading for me to post what I eat specifically. My Traditional Diet could easily be misconstrued by some that this is the way to eat traditionally, when it is, in fact, only the implementation of a mix of Traditional Diets that works for me given my unique genetic heritage, health history, home environment, toxin load, food budget etc.
How to Determine the Best Traditional Diet for YOU
So how did I come up with the typical way I eat?
Here’s the approach I used.
First, you need to read Dr. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. There is absolutely no substitute for reading this amazing book. Just seeing all the pictures alone is guaranteed to rock your world! This book really should be required reading for every dietician, nutritionist, doctor, nurse or anyone else working in the healthcare field today. It really is quite laughable for anyone working in the field of nutrition to attempt to counsel people on the best way to eat without intimate knowledge of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Price.
That is a clear example of the blind leading the blind, don’t you think?
Once you’ve read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, then you should read Nourishing Traditions Cookbook, which is the practical implementation of the Traditional Diet blueprint.
If by that point, you are still confused about how to implement a Traditional Diet for yourself, then you can do what I did.
What is YOUR Ancestral Heritage?
Take a look at your genetic heritage and focus your Traditional Diet on those foods consumed by your specific, cultural ancestors. In my case, the Northern European cultures described in Dr. Price’s book fit the bill.
The Northern European cultures did not consume rice, beans, and corn for example. These cultures also ate little if any fruit or raw vegetables. So, my Traditional Diet at home does not include these foods very frequently.
Instead, I focus on sourdough bread, raw dairy, fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, and meat, cooked stews and soups like the mountaintop Swiss culture.
I also include seafood and oats like what the isolated Gaelics consumed.
Of course, there is variation in our diet based on the other cultures studied by Dr. Price, but we focus our staple whole foods on the cultures from which we obtained our genome.
My cultural ancestors didn’t eat that many vegetables unless they were fermented or cooked in stews or butter, for example. Consequently, raw veggies are not consumed much at all in our home except for the occasional veggie juice or salad.
Watch out for Modern Fads Masquerading as Ancestral
Are you drinking regular green smoothies? You need to know that no Traditional Society ever consumed raw plant foods at that kind of rate. Given that many green vegetables contain anti-nutrients like oxalic acid or are goitrogenic (thyroid depressing), you are really rolling the dice with this modern day health fad even if you “rotate” your greens.
While this may go against conventional “wisdom” to eat raw veggies, fruits and salads with abandon, to that I say “why”?
The healthy traditional cultures that comprise my ancestry didn’t eat much in the way of vegetables and fruit unless fermented or cooked and they were perfectly healthy with straight teeth free from tooth decay, high immunity to disease, and excellent vitality into old age.
Sounds good to me. Those are the same health goals I have for myself and my family, so I’m going to stick with what works, thank you very much, not with nutritional “science” that blows with the wind and is more interested in influencing your buying habits than your health.
Figure Out Your Ancestry then Go from There …
What if you aren’t of Northern European heritage? What if your genetic heritage hails from South America, for example? In that case, I would suggest reading the chapters on the South American cultures in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and focusing your staple foods on what those cultures emphasized, which was corn, beans, and fish – grains and legumes prepared in a traditional manner!
If you are of Asian descent, rice is likely to be a better choice for you instead of the oats and wheat in my home. We don’t eat rice much in our home. We don’t do as well on this grain as we do on wheat and oats which is what our ancestors ate. An exception to this is wild rice, which is not really even rice at all.
Are you getting the picture somewhat?
The Most Important Key to Implementation of Traditional Diet
However you choose to implement your Traditional Diet, the most important key is to focus on ample amounts of the sacred foods. These foods include raw grassfed butter, organ meats like liver, egg yolks from outdoor chickens, fish eggs (roe), and fish liver oils like cod liver oil.
Don’t skimp on these critical foods! You can round out your diet with whatever whole food staples comprised the general eating pattern of your ancestors, but the sacred foods should always remain the focal point of the diet to ensure maximum health and immunity to disease both infectious and chronic.
I hope this discussion helps you along the path to finding the best implementation of Traditional Diets for you and your family. As you can see, it’s not as simple as just posting a mealplan.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Thank you so much for this post!…..just the nudge I needed!
I love your insight on this subject, and I feel much better about the food choices for my family. I always say I am going to throw in more raw veggies and get a variety, but there are so few I even like raw, steam and butter them and we love them all! I do have to say traditional cooking does take a lot of time, traditionally food consumed the life of a mother, their main job was to keep everyone fed and healthy. Change is slow around here, today my daughter caught sight of the chicken head in the stock and wouldn’t eat dinner and I was pleased because I feed 11 mouths and only 1 went unfed because of the head a year ago it would have been 5-7. Maybe someday she’ll ask for recipes.
Diane (or anyone), can you tell me the benefit of the head in broth? I’ve used them before too, based on the NT recipe calling for them, but I can’t find any info on what they add nutritionally….
The head adds lots of extra gelatin.
Your comment on green smoothies leaves me confused. I drink green smoothies, but I don’t use cruciferous veggies very often. But if you are eating the cabbage in the form of sauerkraut or as a smoothie, how does it make a difference on how you consume it. I have read articles suggesting that cruciferous veggies only cause a problem with folks who have a iodine deficiency, but won’t cause a problem otherwise. Cruciferous veggies are supposed to have anti cancer properties too. While it is true that traditional societies didn’t drink green smoothies they also didn’t consume cod liver oil. Or am I missing some part of the picture.
Sauerkraut is traditionally consumed as a condiment and in small quantities. Green smoothies contain obscenely large quantities of raw green vegetables – more than you could ever eat in one sitting under normal circumstances. It’s akin to consuming fermented soy in small quantities like Asian cultures have for hundreds of years (safe and healthy) versus consuming unfermented soy in the modern sense in huge quantities … ground up and put in everything which is not traditional nor is it healthy. It’s a matter of degree.
Let me tell you my experience with kimchi (kim chee). So I read ‘fermented is great’.
I go to the nearest town, load up on frozen kimchi, and start to eat this 24/7. Kimchi
and me were a match. Loved getting up in the morning and having that flavor punch first thing: rousing!
I don’t remember how long after it started: I got BLAZING rosacea………bright red cheeks AND face. It was embarrassing to be lit up like that! Started to make the rounds of naturalpaths and derms…….but nothing worked. Then someone brought up the idea I wasn’t eating it like a condiment AND since it was commercially prepared, it was loaded with bad stuff like MSG. You really need the whole picture: a little bit of information can be a dangerous thing.
Too much kimchi ruins your spelling, too: naturopath (duh……!)
I don’t think I consume an obscene amount. I think of it this way – when humans were still a hunter gatherer society we didn’t eat grains at all because they were not digestible in the raw state. So more of something else must have been eaten, probably more fruits and veggies. Prior to our grain eating ways, archeology finds of human remains showed that we were 6 inches taller and had larger brains. So that shows me that grains interfere with nutrient absorption. Grains make us shorter – just look an asians with all that rice they eat – short, short, short. It is a matter of opinion of how much greens is too much. I juice about an icecream bucket full of veggies, and that juice lasts me one week.. Maybe other do more than this, but for me it is an easier way to get the veggies in my diet that I don’t normally eat. I love your blog though Sarah, keep up the good work.
we’re not all meant to look the same or be the same height! asians can be quiet healthy and sturdy too.
I meant no disrespect. I have read about how asian people who have lived in North America and eat a more western diet grow taller than those who consume rice with almost every meal. I am not suggesting that eating rice is unhealthy. I am only saying this to make a point that when humans were hunter gatherers we at no grain, and so we ate more vegetation. That is why when we switched to an agricultural diet we started to become smaller. Fossil evidence shows this. Eating grain stunts growth. Not presumptuous of me at all. I am only trying to argue the point that green drinks are not unhealthy. (The question might be if rice stunts growth more than wheat – I would probably argue YES. Is it unhealthy, in moderation probably not.)
Er…that’s pretty presumptuous don’t you think so? That Asians are short because of rice?!?! Yes, diet plays a big role – we generally eat much less meat and drink almost no milk traditionally than those of Caucasian stock.
The Japanese are much taller now that they are consuming dairy in the more recent generations. To say they are short because of rice is again, an argument by the anti-grain community that does not hold up to scrutiny.
A single green smoothie contains an obscene amount of greens to be consumed in a single day. I have never had a green smoothie, nor will I ever. It is not normal nor is it a natural way to consume greens which are toxic in such large amounts.
The hunter-gatherer logic just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Science is not really science unless it is verifiable with reality. There were plenty of traditional cultures that ate grains and were perfectly healthy – therefore this thing going around the paleo world that “humans weren’t meant to eat grains” simply does not hold up. Perhaps some folks do better without them but to insist that they are a bad food is nonsense.
What do you think about juicing being recommended in the GAPS diet?
I never said that grains were bad. I just said that based on fossil records they affect growth. But if you choose not to believe that, that’s okay. Rice should be used only in moderation is what I said. Even Nourishing Traditions says the same thing about rice on page 466 (It just says that westerners should not eat rice every day)
It is true that for me personally that I use a little paleo logic and a little Weston A Price logic and combine the two. Maybe that is why my posts are seeming to cause arguments. I do enjoy your page and your blogs, and I do agree with you most of the time, but I think I have to stop posting here. My intent is not to cause fights, and I fear that is what is happening. I will just read your blog and try to not comment. Cheers
I really appreciate this post. In my zeal for new found nutrition, I wanted to eat everything in the NT book like a good little WAP’er. I have also tried to keep RAW at the center. But I found my family and I running into trouble with certain types of food, especially too much raw. This gives me a better basis on which to make those traditional food choices. It is more fun to eat when the wisdom of our bodies and ancestry are heeded.
Our son also has eczema and we’ve noticed a improvement since we started taking FCLO. I’d much rather pay for something that will build his immunity than pay for something that will suppress it (topical and oral steroids). Plus the side effects of steroid use are not worth it.
Makes so much sense! We are mostly northern European over here too and I find that eating the way my mom and grandmother cooked seems to “sit right” with me as well. It’s roasts, stews, broth-based soups, meat and potatoes, cooked veggies, and a decent portion of dairy. I still love Mexican though, and always have … so we probably get an extra portion of corn into our diets if we’re not avoiding grains. Making me hungry for our lentil soup tonight!
I love my corn and beans too. Nothing wrong with some Tex-Mex on occasion!! I just don’t eat it that often (maybe a couple times a month .. see how you go for yourself – it may be more often or less often than me) as these foods even when prepared traditionally don’t do it for me as well as the Northern European cuisine which suits my digestion best. Sample and enjoy from the smorgasboard of Traditional Whole Foods and focus your attention on the sacred foods and those whole food staples that would most likely work best for your heritage or mixed heritage. Some trial and error may be required as you figure things out through observing your digestion and wellness after consuming certain foods. Fatigue is probably the #1 symptom that what you just ate wasn’t such a great choice. You should feel GREAT after you eat.
This is funny because I’m of Northern European (German, French, English, Dutch) ancestry and love all the foods that go with it but I am equally attuned with Mexican cuisine. My family and I have always thought it must be because I was born on the border of Mexico (outside San Diego) and was the only Caucasian baby in the nursery! I adore all Mexican food and do really well on it. I use many kinds Mexican ingredients 2-3 x’s a week. I also do better on corn flour than wheat digestion wise. It could be that ALL of my ancestors from both sides except 1 set of great grandparents have been in America since the 1600’s and corn was a major staple for them when they got here. I love the principles of Deep Nutrition and find that it makes it easy to cook using them.
Thanks for a great post!
what an interesting post!! very informative. thanks for sharing!
I agree! Another one hit out of the ballpark, Sarah!
Such great rationale! Thank you for this one, and for all you share!
@Angela That is great news! You will be rewarded for your persistence with far fewer health issues and meds being needed. No one in our family has needed a round of antibiotics for an illness in over 10 years and the fermented cod liver oil/butter oil is a huge reason why.
Well said, Sarah. Keep up the good work. Even if at times I feel completely overwhelmed with your suggestions I love to feel challenged and you have just the personality to challenge people. I keep reading since it helps keep that flame going for why I choose to spend time in my kitchen and my yard rather than in the shopping malls and such. We all have a choice of where to spend our limited money and time.
You folks inspire me right back. If you think I don’t get tired of all the dirty dishes from my constant cooking – THINK AGAIN. But then when I am tired of yet another pile of dirty dishes stacked on the counter, I try to remember the last time any of us were really ill and I can’t remember it … SO WORTH IT.
Amen! At least I know I’m not the only one now lol. I keep thinking there’s for a,be a better way, because it seems I have a perpetual supply of dirty dishes! Thanks for sharing, Sarah.
Ha – this is EXACTLY what I was thinking last night. I had a huge pile, and it wasn’t my first of the day. I was in there quite a lot (along with my two daughters – since it is summer, they are helping more). Was actually thinking about how little we get sick so yes, it is worth it. Health is everything . . . it really is.
Its even more worth it when the ones youre cooking for do all the dishes! I’m lucky that I spend all the time researching, purchasing, cooking.. But then darling hubby washes every single dish!