Wise Traditions 2010 Roundup

I’m back home, unpacked and sort of back in routine after 5 days of the most mind-blowing Wise Traditions Conference yet!  Attendance continues to jump every year even in an economy where most other conventions are experiencing decreasing numbers.

To give you some idea, the very first Wise Traditions Conference I attended in 2004 attracted just over 600 people.  In 2007, attendance had increased to just over 1000.    This past weekend, attendance soared past 1500!

I was up until all hours each night talking with some of the most interesting, fabulous, out of the box folks I’ve ever met anywhere in the world.   Not only are Wise Traditions attendees incredibly interesting to talk to and exchange ideas with, but they also are noticeably and jaw-droppingly fit and healthy looking too.

One thing that becomes immediately apparent is how most folks at the Conference look so much younger than their actual age.   The women have smooth facial skin with a healthy glow with clear, bright eyes – the BIG, cosmetic bonus of eating plenty of whole, unprocessed saturated fat in the diet.   The men – even those in middle age and beyond – rarely sport the ample spare tire that accompanies those eating the standard, low-fat, high grain-based American diet.

If you have any doubts about the physiological and mental benefits of eating plenty of healthy, whole, animal fats in the diet, a few minutes observing the Wise Traditions Conference attendees is convincing enough in very short order.

So what were the highlights of the Conference for me?   There were so many memories .. here are a few of the big ones:

• Rami Nagel, author of Cure Tooth Decay and a featured Conference speaker, stayed in the hotel room right next to the room where I stayed.  I had the most interesting conversation with him at 
  1:30 am in the hallway outside of our rooms one night!   I will be blogging about this conversation soon.  Amazing stuff
• I met so many of you, dear readers, while manning the Real Food Media booth on the exhibit floor. There was a bit of a mess-up getting together for lunch on Friday since the Real Food Media booth was not even set up until Saturday, but everyone seemed to roll with it and we got to meet up anyway! Thanks to each and every one of you who came by to say hello sometime during the Conference!  I got some great feedback for the blog and lots of encouragement!    Thank you for sharing your stories and inspiration with me!
• Ann Marie Michaels and I both won Activist Awards (Maureen Diaz, my dear friend, and fellow Chapter Leader, was also a recipient) at the banquet on Saturday night.   It was a total shock for both of us, but I guess we should have suspected something was up when we had seats at a reserved table right in the front of the room by the stage.  Joel Salatin was the keynote speaker after the banquet dinner and he both entertained and challenged all of us with his wise and humorous perspective on the Real Food Movement.
• Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez MD wowed everyone with his talk on Nutritional Therapy for Cancer.   I ate several meals (ah, the food!!!)  with his MD assistant (Ingrid – you are awesome!) who explained the particulars of Dr. Gonzalez’s holistic cancer protocol.    She gave me a written excerpt from his upcoming book What Went Wrong which focuses on scientific bias in the treatment of cancers and I will reading through this and blogging about it.  Incidentally, Dr. Gonzalez was the recipient of the “Integrity in Science” award at the Conference banquet!

• I attended Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride MD’s talk on Gut and Psychology Syndrome which has been recently re-released and has 100 pages of new material.   Much of this new material was discussed in Dr. McBride’s seminar and I will be blogging about this too for all of you interested in GAPS!

• I was delighted to see Dr. Bruce Rind MD return to the Wise Traditions Conference.   I attended his seminar at Wise Traditions 2004 and was very excited to listen to his latest thinking on the adrenal/thyroid/Lyme disease connection.    Most interesting was the beginning of his talk when he put up thermography photographs of his assistant’s upper torso before talking on a cell phone and also 5 and 10 minutes later.    If these pictures didn’t convince everyone in the audience to stop putting those cancer devices next to their heads all the time, I don’t know what will!

• One of the most interesting talks I attended was given by Nora Gedgaudas, author of Primal Body, Primal Mind. While I do not agree with Nora’s “all grains are bad” stance, I did find her research on the link between blood sugar/insulin resistance to mental decline and mental problems, in general, to be compelling.  I plan to blog about what I heard during this talk very soon!

• I got to meet and reconnect with so many of my heroes in the Real Food Movement including my mentor Sally Fallon Morell among many, many others.   Just breathing the same air and being in the same room with these folks was exhilarating and so very motivating.    As I share more of what I learned in the coming days, I hope you can catch a glimpse of the excitement that I experienced during the Conference and perhaps you will be convicted to attend Wise Traditions 2011 in Dallas Texas!

• I got to spend a lot of quality time with my fellow Real Food Media bloggers throughout the entire Conference.   Our dinner together Sunday night was a moving experience as we all shared our goals and how we are using our blogs to bring an ever-growing segment of people into the Real Food Movement.   We inspired each other greatly.   It was an unforgettable night.

• The absolute highlight for me was presenting a check for $500 to Sally Fallon Morell, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, after my talk to the Chapter Leaders on Monday.    Thanks to each and every one of you, dear readers, who voted for my Nourishing Traditions Mayo Recipe in the Natural News Video Recipe contest last month!    By winning this (vegetarian, no less!) contest, we all pulled together to bring in more funds for an organization and cause that is truly out of the ordinary in the field of nutrition today!

I hope you found this brief summary interesting and it whets your appetite for upcoming blog posts about specific talks during the Conference that I attended.    I can’t wait to get started!