A diet debated The Weston Price school of ‘traditional’ foods draws converts and critics

By Sandra Dias
Craig Fear, a nutritional therapist in Northampton, was a vegetarian for seven years, and during that time he suffered from health ailments, including profound fatigue and digestive problems. Then he heard about the Weston A. Price Foundation. This national nonprofit founded in 1999 disseminates the nutritional research of Dr. Weston A. Price, a Cleveland dentist who traveled the world studying “primitive” diets in the 1930s.

Soon, Fear radically changed his eating habits. Instead of tofu and vegetable stir-fries, Fear, age 36, switched to a “traditional foods” diet advocated by Price, which focuses largely on animal fats from grass-fed livestock and, he says, he soon began to feel better.

“I became a vegetarian for what I thought were good health reasons, but what happened was quite the opposite,” said Fear, who co-leads a local chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. “When I was a vegetarian, I had no energy at all. I had to stop a lot of my activities and found I could not go as long distance when hiking or biking.”

The Northampton-area chapter of the WAPF, founded in 2009, has a Facebook page and meets for monthly potlucks and information sharing about recipes and local resources. Interest in the group is growing, participants say, with 123 people listed as members on its Facebook site.
But the diet is not without detractors.

While WAPF members claim those populations enjoyed optimum health and increased longevity, one medical doctor, Joel Fuhrman, M.D., a family practice doctor in New Jersey specializing in nutritional medicine, disputes that. On Fuhrman’s blog, Disease Proof, he says that the groups Price studied actually had shorter life spans, higher infant mortality, endemic disease and infection.

The case for animal foods

Price studied the dietary characteristics of isolated populations with low dental decay rates, including the Maoris in New Zealand, Eskimos, the Masai in Kenya, and residents of the Outer Hebridean islands in Scotland, and determined that while specific foods differed, they all shared high levels of Vitamins A and D and also what he called “Activator X,” which is now believed to be Vitamin K12. They also all ate some fermented foods and drank broth made from steeped bones. At the time, no one in those isolated groups ate processed foods or refined sugars.
Price determined the combination of fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K could be found largely in nutrient-dense animal foods and he recommended a diet of meat from pastured animals, seafood, organ meats, eggs and butterfat. The WAPF also advocates for the consumption of raw milk, organic (preferably locally grown) vegetables, and the avoidance of chemically processed and prepared foods, sugar, and soy products, except for fermented soy, such as miso.

Consumption of grain products should be minimized, according to the diet, and when eaten, whole grains should be soaked or soured overnight to neutralize phytic acid and support digestion, according to the WAPF. Other components of the diet include sour or lacto-fermented dairy products and vegetables, such as sauerkraut, and bone stocks made by slow-cooking animal bones in water and salt. The diet also allows for the liberal use of salt, particularly hand-harvested sea salts.

Fear said when he examined the diet it “just felt right,” and seemed to be “based in common sense.”
While some of the Weston Price dietary recommendations are
“laudable,” such as an avoidance of processed foods and recommendation to consume organic, locally grown vegetables, others are “irresponsible,” according to Fuhrman.

“It is well established in the scientific literature that a diet high in saturated fats and low in fruits and vegetables in early childhood is the leading cause of adult cancers,” Fuhrman says in his blog.

Christine Decker, 57, a naturopathic doctor in Northampton and WAPF group co-leader, said the diet really is based on traditional whole foods and is very much like what earlier generations, particularly those on farms, consumed, prior to the introduction of processed foods, beginning in the 1930s and continuing to this day.

“Back in the day, everyone made bone broths on Sunday, simmering a pile of bones with a few tablespoons of salt,” Decker said. “You get a rich broth that is laden with gelatin that is very healing to the digestive tract.”
Decker said the USDA’s food pyramid emphasizes whole grains, fruits, and vegetables with only minimal daily protein, but the Weston Price diet is almost a reverse of that.

“This is very different from the mainstream nutritional advice that we have been handed for the past 40 to 50 years, which is embodied in the USDA food pyramid,” she said.

The diet does, in fact, fly in the face of the American Heart Association’s longstanding recommendation to limit saturated fats, salt, and cholesterol to prevent heart disease and stroke. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.

“This is what doctors and the American Heart Association tell you, but Price did not find this to be true at all,” Decker said. “The people he studied really valued fat and cholesterol.”

“To advocate eating a diet high in saturated fat is to ignore all of the nutritional research — especially of the past 40 years — that links this diet to shorter life spans and higher rates of heart disease and cancer is unconscionable,” Fuhrman says in his blog.
Two local registered dietitians said while the Price diet is fine in some areas, it is worrisome in others.
Bruce Homstead, a registered dietitian, said he understands the appeal of the Weston Price diet because it is home-cooked and tasty, and he said in many ways, people who follow it are “eating in an incredibly wholesome way.”
“These are often slow-cooked wholesome meals that include meat put in a pot on the oven to braise for hours,” Homstead said. “It’s the way our moms and grandmothers used to cook.”

He said the Price diet, based on whole foods, is superior to a diet that many Americans subsist on that includes processed foods, fast-foods replete with transfats, and high-sugar cereals loaded with sugar.

“This diet might go a little too far to the side of eating too much butter, lard, and meat,” Homstead said. He said that could be problematic for people who are not physically active. “The missing element really is physical activity.”
However, Homstead personally believes the “elixir of youth” is increased consumption of vegetables and fruits.
“From my clinical observation, when I am teaching people how to lose weight and gain health, I look to the plant kingdom,” he said. “It’s well-known in the scientific literature that if we want to reverse our risk of cancers, particularly breast cancer, we need to increase our consumption of fruits and vegetables to 15 portions a day, with most of that being vegetables.”

Homstead agrees that humans were not designed to eat and digest a lot of cereal grains and legumes. But he does not agree with the Weston Price advocacy of raw milk and noted humans are the only animals that continue to drink milk after weaning from mother’s milk. Homstead said farms are “notoriously dirty” and there is a potential for bacterial-borne illness from raw milk, which is not pasteurized. He also said the WAPF criticism of soy as an endocrine disruptor has largely been debunked.
Proponents of the Weston Price diet say sugar, highly refined carbohydrates, transfats, and processed foods are the true health hazards, not fat. And, they note, the organization recommends eating meat from pasture-fed animals, not grain-fed, which one local registered dietitian said alters the type and amount of fat in the meat, making it healthier to eat.

Many WAPF members use recipes from the book “Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats,” by Sally Fallon, WAPF co-founder and president. Fallon recommends spreading butter so thick, “you can see teeth marks on it,” and sauces and gravies feature prominently in her book.

Nourishing — and rich

Decker claims that the current low-fat, low-salt emphasis is “based on very poor research,” and said that fat and cholesterol are necessary for healthy brain functioning, collagen production, integrity of the body’s cell membranes, improved production of sex hormones, and more. She also said low-fat diets tend not to be satisfying and as a result, people have trouble adhering to them. The Weston Price diet is both nourishing and sating because it satisfies an innate human need for animal fat, she said.
“Cholesterol has no relationship to heart disease whatsoever, except it protects people against it,” Decker said.

Decker and another WAPF local chapter leader, Jennifer Herman, 25, a registered nurse, are roommates who often cook together. On a recent night the pair made beef kidneys with mushroom sauce, a recipe drawn from Fallon’s book. Herman was drawn to the “traditional foods” movement after being introduced to it by an aunt in California.
In preparing their recent meal, Decker and Herman soaked the kidney for several hours in lemon juice and then cut it up and browned it in a pan with ghee, a type of clarified butter. They also made a sauce to ladle on top from mushrooms, bone broth (prepared earlier from beef marrow bones), and homemade crème fraiche from fermented raw cream, fermented Thai fish sauce, stoneground mustard, and red wine.

Herman ate the meal with cold home-fermented cabbage while Decker’s entrée was accompanied by Korean kimchi. They also drank homemade kombucha, a fizzy, chilled, fermented beverage, and local raw milk.

The next morning, Decker had a breakfast of scrambled eggs from local pastured chickens, raw aged cheddar cheese, fresh tomato fried in butter, bacon fat, and home-rendered lard, a few pieces of fried ham, some lacto-fermented sauerkraut, and a glass of raw milk. Other meals for the week included bone marrow for lunch, grass-fed beef stew with organic root vegetables for dinner, oxtail, browned lamb shanks with kimchi, and raw whole milk yogurt with honey drizzled on top for a dessert.

Fear’s diet is similarly rich and none of the three leaders of the local WAPF chapter worry at all about a high cholesterol level. In fact, both Fear and Decker said they hope their cholesterol levels rise on the diet. Fear said his latest cholesterol test showed a total cholesterol level of 177 milligrams per deciliter. Current guidelines in the United States for total cholesterol recommend a level of 200 mg/dL or less.

“I was disappointed by that,” he said. “Total cholesterol levels under 150 are associated with violent behavior and early death.”

Louise Amyot, a retired registered dietitian in Greenfield, agrees that aspects of the Weston Price diet are healthy, but she said multiple servings of meat per day, coupled with the liberal use of salt, whole fat milk, butter, lard, and other products high in saturated fats is not healthy. Meat and milk from 100-percent pastured cows is high in healthy Omega-3 fatty acids, compared to a corn-fed cow whose meat and milk has a high amount of saturated fat.
“A grass-fed cow produces leaner meat that will not raise cholesterol levels in the same way that meat from corn-fed animals does,” Amyot said.

Amyot said the whole issue is “confusing” because the WAPF produces research that shows saturated fats are healthy, while low-fat supporters come out with their own research, including from top scientists at Harvard Medical School, showing just the opposite. Two such respected scientists, Alice Lichtenstein, senior scientist and director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory at Tufts University, and Walter Willett, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, both say saturated fats raise cholesterol and increase the risk of heart attack while polyunsaturated fats decrease cholesterol and lower the risk of heart attack, according to Amyot.

Amyot attended the American Dietetic Association Conference in Boston in March where dieticians brought up the research of Mary Enig, Ph.D., a nutritionist who co-wrote Fallon’s book and claims that saturated fat is actually heart protective.

“Lichtenstein and Willett simply said all evidence is to the contrary,” according to Amyot.
Amyot said most accepted research also indicates that high daily fat consumption contributes to the development of colon cancer and liver cancer. She also said a liberal use of salt is not recommended and can contribute to high blood pressure, calcium loss, and macular degeneration. Amyot also noted that the Japanese have the highest rate of longevity in the world and the lowest levels of cholesterol; their diet includes little fat and meat and is based mostly on minimally cooked or half-raw sea fish, rice, miso, tofu and specially cultivated seaweeds. In Japan, people also tend to eat smaller portions and have a much lower daily caloric intake than Americans.
Both Amyot and Homstead said butter has a lot of saturated fat and is not healthful in large amounts; olive oil is much healthier as an alternative. Raw milk may have some beneficial nutrients that are otherwise destroyed in the pasteurization process, but it also carries the possibility of harmful bacteria and is not recommended for young children and pregnant women, Amyot said.
Herman said part of the local WAPF chapter’s mission is to educate people about how to purchase and prepare “traditional” foods and where to locate products, all of which are available locally. WAPF members share tips on how to cook bone broths, render lard, make sauerkraut, and more. She also noted that the WAPF is a strong advocate of sustainable farming practices.
“We are lucky to live in a nutrient-rich area and can go to a co-op, farm, farmer’s market or CSA for pastured meat and organic vegetables,” she said. “We have such a wonderful opportunity in this area to eat well and at the potlucks we share that bounty.”

Sandy Dias is a freelance writer living in Holyoke.

Photo captions:
KEVIN GUTTING
The Weston A. Price Foundation chapter of Northampton gathers at the home of Lundy Bancroft for a potluck last month. From left are Charity Ritscher, Marnie McKay, John Delmolino, Chris Wrona, Christine Decker, Jennifer Nicole Herman and Noah Gordon.
KEVIN GUTTING
A cantaloupe and blackberry salad was part of the meal at a recent traditional foods potluck in Northampton.
KEVIN GUTTING
Christine Decker, a naturopathic physician with offices in Connecticut and Northampton, chats with John Delmolino of Hadley during a potluck meeting.
KEVIN GUTTING
Kombucha is a fermented beverage. The Weston A. Price Foundation says lacto-fermented foods contain enzymes and beneficial bacteria that aid digestion.
KEVIN GUTTING
Jennifer Nicole Herman, leader of the Northampton chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation, first heard about the traditional foods diet from a relative. Foods shown here include cheese with fresh dill, sourdough bread with rosemary olive oil and pasture butter, chicken soup, salmon and a glass of kombucha.