Traditional Diets

c2008 Shanna Ohmes

Traditional diets are rarely talked about in the media today. Mainstream media typically depicts diets to mean completely eliminating some foods, or eating only certain other foods to lose weight.

Over the years I have read many books on the subject of diet. I had two criteria in mind with each book I read: 1)Would my ancestors have eaten this? and 2)Would there be a way to gather/grow/trade for this food in my area without a grocery store?

I asked these questions because I believe that with each further step into processing and shipping, we lose more valuable nutrients in our food. Now I still eat bananas even though I don't live in the tropics, but I also know the equivelant of food that has the same type of nutrients that does grow in my area, like watermelon. (Both are high in potassium.)

These are the 3 best books I have enjoyed.

"Nourishing Tradition by Sally Fallon
"Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston A. Price, DDS
"NeanderThin" by Ray Audette

The NeanderThin book helped me get off the processed foods and focus on what I was eating. It was a high protein/low carb diet, which worked very well for awhile. I don't follow it as rigidly now, but the research in it was mostly what my ancestors would have eaten and I could raise or gather most of the food myself.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration opened my eyes to the physical evidence to many of our health problems today. Dr. Price was a dentist who traveled to study many cultures and took pictures of people that ate only their traditional native diets, and then pictures of the next generations who went to the cities to work and ate more modern food such as white flour and white sugar products. The contrast in the dental pictures within even one generation was amazing.

Nourishing Traditions gave me more research than expanding on Dr. Price's discoveries. It is also a cookbook, and gives the research and evidence of why to use more traditional foods and cooking methods for better health. I rate this the best of the three books, it is by far my favorite.

My conclusion from my research is to eat a large variety of vegetables and fruits prepared by the traditional cooking methods, meats that are raised free range and to include good quaity fats essential to the body. And exercise. But we all knew that didn't we?