Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine: Improving Health and Longevity with Native Nutrition [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I first read this book in 1987, when it was initially published. I'd picked it up in a bookstore on Fifth Avenue (that's how well I remember the occasion, 16 years later), started to read, and couldn't put it down. So I bought what for me then was an expensive book and finished it that night.

It was difficult to know who to admire more after after I'd completed it, Ron Schmid, who so lucidly and modestly outlined the accomplishments of Weston Price (really, the centerpiece of the book), or Price himself, an extraordinary man whose self-supported, worldwide investigations of the food traditions of native cultures were nothing less than revolutionary in what they implied for how most of us eat--and live--today. In any case, I felt oddly moved by this book--a strange thing to say considering its subject--as if some real portion of an invaluable truth had been exposed to me.

Three years later, I used this book to develop an eating plan for my pregnant wife, including cod liver oil every day and a lot of fish and raw milk cheeses (the closest we could come, even in Manhattan, to any raw milk products). With all of that, our son decided to wait two weeks beyond his due date to make his appearance--21 1/2'' long and weighing over nine pounds--with the obstetrician remarking that my wife's placenta was twice the normal weight, in fact was the largest she'd seen in all her years of delivering children. I don't know whether either fact can be attributed to the diet my wife had followed, but the important thing is that our son turned out to be very bright, healthy, and the owner of a sweet temperament (our first clue of that being that he was effectively sleeping through the night when he was two weeks old)--qualities that this book suggest are not at all unusual when pregnant women follow traditional diets.

So, for me this book has some sort of talismanic power, the kind I associate with other profound life-transforming (or -generating) reading experiences. In that sense, I'm not particularly interested in challenging ANY part of it, as some others here have done, because I feel its general, encompassing theme is so strong and effectively expressed by the writer, and because, as far as I know, Schmid was a trailblazer in introducing (and explicating so clearly) Weston Price's work to the general reading public. I will add, though, that anyone interested in this book, should and even must buy a copy of Sally Fallon and Mary Enig's Nourishing Traditions, which extends Schmid's (and Price's) generalities into the American kitchen. It's as much a treasure as Schmid's book, as the two together, like Jack Sprat and his wife, cover everything (including how to think about fat), from principles to practicalities, that you might need to build new lives out of ancient practices.

Schmid's book was the first one I read on the work of Weston A. Price and Francis Pottenger. It is a very good overview of the subject of Tradtional diets. If you are wondering what "Traditional diets" are, they are simply the way people ate before big business took over food production, and made shelf life and profit margin more important than the nutritional quality of food.

Price was a dentist who embarked on a decade long research project in the late 1930s to find the healthiest people on Earth and study what they ate and how they ate it. His studies ranged all over the world, covering all different races. Schmid has done a good job of giving an overview of Price's findings.

The only issues I have with this book are that Schmid falls for the cholesterol scam in discussing heart disease, and that he also falls for the idea that the term "life expectancy" as used in statistics means the average age of death. (page 66) It doesn't. Life Expectancy as an arithmetic average would be reasonably close to the median age of death in a perfect Bell curve population sample, but such perfect samples only exist on paper, not in reality. The median age of death, that is the age by which half of the population died, was 57 in 1900. This means that half the population lived to be 57 or older. Kind of different than saying the average age of death was 45-50. In 2000, the median age of death was only 78, so there hasn't been as much gain as we are led to believe. Neither figure addresses the health or quality of life of people at those ages, either. A minor point in the grand scheme of this book. His discussion of life expectancy differences for those 40 and over on the rest of the page is still very much true and sets the record straight on the PR hype we are given about our current state of health.

For more in-depth information on fats and cholesterol, I recommend Mary Enig's book, Know Your Fats.

This is a great book, and will open your eyes to a better way to eat and improve your health. I heartily recommend it.

This book is well-written and provides an excellent synopsis of Dr. Weston Price's research into traditional diets from many peoples around the world. Dr. Schmid writes lucidly and shows the benefits and limitations of traditional diets in treating various diseases.

The book goes wrong, like so many others, in its demonization of saturated fat. Schmid is simply wrong about saturated fats causing heart disease, cancer, and ill health in general. He is also wrong in asserting that our ancestors did not eat a lot of saturated fat. This is strange coming from someone who is so obviously familiar with Price's research which showed every population group to be eating diets rich in saturated fats and these people, as Schmid knows, were supremely healthy.

I think a better book to get would be Lutz and Allan's LIFE WITHOUT BREAD or Fallon and Enig's NOURISHING TRADITIONS.