Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!
Discussion Topic:
MYTH: THE WAPF DIET IS LIKE THE PALEO DIET
Links: The Paleo Mom (Sarah Ballantyne) has a fantastic rebuttal post as well on her blog to this anti-Paleo information from the Weston A. Price Foundation.
I created the graphic to the right of what I believe to be the major foods eaten by Paleo/Primal and Weston A. Price/ Traditional Foods eaters as part of my What is Paleo? blog post. Check out that post to view the graphic larger.
Click here to download this episode as an MP3.
The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.
Liz Wolfe: Hey, friends… and everyone else. Welcome to Episode 97 of the Balanced Bites Podcast. It’s me, Liz! And I’m here with Diane. I thought I’d try a new opening, but then it kind of fizzled halfway through.
Diane Sanfilippo: It felt weird.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, it felt weird. Hey, friends.
Diane Sanfilippo: Hey, everyone.
Liz Wolfe: Hey, everyone. Ugh. Why? So Episode 97, very exciting. Diane, what are you doing? Whatcha doing, girl?
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, we were both just eating some chicken. I was thinking it would be funny to do a little segment – and when I say that, I pretty much don’t mean it’ll become a regular thing because we’ll probably forget – but I feel like there should be a segment on the show called Foodie/Non-Foodie. What did I eat and what did you eat today? Three, two, one, go!
Liz Wolfe: My answer will usually be ground beef with avocado or chicken with avocado and probably a scoop of some kind of healthy fat. Ugh. It’s so bad.
Diane Sanfilippo: Bacon?
Liz Wolfe: Some bacon from Pete’s Paleo, that’s fo’ sho.
Diane Sanfilippo: And… iced coffee, maybe.
Liz Wolfe: And iced coffee. Yeah. It doesn’t bother me to do this. I’m not saying other people need to do this, but I’m just not a foodie. I just don’t care that much. I love it when other people cook for me, but it doesn’t make me feel sad that I can’t do that. I am known to eat, like, a scoop of coconut oil, a scoop of, yes, even tallow, a scoop of palm oil, just kind of to get the nutrition in without having to worry about what to put it in.
Diane Sanfilippo: Ugh. That’s like the Jetsons eating a meal pill.
Liz Wolfe: It’s the paleo Soylent approach.
Diane Sanfilippo: That is literally my on-the-road, travel… OK, I would do that if we were stuck in an airport. I would eat your packet of coconut oil if I had to.
Liz Wolfe: I ate better on the road with you than I eat at home.
Diane Sanfilippo: Why am I not surprised?
Liz Wolfe: Or prosciutto. There’s prosciutto. I’m having a little prosciutto. I’ve been watching The Sopranos as my wind-down time with my hubby since we’re not in New Jersey anymore.
Diane Sanfilippo: Get your fix.
Liz Wolfe: I have to get my Jersey fix.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’ve been catching up on the last season of Desperate Housewives. And when I say “catching up,” I probably watched the first two or three seasons of that… what was that, in the ’90s? I feel like it was forever ago.
Liz Wolfe: Is that on still?
Diane Sanfilippo: No, it’s not. It’s on Hulu. And for those of us who are randomly trying to watch TV to just escape the fact that writing a book is so isolating – Somebody said something about me posting too much on Facebook lately, and I really wanted to just tell them that it’s because I’m in my house literally talking to nobody all day for weeks on end, so I’m completely isolated except for the two hours I leave to go to the gym or maybe the grocery store. So if you run into me at Whole Foods, I’ll probably talk to you because otherwise this is it, just Facebook. So yeah, I’m ready to be done with all of this, but it’ll be awhile still. Anyway, so what did I eat today? What did you actually eat? You didn’t actually say what you ate. You just said what you sometimes eat.
Liz Wolfe: Well, this is what I ate today: grilled chicken with the PaleoChef wing sauce from Steve’s PaleoGoods. Just basically dipping chicken in wing sauce. And I’ve got some avocado, too, that I’m dipping.
Diane Sanfilippo: That’s all for the day?
Liz Wolfe: That’s all for right now!
Diane Sanfilippo: OK.
Liz Wolfe: And you?
Diane Sanfilippo: I was cooking for The 21-Day Sugar Detox book. I was revamping the apple egg muffin recipe that’s in Practical Paleo. I think it’s called Apple Streusel Egg Muffins. It’s not a regular muffin. It’s an egg muffin but with apples in it. I was revamping that, so I had a couple of those. They’re quite tasty. I think you should try and make those. They’re really easy.
Liz Wolfe: We had some family come for the Fourth of July, and we made these little fudgy brownies, but they don’t even have coconut flour in them. They have cocoa powder, eggs, a little bit of maple syrup, and some butter. Let me tell you, though, I actually forgot to put in the butter!
Diane Sanfilippo: Classic.
Liz Wolfe: It was literally just, like, eggs baked with cocoa powder, but it was really good.
Diane Sanfilippo: There’s a recipe in my book like that.
Liz Wolfe: Well, shoot.
Diane Sanfilippo: I have this book. It’s actually the last recipe in Practical Paleo. It’s pretty much exactly what you described, including the butter. It’s a flourless brownie recipe.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, that’s what it was.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s legit. So I had those egg muffins. I had two of those with some bacon for breakfast, and that was delicious. And then I had the same thing you did for lunch, basically: chicken. I actually had wing sauce, too. Mine was the Tessemae’s. That’s my fast go-to, like, baked chicken, bone-in, skin-on, and half an avocado. That’s been it lately.
Liz Wolfe: It’s easy-peasy. I’m still doing my sardines a lot. I know you love the Tessamae’s, but I love the PaleoChef stuff.
Diane Sanfilippo: Hey, to each her own!
Liz Wolfe: Exactly. They have some kind of lemon… ugh, I forgot what it’s called. A lemon tomato sauce that is perfect with sardines. So that gets in there somewhere.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think what people don’t understand about your recommendation to eat sardines is that you are completely utilitarian with your food… not completely. I’m going to say you definitely take pleasure in your food. But I would say, like, 70% to 80% – this is my estimate – of the way you approach food is like food is fuel. It’s utilitarian. You want it to taste good, but you’re definitely not a visual, creative, like, “my food’s going to be exciting” kind of person, right?
Liz Wolfe: Not at all. I don’t get intricate with it. Spices kind of intimidate me.
Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, my gosh.
Liz Wolfe: Seasoning.
Diane Sanfilippo: The funny thing is that how I eat most of the time at home is actually not that interesting. I was telling this story to somebody. I was making meatza. I actually made meatza for the first time ever when I was developing the recipe for The 21-Day Sugar Detox book, and I sat down to eat it, and I was like: This is really good! Did I already tell this story to you?
Liz Wolfe: Is this what Liz eats?
Diane Sanfilippo: Is this what people do when they cook with recipes? Like, they eat these really good-tasting things? Because what I normally eat is pretty similar to what you’ll do, like, chicken with some kind of sauce or ground beef with lettuce.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: But I try to make it colorful and have interesting flavor, I guess. Anyway.
Liz Wolfe: Speaking of lettuce – and we’re going to get into this a little bit here –
Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, yes. Good segue.
Liz Wolfe: Sally Fallon has a little quote from The Oiling of America connecting the rise of lettuce in the human diet with heart disease, basically.
Diane Sanfilippo: Sally Fallon hates lettuce.
Liz Wolfe: Sally Fallon hates lettuce, and heart disease is a direct result of lettuce in the human diet, which actually makes as much sense if you actually look at the evidence that you could pull out for that as much as cholesterol.
Diane Sanfilippo: So we could say that based on other similar correlative studies that lettuce is what causes heart disease.
Liz Wolfe: Exactly. If you look at USDA food disappearance data.
Diane Sanfilippo: Seriously.
Liz Wolfe: Denise Minger could have a field day with that, too.
Diane Sanfilippo: So Sally Fallon hates lettuce. What else does Sally Fallon hate? Sally Fallon sort of hates paleo. I want to talk about this.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, talk about it.
Diane Sanfilippo: You and I have a bunch of paleo lady friends who… Liz, I don’t know if you were left off of this thread. Were you on the Facebook little thread that we had? I’m not going to disclose all of the people who were having this conversation, but basically one of our friends brought to my attention what was in the most recent Weston A. Price Foundation journal that comes out, like, their newsletter thing. I think I missed it because my membership lapsed, so I don’t think I got it, or it went to my old address. But in any event, there is a question in their most recent journal that is actually addressing a myth, and the myth is the Weston A. Price Foundation diet is like the paleo diet. So Sally kind of goes on and brings up a couple of points, and one of the things I like to present with my rationale behind most of what I teach people is sort of this balanced view of things, you know, Balanced Bites. Get it? Anyway, she addresses what Loren Cordain wrote about in the original Paleo Diet book, which you and I have –
Liz Wolfe: Which is Paleo with a capital P, branded trademark.
Diane Sanfilippo: Correct.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: You and I have pretty much, over the course of this podcast, attempted to squash most of what we think is sort of dogmatic and myopic in the original Paleo Diet book regarding things like saturated fat; lean meats; olive oil being the number one oil everyone should eat all the time and not lard, tallow, or dairy; and also the fact that Cordain says that we maybe want to eat up to 35% of our calories from protein. This is what Sally Fallon is kind of calling out as potentially problematic, but just what she’s noting, which you and I know that when we talk to people about paleo, we do focus on protein, but we focus on healthy quality fats, including animal fats, including grass-fed butter if they can tolerate it. I think what I want to do is talk about a few of the points that she’s addressing and then give you my counterpoint. So sort of my counterpoint there is that the original Paleo Diet book did probably need to draw a hard line. Like, if I’m Loren Cordain and I’m making a statement about what ancestral people ate in the Paleolithic, then I probably do need to draw a hard line at dairy. That said, we know that research, modern research that’s done on dairy is typically done on pasteurized, not-from-grass-fed-cows milk, and it’s not the same product at all. And I think it’s actually way worse, potentially, than comparing meat from a grain-fed cow to meat from a grass-fed cow, which we know is vastly different. But I think that what we’re getting additionally with pasteurized milk is the pasteurization process and so much of what’s great about real, raw milk is not just that it’s from the grass-fed cow and that there’s more nutrition there. It’s that the nutrition is much more intact before it’s pasteurized. And what we know about cooking meat, of course, we’re damaging some of the naturally occurring nutrition in raw meat potentially, but we do well to make it a little bit easier to digest and more accessible to us as humans versus something like raw milk. Pretty much everything that happens to it once it’s pasteurized is negative. It doesn’t make it better in any way. It’s just this myth about safety of raw milk, which back when pasteurization began, that was probably a real concern, but what’s happening today with raw milk, as we know, it’s produced on small-scale farms. It’s produced by pretty much only 100% grass-fed cows because the restrictions and the laws around what needs to happen to produce and sell raw milk are extremely strict, and it’s actually illegal in a lot of states. There was actually a graphic being circulated – I don’t have dates, but recently – with states where it’s legal, where it’s legal as pet food, where it’s legal if you have a cow share, etc. Anyway, that’s kind of addressing that.
I think the whole low-fat thing we’ve squashed a bunch of times, and I think my overarching concern with the way that this is being addressed by Sally Fallon in this newsletter is that it’s just focused on Cordain’s original, as you said, branded Paleo Diet book. And I can understand why that happens, right? The same reason people say: Oh, well Atkins is all bacon and cheese and meat, which is not actually true if you actually read what the Atkins Diet is all about. People have this snapshot picture of what is “paleo,” and I think the most important thing is to, if you going to build a case against something or put it under attack at all, I think you should really understand more about what the movement is today and what’s current and real. I almost liken this to if we as paleo/traditional diet followers – whatever we want to call ourselves – if we were to start attacking all vegetarians, saying –
Liz Wolfe: They all eat soy, right?
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. They all eat soy; they all eat this; they all eat that. I think that’s a really narrow-sighted view. I just think it’s the wrong way to approach it, and I think all you do is offend people. And I think personally if you go onto Amazon and search for “paleo,” my book is the first one that comes up. Awesome. I’m probably referencing the Weston A. Price Foundation at least once in that book, explaining a little bit about the approach there, talking about raw milk, so people who are coming into this whole paleo thing now are actually having contact with people like me a lot more than they are with Cordain and what his approach was. And while I have the most respect for his work, it’s just not what is the current context of what people are learning about paleo. I just wanted to put that one to rest. She made a note about how at the “PaleoFX conference, attendees were served Spartan meals of lean meats and salads, along with some lacto-fermented condiments.” I don’t know what she’s talking about or if she was at PaleoFX this year. I don’t think they fed us at all. I don’t even remember.
Liz Wolfe: I didn’t go because I was home eating lean meats and olive oil.
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t remember. We had one speaker dinner. We weren’t eating lean meats there. We had some kind of chicken with skin. I can’t even remember, but we feed ourselves at those conferences for the most part. Unless she’s there eating the meals, to make a statement like that, it just kind of makes me buggy. But if we were eating lacto-fermented condiments along with it, then that seems to be kind of a good thing. I don’t really know what her beef was with that. She made a comment about paleo being pretty low in fat and paleo dieters putting little to no emphasis on fat-soluble vitamins and fat-soluble activators, as Weston Price obviously focuses on. And I will say this: For those who are out there teaching about paleo who don’t have holistic nutrition backgrounds, who don’t have a more broad view of what nutrition really should be all about, and it’s not just about very basic food choices and macronutrients, those of us who have that background, we are teaching about fat-soluble vitamins and fat-soluble activators and how important it is to look at your food from… not a nutritionism perspective, like what Michael Pollan says, where we’re just looking at it for nutrients, but from a broader perspective so that they’re not just eating – as we like to joke – chicken, broccoli, and coconut oil.
Liz Wolfe: And fish oil and magnesium and vitamin D.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah! And to judge this movement based on what you might see at, for example, a paleo meet-up potluck, where people are probably not going to bring a vat of broth, but you don’t know what’s bubbling on their stove at home. I wouldn’t bring broth to a meet-up. I just wouldn’t. I might bring a stew made with broth or something like that. I’ve heard some different things circling around about what she’s seen at different meet-up groups. Anyway, long story short, we are focusing on that, but of course, this community is huge and growing so fast that people like you and me, Liz, and maybe 10 to 20 other kind of louder voices out there who are teaching about this, we can’t affect every single person as quickly as this whole movement is spreading. The Weston Price Foundation “diet movement,” which is real food, traditional foods, it’s not spreading as quickly as paleo is for a lot of reasons. I seriously think this could be an entire podcast. Perhaps we’re not even going to answer questions today!
Liz Wolfe: You’re right, though.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m not even close to done right now! Sorry.
Liz Wolfe: No, this is good.
Diane Sanfilippo: Liz didn’t know this was going to be a tear. But our movement is growing very, very rapidly. Part of that is because the people finding this way of eating are suffering with health conditions that are not being remedied by other ways of eating and largely in part to getting rid of things like grains and garbage, low quality dairy. And yes, your Greek yogurt is garbage unless it comes from cows that have been fed an appropriate diet.
Liz Wolfe: You’d probably be a little closer, too, if you were using goat’s milk yogurt.
Diane Sanfilippo: Correct. So our movement is growing a lot faster. Guess what? We’re pulling the Weston Price movement along with us because those of us – present company included – who are the loudest in this movement are consistently mentioning the work of Dr. Weston Price. So it actually really gets me angry when someone like Sally, who is leading the Weston Price Foundation, poo-poos what we’re doing and doesn’t actually know that… or even if she knows, she’s not recognizing the fact that probably almost every single episode that you and I do, Liz, we talk about the Weston Price Foundation. We get people interested –
Liz Wolfe: Or fat-soluble vitamins or –
Diane Sanfilippo: Or fat-soluble vitamins.
Liz Wolfe: Or fermented foods, organ meats –
Diane Sanfilippo: Or mineral cofactors. I would be willing to bet we, collectively as the whole paleo movement, are sending more people to join the Weston Price Foundation than any other group anywhere. I would not be surprised if that’s honestly the case. And so what aggravates me is creating a divide and speaking negatively about this movement. I think it’s fair to say what’s different, right? There are differences in what we are teaching. And I think that’s completely fair. I think it’s really horrible to talk about things like… One of the points she made in this newsletter was… This is the part that really got my friends angry and using some rough language about it. OK, her biggest concern. I’m going to just quote this entire section. She says: “And this brings me to my biggest concern about paleo – the application of this restrictive diet to growing children.”
Liz Wolfe: I was just going to say: Does this have to do with babies?
Diane Sanfilippo: I mean, I’m really ready to just punch somebody right now.
Liz Wolfe: A baby?
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t like children, but I don’t think I would punch a baby.
Liz Wolfe: [laughter]
Diane Sanfilippo: I think that might be wrong. I’m channeling Jeff Lewis here from Interior Therapy.
Liz Wolfe: What does he say? “It’s a little cruel, but I just love it!”
Diane Sanfilippo: I love him. OK, so I’m quoting Sally Fallon. “Do we really want to bring up children in our grain-centered and dairy-centered culture by denying them these delicious foods, foods that can be nourishing and wholesome if raised, handled, and prepared properly? Many advocates of the paleo diet are childless and may not have thought this through. What does it do to the psychology of a growing child to always say ‘no’ to foods that are prevalent in our culture, to deny them ice cream (homemade, of course), whole milk, sourdough bread with butter, baked beans, and potatoes with sour cream? While we certainly should be careful about our children’s diets, they need to grow up on a diet that says, ‘Yes, you may,’ not ‘No, you can’t.’” Seriously?! I’m about to cut a B about this thing because I am really angry at this whole approach! “Do we really want to bring up children in our grain-centered and dairy-centered culture by denying them these delicious foods?” Does she have any clue what people are eating?
Liz Wolfe: I think she doesn’t, Diane. That’s the thing.
Diane Sanfilippo: She has no idea. She does not work with people. She has no contact with people who are out there eating grains and dairy every day that are a completely 180-degree difference from what she is asking people to eat when it comes to grains and dairy. This is the biggest reason why paleo is so powerful, is because when we give people a hard line at first, we first bring them in and we say: We don’t recommend that you eat grains and dairy. If you’re struggling with health concerns, if you’re looking to lose excess amounts of body fat that are just not serving you and that are really harming your health, the grains and dairy you’re eating are problematic. Because when you say that to the average person, what they’re currently eating is not raw milk and fermented sourdough bread.
Liz Wolfe: And homemade ice cream.
Diane Sanfilippo: And homemade ice cream! I mean, she is really out of touch with this whole statement.
Liz Wolfe: That’s OK, though, because you know what? The problem is that she’s talking, right? She just needs to not be talking about these things because she is off, like, putting her money where her mouth is, and she’s running a sustainable farm, and she’s doing all of those things, but it reminds me a little bit about, you know, I love Nora Gedgaudas. She’s one of my favorite authors that really got me started on a lot of this stuff, but she’s another person that just continues to bring the same shtick over and over again to a community that has evolved and changed a little bit. It’s just the same old shtick. She really doesn’t know what’s going on. Not that Nora Gedgaudas doesn’t know what’s going on, but she has that same low-carb thing going over and over again, when really we’re learning that that’s not appropriate for everybody.
Diane Sanfilippo: Correct. I’m also taking issue with “Many advocates of the paleo diet are childless and may not have thought this through.”
Liz Wolfe: [laughter]
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m sorry… I’m sorry. What is she talking about?!
Liz Wolfe: You’re childless, Diane.
Diane Sanfilippo: Does she have any idea how many people are out there who are actually blogging about this? First of all, I’m not even going to put pressure on the many thousands of parents who are out there promoting and teaching and feeding their kids a paleo type of diet to start blogging about it because guess what? They’re taking care of their kids. For the handful of paleo parenting bloggers that we have, bless them for taking the time away from everything that they’re doing to try and educate other people on how to do this. And I’m going to remind people that the reason it’s so powerful is their kids have struggled with attention deficit disorder, they’ve had all kinds of behavioral problems, possibly weight problems, some of them. I mean, I’m not calling any specific kids out that I know who are of some of these bloggers. I’m just saying this is what parents and kids are dealing with, not to mention food intolerances all over the place. And I know that there are some very prevalent paleo bloggers who are parents who cannot feed their children any sort of grains, fermented or whatever, or any sort of dairy, even the highest quality raw dairy, without their kids sitting up an entire night with acid reflux. So this point, I say there are plenty of paleo “dieters” who have children and who are doing this every day, and guess what? They’re doing it because they have to, and they are being parents, and they are protecting their kids, and they’re serving their kids real food. So what if they’re not also including soaked, sprouted, and fermented grains? The reality is the nutrition that we get from those foods is not lacking if we don’t eat grains. That’s the real issue here that should be the focus. It shouldn’t be that they don’t eat these foods, they’re not eating the right way, and they’re being exclusionary. That’s completely divisive. It’s just not the right way to approach this whole thing. And we should be looking at, are these kids getting the best nutrition possible without eating the foods that are causing them all kinds of problems?
And to say that we’re going to pander to what society is feeding us and say that in a culture that’s surrounded by grains and dairy, eff that! Forget it! I don’t even care! What’s out there right now, the whole point of what we’re all doing is to teach people that what’s out there is not what we should be eating and we should not be listening to marketing and what’s in the grocery store and on the end cap and having our kids watch commercials and say: Mommy, I want this cereal. It’s the responsibility of parents to do that. Now, I was raised by parents who didn’t know anything about nutrition, and I ate all of the garbage. And guess what? I can’t tolerate grains. And this is another point that she brings up about the fact that not everyone is intolerant to grains. That’s absolutely true. Nobody on this podcast is saying that there are no people out there who can tolerate grains and eat them and experience good health, especially when they’re prepared properly. But guess what? We are actually in the heat of this whole generation of us who were not raised 100% on breast milk. If we were lucky, a lot of us got a few days or a couple of weeks of breast milk, and so that’s why this is so important to understand that there are more and more people today who can’t tolerate these foods. And not that breastfeeding is the only reason why, but we know that the foundations provided to our gut and our entire formation of our digestive and immune system in utero and when we were first fed, either breast milk or not, and whether we’re fed gluten-containing grains and all kinds of refined garbage that we were fed as toddlers and infants, that is affecting what we’re digesting today. So it’s very wonderful to think that a lot of people can digest and tolerate grains. Great. That would be so beautiful. But you know what? What we’re seeing in people who are now coming of age and they’re discovering that they want to make different food choices, we are the whole generation that was raised this way. We were raised on Twix and Pop-Tarts – I say the same garbage foods over and over – and SpaghettiOs and Cheerios and all this junk from a box, so we were not given the same opportunity to digest and assimilate foods that maybe Sally Fallon was. So enjoy your grains if you can tolerate them, but there are a lot of people who can’t. OK, what else do I want to say about this?
Liz Wolfe: That was excellent.
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m seriously, like, fired up right now.
Liz Wolfe: But you know what? To be fair, though, I think also Sally Fallon is a person in the Weston A. Price Foundation in the same way Cordain is a person in the paleo movement, not representative of other people in that movement.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right.
Liz Wolfe: I’ve had a ton of conversations with the higher-ups at the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which is heavily related to the Weston A. Price Foundation. There’s, like, a Paleo/Polyface Farm thing getting ready to happen. I think the Weston A. Price Foundation was at PaleoFX getting people signed up for Farm-to-Consumer stuff. There’s a ton of overlap right now, and that’s what the people that are actually up to speed on what’s going on are working at.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right. And I think that is kind of my point.
Liz Wolfe: Get with it, Sal pal!
Diane Sanfilippo: Get with it! Understand what we’re trying to do here and that what we’re trying to do is actually get more people to read and understand that information. We also have Chris Masterjohn to thank for a lot of this crossover, I think, and the way that he represents in the different communities. I think, Chris Kresser. You had your education with, obviously, a Weston Price-oriented certification, and I pretty often will credit the teachers that I learned from through the Bauman College program that I went to, which was not really a Weston Price-oriented program, but the two instructors that I had the most were very, very Weston Price-oriented, and I credit them hugely with my experience and education over the course of two years while I was studying, where a slide would come up in class talking about sources of vitamin A, for example, and it may not have included or emphasized the animal foods that included vitamin A. So some people who may be going through that program may not have had the same experience as I did, where my instructor would have said: You know what? Beef from well-raised meats, grass-fed, pastured cows, and raw dairy from grass-fed cows are also excellent, excellent sources, probably the best source, and grass-fed butter. They would call this stuff out even if it wasn’t on the slide. So this, to me, is the foundation of what we just really need to understand.
I was going to say, too, Chris Kresser, I know, was definitely a huge Weston Price-oriented person before, I think, he leaned into the whole paleo thing. So while you’re not going to come to my website and find recipes that include grains, you’re also not going to find an “in defense of paleo” or “why grains are killing people” blog post because it’s just not the reality. And what the reality is, is the types of grains that people are eating all the time are likely a huge contributor to the destruction of our health, and that’s the issue with this whole quote about, “Do we really want to bring up children in our grain-centered and dairy-centered culture by denying them these delicious foods?”
Liz Wolfe: That just sounds like a SAD diet argument. It just sounds like: I don’t want my kid to not eat candy corn on Halloween with all his classmates. Like, give me a break.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right. We may not all have kids yet, but I think we have a better grasp on what kids are actually eating, and it’s not generally sourdough bread and homemade ice cream.
Liz Wolfe: My kids are going to be homeschooled, and they’re going to be eating sourdough bread and homemade ice cream.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, you are going to not make ice cream!
Liz Wolfe: I so am!
Diane Sanfilippo: Who are you kidding? Your kids are eating ground beef and avocado.
Liz Wolfe: And no fat.
Diane Sanfilippo: No.
Liz Wolfe: It’s going to be tragic.
Diane Sanfilippo: So anyway, that was kind of my rant. That was a good 30 minutes, so maybe we should just continue on this topic and address this completely and save our Q&A for Episode 99 because we know Episode 98 will be with Jill Ciciarelli.
Liz Wolfe: Ciciarelli! Yeah, let’s do that.
Diane Sanfilippo: Let’s keep talking.
Liz Wolfe: Let’s keep talking about it. So what else is on your mind about this in particular?
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, she’s also talking about… Another section of this says: “The Weston A. Price Diet is not based on exclusions – we do not say no to grains, beans (the most nutrient-dense plant food),” which she thinks beans are the most nutrient dense. They may be nutrient dense, but that doesn’t mean they’re dense with bioavailable nutrients.
Liz Wolfe: With macronutrients or micronutrients?
Diane Sanfilippo: I don’t know. Anyway, “… starchy vegetables or dairy foods, nor to fats, salt or even sweet foods – all of which were consumed and enjoyed by healthy traditional peoples.” So this is just coming back to the point of, like, we are not traditional people. We are modern people, and the problem is when we try and eat a traditional diet in modern times there are so many amazing benefits to that, right? With bone broth, with organ meats, and we can consider that traditional or we can just consider that a respectful way of eating. This is something that Pete from Pete’s Paleo talked about. When you’re a chef and you learn how to cook an animal, you learn how to use every part of that animal because first of all, you paid for that. They probably bought the whole animal, the restaurant, so if it’s a high quality restaurant, you don’t throw things away.
Liz Wolfe: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: You use them. You use the bones for stock. You use the organs. You cook them. You make everything. And so that’s part of it.
Liz Wolfe: Or, like in the episode of The Sopranos I watched last night, if you’re Artie Bucco and you shoot a rabbit in your yard, then you feed it to the people in your restaurant later. Continue. [laughter] … Are you vetoing me right now?
Diane Sanfilippo: Can you hear me now?
Liz Wolfe: I can hear you now.
Diane Sanfilippo: I was muted. I was trying to make sure you were –
Liz Wolfe: You were trying to make me feel weird.
Diane Sanfilippo: I was trying to make you feel completely socially inept by referencing The Sopranos.
Liz Wolfe: I feel like I’m finally caught up with a little bit of pop culture even though it’s, like, a decade old. I want people to know that I watch something that normal people watch.
Diane Sanfilippo: You watch vampire fiction and Downton Abbey. I don’t watch either of those.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.
Diane Sanfilippo: OK. I had another tangent here that I was going to go off on. Let me just read what she’s saying here again… how to say yes to foods. There was some other point that I was thinking about that I can’t remember right now.
Liz Wolfe: Well, she’s saying in this world of being surrounded by grains and dairy, so do we want to make our kids feel deprived in this environment, or do we want to make them feel like: You can have this, but first you have to know exactly how to do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. First you have to set up all these barriers. Our mom or your dad or somebody has to know how to soak, sprout, ferment, get a sourdough culture, get a whatever. To me, there’s just as much standing in between some of those lessons of traditional foodies when it comes to grains or making nutrients bioavailable out of things that don’t contain all those bioavailable nutrients in the first place, so we’re talking grains and beans. Or we can say we’re just not going to eat processed foods. Let’s find out what else is in this amazing world full of edibles that you can enjoy instead of processed grains and dairy. Does that make sense?
Diane Sanfilippo: It does. And I think that’s kind of the big thing, too, because we know that not all of us are even cooking with organ meats as regularly as we want to, though we know the value of them, and we try to get them into our diet as much as possible. So what we’re doing is trying to make things more accessible, and I don’t think we’re trying to do that, necessarily – I know you and I, we’re not trying to put it in a super neat, pretty package to make it easy and accessible. We are challenging people to not dine out as often, to avoid seed oils. We’re challenging people to reconsider a lot of things.
Liz Wolfe: Go find some cod liver oil.
Diane Sanfilippo: Exactly. I think we have probably sent more people to buy fermented cod liver oil than the Weston A. Price Foundation in the last I don’t know how long. I’m not just saying that as: Here’s all the great things we’re doing. I’m just trying to say we’re here to support that movement more than anything else.
So here’s the other issue I was going to tackle. I think that a traditional diet is fantastic for somebody who is healthy, for somebody who has a really good constitution, for somebody who comes from a family where they are willing to soak, sprout, and ferment, where they can access raw dairy and do all the things they need to do to make that diet really work in the context of a modern society. Where I think it falls short – and I think we’ve seen this even in the conferences because it’s people who are struggling long term with health conditions, right? It’s the biggest thing that draws us to these different approaches. It’s not just about losing weight. People don’t just find these ways of eating because they want to lose weight because there are a million ways to lose weight, but there’s not really a million ways to change your diet to improve autoimmune health conditions. There’s a handful of ways. Paleo, grain free, refined food free, possibly dairy free is a very, very powerful way of getting our digestive system to just calm down and deal with our own body and not deal with the foods that are coming in as irritants. This is one of the things where I always tell people: If you’re healthy and you’re eating fermented grains and whatever else, I have nothing to say to you. It’s not the healthy people who are doing well with it that we’re saying: Don’t eat that; it’s not good for you. We’re not walking up to those people and slapping there sourdough out of their hands. That’s not what this is about. What this is about are the people who are not healthy and who are coming to us with problems. Do I think that grains and beans rebuilding the health of a person’s gut and their micronutrient status are the most effective way to get there? No, absolutely not. I think dairy can be fantastic if a person tolerates it well, if they’re not experiencing inflammation or congestion or any of that from dairy, but we know that pulling these foods out is giving somebody a better opportunity to regain health. Now, maybe they can come back to those foods at some point, but I don’t think that rebuilding the whole structure of the person’s gut is best served including those foods.
And this is one of the issues. It’s a very dogmatic approach when you have a traditional diet or whether it’s a religious traditional diet that you’re following, and this was an experience I had in the classroom where there were some people in my classroom who were following a religious vegetarian diet, and one of them had a child who was dealing with an attention deficit disorder or some sort of… I can’t remember if it was autism spectrum or just a behavioral disorder, and I don’t mean to diminish the difference between them, but I just cannot remember what the issue was. But she was not willing to hear out the fact that a paleo approach that did not include the lentils and the soaked grains or the soaked beans that she was so used to feeding her family as a traditional – This was an Indian type of diet, so it did include animal foods like ghee. There were animal foods and animal fats, just not meat and very heavily based on soaked and sprouted grains and legumes. And she just wasn’t willing to hear it and actually got really angry that we were even talking about the fact that what she’s been feeding her child might not be supporting his digestive and mental health in the best way possible. The problem isn’t that the diet is a bad diet. It’s that it’s not working for him, and you need to find something else that you’re willing to try because that’s your responsibility as a parent, to just keep seeking out the truth and be open-minded. And I’m not judging or telling a parent what to do or how to raise your kid. She was in this nutrition education program with me, so especially as educators and consultants it’s our job to remain open-minded. If something’s not working for someone, you can’t tell them to keep doing it as is. There has to be something that gives. You and I both know if somebody keeps a food log and we discover they don’t tolerate fish or grass-fed beef – things that we think are amazing, healthy foods – if that person doesn’t tolerate it, we’re not going to be dogmatic and say: Well, you have to eat it because this is traditional and this is nutrient dense. No. There’s a different way to create this whole thing for different people.
This really struck a chord, and this whole thing happened in my class – I can’t remember what year it was. I think it might have been the first year I was in the program, and I think it was a post on Robb Wolf’s website where for a child the condition was completely reversed with a paleo diet, and it sparked up this heated conversation via email amongst my classmates. And I probably shared one other article after that, and literally for the entire next year plus, I didn’t share anything else because I got so much heated pushback from angry people in the class that the rest of the 20 people or however many who were in the class with us didn’t get to hear what else I had to say until a couple of years later when I put it all in a book. It just became this thing where the dogmatic approach closes you off to learning something that could be valuable, and I think we all know that we don’t know everything. And I think the minute we think we know everything or the minute we think that our way is the only way, we’re done. We’re done learning, we’re done helping people, and we’re done really seeing this whole thing for the purpose of it and just protecting our own ego if we’re doing that. And I have no reason to do that. I don’t do any of this work for myself. I’m not looking to further my own anything with this work because I wouldn’t be doing it.
Liz Wolfe: Well, getting back to the whole, what do people eat at X, Y, Z’s conference? Doing a lot of XYZ, ABC’ing today, but what did we eat at the PaleoFX conference?
Diane Sanfilippo: What did we eat at the Weston Price conference? Not much.
Liz Wolfe: What did we eat at the WAP conference? Well, if you think about this, four years ago, I think, when I went to my first Weston A. Price Foundation conference, there were hardly any people with gluten-free tickets. You could register for the regular meals or you could register for the gluten-free meals, which aren’t all that different except for obviously they might give you some kind of gluten-free bread or something like that. But up to last year when we were all there, the gluten-free line was probably longer than the non-gluten-free line. So this is catching on within that population. This is something that people are thinking about and people are, like you said, healing themselves with, yet for whatever reason… I don’t know, maybe that’s not OK to talk about if you’re Sally Fallon, is how many people are choosing this gluten-free, dairy-free, casein-free lifestyle even within her own tank.
Diane Sanfilippo: I think it’s also one of those things were maybe people eat gluten-free 90% or whatever percentage of the time when they’re outside the home, and maybe when they’re at home they do some sourdough bread that’s been fermented and made at their own hands by grains that they know where they’re from. But if people are out in the world eating gluten- and grain-free… I don’t want to eat food that was harvested months and months ago and sat in some kind of container somewhere long before it gets to me. That’s not fresh, real food. That’s not what our ancestors were doing. I don’t think their grains were the grains of today. They were eating ancient grains that were harvested at their own hands and possibly stored probably not the way they’re stored today… or transported or any of that, so if we’re going to be nitpicky and really look at eating things that are traditional with a traditional approach, I don’t think it’s just a matter of muscle meat versus organ meat, grains versus not grains. I think it’s all of these things in context and in concert.
Liz Wolfe: We could speak of context and think about the different limitations that were on traditional cultures that they couldn’t circumvent with air conditioning, refrigeration, shipping, and all those types of things. A lot of times you’re kind of bound by the resources in your region. In certain places, what was available were the raw materials for making rye bread and you kept some milk-giving animals that were able to give you nutrition throughout the colder times of the year when maybe other things weren’t producing. We don’t all live in a garden-friendly, CSA-friendly, “you can get tons of kale and lots of pastured chicken” type of region. There are places that are bound by their resources, and this whole concept of fermenting or soaking and sprouting is, in my opinion, a means of making subpar food more nutritious or at least not damaging.
Diane Sanfilippo: I agree 1000%. I do. I mean, just because we did that then doesn’t… I think the vast majority of traditional wisdom about food is probably spot on, passed down for many, many years for many reasons, but if we were to look at, exactly what you said, why did they even eat grains –
Liz Wolfe: Why did the Maasai drink cow’s blood? You know?
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. Why did they do that? And in the context of what we have available to us today, should we still do that or not? That’s an interesting thing, and I don’t think we’ve really brought that up before. Just because they did it, are all of these traditions things we should carry on?
Liz Wolfe: Right.
Diane Sanfilippo: Maybe not. The idea that traditional cultures didn’t eat as much muscle meat as we do today, like you said, maybe it didn’t ferment as well. Who knows? Maybe there was some reason why. You know, they realized there was more nutrition to be had from organ meats, obviously, but I don’t know. Maybe they were just doing something else with it.
Liz Wolfe: Well, we’ve talked about this before: the demands of modern life, right? Sally Fallon is not a CrossFitter. We talk to athletes, CrossFitters. And people within the Weston A. Price Foundation, I think there are probably fewer people in that population that are doing powerlifting, weightlifting competitions, CrossFit competitions and that kind of thing, and it’s very true that I think protein intake needs to be higher, and we need to strategize certain macronutrients and micronutrients differently for somebody that’s prepping for competition. There are different modern needs that I think you and I probably work with folks on that maybe aren’t seen as frequently in the Weston A. Price community. I know some Weston A. Price weightlifters. I know a couple Weston A. Price-type CrossFitters, but for the most part, I think that’s really not the population that you’re speaking to. You’re speaking to people that are doing a different kind of work and don’t necessarily need different nutrients, but certainly we strategize carbohydrates and protein differently, at the same time looking at these cofactors that we talk about, vitamin A, saturated fat. Chris Masterjohn gave a talk at the last Weston A. Price Foundation conference about… I think it was something like Blood, Skin, and Bones… I can’t remember what it was called, but glycine, different cofactors that actually make the consumption of higher levels of muscle meat more safe. We actually do need some of that other tissue to process muscle meat effectively. So this is all strategization that we maybe don’t see in the standard –
Diane Sanfilippo: Strategery?
Liz Wolfe: Strategery! Lockbox. [laughter] But yeah, I think my point is made. Oh, man.
Diane Sanfilippo: Indeed. I think the influx of a different type of person, a different culture, those of us who are a little younger… shinier, who knows what in Sally’s eyes, are just –
Liz Wolfe: You’re so shiny. I’ve been meaning to tell you.
Diane Sanfilippo: It’s your fault. I’ve been oil cleansing. That’s why I’m so darn shiny. I have all this cod liver oil on my face. I think it’s just a little bit of growing pains. It’s this influx of people who are talking about, asking about, and the reality is the way that we approach people who even have the wrong impression of paleo, guess what? They’ve heard of paleo now. So even if somebody has the wrong impression of the Weston Price Foundation, well, good. They’ve heard about the Weston Price Foundation. Now they can go to the website and do some research. It’s just the same with any way of eating out there that’s starting to gain traction, and I think it’s more positive than negative that Weston Price is associated with paleo because I’d be willing to put some good money on the fact that if you went to Google Analytics and looked at what kind of stuff is being searched and what the trends are, I’m pretty sure “Weston Price diet” is not going to outrank “paleo diet” in what’s being searched today. So Sally Fallon can thank us for sending plenty of people over to the Weston Price Foundation.
Liz Wolfe: And you know what? By the same token, we can thank Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and Dr. Weston A. Price and all of these people.
Diane Sanfilippo: We love Mary Enig!
Liz Wolfe: We do! And you know what? We are being very heated in this podcast –
Diane Sanfilippo: We are.
Liz Wolfe: – but no love lost, because we are grateful for everything that Weston A. Price has done. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am, and I don’t think I would’ve had the same success with clients as I’ve had if I was just going with a straight paleo template. I really don’t. If we hadn’t looked at digestive health, the fermented foods, the traditional foods, the fat-soluble vitamins, the cofactors… It completely changed my practice, and it changed my outlook on this type of eating, so we’re grateful, but I don’t understand the antagonism.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I’m with you. I think, too, we talk a lot about folks who want to go out there and study this stuff and teach it and kind of do what we do, and I think there is almost no worse thing you can do than to stay in your own little bubble about nutrition. I think it’s really important to learn about all this stuff and to have a really solid foundation upon which you can build your own case for what you believe in. You know what I mean?
Liz Wolfe: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: And I think that standing for what we stand for now, it’s not just based on having gone to Robb Wolf’s seminar one time and reading a bunch of articles or books. It’s based on studying nutrition for quite some time before that, having some trial and error with our own health, having trial and error with clients, and working on… not error with clients mostly. No, I’m just kidding!
Liz Wolfe: [laughter]
Diane Sanfilippo: But working at this stuff, and it’s not just that you read about paleo and you teach about paleo. And I love for people to spread the word – I don’t know where, but I’m just going on a tangent – I love for people to spread the word, but I caution people against overstating things. I think we talk about that a lot.
Liz Wolfe: Making manifestos and whatnot.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, or just overstating how problematic a potentially real, whole food is if it’s in a context that maybe it really isn’t as damaging as we think.
Liz Wolfe: Mm-hmm.
Diane Sanfilippo: And this kind of comes back to the whole idea of balance. I have some posts coming up on the blog about things like paleo treats and things like legumes, like what’s so bad about grains or legumes, and I always want people to have the balanced view of things. I want people to understand how problematic they can be, very devastatingly so, for tons of people. We know there are a lot of people who come and they say: I was eating a vegetarian diet. I was eating this and that. And I stopped eating those things, and my health has completely improved. It’s life changing. But there are some people for whom that’s not going to be the case, and the lentils that they’re eating are not what’s the problem. It’s totally not the case that we need to tell everyone you should never eat legumes. I tend to like to give people more credit. As much as I like to give them some hard and fast rules when the time comes of like: OK, you know what? Do this for a month, two months, three months, six months, and then try it again and see how you feel and start to learn something about what real food is versus this garbage bread and pasta and whatever else that people were eating beforehand, and give them the benefit of the doubt that they can start to put the pieces together and just start to look at things differently, like this is food, this is not food.
Liz Wolfe: Amen!
Diane Sanfilippo: I mean, I’ve seen you eat quinoa. It’s been on my plate, and I’m like: Meh. I’m just not excited, but you’re like: I’ll have a bite.
Liz Wolfe: I ate quinoa?!
Diane Sanfilippo: [laughter]
Liz Wolfe: Wait. Hold up.
Diane Sanfilippo: We were in Portland. It’s just memorable because we just don’t eat that stuff. It was on my plate, and I was not going to tell them not to bring it, and you were like: I’ll have a bite of it. Like, whatever. This is the point. You know all the stuff about it that’s good, bad, ugly, whatever. Your system can handle it. You’re like: I’ll have a bite of it. I’ll try it.
Liz Wolfe: I’m totally not denying eating that –
Diane Sanfilippo: You don’t remember.
Liz Wolfe: – because I completely ate some organic soaked homemade corn tortillas just the other day.
Diane Sanfilippo: We went to some farm-to-table restaurant. Do you remember that –
Liz Wolfe: Oh, it was like a romantic date, right?
Diane Sanfilippo: It was like a date!
Liz Wolfe: And there were cocktails, too!
Diane Sanfilippo: And there were people at the table next to us talking about vegetarianism. Do you remember?
Liz Wolfe: Ugh, yes. A bunch of pale, slouchy people.
Diane Sanfilippo: And we got some kind of sampler plate that had a whole bunch of really awesome stuff, and one of these things was this quinoa that sounded really good. It had a bunch of stuff mixed into it or something. And I was like: Whatever. I don’t really want it. And you were like: I’ll take a bite to just make it look like we ate some. Because you have that guilt thing where you feel bad about things.
Liz Wolfe: Oh, I do. I totally do. But you know what? And I think this is probably going to be one of the questions –
Diane Sanfilippo: I wasn’t trying to, like, call you out for eating quinoa.
Liz Wolfe: No, no, no. I’m just trying to remember when that happened because I’ve also had recently… There’s a restaurant in Kansas City – and I think this is probably going to come up in our 100th episode when people can ask us anything – I do lean towards traditional foods when they’re there and they’re traditionally made and they’re specially made. I will have them. I’m not going to go down to Safeway and get a plastic tub of quinoa salad or something like that, but hell yeah. People know that when I go to the Weston A. Price Foundation conference I have a piece of traditional sourdough bread. I had some polenta the other day at a restaurant that specialized in local traditional foods, and that was great. It makes up 0.01% of my diet, but I enjoy experimenting with traditional foods. And I think that’s a point that I do want to make for folks. That’s been the most fun part of this journey for me. Not just eating chicken, broccoli, and coconut oil, but discovering why cultures ate a lot of these foods, trying them for myself, trying the foods of different cultures. It’s been amazing. I don’t want people to lose out because they’re afraid of traditional foods just because they may not be paleo, if that makes sense. Melissa McEwen, who is kind of on the fringe of the whole paleo movement, has kind of moved in that direction a lot. We don’t hear from her as much that I know of, but she was always somebody that talked about how she went to this traditional Korean restaurant and had all of these different traditional foods from that culture, that she went to… Oh, there’s another one. I had Ethiopian food a couple months back and had some of their traditional bread. It didn’t make me feel so good, but it was also just kind of a way for me to experience another culture. Being that I’m not overtly gluten intolerant, I went for it. I’ll admit that all day long, but like I said, it’s not a large proportion of my diet. That’s pretty much all I had to say about that, and for some people, that’s a problem. Some people don’t like that about me. And that’s OK. That’s totally fine with me. That’s what I got, girl.
Diane Sanfilippo: I keep muting myself.
Liz Wolfe: I know.
Diane Sanfilippo: I just want to make sure I don’t interrupt your rants.
Liz Wolfe: My little rant there. I just don’t think there’s anything wrong if you know your body can handle it and if you take ownership of the potential end result as I did with that traditional Ethiopian bread. There’s no reason to not experience the traditions of other cultures.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right, and I think that’s where we have those people who know that they are in a place at a certain point in time where straying is not an option for them for a certain period of time. I mean, it is an option. Right? You always get to make that choice, and it’s not deprivation. We’re not depriving you. We’re giving you your health. That’s the difference, and that’s that whole perspective and the end of that myth about paleo and Weston Pri