A TANTRUM FOR BUTTER
I had a funny experience I wanted to share with you. I live in northern India, just outside Delhi, and last week, my sister-in-law and her two daughters visited me. Her youngest daughter is eighteen months old. I was in the kitchen with her one night, and I had a packet of butter in my hand. It was in a bright yellow box with the illustration of a happy girl on the front. As I was about to put the butter back in the fridge, my eighteen-month-old niece grabbed at it. I thought she was just interested in the colorful box, so I tried to distract her with a brightly colored bowl while I put the butter away. She had a death grip on that butter.
I eventually maneuvered it out of her hand and put it in the fridge when the tantrum started. She is usually a pretty easy-going toddler, especially if her mother is nearby (which she was). My niece tried to open the fridge to get at the butter again. When she couldn’t get the door open, she went into a rage. I still didn’t understand. I kept thinking she was interested in the box. Her mother then told me that she likes to eat butter. So we got the butter back out of the fridge, cut off a one-inch piece, and my niece glowed with happiness, sitting on the floor slurping on her piece of butter in peace. I’ve never seen another kid do that! She likes chocolate too, but I’ve never seen her throw a tantrum over it.
Other things I’m learning in India: my mother-in-law taught me that in the remote town where she grew up, it was customary to cook the brains of a male goat for someone who had a cold or respiratory infection. She prepared them for me a few times, and I liked it. It was like warm cottage cheese. Liver and kidneys are also regularly consumed, especially the kidneys. They are either prepared in a pressure cooker as is, or they are sometimes minced and cooked with onions, garlic and chilies and then deep fried in a samosa. All of my nieces and nephews love to eat kidneys, even if they are picky and won’t eat other foods such as carrots, cauliflower or green peppers. My husband also tells me that goat kidney was his favorite food growing up.
I thought you would enjoy these anecdotes!
JoAnne B
India
WAPF DIET FOR OLYMPIAN
I’m a 2012 Olympian, current member of the Canadian National Rowing team, and a huge supporter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I initially became interested in nutrition to maximize my athletic performance. I’ve spent the last eight years researching nutrition and I’ve come to understand that cultures that knew nothing about “nutritional science” were the healthiest. Dr. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was one of the most revelatory books I have ever read.
I conduct fermentation workshops, raise my own organic chickens, and have a book contract. When I’m on training camps I seek out sources of grass-fed butter and bring a kombucha mother. As a public figure, I would love to work with the Weston A. Price Foundation because they provide such great information about how these cultures ate, and advocate common sense issues like access to real milk.
I was recently covered in EAT magazine (see http://eatmagazine.ca/interview-with-will-dean/) and gave the Weston A. Price Foundation a shout out. If WAPF would like to work with an Olympian who follows its dietary principles, I’d be happy to work with you.
Will Dean
British Columbia, Canada
TENT CATERPILLAR DETOX
Many of us in New England, and maybe in other parts of the country, have tent caterpillars that do a lot of damage to the native cherry trees. A lot of people kill them to save the trees. I have a better use for them, because their physiology is so tightly connected to the cherry trees.
Stone fruit trees contain a substance known as amygdalin, the natural substance that the semi-artificial laetrile was patterned on as a cancer treatment (which was later forbidden by the FDA). However, in Mexico, they still use amygdalin from apricot pits to treat cancer, with success I hear. Our native black cherry is one of the better sources of this substance. The tent caterpillars, which obviously eat many cherry leaves, break down the cellulose in the leaves and concentrate all the substances in the cherry tree. The cherry trees and their caterpillars have been engaged in an arms race for eons, and both have evolved some powerful substances in that dance.
I cut down all the nests, including caterpillars, their feces, and the denuded twigs that extend out from the nest. I cut these small and, in a big pot, bring them to a boil every morning for a few days in a row. That makes a very nice, very cherry, dark tea. Caterpillar feces are only composed of digested cherry leaves and the microorganisms that digest them, as well as whatever other good substances, like cellulose-digesting enzymes, that are produced in the caterpillars. I drink this, with or without a black pekoe tea bag, a spoon of sweetener, and some raw milk or cream, just the way I always like all my tea. It is very tasty, and does a great job at detoxifying.
The first time I tried it, I did get rid of a lot of toxins, and I won’t mention how I could tell. After that, the red blood vessels that squiggle through the whites of my eyes began to fade, and continue to do this after many weeks of this tea, taken a couple of times a day. This is just one of the more visible benefits, and I’m sure there are benefits that aren’t so readily seen.
I have always made twig teas from our native trees—maple, mountain ash, birch, elm, and all the evergreens, by the same method of bringing to a boil every morning for a few days. As the tea in the pot of twigs goes down from drinking it, I just add more water for the next boiling. It lasts for weeks before it gets pale and then I begin again with new twigs. Our native plants, mostly the trees, have just as much medicinal strength as any in Asia or India, and the insects that eat them can help us to harvest those medicinal strengths. The art of using fire, and water containers, gave early humans the ability to share in the power of our trees.
Laura Livingston
Brooksville, Maine
THIRTY-ONE DIETS LATER
I have been on a weight-reducing diet since I was eleven. I wasn’t heavy then, it was just “the thing to do,” everything from Jello to the Cabbage Soup Diet. For most of my later teens, twenties and thirties, when I could run long distances, I was thin….but I was still on a “diet.” Dieting changed my metabolism so that I had to do a lot of running to eat normal amounts of food.
All totaled, I’ve counted thirty-one real diets over all. I may have needed to lose a few pounds at times, but I think I was actually looking for a way of eating that I could maintain. Then physical injuries sidelined me, I couldn’t run, and the weight piled on. So I compensated by making sure fat and calories went down. One thing anyone would tell you, will power has never been an issue for me. As proof, I did an organic fresh juice diet for sixty days along with coffee enemas. No one has ever been more serious about trying to figure out why their metabolism was so slow. Needless to say I know now—it was the diets! The very thing I thought would fix my weight problem actually created it, and the results were progressive.
So slowly but surely every food I ever ate became “bad” and doctor after doctor admonished me to eat less fat, even though there was almost none in my food. Even when I came in with print outs from a food journal computer program (including ounces eaten) listing calories and fat grams, I would hear I had not listed everything, or that I was eliminating entries on purpose. Insulting, degrading, and on so many levels wrong. I cut out everything until I was vegetarian for seven years and vegan for three. Then last October at a conference, I learned about the Weston A. Price Foundation. I knew on a cellular level the diet was right. It was mind-blowing to throw out so many years of personal research, learning, and being a human guinea pig. But I knew truth when I heard it.
You talk about scared, nothing is more scary than an obese person thinking of adding fat and cholesterol to her diet after eliminating them for so many years and still not losing! Nothing. The night of the conference, vegan me could not bring myself to order meat. I was almost shaking when I added a pat of butter to my broccoli. It was the shot heard round the world for me. It felt like jumping off a cliff.
I began that night in the hotel. I saturated myself with info on WAPF and set about making changes. I left the hotel having ordered cod liver oil, and arranged to visit farms. Within weeks I had given away the microwave, bought a freezer, bought a herd share, made lard, cleaned out the pantry, traveled to what must have been Timbuktu for an organic free-range turkey for Thanksgiving and bought a quarter of a cow from a WAPF chapter leader. Within a week of just adding butter, my energy increased and some of my fibromyalgia pain decreased. I was already feeling better. For the first time in years, I began walking. Later I added more fat to my diet, including coconut oil.
I found a holistic physician who pinpointed thyroid problems and mycoplasma as problems for me. She put me on a natural thyroid compound, and was totally supportive of my WAPF way of life. When I went to see her in late spring, the nurse weighed me, took my blood pressure and a few minutes later came back and weighed me again. She said, “I thought I wrote it down wrong, but evidently someone else did back in January.” I told her they were both correct. The doctor came in, stood there and looked at me and said, “Amazing, what did you do?”
I still have a ways to go but I am feeling so much better. I walk about five miles a day and I’ve lost sixty-five pounds. My weight loss has folks asking questions, and they get an earful about the danger of diets from me and the need for dense nutrition.
I’ve always loved to cook, but now I get to cook with “real” ingredients. Hubby says he is eating better than he has ever eaten in his life. Nothing takes the place of real food raised the way it should be raised.
After thirty-one diets I now have a “way of eating.” It’s the same way of eating both sets of my farming grandparents and my naturally thin mother had. It is my roots; no wonder it felt so right when I heard about it, although I had been “educated” and “doctored” right out of it.
At this point I’m a walking, talking WAPF poster child, and the image keeps getting better!
Deborah Maxey
Lynchburg, Virginia
AUTISM ONE CONFERENCE
I’d like to share some of the things I learned at the Autism One conference in Chicago. Although the mood was upbeat, I did not feel upbeat. I thought to myself that this conference should never need to happen. Children should not be this sick. One thing we learned is that it is expected that one out of two babies will be on the autism spectrum by 2025. Down’s syndrome, Lyme disease, Hashimoto’s and other illnesses that can be linked to neurological issues were also on the table for discussion—autism is only part of the spectrum of problems kids are having these days.
You would not find any mothers there who would vaccinate again. These are the ones who learned the hard way. This was not about statistics, but real live people who know the facts regardless of the media propaganda.
Dr. Rashid Buttar, who wrote the book Nine Steps to Keep the Doctor Away, was one featured speaker. He has worked successfully with many autistic kids. His main theme was toxicity. His own son became autistic after vaccinations which put him on a course for figuring out how to heal his son who is perfectly normal now.
Dr. Buttar said that these kids are non-excreters; thus when a saliva or urine test is done they do not show mercury or other heavy metals. But once the treatment begins, the levels of these heavy metals coming out are very high.
He said the immune system is developing for at least a year after a baby is born. Mother’s milk is an important contributor to this development. Vaccines are immunosuppressive and thus given before a year they make no sense and are very risky. If you go to VaxTruth.org you will note that just the hepatitis B shot will give a child fourteen times more aluminum than is considered safe for a baby. That is only the aluminum—vaccines contain many more toxic ingredients than aluminum. And by the way, some vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue.
Dr. Mayer Eisenstein was one of my favorite speakers. He has practiced medicine for over forty years. He was a protégé of Dr. Mendelsohn, the doctor who wrote Confessions of a Medical Heretic. That book forever changed my mind about medicine and doctors.
Dr. Eisenstein’s patient population of more than fifty thousand over the years is mostly minimally or totally unvaccinated. In this group there is virtually no autism, no respiratory illness, no diabetes, asthma or allergies. Last winter he had four ear infections out of six thousand clients—this is in Chicago where it is cold, wet and miserable in the winter. Dr. Eisenstein said that anti-virals, antibiotics and vaccines have no place in medicine! He insisted that pediatricians are the archenemy of the child.
I kept thinking of the mothers weeping in Ramah over the children they lost to King Herod, who wanted to kill Jesus. The weeping continues to this day as our children are sacrificed for the sake of corruption, coercion, ignorance, power, greed, misinformation and money. God loves children…after all they were His idea. Learn, become informed and do what you can to protect yours!
Connie Newcome
Inman, Kansas
BEST TEN YEARS OF MY LIFE
This month I am celebrating my tenth year of WAPF eating. They have been the healthiest years of my life. Prior to discovering the WAPF material, I had been subsisting on the politically correct diet that is so pervasive: pasteurized skim milk, margarine, supermarket oils, eggs with yolks cut out, chicken with fat fastidiously discarded and very little red meat. When I used ground beef, I’d cook it, strain it, and pour boiling water through it to remove the allegedly “evil” saturated fat. I ate organic cereals three to four times a day, in addition to loads of processed grains and pastas, cheap protein powders, aspartame for sweetening, and all sorts of canned and processed foods. I ate my vegetables too—salads with reduced or no-fat bottled dressing and cooked vegetables with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray.
The results? By my late thirties, I was suffering from arthritis (one knee was so bad I thought I was going to wind up crippled), terrible skin problems (cracked heels and nails separating from their beds), hemorrhoids, frightening neuro-spatial imbalance, lethargy from blood sugar spikes and crashes, irregular heartbeat—I felt terrible most of the time.
When I came across your work, in one fell swoop I made the switch in my diet. I still remember that exciting week. Spurred to action, I bought three stock pots, and a couple dozen Mason jars. I made beef and chicken stock right off, and my first fermented vegetables: ginger carrots. I cleaned out my pantry and refrigerator. Out went the processed cereals. I signed up with a family farm co-op. Raw milk, liver, red meat, coconut oil, butter (lovely butter!), soaked/ sprouted/fermented grains, pastured eggs—oh, the joy of eating real food!
Within a month’s time I felt vastly better. Within a year my arthritis cleared up completely—knee problem vanished. Skin cleared up, nails grew strong and vital. Health soared in every other way. And not one dental cavity. At age fifty-one, I am in far better health than at any time when I was younger!
My big announcement is that I have decided to get certified as a personal trainer, as well as a nutritionist. (My sister warned me that I will not be a well-liked student if I contradict the instructor on the evils of vegetable oils.) I’ve been training as a bodybuilder, and the WAPF way has worked phenomenally well for me. Best protein, best joint protection, best carb assimilation. Most bodybuilder diets are horrendously bad—egg whites without the yolks, low fat, processed powders, etc. They complain about poor gut digestion and joint problems.
I got into a couple of heated debates with a few “exercise scientists” PhDers. They subscribe to the anti-saturated fat dogma, believe in polyunsaturates, and argue that grass-fed beef and butter are no different in quality from factory-farmed. And they got condescending when I referred to Dr. Mary Enig’s book on fats—they said they wouldn’t touch a “consumer” type book—even though I pointed out it was based on science.
Thank you for all the work you do!
Niel Rishoi
Novi, Michigan
NURSES AGAINST MANDATORY VACCINES
I am writing to help bring attention to an organization for which I am very proud to be a board member. I belong to the Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines (NAMV). We are applying for non-profit status, have a very large following on social media, and are hoping to get our message out to an even larger audience by writing you today.
Our organization was formed in response to the mandates across the country for nurses and all healthcare personnel to receive yearly flu vaccinations in order to continue employment. Some employers are offering mask options, but this by no means is consistent across the nation. In addition, forcing employees to wear masks violates the individual’s privacy rights regarding their own health decisions. Many caring and excellent nurses are losing faith in our chosen profession and are often harassed about their decision.
The CEO of NAMV discovered that the flu shot mandates are not necessarily to keep patients from developing the flu (the Cochrane Collaboration Study shows this) but rather they are a part of new monitoring that will be conducted by the CDC with statistics being reported to Medicare. If flu vaccination levels are lower than 90 percent, the facility stands to lose two percent of funding from Medicare. Nurses and other healthcare workers are not being informed of the monetary loss, and are told only that this mandate is for the protection of patients despite research showing vaccinated staff does not affect patient health. It is unfair to disguise a massive vaccination campaign as a wellness measure (when the flu vaccine is only said to be overall 60 percent effective by the CDC) when it is actually driven by money.
We at NAMV believe that medical procedures such as vaccination should not be forced. We feel that it is unethical to force any worker to receive a vaccine under coercion or fear of losing her job. We feel that wearing a mask in place of the flu shot is a violation of privacy, and mandates for both the mask and the shot need to be stopped. We hope to take this issue to our state representatives and we need all the help and support that we can get.
As far as we know, there is only one court case in Michigan that is trying to take on the freedom of choice issue regarding workplace vaccinations. The class action complaint was filed in response for the wrongful termination of the plaintiff who was fired for refusing a flu vaccination. We hope that this case will bring more attention to the fact that mandatory vaccination is a violation of civil rights.
We need people to stand up together and protect their rights. While we understand that jobs are at stake, if every person who did not want to be vaccinated refused, there would be immediate change. People are too afraid to speak out to protect their own rights. We want employees to be brave and serve as advocates for themselves as they would for their patients and anyone else having their wishes violated. Our organization supports the freedom of choice regarding vaccination. There are very real and valid reasons why healthcare workers would refuse such an invasive procedure and we need to band together to help protect these rights. If you share our opinion about worker vaccination, please feel free to visit our page or share our message! Our website is www.namv. org.
Erin Randles, RN, Board Member
Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines
WAPF CONFERENCES
The Weston Price Foundation conferences have played a seminal, fundamental role in shaping my understanding of human physiology and the impact of nutrition and environmental toxins on health. The first meeting I attended opened up the possibility of treating cancer with nutrition rather than chemotherapy, as well as introducing me to the importance of gut bacteria to health and the link with autism.
At one conference, I heard a two-hour presentation by Prof. Don Huber which changed my life by exposing the urgent need to get rid of glyphosate in agriculture.
WAPF has also made me appreciate how grazing cattle on grass can solve so many problems in such a simple and natural way. Other facts I learned are too numerous to mention. I look forward to every meeting with excitement, and I am never disappointed. I am working hard on my slides for the upcoming meeting, and I hope you will find my talks on the dark side of antibiotics, vaccines, pesticides and prescription drugs to be stimulating and eye-opening.
As you can see, I consider WAPF to be a very important influence on my thinking! Thank you WAPF for all that you do!
Stephanie Seneff
Senior Research Scientist MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
A HAPPIER LIFE
I just read the articles on your website on the myths of vegetarianism. I agree with you 100 percent. There is one other point I would like to add. I consume raw milk and organic meats from humane, small, family-based organic farmers. Not only are the dairy products much tastier and much more nutritious than those of big commercial farming, but the animals have a much better life on small pasture-based family farms than on big commercial enterprises.
Vegetarians often say animal husbandry itself is cruel. All animals should be left in their wild state. Even pets such as cats and dogs should be left to go wild, as animal husbandry and having pets is slavery. These claims are all false, as your website correctly points out.
The point I am trying to make is that the humane treatment of farm animals on small organic family farms, which was the norm throughout all of history except for big commercial farming of the past century or so, is a much more humane treatment of animals compared to letting the farm animals and pets go wild. On a typical organic farm, the cows, pigs, chickens, sheep and goats have a much better quality of life than they would in the wild. On the organic farm, they are given plentiful nutritious grasses to feed on that are rotated to ensure quality. They are given plenty of pure water to drink. They have numerous natural bugs and insects to eat. They are given barns to stay in during inclement weather. They are allowed to roam freely. Cows that produce milk often live to a ripe old age of fifteen years. Even animals that are slaughtered for their meat live happy healthy lives up until that point, and are slaughtered quickly and humanely. The animals are protected from wild predators by the guard dogs and the farmers. The pet guard dogs are given ample food and good care by the farmers. If the farm animals get sick or injured, they are cared for by veterinarians and the farmers themselves.
Compare this with what happens in the wild. In the wild, these animals would be constantly hunted down by predators such as wolves, bears, lions, mountain lions, foxes and coyotes. Most wild animals don’t make it past their first year due to either predators or starvation. In the wild, these animals would have to find their own food and water supplies, which is often difficult during summer droughts or freezing winter conditions—not to mention the predators that are waiting for them at watering holes. The animals have to compete with other animals for scarce food and water supplies in the wild.
When the animals are caught by predators, it is not a pretty sight. Exhausted from the hunt, they are then ripped apart violently by the predators. If a wild animal gets sick or injured, it is left behind to die or be hunted down by predators.
All in all, these animals have a tough life in the wild compared to the farm. Most farm animals would never survive in the wild if they were “set free.” In fact, most of these farm animals would return to the farm if they were let go. Pets and farm animals have existed in a beneficial symbiotic relationship with humans for thousands of years. Both the animals and humans benefit from each other. It is not “slavery” for humans to have pets and farm animals. On the contrary, it is as God intended for certain domestic animals to live in harmony with humans.
Noah Cencetti
Riverton, New Jersey
HEALING MIGRAINES WITH FOOD
I have had headaches and migraines starting around age twelve, and they became disabling in 2010. Over the course of three years, the migraines grew in intensity and became more frequent. I started having daily facial pain and other chronic pain. I had insomnia, restless leg syndrome, TMJ, joint pain, neck pain and stiff neck, pain in my eyes and also at the base of my neck.
I went from lifting bales of hay and feed bags to hardly being able to pull open a door or lift a milk jug. I became very weak due to all of the pain. At one Christmas dinner, a family member hugged me and it hurt so bad that I thought my body would shatter into a million pieces.
My face hurt on a daily basis. It felt like my face muscles were stretched across my head like a tight net.
I felt nauseous most of the time, and when the big migraines came, they were sudden and out of the blue. I would be having an okay day, and then suddenly I would start sweating and chilling. Then the extreme head pain and vomiting—violent vomiting. I would alternate between scalding and chilling myself in the shower and then finally lying down on the bathroom floor for hours and hours. I felt dead. At one point lying there, I could hear my kids playing and the world going on without me and I had a really extreme thought. I thought that they would be better off without me. Maybe if I finally died, it would be a blessing for everyone..
During my three years of torture, when my migraines had escalated, I saw a total of nineteen doctors, and racked up seventy thousand dollars worth of medical bills. Every neurologist that I saw wanted to give me multiple prescriptions that would only make me sicker.
I am very sensitive to medication and there were no pills that helped so I started looking into Botox. I got thirty shots of Botox in my head every three months, but after a time, they were no longer effective. I then endured six nerve blocks and six nerve ablations—without anesthesia—because our insurance wouldn’t cover it. Those did not help at all.
I then went and saw three surgeons because I was convinced it was my three herniated discs and prior fusion in my neck that was causing all of this pain. Thankfully, none of them wanted to fuse my whole neck at my young age (thirty-five). I finally went to Michigan Head and Neck Institute for an eight-hour appointment with many specialists. I left there with at least eight prescriptions that I did not fill. I was hopeless.
The last stop was back to the pain doctor who suggested the neurostimulator. I arrived at my appointment not really expecting this to be a pivotal day in my life. After some discussion, the doctor said that all of my nerves were firing and he didn’t know what was causing my migraines and pain. He kept saying that he was so sorry. He told me about the neurostimulator, which is a wire they plant into your spinal cord. It is connected to a stopwatch-sized implant under your hip which is then controlled by remote control to disrupt pain signals. I saw the brochure, which of course had a woman with this implant running with her dog looking happy… nice marketing, I thought.
As he was talking I started zoning out. I could feel my anxiety rising to a point where it had never been before. I was trying so hard to keep the crying in. This was not happening to me, and I was not getting that implant. At that moment, my soul was screaming to get out of my defective body. I have never felt such terror in my life.
When my appointment was over I could not make it to the car fast enough. I slammed the car door and my sobs escaped. I was never going to be the wife and mother I wanted to be. I would be forever weak and a burden. My life was not just over, it was going to be a lot of suffering until I died. I kept thinking there has to be another option.
I was crying so hard on the way home that I had to pull over. There had to be something causing this! When I got home, I Googled causes of nerves firing and I got the word “excitotoxins.” This gave me a little hope, learning that there are different chemicals that cause this type of reaction with nerves.
At this point, I had already attended a couple of local Weston A. Price Foundation meetings and was ready to start getting rid of the food in our house that contained harmful food additives. After removing most of the additives, I felt much better. Occasionally, I would still have times when I got really close to having a migraine, or a few bad days in a row with no explanation.
The turning point came when the local Weston A. Price Foundation meeting speaker was Dr. Wayne Feister. His talk was about fibromyalgia and chronic pain. I spoke with him after the meeting and told him my story. He said, “I bet it is MSG.”
I had no idea that MSG came under at least seventy different names! Why hadn’t my neurologists told me this!? I had been overlooking some very dangerous food additives.
I got the book Battling the MSG Myth by Deborah Angelsey, and I got my life back.
Looking back, I don’t know how I survived it all. I don’t know if I had one good day in three years. Now I am on top of the world and feeling great! I have changed my diet drastically. Of course, I no longer eat any ingredients that are neurotoxins like MSG, aspartame and L-cysteine, but I have also eliminated nearly all preservatives, dyes and GMOs. To further my healing I also eat a lot of “living foods” like water kefir, milk kefir and fermented foods.
Because of the differences I saw in my family after removing these chemicals from our food supply, I went from a person who hated cooking to a person who loves to cook!
My husband has normal blood pressure now and no sinus infections or headaches. My thirteen-year-old son no longer has daily headaches or asthma. My five-year-old daughter no longer has behavioral issues.
When I started making all of these changes, I thought that our new way of eating would isolate us from society. I couldn’t have been more wrong! I have gained many friends through my real food journey. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t have a group of friends over for what I call “weird food experiments,” like rendering lard or fermenting. I feel so lucky. I’m strong again, and very, very thankful. I have not had one migraine in fifteen months.
If you are wondering, I did report back to my doctors about my discovery regarding the cause of all of my health problems. They were happy for me. I think they really tried to help me, they just did not know how. I was told by one of the doctors that he was only required to take one class on nutrition during medical school. My hope is that with this information they can help another suffering person.
My advice to anyone in a health crisis is to do your own research. There is a cause for everything and the solution is most often not a pill or surgery.
Jodi Ledley
Kenton, Ohio
SOME DISCOVERIES
Thought I would share some discoveries with you.
The first involves kombucha. We had been using kombucha daily for at least two years. Our teeth hadn’t had problems as far as kombucha was concerned until I accidentally started not fermenting it enough and added too much sugar. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was (I did start to get tooth decay again, though I hadn’t been taking cod liver oil or liver much, shame on me) until my husband started to complain of feeling sore and stiff again like the “old days” (before we changed from SAD to the WAPF diet). I had previously dreamed that the kombucha was “poisoned,” which didn’t make sense at first.
So, you do have to be careful of the kombucha if you add too much sugar and are not fermenting it long enough, also not eating as you should (liver, cod liver, high vitamin butter oil, etc.), you may get tooth decay or rheumatoid arthritis. By the way my own RA disappeared thanks to the WAPF diet.
The second discovery involves morning sickness, which I got in spades with our first baby—pre- WAPF wisdom. I found with our second child that even though I drank loads of raw milk I would still get it. When I started eating raw milk yogurt, that was when I stopped getting morning sickness. As you can imagine, I consumed a lot of it. I also ate raw pineapple when I could get it, which was a nice combination with the yogurt. When I got lazy and fell behind on the yogurt making, the morning sickness came back again. I’m not sure whether raw pineapple alone would stave off morning sickness or not, as I’ve heard that it does help prevent it.
Our second and third children are super-healthy thanks to the wisdom we received from WAPF. Which brings me to the third discovery I’d like to share. I discovered that if I eat anything that has been sprayed with pesticides or may have GMO in it (even secondary contamination from animals eating GMO grains), our baby would get a terrible diaper rash. It looked like a really bad sunburn. Even a tiny bit of (gasp!) chocolate inflamed it to no end. So, it pays to watch what you eat for your kids’ sakes!
By the way, my children have excellent eyesight which is more than I can say for me. God bless all of you for helping to save children (and adults) from a life of medical misery. Seeing people my age (early forties) who are failing in health already makes me wish that more people would wake up and realize that their food is killing them.
Jennifer Murdock
Littleton, WV
RAW MILK CURES!
Just an hour ago we got my son’s lab results following a long health crisis. It began three months ago when he contracted a superbug staph infection during a routine outpatient surgical removal of an ingrown toenail. Within a week he had severe blisters all over and broken blood vessels covering his body. We were treating him with healthy, whole foods and herbal supplements. This was not enough, and after three or four weeks my son was in terrible abdominal pain and showing blood in his urine. My strong and vibrant fourteen-year-old was deteriorating before my eyes and I felt helpless as a mother.
When he started vomiting blood, I took him to the hospital and he was admitted to Hershey’s Children Hospital with a diagnosis of Henoch-Schőnlein purpura. He was placed on IV fluids and prednisone. Thankfully, these helped stabilize him and I know they were necessary at the time, so that his kidneys would not shut down. He was released from the hospital with instructions to follow the schedule for prednisone which would be gradually weaned out of his system after four weeks. However, within two weeks of being weaned off the prednisone my son’s symptoms returned. We were told he’d have to start prednisone again and be monitored frequently until there were no traces of blood in his urine.
I heard about the raw milk cure a year or two prior to this and I let my son read the link to the article (www.realmilk.com/health/milk-cure). He asked to start the cure immediately and began consuming only raw milk. The day before his decision, red blood cell counts in his urine culture were said to be forty to sixty. Four days after drinking one to two gallons of raw milk per day, and nothing else, his levels came back (we got the results) showing zero to three red blood cells. His doctor is amazed, wants to know what we did, and doesn’t need to see my son again until next month.
I have another testimonial. Last year our basement became infested with mold. Our one- and three-year-olds were coughing for weeks. We cleaned up the mold professionally and received a small sum towards repairs from our homeowners insurance, but the babies’ coughs persisted. After about two months of trying various expensive herbal remedies, I decided to remove everything from the babies’ diet and have them only consume raw yogurt. I am not exaggerating when I say that their coughs and congestion were cleared in under two days. I continued the diet for about four or five days, giving them yogurt whenever they wanted and they were calm, happy, and healthy. I gradually introduced other foods starting with meat and broth. Now, a year later they are still healthy and eating a variety of foods.
Rebekah and Adrien Barlup
Lynchburg, Pennsylvania
CHEMOTHERAPY AND NUTRIENT-DENSE FOOD
I wanted to share our story with you. Within a week of returning home from the WAPF conference in Atlanta last year, my three-year-old son Kicker was diagnosed with leukemia. Needless to say it rocked our whole world. We could not refuse the chemotherapy that the doctors prescribed—they would have taken our child away if we had.
Long story short, thankfully as a nutritional therapist and a mom with a very thorough understanding of real health, we immediately employed a ketogenic diet, detox, supplementation, essential oils, as well as our team of alternative practitioners, including Kim Schuette, to help heal our baby boy. He has done fantastic. He has not experienced one single side effect (other than hair loss) from his over seventy rounds of chemotherapy. It took about five months for his hair even to begin thinning and once we shaved it, it grew back fully. His oncologists have been totally amazed at him-they just can’t figure out why his ANC, hemoglobin and platelets are so high and why he has not experienced mouth sores, vomiting, headaches, lethargy, low counts, etc. As frustrating as it is not to have a choice in the healthcare for our son and be forced to do conventional treatment, I am beginning to see that our challenge and heartache are not in vain. I am realizing how important diet, detox and immune support are for cancer treatment and how when coupled with the toxic, harsh drugs of conventional treatment, these kids can still stand a chance at healing and fighting with strength and grace.
As we have watched our boy thrive and kick cancer, my heart is broken as I look around at all the other children suffering from the same disease and treatment. I see kids relapsing, I see kids dying. And it is not from the disease, but from the treatment and the lack of true healing and support these kids are getting. We are starting a non-profit called The KICKcancER Foundation. The sole purpose of this foundation is to educate families on how to support their children so that they not only thrive during treatment, but heal after treatment. We will be raising funds through various fundraisers and private donors, to provide “scholarships” to these families to local organic farms, local naturopathic and osteopathic physicians and scholarships for supplements (fermented cod liver oil, probiotic, immune support, etc.). This is a key part to healing, but insurance won’t cover most of it, and most families are very limited financially during such a battle, therefore we hope to provide families with the monetary resources to afford all of this.
I am sharing this with you so that you can understand the depths of how WAPF has affected so many and is literally helping save lives. The ripple effect is loud and strong, and I pray that it continues and reaches every single person. I am hosting an educational retreat in Los Angeles in October with about twenty cancer moms. We will be paying for their hotel, speakers, real food meals, etc. My hope is that they leave educated and empowered to begin implementing alternative care and diet with their children. This will be my first effort in beginning a similar “ripple” effect toward healing others.
You can read about my son and our foundation here: http://www.seasonjohnson. blogspot.com/2014/01/my-kidswill-never.html
Season Johnson, BA, NTP
Chapter Leader, Mammoth Lakes, California
BREAKFAST IN THE CLASSROOM
I am sending you the photos of my school district’s “Breakfast in the Classroom” morning meals. By no means do these photos encompass the extent of the entire program’s menu, but enough to provide a clear idea of what our children are being fed.
Evident in the photos are various food items ranging from pre-packaged burritos, pancakes, waffles, and food bars to yogurt, fruit, animal crackers, and juice or milk. What used to be their favorite meal is missing from the photos. This would be the coffee cake. After removing this item from its plastic packaging, the children used to love pouring their pasteurized, factory farmed, lowfat milk over the top of this brown square sugary loaf and gobbling it up. I use the words “used to” because towards the end of the last school year, the children were served this meal about three times a week. They all became sick of it. What also became apparent throughout the school year was that there were fewer fresh fruits being served, and many teachers complained of moldy and expired food being served to the children.
Many of the children choose to skip the breakfast. Many of them eat at home. I have no idea what they are eating, but it can’t be much worse than what the school provides. Except of course when a child arrives in the morning with those notorious orange fingers. I would then have to say that the school breakfast is better than a breakfast of Cheetos. Much of the school breakfast food is thrown away, since the district’s rule is once a child takes a breakfast, everything is thrown away, whether it is opened or not, including the milk cartons.
TYPICAL SCHOOL LUNCH ITEMS
The “Breakfast in the Classroom” program is a good idea in theory. But, due to the pervasive misconceptions and misguided nutritional agenda of this major metropolitan district where I am employed, school breakfast and school lunch will continue to amble along its destructive dietetic course never comprehending, connecting, considering, or caring about the collateral damage left in its wake.
Angela Karlan, Chapter Leader
South Bay/Redondo Beach, California
TEACHING NUTRITION IN MEXICO
I learned about nourishing traditional diets in 1995. I had just recovered from a diagnosis of leukemia in 1992. I opted out of the traditional program of chemo and medulla transplant and followed what I had learned whilst living in London of the body’s ability to heal itself with the right nutrition.
The team of doctors that helped me through this period are all practicing functional medicine physicians who are well aware of the value of the right nutrients for the body to heal. The only medicines used were neohomeopathy. I moved from Mexico to London in 1972 with my three young sons. Unfortunately, the rage at that time was yoga and vegetarianism to which I succumbed, not knowing the value of nutrients. After several years of practicing vegetarianism and not feeling very well, my homeopathic doctor, Andrew Stringer, spoke to me about the Weston A. Price research on nutrition. He had me do a food allergy test at the time finding out that I was lacto-intolerant. Without asking Dr. Stringer’s guidance, I decided on my own to become a vegan. Little did I know that I was a hostess to my own illness.
I was fortunate enough to work in an East London center where battered women and children of low economic class were taken in. A friend of mine was the director and she asked if I would volunteer to work with the children. I am a Montessori teacher, as well. It was here that I learned about the value of nutrition through the doctors in charge and the importance of looking at the three aspects of health: physical, emotional and spiritual. Nutrition was the main medicine used in healing the body. Obviously they first detoxed the body and then nurtured it at the intra cellular level. The same process was done with the emotional side, through assisting in restoring self esteem and healing the trauma of pain. These women not only were battered but were also drug addicts, and the children I worked with were HIV positive. I gradually saw the changes and started looking at the importance of food from a different angle. My healing process took eight months, working with all levels: physical, emotional and spiritual. I learned the value of nutrition and the need for the right food to obtain the nutrition our cells need to restore themselves. This was confirmed a few years later when I found out about the principles of nourishing traditional diets.
Since then I became a nutrition journalist, looking into all sorts of diets and the values to our health, always coming back to the principles set forth in Weston A. Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
Fifteen years ago, I created AMAYAL, an educational health center for well being in Monterrey, Mexico (www.amayal.com) where functional medicine doctors form a part. We have a department called Erudito that organizes lectures and workshops related to health. It has been hard work teaching nutrition to a country that is not well aware of the value of food. I now teach nutrition through a course called Cocina con Conciencia based on the WAPF teaching.
Even in Mexico the food industry has seduced people with its products, but slowly during these last three years, I see a marked change. Unfortunately more people are becoming ill, especially young children and it is young mothers and people already affected by a chronic disease who come to my classes.
I am eternally grateful for the information provided by the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Barbara B. Powers
Monterrey, Mexico
ROUNDUP IN THE GRAND CANYON
We recently visited Hoover Dam. They have a display showing how the Southwest is now able to grow crops year round, thanks to Hoover Dam regulating the Colorado River and its tributaries. Impressive.
We continued upriver to the Grand Canyon and hiked to the bottom. Awesome!
During a ranger talk, we learned that Roundup has recently been approved for use along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon to control nonnative plants they are having trouble with. How awful!!
I suppose that many of those making use of the Colorado and its tributaries are the organic farmers that help supply us with produce during winter. Organic or not, how horrible to think that Roundup will be used in the Grand Canyon. I assume this means it eventually will find its way past Hoover Dam to all those tributaries—after becoming part of the Las Vegas water supply. (Hoover Dam created Lake Meade. Lake Meade supplies Las Vegas, Nevada and other locations with water.)
We so hope that someone with a good handle on Roundup and with good diplomatic skills will engage the Grand Canyon on this issue. Since this is a policy that only recently was approved, now is the time to say something!
The place to make comments is on the Grand Canyon website: www.nps.gov/grca. Click on Backcountry Hiking. Scroll way down to the “Contact Us” button. We sincerely hope that someone will take this on.
Wayne and Lydia Arnold
Lincoln, Nebraska
SUPPORT FOR HOMEMADE FORMULA
On Christmas Day 2010, curled up under a warm blanket, our eyes filled with tears, my partner, Rob, and I made one of the toughest decisions of our lives. We’d been talking about how much we wanted children, but we knew that if we couldn’t bring a little one into the world naturally, we would rather accept never being parents. Heart-wrenching, but a reflection of how we chose to live: authentically, naturally and consciously.
For many years, due to PCOS (Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome), I hadn’t been menstruating. The roots of PCOS were in my past; fed white sugar as a child, by the time I was twenty years old I was two hundred eighty pounds. Since then I’d been on an incredible journey, losing half my body weight. The weight loss had cleared up many of my symptoms, but it hadn’t restored my menstrual cycle.
It wasn’t a pressing problem, until I met Rob. As our relationship developed, I knew I wanted to have a child with him and he felt the same. We both believed in natural healing and started a journey that saw us eating vegetarian, vegan, and then raw vegan for two years. We juiced, avoided all processed food, even water-fasted. Outside my diet, things were changing too—we’d moved to the country I’d always dreamed of living in, I’d given up the nine-to-five to set up my own business doing what I loved, and I was on a spiritual journey that challenged my habitual responses. Yet I still didn’t have a period. A few years down the line, I went back to medicine to see how things were and was told my hormones were flat-lined. I talked to the “experts” about my belief that I could restore my fertility naturally and was laughed at: “Don’t be ridiculous, Alison, you will never restore your menstrual cycle by changing your diet.”
I didn’t give up. My faith in the body’s ability to be healthy informed my actions as I stepped forward believing I could heal and we could conceive naturally. It was about this time I was led to the work of Weston Price. I’d started to eat some well-sourced animal products and raw dairy as I’d read that animal fats were a traditional fertility food and that they could help increase my body temperature, which I’d noticed was very low. Soon my kitchen became a haven of fermenting grains, souring milk, processed-sugar free desserts, and all manner of weird and wonderful bread concoctions.
A few months in and we were both Weston Price converts. Amazingly Rob, who’d not been able to eat complex carbohydrates since being forced to stop eating wheat due to the serious illness it provoked almost a decade earlier, began to digest grains again. I was able to have raw dairy and not get the sinus problems I always got on the pasteurized stuff. My body temperature was approaching normal and we were loving our food!
After having experienced five years with no menstruation, nearly a year into eating this way, I had a period! I’d been blessed with what I’d dreamt of: restored fertility. Then within a week of trying, Rob and I conceived a child.
I had a happy, healthy, scan-free and doctor-free pregnancy and my baby boy, Gabriel Ethan, came into this world via the warm waters of a birthing pool, at home, without the use of any drugs.
It was all perfect and I imagined we’d slip easily into breastfeeding, but it didn’t happen like that. The very thing that had started my health journey and led me to Weston Price, enabling me to bring my son into the world naturally, was the thing that made breastfeeding such a struggle. I had IGT—Insufficient Glandular Tissue (something common to PCOS and particularly to women who were overweight as teens). Our first few months were traumatic—Gabriel wouldn’t latch on my breast, had two operations to correct tongue tie and due to my IGT, I didn’t have enough milk for him. After incredible efforts to get him to breastfeed, I turned to a breast pump. The IGT, however, meant that my overly elastic breast tissue was inefficiently being pulled way too far into the mechanism. I had red, raw areolas and was spending over ten hours a day attached to the pump.
Sleep-deprived, I was exhausted and had hardly seen my beautiful boy. He was spending most of the day with Rob, who’d not worked for two months so he could care for him.
I knew we couldn’t continue. The one thing I felt really blessed about was the fact that, because I’d been to the UK WAPF conference, I knew about the home-made baby milk formula. The thought of giving our little one powdered, pasteurized formula went against everything we stood for and this gave us another way. We’d started using the raw milk formula a few weeks earlier in addition to breast milk, and it was beginning to make up a larger part of Gabriel’s diet—he digested it easily and looked so well. Rob and I had thrived on raw dairy and I was so relieved to be able to make a food from un-processed, real ingredients, with a nutritional profile the same as breast milk.
Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with us. We were prepared for that. We’ve spoken the truth many times in our lives and been criticized for it. What we weren’t prepared for though, was the outcry this particular truth caused.
When asked by a post-natal health visitor what we were feeding Gabriel, we mentioned the fresh formula. Unbeknownst to us, we were reported to our local doctor. This was then escalated to the nearby hospital and we received a phone call from a shocked pediatrician who told us that we were putting our child at grave risk and that she would be reporting us to the local child protection authorities.
This threw me into absolute panic. The thought of having our little boy taken away from us for feeding him food made from the same ingredients both Rob and I thrived on, one that we knew would give him his best chance of good health and strong immunity, was just unbelievable to me.
I felt so angry that the mainstream could not accept that unprocessed food is what we are meant to eat. I felt so frustrated that someone was telling me what I could and couldn’t feed my child. And I felt so scared that this might escalate to the point where we were threatened with taking him away.
We were called in to see the pediatrician who’d spoken to us on the phone. During the most challenging, terrifying and emotional hospital visit I have ever experienced, Gabriel was weighed, measured and checked, whilst Rob eloquently discussed the whys, hows and wherefores of our choice with the doctor. I was terrified of what the outcome may be, but somehow, fate was on our side. The pediatrician had, since her initial phone call, spoken to her boss, the most senior pediatrician at the hospital and he’d let a tiny shaft of light onto the situation. A man with many years in pediatrics, his grasp of infant nutrition moved beyond the corporate world of formula, and he had knowledge of traditional methods of feeding babies when a mother’s milk was not available. This allowed her to talk to us without being convinced that we were irresponsible and wrong.
As the discussions came to an end, the pediatrician asked us what we wanted to do and Rob bravely stated we wished to continue feeding our son this formula. To my joy, the response was that, although the medical staff flatly did not agree with what we were doing and considered it a risk, as long as Gabriel was healthy, they were willing to let us be.
Gabriel passed the physical examinations— he was officially as healthy as I knew he was and he remains so now, being fed the raw milk formula as 100 percent of his diet.
At times, during this saga, I wished that we had hidden the truth, as I know virtually all of the people in the UK using the Weston Price infant formula are. But with hindsight I am very proud that we acted in integrity with our values.
There is a long way to go before the choice to feed yourself raw dairy will be accepted by society and an even longer way before choosing to feed it to your child will be okay. I hope that, in telling the truth to the medical world, Rob and I have played a small part in hastening that time. Because we both believe that when that time comes our society will be much happier and healthier.
Alison Ottaway
Kent, UK
www.pathlesstroden.com
YOUNGEST MEMBER OF THE WESTON A. PRICE FOUNDATION!
At age fifteen, Macy Smith of Indianola, Iowa, is the youngest member of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thanks to a gift membership from cousin-in-law Diane Smith. After reading all our literature and tasting raw milk and cheese for the first time, courtesy of Diane, Macy was 100 percent on board, and already talking about becoming a chapter leader one day. Youth is the future of WAPF and we are thrilled to have Macy on board!