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Weston A. Price

The Weston A. Price Foundation was founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon Morell. The foundation promotes a return to whole, unprocessed organic foods, prepared using traditional techniques. The foundation's mission is based on the work of Weston A. Price, who observed the eating habits and food preparation methods of extremely healthy, isolated peoples around the world and connected their traditional diets to their astounding health. He believed that their isolation from the West and from its standard diet of processed foods played a major role in their fitness. These findings have led to the foundation's recommendations as summed up in the following quote from Fallon Morell's book, Nourishing Traditions: "the food choices and preparation techniques of healthy nonindustrialized peoples, should serve as the model for contemporary eating habits."

Today, the Weston A. Price Foundation promotes a diet of organic whole foods, including whole grains, pasture-fed meats, vegetables, fruits, and unpasturized whole dairy as well as traditional preparation methods such as sprouting grains and fermenting vegetables, grains, and dairy products. These methods are based on traditions that have occurred repeatedly throughout the world.

Basic Dietary Guidelines

Meat

The diet allows for meat such as beef, lamb, game, organs, and poultry coming from animals that were pasture fed or wild. Wild fish is highly regarded as long as the waters they were raised in were not polluted.

Whole Grains

The Weston A. Price diet calls for whole and unprocessed grains and seeds, and states that preparation should include soaking, sprouting, fermenting, or sour leavening to make them easier to digest. Some believe that gluten intolerance results from the general population eating lots of wheat flour that hasn't been soaked.

Dairy

Full-fat, unpasturized milk products are recommended over their reduced fat and pasturized counterparts. Raw milk is considered preferable for retaining more nutrients than pasturized milk. And, unlike many other dietary philosophies, the Weston A. Price Foundation believes that the fat in dairy is beneficial.

In addition, fermented products are also highlighted such as yogurt, raw cheese, and kefir since raw foods contain vitamins, beneficial bacteria, and enzymes.

Fruits and Vegetables

Organic fruits are highlighted and can be eaten in many ways including lightly steamed with butter, in soups, or in salads. They can also be fermented in traditional ways to increase nutritional value and aid the digestive system with probiotics.

Oils

The diet uses a mixture of traditional oils, such as extra virgin olive oil, some expeller pressed flax oil, and expeller pressed sesame oil, as well as tropical oils like coconut and palm kernel oil. Cod liver oil is regularly eaten for its nutritional value. Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are avoided.

Water, Salt, Spices, and Sweeteners

Filtered water as well as small amounts of natural sweeteners such as raw honey, dehydrated cane sugar, maple syrup, and date sugar is used. Spices, herbs, and unrefined salt are used to stimulate the appetite.

Born in 1870 within a farming community in Canada, Weston A. Price later on obtained a degree of dentistry in 1893 and begun practicing in Cleveland, Ohio. While in Ohio Price observed a deterioration of the teeth in his younger patients such as an increase in cavities. He also witnessed a higher level of health problems like allergies and asthma and, as a result, hypothesized that these problems were a result of nutrient deficiencies. Price further linked this decline in health with the industrialized process foods that his patients ate.

In the 1930s, with his hypothesis in mind, Price and his wife Florence, who also worked in health as a nurse, began traveling the world to observe the health and diets of isolated populations who had not been exposed to the Western diet of the time. Some of the many people they met were shepherds in Uganda, Maori members in New Zealand, Inuit and Cree members in North America, Gaelic communities in the Hebrides and Aborigines in Australia. Traveling for more than ten years and collecting more than 10,000 samples of the food eaten by these isolated populations, the Prices found four commonalities that permeated each group of peoples: polyunsaturated fat like fish, saturated fat like butter, monounsaturated fat like bone marrow, and whole foods. The refined flour and sugar so common in the United States even then, were foreign commodities unknown by these peoples.

Price found little to no tooth decay and poorly formed arches in the mouth and to document these pristine teeth he took pictures that he included in his work titled Nutrition and Physical Degeneration published in 1939.

Although Price studied a range of diets of healthy populations around the world but never found the "quintessential diet." Different populations lived off of the food that was available in their environment, for example, one of what Price thought to be the healthiest group of people were living in Ethiopia near the Nile and eating a diet rich in milk, meat, and blood from pasteurized cattle and the river. While these populations ate different foods, traditional methods of fermentation, soaking of grains, eating of raw dairy, raising pastured cattle, and educating their youth about healthy eating, permeated many. Price was extremely interested in the link between the soil used, the preparation of food, and the nutrition it provides. For example, he determined that the butter from pasteurized cows versus cows fed on grain contained higher amount of vitamin A and vitamin D. With this new, yet traditional, idea in mind, Price returned to the United States where he continued to support a focus on whole, healthy, foods.

Back in the states, Price established a clinic to help bring healthier eating to the West. For a period, he cooked one meal a day for malnourished children whose diets consisted of items such as white bread and vegetable oil fried donuts. These meals contained food like fish chowder, tomato juice with cod liver oil, whole wheat freshly ground and baked with butter, as well as whole milk. After a few weeks the children's heath improved along with their performance in school. This idea of a well balanced diet of whole foods is one that persists after Price's death in 1948. The Weston A. Price Foundation is currently a non-profit organization that started in 1999 by Sally Fallon. Spreading the ideas of Price and striving to bring food high in nutrients to the Western diet, the foundation continues with further education and research.