Washington Post

The Great Divide
Who Says Good Nutrition Means Animal Fats? Weston A.Price.
By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Eating healthy on the road can be tricky for Sally
Fallon. But if the founder of the Washington nutrition
nonprofit group Weston A. Price Foundation ever gets
desperate, she can always hit a gas station for a bag
of pork cracklings: "It's often the only real thing to
eat," she says.

Fallon's definition of "real" is vastly different from
what many Americans who consider themselves
health-conscious might describe. She advocates butter
on bread "so thick you can see teeth marks in it,"
plenty of meat and unpasteurized, or raw, milk.

Those are foods recommended by Price, a Cleveland
dentist who traveled the world studying primitive
diets. His 1939 book, "Nutrition and Physical
Degeneration," concluded that a diet high in the
vitamins found in animal fats and untouched by
"modern" innovations such as refined flour, sugar and
chemically preserved foods was the key to preventing
chronic disease and tooth decay.

Such ideas have been considered heretical by modern
American public health policy that promotes a low-fat,
low-sodium diet. But increasing interest in
sustainable, local foods, combined with industrial
health scares such as the recent salmonella outbreak,
has put the spotlight on the foundation's unorthodox
ideas about healthful eating. Its membership is nearly
10,500 strong, and growing at a 10 percent clip each
year. There are more than 350 U.S. chapters, plus
international groups from Australia to Norway.

For years, these ideas were "as fringe as you could
get, as politically incorrect as you could get," says
Fallon, 60. "All of a sudden, people are listening."

That new audience is surprisingly broad. Some
adherents are interested exclusively in nutrition. But
more and more, the concept of returning to traditional
foodways is pulling people in. New members include the
expected "back to the land" types, for whom the
foundation's message provides yet another reason to
support small organic farms, and those who oppose the
government's attempt to limit the availability of
foods such as raw milk.

"This idea of real food crosses all demographics: red
states, blue states, seculars, environmentalists, men,
women and children," says Nina Planck, a Weston A.
Price member and the author of "Real Food: What to Eat
and Why." "What's gone wrong with farm policy is
something conservatives and liberals can all agree
on."

A Diet Rich in Vitamins

Fallon first stumbled on Price's work in the 1970s. It
charted Price's visits to isolated populations, from
the New Zealand Maori to Gaelic cultures in Scotland's
Outer Hebrides, to discover the roots of dental decay
that he found in his Cleveland practice. Price counted
cavities, noted facial structures and collected food
samples, which he brought home for nutrient analysis.

There was great variety in the diets: Some subsisted
on meats, others on seafoods, grains, even insects.
But in each group, Price found little or no evidence
of chronic disease or tooth decay. He concluded that
what those diets had in common were high levels of
vitamins A and D and what he called "activator X," now
believed to be vitamin K2. He determined that those
important vitamins could be obtained only from animal
foods, including seafood, organ meats, and butterfat
and eggs from pastured animals. Price, who died in
1948, got some early attention for his work, but its
message was largely forgotten during the pro-industry
'50s and '60s.

Fallon found Price's ideas "life-changing" and altered
her family's diet accordingly. She began to buy raw
milk and added liver, where possible, to meals she
cooked for her four children.

In 1989, Fallon began to think about spreading the
gospel of Price. She did not have any formal nutrition
training, so she recruited Mary Enig, a Washington
nutritionist whose controversial work promotes
saturated fats, to co-write a cookbook. It had two
goals: to explain Price's findings and to provide a
range of recipes for traditional foods such as chicken
liver pâté, sauerkraut and sourdough breads that
deliver the requisite fat and nutrients for good
health. (Some of the book's recommendations, such as
the importance of bone broths, are inspired by the
work of California doctor Francis Pottenger, a
contemporary of Price's.)

The result was "Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook
That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the
Diet Dictocrats." The first edition, released in 1996,
was riddled with typos and errors. But it sold.

In 12 years, the book, corrected in a second edition,
has sold 310,000 copies (see sidebar). That is 30,000
more than the paperback version of Rachael Ray's "30
Minute Meals" and 50,000 more than Ina Garten's "The
Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," according to Nielsen
BookScan.

"I'm as amazed as anyone," Fallon says. She credits
its success to the fact that the book's rules "tell
people they can do what their body naturally wants to.
All of the other rules require willpower, and
willpower doesn't work."

Fallon appears to be living proof of the benefits of
the "Nourishing Traditions" diet. Her typical day's
food intake is about 2,300 calories and includes eggs,
with extra yolks, or oatmeal with at least three
tablespoons of butter for breakfast; soup with cheese
or pâté for lunch; and meat or organ meat for dinner
with lots of vegetables. And though Fallon is far from
model thin, she has a healthy, farm-fed look. She says
she hasn't gotten sick in 10 years and long ago
overcame allergies and digestive problems that dogged
her in her 20s.

A food regimen that endorses creamy soups and pork
chops has its appeal; witness the sweeping success of
the Atkins diet. But what has made "Nourishing
Traditions" a word-of-mouth success is its combination
of common-sense advice and the science to back it up.
The foundation's quarterly journal, Wise Traditions:
Farming and the Healing Arts, offers a similar mix.
The summer 2008 issues include articles on the history
of mercury in medicine and how to best prepare
grass-fed beef.

"You have to demonstrate the science for the
skeptics," says Planck, who says she faced similar
challenges with her book advocating unprocessed foods.

Some independent studies, such as the ones charted in
Gary Taubes's recent book, "Good Calories, Bad
Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet,
Weight Control and Disease," do support the premise
that saturated fat isn't the enemy. But not everyone
agrees with the foundation's claims. Joel Fuhrman,
doctor and author of "Eat for Health," which advocates
a nutrient-dense diet with limited animal products,
calls it "unconscionable" to advocate a diet high in
saturated fat, especially for children. He also
alleges that the evidence Fallon and Enig use to
support their claims is based on antiquated studies
with poor observations.

"The worst people can say about us is that we use
older studies," Fallon says. "Would you jump off a
building because the law of gravity was discovered 300
years ago? This is good science."

Raw Milk Advocacy

Fallon runs the foundation (
http://www.westonaprice.org) from a bungalow in
Washington's Palisades neighborhood. Initially, Fallon
wanted to focus the $1 million annual budget on
education and research. But her message has filtered
into the mainstream: Journalist Michael Pollan spent
several pages of his recent bestseller, "In Defense of
Food: An Eater's Manifesto," outlining Price's
research. Fallon has since been forced to put more
resources into advocacy of such foods as raw milk.

One of the cornerstones of the diet, raw milk is sold
legally in 28 states; several others permit it to be
sold as pet milk or allow people to buy cow shares, an
agreement in which a customer buys a percentage of the
cow and its milk. (Raw milk cannot be sold legally in
Maryland and the District and can be purchased only
through a cow share in Virginia.) The foundation also
has established a farm-to-consumer legal defense fund
that offers, among other things, a 24-hour hotline for
legal advice about how to bring unprocessed products
to market. "If you teach people what to eat, they have
to be able to get it," Fallon says.

That's how Bowie resident Liz Reitzig got involved. In
2004, at the suggestion of a relative, she decided to
give raw milk to her 2-year-old daughter, who was
suffering from digestive problems. Because the sale of
raw milk was illegal where she lived, she bought into
a cow share. Within weeks after switching her
daughter's milk intake from organic to raw, Reitzig
says, the problems disappeared. In 2006, the Maryland
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene announced a
change in regulations that prohibited cow shares.
Reitzig retreated to serving organic milk, and health
problems emerged for several family members.

"This is about our rights," Reitzig told 37 people who
attended a recent Saturday evening meeting in Great
Falls sponsored by foundation members. "I'm nine
months pregnant, and I can go anywhere and buy a pack
of cigarettes and a case of beer. But I can't get raw
milk, this food that has nourished us for thousands of
years."

Reitzig's libertarian streak seemed to appeal to her
audience: a mix of liberals, conservatives and several
nutritionists who had come to learn more about the
Price philosophy.

"As consumers, we don't know what we're eating," said
Luisa Burke, a 40-year-old Oak Hill resident. A
self-described conservative, Burke emptied her pantry
of processed foods and switched to organic produce
several years ago when nothing could cure her son's
chronic sinus infections. Burke has not switched to
raw milk, in part because of the hassle of obtaining
it. But she is considering it: "This is everybody's
problem. We need to look at why so many kids are
diagnosed with autism and so many kids are obese."

Burke's friend, 44-year-old Michelle Steindl, said the
idea of traditional, unprocessed foods also resonated
with her progressive upbringing. She began giving her
daughter raw milk several years ago to help with
digestive problems and now goes through several
gallons per week. "This is not a liberal or
conservative thing anymore," she said. "Everyone can
come together around healthy food."

That is Fallon's hope. "I know we're still small, but
we've grown because people are searching for answers,"
she says. "And there are millions more people out
there searching for answers."

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