You probably know that what you eat impacts your health and ability to sleep. But how are you supposed to figure out the right diet and how to make sense of nutrition when there’s so much conflicting and confusing advice out there?

Should you eat plant or animal based? Should you eat high fat? Keto? Low fat? Low carb?

Even when I got a master's in holistic nutrition in 2008, I was still confused about what I should recommend to people. The school I went to really focused on a vegetarian diet, and I was vegetarian at the time, so that made sense to me. But I also didn't think that everyone should be vegetarian. I had this instinct that that it wasn't right for everyone. At the time, I was dating a guy who was super tall and super skinny and ate a lot of meat, and I didn't necessarily think that he should be vegetarian.

I started working on an organic and biodynamic farm, Cosmic Apple Gardens, at this time. One of the owners of the farm, Dale, who is a dear friend, gave me a journal called Wise Traditions from the Weston A. Price foundation. It made so much sense to me and changed my views about nutrition forever!

So I dove deeper, and today, I want to share what I’ve learned about Weston A. Price, who he was, what he found, and how I have made sense of this very simple approach to figuring out what we should be eating.


Where your meat comes from matters: factory farming vs biodynamic farming
Before we dive in, I want to explain that I was vegetarian at the time when I started working on this farm and learning about Weston A.Price. The reason I became a vegetarian was I started reading about how horribly animals were being treated and how bad that was for us to eat.

Factory farmed animals aren't thriving; they're totally sick. They aren't eating what they're meant to be eating. They're given growth hormones and antibiotics, and they live in horrible, filthy conditions.

But on the farm I was working on, things were very different from these factory farms. Cosmic Apple grows organic produce, mainly vegetables and some berries, in Idaho, right over the border from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The farm also has cows, and so they sell beef. They have chickens, so they sell their eggs and they have pigs, so they sell pork.

This farm is beyond organic; it's actually biodynamic. And there's a lot to that, but simply put, biodynamic farming really focuses on the health of the soil.

The farm is a closed circuit so they aren't adding all these inputs from other places. The animals are providing a lot of the fertility for the farm and they're a necessary part of the farm. For example, the cow's poop is turned into compost.

Conventional farms might add fertilizer, which is NPK (nitrogen, hydrogen, potassium). Whereas a biodynamic farm is producing this natural, mineral rich soil full of all the minerals, not just the three that have been isolated in conventional fertilizer.

When vegetables are grown in that soil, they’re much more nutrient rich.

I saw how the chickens, as they pecked in the ground and ate the insects, aerated the soil. And so they always rotate where the chickens are living every year. And so then that land that they've been on the year before is more nutrient rich from their poop and from that soil being aerated to grow plants the next year.

The pigs do the same thing. As they're rooting in the dirt, they are breaking up the soil, sending oxygen and nutrients into that soil.

I saw how the animals were part of the circle of life. They're living in the conditions that they're meant to live in. And they're cared for.

They're fed the food that they are meant to eat. All the cows are grass fed. The chickens are fed organic, soy free feed in addition to the natural bugs that they're getting. And then the pigs are eating a lot of the scraps that come from the farm. So it was this very closed circuit.

Seeing this farm totally changed my views. I saw how eating meat from this farm is very different from eating meat that you buy in the grocery store!

Weston A. Price
Weston A Price was a dentist practicing in the 1930's. He found that more and more of his patients were getting cavities than they were ten years prior. Guess what also happened around the 1930s? Our food industry was born.

Processed foods, especially refined flour, refined sugar, and canned goods, were in mass supply.

Until this point, people were eating what they could eat locally. With the introduction of these processed foods, the majority of people, especially in cities, started eating these foods and they started getting more cavities.

So Dr. Price decided to travel the world and look at different cultures and what they were eating. He even sent samples of what they were eating back to labs in the US to analyze their nutritional content.

Different Cultures Eat Different Foods
Of course, he found that every culture was eating completely different foods.

For example, in Switzerland, they ate a lot of dairy, raw butter, milk and cream, and rye bread. They would eat meat about once a week and they used all the parts of the animal.

In Scotland, they ate a lot of oats and root vegetables. They ate some dairy too. They had some fish and meat and berries in the summer.

But these European cultures are completely different from, say, the Maasai tribe in Africa that's known for eating blood. They eat a lot of meat and fat and blood and milk and also honey and tree bark.

And that diet is very different from what people in Tahiti are eating, right? They're eating a ton of seafood and coconuts and root vegetables and fruit.

Dr. Price traveled to all these places, and he studied their diets and found that when cultures were eating their traditional diet, they didn't get many cavities. They also had these great facial bone structures.

He took pictures of a lot of these people so we can see their big white healthy teeth and huge jaws and strong bones. They just look very healthy.

He also found that when people were eating their traditional diet that they didn't get sick as often, especially with tuberculosis which was one of the main diseases of the day.
He also saw that within the first generation of people eating the new highly processed foods, their health deteriorated.

They were more likely to get tuberculosis. They got way more cavities. And the jaw structure of the children of people eating these foods completely changed. They would have this narrow face structure and palate and crooked teeth and again, a lot of cavities.

So what should we eat?
Dr. Price noticed that even though different cultures were eating very different foods, they had some similarities. They were always eating whole foods, right? Everything was organic because pesticides were not used. They didn't even need that term.They were eating whole unprocessed foods because that's all that was available.

Now, every single culture he found ate animal products and they prized animal foods. Even if some cultures didn't eat much meat, often the animal foods were the most prized foods and they ate the entire animal. From nose to tail, as it's called. There was a focus on organ meats. They didn’t just eat muscle meat like we do today. And now we know this makes sense because there are different amino acids in muscle meat vs sinews and tendons vs the fat.

They also focused on bones, especially making broth from bones.

Using the samples he had sent back to the labs in the U.S. he found that all of these different cultures, even though they were eating completely different things, ate ten times or more the fat soluble vitamins (vitamins A, D, E and K) than what Americans were eating, if they were eating the standard American diet at that time, which included processed foods.

This makes sense of course. Processed foods have zero nutrients. Refined sugar, refined flour, and canned goods have almost no nutrients. Whereas if you're eating whole foods, they are naturally nutrient-rich.
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What's interesting too is he found all of these cultures ate some animal foods raw and that they cooked most of their vegetables.

He also found that every culture ate fermented foods or drank fermented beverages. So things like sauerkraut and kimchi and beet kvass were a really important part of the diet.

They also knew how to properly prepare seeds, grains and nuts. Seeds, grains and nuts have a lot of anti nutrients in them. And when you ferment or soak or sprout them, those nutrients are released.The starches are broken down, so it's more easily digestible. Properly preparing in these ways makes the food good for us.

We've gotten away from this now that we're in the 2020's, over 100 years later, and we don't prepare foods this way. Our bread is made really quickly in factories instead of traditional sourdough bread, for example.


Price also found that people ate a lot of fat, although the amount varied. Between 30 and 80% of calories were from fat, but only 4% of that came from polyunsaturated fats.

Polyunsaturated fats are what the vegetable and seed oils that we've been told are “healthy” for us are high in. But these traditional cultures were getting hardly any polyunsaturated fats.

They also had equal omega 3 to 6 fatty acids.

And they ate some kind of salt, which makes sense now because we know it's rich in minerals.

Lastly, these cultures around the world really focused on fertility. Men and women of childbearing age were given the most nutrient rich foods, especially organ meats or fish roe, for example. People who are having children got the most nutritious food so that they could have healthy children.

So again, all these cultures are eating completely different things, but there are these similarities in them.

Now I see that nutrition doesn’t have to be confusing at all. We just need to eat how we were eating, let's say 150-200 years ago.

We don't necessarily need to go back to eating Paleo tens of thousands of years ago. We have evolved since hunter gatherer times.

Paleo isn’t necessarily bad, but I don't think it has to be that extreme, because as Dr. Price found, there were plenty of cultures eating grains. They just knew how to properly prepare them. And same with beans, right? And same with dairy. That's not allowed in Paleo. But there were societies that thrived on dairy, and it was a main source of their food and calories.

Thinking of how our great-grandmothers were eating before the 1930's, before these processed foods were widespread, that's how we should be eating.

To me, it's as simple as eating whole foods and focusing on that.

It can also help to think about your ancestry and what your ancestors would have been eating.

So I think it's a matter of really focusing on whole foods and not on things that are marketed as superfoods. That's not what traditional people were focusing on.
They were focusing on fermented foods, properly prepared foods, animal products, and included eating the entire animal.

To me, this all just made so much sense. Once I learned about this I realized that this is how we should be eating. And based on seeing how different it was, seeing how the animals were treated on this farm has completely changed my view and my diet. And so now I do eat plenty of animal foods.

It feels simple, and I am all about keeping it simple. I never ask my clients to count grams of anything or to count calories. It's more focusing on a nutrient-dense diet.

(As a note, while I do support much of what the Weston A. Price Foundation says about nutrition, I don't support everything that they believe in.)

I’d love to explore further with you exactly how we can optimize your diet and health so you can sleep well and feel great!