Skip to main content

Nourishing Traditions - from start to finish

This review is WAY overdue.  I keep referring to the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats (affiliate link), but many people will have no idea what I'm talking about, so its time for a detailed review.  I found out about this book when we did our cheese making course, the instructor talked about it throughout the day (I'd also seen it mentioned on a few blogs) and I thought it sounded really interesting.  I'm so glad that I bought it because I've already used many of the recipes and I think its really changed the way I think about food.

See more posts on Eight Acres about Nourishing Traditions here.



Nourishing Traditions  is a cook book, with the tagline "The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats".  It is written by the co-founders of the Weston A Price Foundation (WAPF), Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig (PhD). Already you can see that its going to be about more than just recipes!  From what I can find out, Sally is a food writer and has compiled most of the book, however Mary has a PhD in nutrition, specialising in fats and oils, so that gives the book more credibility from a nutritional point of view.  The book is based on the 1930s work of Dr Weston Price, a dentist who documented the diets of several isolated societies that were still living and eating as they had for hundreds of years, without the influence of modern refined and processed food.  He found that these people invariably had very good health, strong bones and teeth, with virtually no cases of cancer, obesity or heart disease.  The only sick people were those who had started eating a modern diet.

Dr Weston Price - looks like a nice sensible man :) 

This book documents the type of foods eaten by those traditional societies, explaining in detail the benefits of the food and who it should be prepared.  The book is split into sections:
  • Introduction - all about the nutrients in foods and the lessons of Dr Price compared to modern medical advice.
  • Mastering the Basics - including cultured dairy, fermented dairy, sprouts, stocks, sauces and salad dressings
  • Great Beginnings - dips, salads, soups, raw meat (!), and appetizers
  • The Main Course - fish, poultry, organ meats, game, beef and lamb, ground meat
  • Vegetables
  • Luncheon and Super Foods - meat salads, south of the border, eggs, sandwiches
  • Grains and Legumes - whole grains, breads and flour, baking and legumes
  • Snacks and Finger Food
  • Desserts - natural sweeteners, sweets, pies and cakes, gourmet desserts
  • Beverages
  • Feeding Babies - untested by me!
  • Tonics and Superfoods
Each section of the book begins with a summary of the benefits of eating the food in the section, followed by the recipes.  On the sides of each recipe page are excerpts from various relevant books and research papers explaining further the importance of each food.  For the most part the references are peer-reviewed journal articles, with some books and newspaper articles.  The book is nearly 700 pages long, and the first time I read it I only looked at the sections and flicked through the recipes, it seemed like I'd never finish it.  The second time I made myself read every word, and I can tell you there is an awful lot of very useful information, so even if it seems like an expensive book, it has been worth it for me.  I'm going to do a series of posts about each section of the book and the recipes and techniques that have found useful.

I've read a bit of the criticism of this book on amazon and most of the comments seem to come down to the following points:
  • the work is "unscientific", the references are old and it doesn't agree with conventional diet advice
  • the recipes are too hard to follow, the ingredients are too hard to source, it required too much preparation and is not practicle
  • vegetarians don't agree with the idea that we should eat meat and shouldn't eat soy products
My response to the first point is that all the explanations of how we digest food made logical sense (as well as being referenced to peer reviewed papers) and were in agreement with other books that I have read on nutrition and digestion (including those on animal health).  I think that conventional diet advice and research is mostly all sponsored by big agriculture, so I don't believe a word of it anyway.  As for the recipes, they do take a little planning, but for me that's part of the fun.  I don't tend to follow recipes step by step anyway, rather as a guide to how things should be done with whatever ingredients I have, that's why I thought I should write about how I've used the book.  Vegetarians just need to read the book, and at the very least, make sure they are getting all the nutrients they are missing out on by not eating meat, vegans even more so.

INTRODUCTION
The introduction sections covers the basics of the "diet dictocrats' guidelines" vs the traditional diet recommended by NT.  The over-arching theme is that processed foods are not good for us and we should be eating fresh food made from scratch.  The subjects covered in this chapter include, in very brief summary:
  • Fats - highly processed vegetable oils (eg canola, sunflower, soybean) are bad, including margarine, traditional fats like lard, tallow, butter, olive oil and coconut oil are good, eat lots of them to get enough fat soluble vitamin A and D in your diet.  We now only eat butter, would like to make tallow next time we have a steer killed, and use olive oil for all cooking (will buy coconut when I can).  (see also my review of Toxic Oil)
  • Carbohydrates - refined carbohydrates are bad, white sugar is terrible, puffed grains are also bad, whole grains should be soaked or fermented to deactivate phytate which blocks mineral adsorption (more on this in later sections).  
  • Proteins - proteins are composed of 22 amino acids, and we need those amino acids to build our own muscles.  The most complete source of all amino acids is meat, particularly raw meat and organ meat. Grain and legumes contain some amino acids and must be eaten in the right combinations to get all the amino acids we need.  
  • Milk and milk products - fermented milk products are easier to digest, raw milk is best, pasteurised homogenised milk is not good
  • Vitamins - all vitamins are important, and best in their natural form (rather than in supplement tablets) as they are accompanied by "cofactors" that aid adsorption, meat products (even in small amounts) are an important source of some vitamins
  • Minerals - aid in production of enzymes and hormones and in adsorption of vitamins, sourced from meat and vegetables
  • Enzymes - produced by the body and found in raw foods, essential for digestion
  • Salt, spices and additives - salt is essential, but raw sea salt is better than refined salt, spices stimulate enzymes, artificial additives are bad
  • Beverages - soft drink is bad, fermented beverages and herbal teas are good
  • Food allergies - can be exacerbated by processed food, artificial additives etc, sometimes a whole food diet prepared as described in NT will help ease allergies, but everyone is different and it depends how much damage has already been done.
It seems that I read this book at a time when I was ready to accept that the ideas were worth trying, and when I happened to also have a dairy cow providing fresh milk, a garden full of organic veges and tanks of rainwater to work with.  If I had read this book even a couple of years ago, I probably would not have tried as many recipes as I have now and certainly 5 years ago I would not have had the resources or the knowledge to try any of it.  

Have you read Nourishing Traditions?  Do you use the recipes?




Here's the rest of the series:

Nourishing Traditions - from start to finish

Nourishing Traditions - Mastering the basics


Nourishing Traditions - more chapter reviews


Nourishing Traditions - Grains and Legumes


Nourishing Traditions - Snacks, desserts and "super foods"


Comments

  1. Hi I just discovered your blog from a comment you made on Kate's blog! It looks as though there a wealth of information here, glad I "met" you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I requested "nourishing traditions" from the library about 2 weeks ago as it kept popping up. This was helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Being a seven year vegan and not dead yet I can safely state that eating vegetables isn't lacking in nutrition. It is interesting to note though that if one attempted to sustain themselves purely on animal products they would lack any source of vitamin C as meat doesn't provide this.

    In this case however factual information really is moot because everyone is free to choose their own dietary path for any number of different reasons.

    Aside from that, I miss the days when I was living in Oz and look forward to digging further into your journey covered in this blog!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the comments.

    From what I can work out, there's no reason not to be vegetarian, it just takes a bit of extra effort to get a balanced diet (and NT does say that only very small amounts of meat are required in an omnivorous diet to get the vitamins/proteins, so its not like it advocates even having meat every day, although I personally eat lots of meat). Anyway, I think we can probably all benefit from learning what is required from a balanced diet, so I probably shouldn't have singled out vegetarians, I just noticed that much of the criticism was from vegetarians. It also worries me that so many vegetarians replace meat with processed soy products, which can't be very good for you!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Can definitely agree with you on that post. No matter what you choose, be it omni or vegan, if you opt to eat processed garbage as the pinnacle of your diet you are asking for trouble. ;)

    Any simple food item that has far too many ingredients listed scares the bejesus out of me.

    I was at the store today and was looking over some flat breads. One caught my eye. It was bright green! Nothing natural about it. It was a spinach tortilla/flat bread. Flipping it over (you get good at super ingredient skimming as a veg*n noticing things you don't wish to eat) Immediately noticed in order to get that color it had yellow and blue coloring in it! This was of course after the horrendous list of other ingredients.

    To think those marketing genius' were passing it off as a health option.

    *scoff

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm glad we agree then! What great example of everything that's wrong with our food system, no wonder people can't work out what to eat!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Liz, I've been hearing about this book for over two years now but I didn't really know what it was about. After reading your review, I think I'll do what Jen did and borrow it from the library first. Then I'll know if I need to own it. I'm glad you wrote about it because it sounds like my kind of book!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you so much for this review!! I've been wanting this book for ages (with no spare cash!) so this was great.

    I totally agree with the yes to meat and no to soy, unless fermented mind.. but even then I'd opt for something else.

    To the veggies, go with Quinoa! It's a complete protien, all 8 amino acids (it is eight right?). An excellent way to boost your nutrient/protein intake.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Garden Update - July 2013

This month I'm joining the Garden Share Collective , which was started last month by Lizzie from Strayed from the Table , to allow vege gardeners to share their successes and failures and generally encourage everyone to grow more of their own food organically.  This first month, I'll give a detailed update on everything that's growing in my garden, for anyone who hasn't been following for long.  I'll do my normal farm update on Tuesday as well. If you've just joined me, welcome to my vege garden.  I recently wrote about gardening in our sub-tropical climate , so if you're wondering about the huge shade structure, that's for protecting the garden during our hot, humid summers.  At the moment though, the garden is full of brassicas, which grow best here in winter, and are suitably frost-proof.  The garden is about 12 m long by 5 m wide, and surrounded in chicken mesh to keep out the chickens and the bandicoots.  The garden has spilled out around the edg