Dr. Royal Lee and Dr. Weston A. Price
My main interest—and for the most part the subject matter of my musings and writings—is nutrient dense foods. Yet I realized at one point while running my small practice that if I was going to help my clients learn to heal using food and diet, I would still need a great deal more knowledge in order to bring them back to a higher quality of life.
The people I had the privilege to work with were not only looking for new ways to eat healthier, but also dealing with late or end-stage disorders that broke my heart. In some cases all I could do was listen and offer my compassion. Fortunately I had volunteered at one time for Hospice of Metro Denver, an experience that later equipped me to work with the dying. I served for approximately two very difficult years, often at the bedside of cancer and other end-stage deaths, before burning out. After I resigned, I spent the following year doing some special work on my own health.
While recuperating from that long stint of seeing so many good people struggle with devastating diseases, I happened to visit Dr. Frank Martin, a great chiropractor still in practice in Aurora, CO. The experience was awesome, and it was during that visit that I was introduced to Standard Process supplementation. The positive results in my own health, along with the diet philosophy of Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, led me to contact Standard Process West. I felt an intuitive recognition that this was the missing piece in my small nutritional practice. It would be very difficult to list all of the dramatic effects that came about when I combined Standard Process supplements with my already sound and fantastic diet.
Sally Fallon and her cookbook Nourishing Traditions was a grand discovery for me! Suddenly, I found myself enjoying the best of both worlds. I now had the capacity to teach my clients about foods that I simply hadn’t even heard of until I met Sally Fallon. What was kefir and bone broth? What were crispy nuts and soaked grains? Yes, these ancestral foods that had been long forgotten by most of us, along with Standard Process supplementation, saved my small practice. They also enabled me to offer more than just compassion to the poor suffering clients who came to me with hope for a better tomorrow. Even those who were dying had a new path to follow, and it made a huge difference. For someone like me, that truly was a grand-slam!
Teaching others about traditional foods and dispensing Standard Process supplements is simply all I want to do. The invitation to blog for Selene River Press came about recently, and since there are so many people who have misconceptions about—or who possibly haven’t even heard of—Weston A. Price or Sally Fallon, I felt it might be good to share some of what I’ve been privileged to learn myself. I often refer clients to chiropractors or other great practitioners I’ve met, while I continue to educate them about high quality, nutrient dense traditional foods and supply them with real food-grade supplements.
Allow me to introduce Tango Partner 1: Traditional Foods
What are traditional foods? The diets of healthy, primitive, non-industrialized people contained no canned, refined, or denatured foods—there was no white sugar or flour, corn syrup, refined or hydrogenated vegetable oils, protein powders, artificial vitamins, additives or colorings, or pasteurized, homogenized skim or low-fat milk.
Instead, all traditional cultures consumed animal proteins and whole, raw milk, as well as fermented foods and beverages. Their diets also included soaked, sprouted, fermented, or naturally leavened grains and legumes, methods that neutralize naturally occurring anti-nutrients such as phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, goitrogens, and tannins. Traditional cultures valued foods high in animal fat and rich in vitamin A and D. Such highly prized foods would have included hormone- and antibiotic-free organ meats, butterfat, egg yolks, fermented cod liver oil, and meat from grass-fed and pastured animals. Foods that we’ve been told were bad for us are now slowly gaining recognition as the elixir of good health!
I include many of the unique foods that I both teach my clients about and use myself in my 90-minute Cook Your Way to Wellness DVD and Tell Me More booklet. The video and booklet are for those who want to incorporate the high-probiotic, lacto-fermented, and nutrient dense foods that Sally Fallon advocates in Nourishing Traditions, but who don’t want to spend a year or more learning how to master these simple techniques. It’s my humble opinion that going without these foods is like leaving Standard Process supplements out of your diet. In other words, without their incredible health benefits, you really are trying to tango without a partner!
Let’s now take a look at Tango Partner 2: Standard Process Supplements
We all know that we should get our nutrients from food whenever possible, right? But we also need to recognize a law of nature—our stores of nutrients will gradually deplete over time, in all sorts of ways, including aging, poor diets, and toxins. Therefore it becomes necessary to supplement our diets. Our body is naturally adapted to absorb nutrients from whole foods that contain enzymes, minerals, and vitamins. They must be naturally synergistic and not split up, as they are in synthetic supplements made up of isolated nutrients. The solution to the dilemma of synthetic supplements is to take a true whole-food supplement instead, and I am of course referring to Standard Process.
Dr. Royal Lee, the founder of Standard Process, knew this. He left us with technology to produce formulas for the most potent food-grade supplements yet known. Dr. Lee was a close associate of Weston A. Price, the dentist who wrote Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Had these two genius physicians never met and collaborated with each other, the world would have missed out on some of the most profound health information yet known.
In an effort to give my clients the best of both worlds, I naturally enhanced my study of Standard Process by reading the numerous books available from Selene River Press. Let me give you a brief overview of a few of the most valuable titles that anyone, even non-practitioners, can read to dramatically improve their health:
1. Why Your Doctor Offers Nutritional Supplements, by Stephanie Selene Anderson
A handy 53-page guide that tackles some of the most fundamental issues we all face, from understanding the relationship between nutrition and the digestive system to navigating the health food store. And it poses the biggest question of them all: Why do we need nutritional supplements?
2. Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD
A mighty addition to your library, this book will help you delve into the power of the traditional and ancestral foods that Mother Nature intends us to eat. A must read for those looking for the optimum cookbook and diet.
3. From Soil to Supplement, by Dr. Royal Lee
A compendium of the best course in food, diet, and nutrition as taught by Dr. Royal Lee. This treasure of a book explores the complexities of hormones and vitamins and how they correlate to our modern diet.
This list is but a start, but I assure you that by reading these books and dancing with the two tango partners of Traditional Diet and Standard Process Supplements, you too will come to the same realization that I did many years ago—it takes two to tango.
Maria Atwood is a semiretired Certified Natural Health Professional and Weston A. Price Chapter Leader in Colorado Springs, CO. Visit her website at TraditionalCook.com. Also check out Maria’s Cook Your Way to Wellness DVD (also available as an e-learning course) and be sure to follow her Tips from the Traditional Cook blog.
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