Tidbits from Wise Traditions 2010

SCD & GAPS related

Don’t cook or heat honey – Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride
Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride mentioned this during one of her sessions. Her logic was that bees will do everything they can to keep the hive from overheating to protect the honey. Thing is, they mostly do this because warm honey will be more liquid and might drip out of the hive. So that alone is not a reason to not cook honey for eating purposes. Raw honey does have beneficial enzymes and antimicrobial properties, so it’s best to eat it raw, but I see no evidence of eating heated honey to be harmful. I have had more success removing cooked nuts from my diet than cooked honey.

Keep sugar out of your diet, for the rest of your life. Now you’re thinking, what can I bake with? Well, dates, figs, apricots, bananas are all sweet fruits that can be used to sweeten dishes. Or you can just not bake sweet things, which is what I do. Most food going into my oven these days are squashes or meat.

Cultured butter is usually better tolerated than regular (sweet) butter. – Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride I have been getting a pastured, cultured butter right from the start of SCD so I never did experiment with this. But, it makes sense to me that culturing the cream then making butter from it would make it easier to digest. The fats and small amounts of lactose & protein are broken down a bit in the culturing step.

Overcoming illness requires more than just dietary changes – Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez. While a change in diet is required and is the foundation of healing, it is not usually enough to get completely better. After being on SCD for almost 3 years I do believe at the very least the path to full health through diet can be very slow. I still have hormonal issues, skin problems, and sleeping troubles. I will be writing soon about new things I’m trying in addition to diet. So far I had tried Chinese herbs but they didn’t seem to help.

Not eating enough fat can cause dehydration. This could explain why people are feeling chronically dehydrated on their low fat diets while struggling to drink 8 glasses of water a day just to function properly. Try Googling for this topic though, all you’ll find is “Lose weight by eating low fat, and make sure to drink plenty of water to avoid dehydration!”. In my own experience, when I was first starting to eat a high fat (higher than I eat now) diet, I didn’t need to drink as much water. I would be surprised if anyone on SCD needs to drink 8 glasses a day, especially if you’re drinking broth at every meal like you should be!

Don’t eat wheat (or most grains). This was a common theme among many of the speakers. I would add this certainly applies to people who are dealing with health problems. Grains are not going to help you recover from illness. Note that this doesn’t mean eat low carb or no fiber for the rest of your life. I don’t eat any grains but I manage to get plenty of carbs now that I can tolerate them.

Traditional Diets

Traditional food means traditional preparation and preserving technqiues. Fermenting, drying, freezing, preserving in oil, cold storages, are all methods that traditional cultures used depending on their climate. They used what their land had to offer and managed to preserve food for months and even years. Nothing was wasted. Most people nowadays can’t even keep their vegetables from rotting in the bottom of their fridges.

Everyone is born with a right to physical perfection – Sally Fallon We live in a time when everyone assumes their kids will have crooked teeth, overbites and get their wisdom teeth removed. This is not how nature intended us to be.

The kids of Weston A. Price Foundation are just so darn cute! I challenge anyone to attend this conference, watch Sally’s presentation about Traditional Diets, watch the kids learning to make sauerkraut, and not leave wanting one. These kids are so healthy, well-behaved, and happy.

Carbs and/or fat do not cause the diseases of civilization. Industrialized foods do. – Stephan Guyenet At the conference we saw two very different diets that people were thriving on; one included mostly animal foods with some greens and berries (Arctic) and one included lots of sweet potato and coconut (Pacific Islands). Weston A. Price showed in his travels that diseases of civilization crept into a population whenever they introduced modern foods – flour, sugar, industrial vegetable oils.

Politics of Food

What about “Feeding the world” on a sustainable real food system? Joel Salatin had a lot to say about this:

• America has 35 million acres of lawn – think about that. If you believe sustainable farming is elitist, and that it’s our job to feed the world, then why not help out by growing your own food?
• Using old stats from the 1930’s does not give an accurate depiction of what we are capable of now.
• We have the technology & the space to grow food properly.
• It’s not about going back to old farming methods, but about using modern technologies to build a sustainable farming system in which animals are raised (and produce is grown) properly.

The food regulation system is quite messed up. Cheese pizza is regulated by the FDA, while pepperoni pizza (meat) is regulated by USDA. Does this make any sense??

No society has ever put such a small amount of energy into growing, preserving, and cooking food. – Joel Salatin Sure we spend a ton of energy mass producing food on huge farms, packaging it in factories, distributing it to all corners of the globe, but at the individual level people are hardly even lifting a finger. When food is the absolute basis of life, how can we be so disconnected from it? I know people who don’t know how to cook anything, they just eat at restaurants and get take out every single day.

Notice there are no pictures of FOOD on the new food pyramid? Don’t forget to eat your reds, blues and purples!

Photo from The Washington Post