Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine: Improving Health and Longevity with Native Nutrition

by Ronald F. Schmid

Book Overview

This book traces the cause of many chronic health problems to our modern diet and shows how a return to traditional foods can improve one's well-being. Modern medicine now recognizes that the present-day Western diet is responsible for many of today's chronic illnesses. Nutritionists and anthropologists have noted the decline in health that accompanies indigenous peoples' transition from traditional to modern diets. In Traditional Foods Are Your Best...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0892817356
• ISBN13: 9780892817351
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Traditional Foods are your Best Medicine

Excellent reading with all the modern science information to support the whys and hows of traditonal eating. I especially like the chapter on creating a native diet that assists the reader to develop a balance in diet according to personal needs as those needs fluctuate. While this book has no recipes and no diets...if you're looking for a complete, sound nutritional guide to healing and health - buy this book.

Tradional Foods Really *Are* Your Best Medicine!

Dr. Schmid's book on healing, nurturing traditional foods is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to understand what *real* nutrition is all about. It shows the problems with our US Government-approved dietary recommendations and why following such dogma is making us all sick (while profiting pharmaceutical companies and the whole medical system)! Get past all the vegetarina/low fat/vegan/cholesterol-is-bad doctrine and learn how to *really* be healthy, just as countless people through the millennia have done!

Great Compliment to Nourishing Traditions!!

Awesome book on the principles of traditional healing foods. This is a great addition for anyone who wants to learn true nutrition and about the great discoveries by Weston. A Price. I highly recommend it!

Changing a (new) life

I first read this book in 1987, when it was initially published. I'd picked it up in a bookstore on Fifth Avenue (that's how well I remember the occasion, 16 years later), started to read, and couldn't put it down. So I bought what for me then was an expensive book and finished it that night. It was difficult to know who to admire more after after I'd completed it, Ron Schmid, who so lucidly and modestly outlined the accomplishments of Weston Price (really, the centerpiece of the book), or Price himself, an extraordinary man whose self-supported, worldwide investigations of the food traditions of native cultures were nothing less than revolutionary in what they implied for how most of us eat--and live--today. In any case, I felt oddly moved by this book--a strange thing to say considering its subject--as if some real portion of an invaluable truth had been exposed to me. Three years later, I used this book to develop an eating plan for my pregnant wife, including cod liver oil every day and a lot of fish and raw milk cheeses (the closest we could come, even in Manhattan, to any raw milk products). With all of that, our son decided to wait two weeks beyond his due date to make his appearance--21 1/2'' long and weighing over nine pounds--with the obstetrician remarking that my wife's placenta was twice the normal weight, in fact was the largest she'd seen in all her years of delivering children. I don't know whether either fact can be attributed to the diet my wife had followed, but the important thing is that our son turned out to be very bright, healthy, and the owner of a sweet temperament (our first clue of that being that he was effectively sleeping through the night when he was two weeks old)--qualities that this book suggest are not at all unusual when pregnant women follow traditional diets. So, for me this book has some sort of talismanic power, the kind I associate with other profound life-transforming (or -generating) reading experiences. In that sense, I'm not particularly interested in challenging ANY part of it, as some others here have done, because I feel its general, encompassing theme is so strong and effectively expressed by the writer, and because, as far as I know, Schmid was a trailblazer in introducing (and explicating so clearly) Weston Price's work to the general reading public. I will add, though, that anyone interested in this book, should and even must buy a copy of Sally Fallon and Mary Enig's Nourishing Traditions, which extends Schmid's (and Price's) generalities into the American kitchen. It's as much a treasure as Schmid's book, as the two together, like Jack Sprat and his wife, cover everything (including how to think about fat), from principles to practicalities, that you might need to build new lives out of ancient practices.

Listen to your elders

It's disappointing that this review is only the first to appear on this extraordinary book; after three editions in twelve years, one would think more people would know about it. Unfortunately, Truth rarely basks in the spotlight: Of the minority of Americans who actually pay attention to their health habits, most will look to mainstream sources in the news, or take the bait offered in high-powered advertisements. A few will read alternative magazines and subscribe to vegan or macrobiotic diets and think they've found the answer. And all these people will have missed the mark, in whole or in part.We in modern society, with some exceptions, tend to look for answers, for knowledge, from modern sources--the media, "experts," establishment research. How many of us look to our ancestors? What? Who are they? Ladies and Gentlemen, our ancestors have much to teach us--and in the case of diet, I will put 100,000 years of wisdom up against a modern "expert" any day. And my conviction in making such a statement stems largely from reading this book, TRADITIONAL FOODS ARE YOUR BEST MEDICINE.In 250 pages, Dr. Schmid lays it out: the history of human evolution and diet, and how Dr. Weston Price, who researched indigenous cultures worldwide early in this century, found them enjoying wonderful health and resistance to disease by eating their native foods; why most of today's popular diets--macrobiotics, veganism, the Pritikin diet, and others--are lacking; and how you can make the correct food choices (including organically produced animal products, which our ancestors relied upon and are FAR superior to their factory-farmed cousins). Dr. Schmid also discusses specific health problems and how to best address them. There's even a chapter on how to work with a doctor on making these changes. The fact that I work for the publisher of this book matters little. I am also one of Dr. Schmid's patients and have a solid belief in the principles covered in his book. TRADITIONAL FOODS is one of the best-written, persuasive, and inspiring books I've been blessed to read and I am thankful for what I've learned. To you, reader: Don't swim too much in the mainstream--you won't find the answers. For all of human history prior to this century, the wisdom written about in this book WAS the "mainstream." Do yourself a great service-- buy it, read it, practice it. And enjoy not just a longer life, but a deeper one.