In my home I am constantly thinking about food. Part of this is because I’m usually pregnant or nursing and therefore hungry. Part of it is because my entire family has an insatiable appetite. Bottomless pits. All of them.
And I want to feed them well. I have been working on progressively improving our diet. We’ve been focusing a lot on traditionally cultured foods lately – like sauerkraut and pickles made in a brine solution, not vinegar. These foods, like traditional yogurts, have many probiotic bacteria in them that help enhance health. (Look forward to seeing some information about my kitchen experimentation in the blog :p)
We’ve also been eating more nutrient dense foods like organ meats, and trying to get as much meat as we can from pastured animals. We eat a lot of eggs and enjoy healthy traditional fats like butter, coconut oil, and tallow.
Now why would I choose to eat like this?
Doctor Price’s Invaluable Work
An extremely interesting study carried out by a dentist named Dr. Weston A. Price brought a lot of valuable information to the table (no pun intended) about the nutrition of traditional cultures. Much of research and observation is highly interesting to me because it centers on the health of children and women – women pre-conception, women pregnant, and women nursing their children.
Dr. Price went to many, many traditional societies around the globe in the 1930′s and observed these peoples and what they ate. He found that as long as they ate their traditional diets the people were healthy and had almost non-existent tooth decay. He noted that the children were healthy and happy, and that mothers had good pregnancies and made rich, abundant milk.
He noted that women hoping to get pregnant, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children ate lots of foods especially high in nutrients.
And he found that where traditional cultures began to eat “modern foods” – processed flours and sugars, canned foods, sweets, etc. – their dental health deteriorated remarkably. And the bones structure of children being born was weaker, children and adults were more disease prone, women had trouble with pregnancy and nursing, etc.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words…and Dr. Price took thousands of pictures of his findings. His work is amazing and it truly proves the benefits of eating good traditional foods – meats from animals eating what they’re supposed to (so animals raised on pasture…not in cages), fermented foods, organ meats, clean raw dairy, good fats (butter, coconut oil, olive oil, palm oil, rendered suet and lard – yep, even saturated fats!) – all kinds of food we’ve been told for years not to eat – and we just keep getting sicker and sicker.
I get a lot of information about eating real, nutrient dense foods (and preparing them) from a foundation set up to help get the word about traditional nutrition out – the Weston A. Price Foundation.
For a basic tour of the WAPF and vital nutrition principles for you as you’re TTC, pregnant, and raising your child click right here!
The WAPF gives its information away free of charge so that you can get tons of valuable information. They do provide a membership and one of my favorite benefits is their quarterly journal – I look forward to every issue, and many, many of their issues are on baby and child health – and health while TTC and pregnant.
I highly recommend membership so you can increase your knowledge on nutrition and give your children a legacy of health that will touch generations of your family 
Click here to print the membership form – feel free to put my name (Kristen Burgess) as the referring member!
