Improving Health and Longevity with Native Nutrition
Ronald F. Schmid, N.D.
1997

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The benefits of the traditional foods diet are based on the nutritional research of Dr. Weston Price. A dentist, he noticed that the teeth tended to reflect overall health, and that the children he was treating seemed to have teeth that were more crowded and more subject to decay than his adult patients. In the 1930’s, there were still many indigenous societies in the world that had not been influenced by modern dietary modifications and were still eating their ancestral diets.

Price traveled all over the world visiting tribal locations and studied dental health, making detailed records and taking thousands of photographs. He analyzed native and modern foods and made extensive studies of the effects of different foods on the chemical composition of saliva and its effect on tooth decay. He interviewed the people and tried to understand their cultures. At practically the last moment when it was possible to do so, he amassed a treasure of data about native eating habits in different parts of the world, and published Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in 1939. http://www.westonaprice.org.

Ronald Schmid, a licensed naturopathic physician since 1981, teacher and practitioner, gives a good history of Price’s work and explains exactly why it is even more relevant for us today than in Price’s time. He discusses the varying diets of long-lived populations, protective characteristics of native nutrition, reviews many well-known diets, gives guidelines for experimenting with a native diet. He reviews applications of native diet principles to healing disease, and gives a complete overview of the uses and disadvantages of different types of foods.

Features of the native diet are, obviously, eating from natural and organic sources, but also using whole fats rather than artificially created low-fat substitutes, eating meat, using raw and fermented milk products and real butter, using traditional ways of preserving foods and meets rather than modern processed foods. 

See Nourishing Traditions Cookbook by Sally Fallon for related recipes and tons of health information. This is a great book for cooks who like to make delicious healthy meals from scratch - if you don't have the time or inclination for this, there will still be many recipes you can use - don't be dispmayed by the ones that call for previously-made ingredients.

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