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Comment by taurusnoises | Hacker News Reader

Weston A Price is really the go-to for the early research in nutrition and dentistry. His book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was making the rounds back when Nourishing Traditions became popular. Price, conclusively in my mind, showed that the moment the modern western was introduced into cultures who ate traditional foods, the next generation had terrible teeth, jaws that were too small for all their teeth, etc. Pretty great, if terrible findings, stuff. The typical western diet is a shit show, imo

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It’s a 100 year old book that is still required reading if you want to understand the subject of the article because Price visited existing healthy cultures around the world that had few cavities. He concluded that the shift from a nutrient dense diet to a nutrient poor diet (white flour and sugar) was the cause of cavities.

> The typical western diet is a shit show, imo

On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han:

> In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke

Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.

The cause for losing teeth is very different from cavities.

One doesn't have to ditch all "western food". Just being sensible with it is good enough:

- ditch plant fat for animal fat

- avoid excessive sugar

- eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.)

- stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables

Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing.

You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all.

Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.

Stop eating vegetables? Tbf i can't figure out whether you're trolling or not.

Definitely not trolling. If you don't know how to prepare vegetables in indegenous culture that you got it from, you are better off not eating it.

Also, even if you did follow indegenous preparation methods, the food industry may have changed the plant by artificial selection or genetic modification such that the indegenous preparation is not as effective, so you're better off ditching them anyway.

Vegetables have significant phytotoxin content without significant nutrient content, specially in forms bioavailable to us (eg. a lot of carotinoids in carrots, except we are terrible at converting that to Vitamin A... we need the retinol form, readily available in milk, eggs, fish, meat etc.).

Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten. They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins. We have domesticated some of the plants and learnt how to remove those toxins over thousands of years... but if you don't know how to do that effectively, you're better off not eating them.

Indigenous preparation methods? Sounds interesting.

I remember reading the book “Fatu Hiva” by Thor Heyerdahl, about the island of the same name in the Pacific. He mentions the custom of the inhabitants of fermenting breadfruit in the ground for several years before eating it. One indigenous man is quoted as saying that he cannot digest food unless he has a portion of fermented breadfruit with it.

I haven’t tried it yet. I did start to ferment some breadfruit after reading the book. But that’s only been eight years ago - so not yet good to eat.

You should try it with lutefisk and century eggs! Sounds like a great combination.

Great idea. Remind me in 8 years, will you?

I have recently become interested in finding out more about this (and food/nutrition in general). I want to compile an overview of findings and reference studies. How did you learn about this? Do you recommend any scientific resources concerning the themes of your comment?

I started on this path when I was trying to nurish myself back to health over a decade ago when I suddenly got fat. I thought science was the way to go... but was robbed of that notion a couple of years into it when I discovered that the path to health was in the opposite direction of what the science tells us.

Turns out the food industry fully controls the science of food and nutrition. You can start by reading Unsavory Truth or Food Politics by Marion Nestle for better understanding of why that is the way it is.

Having said that, Marion Nestle doesn't really explore one side of it... which is that because of ethical reasons, we'll never have proper human experiments, thus nutrition science will always be limited and incomplete, which leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which the industry is happy to do for profits. This has been covered very well by the YouTube channel What I've Learned: https://youtu.be/xRAw7yeDO-c

The same channel has several other videos on food and nutrition, one of the most important ones imo being the one on seed oils: https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k

Nutrition and Physical Degenaration by Weston A. Price as described in this thread is one of the best works in support of indigenous foods.

The Hidden Life of Trees is a great book on plant intelligence.

Other than those resources, we have to piece these things together, take long term views... like should we trust a diet that kept a culture of people alive and well for 100s of years over several generations or do we trust studies with couple of dozen subjects done over a few weeks funded by the food industry?

First, I want to ask you to write up a 101/how-to for this diet (and include one for pescatarians like me). Cuz this is great.

Second, my friends and I (years and tears ago) got really into Price and the (recipe /cook) book based on his work, Nourishing Traditions. I recommend this work to anyone into the above. Was this book a part of you coming to these conclusions?

The “What I’ve learned” channel has been a big contributor to why I’m interested in learning more about nutrition. Thank you for the references!

Fruit definitely evolved to be eaten (this is how the seeds spread)

True. Fruits and berries.

Food in general is a poison that is slowly killing you via the byproducts of metabolism.

Meat that is raw puts you at great risk for food-borne illness. Meat that is cooked is full of carcinogens and advanced glycation end products. Almost all meat readily available in the West has very high levels of hormones, bioaccumulated pesticides at higher levels than plants, etc.

> Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten.

Hate to be the one to tell you, but animals are living beings too and don't want to be eaten either.

> They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins.

The very next sentence.

Animals can run away or fight, so they don't have the need to develop other deterrents. I guess aside from a very few exceptions like Amazonian frogs, which would also not be recommended to eat without very special processing. Probably best to keep off the menu altogether, just like most seeds, stems, and leaves for the reasons described in the parent comment.

Thank you for the word of warning.

I'd like to eat a lettuce salad with cucumber and spring onions (standard stuff where I live).

What kind of indegenous preparation technique do I need to use to make the lettuce safe to eat?

I believe you would have to extract the juice, turn it into a kind of lettuce milk by boiling and straining, and then ferment the result into cheese. Takes about 6 months. Best enjoyed paired with 5kg of raw beef and a litre of vodka.

Sounds great but I wanted to have a salad. Is there no way to make lettuce salad safe to eat?

It's just loaded with oxalate, eat it and be merry and don't mind the kidney stones and pseudo-gout.

Isn't oxalate the cause of 5G and so indirectly CORONA?

You seem to be a glowing fan of carnivore diets, is that right? What do you think about the sustainability of this lifestyle? I’m pretty sure our planet can’t sustain 9 billion exclusively meat eating humans.

No, not a fan of the carnivore diet (except for short term use for medical purposes). Getting rid of grains puts us in very high risk, grains are essential because they are easy to store long-term... Even though they are plant seeds, the most toxic part of a plant, we have mastered indegenous preparation of grains... and while the food industry has tried to ruin it, it hasn't succeeded by much... mostly because grains are perfect, even for the food industry.

I believe that indigenous vegetarian diets, such as the traditional Indian vegetarian diet, before ghee was replaced by industrially produced seed oil, is one good option... as is foods like Sushi, where you combine fish/meat with grains.

Well indigenous use of grains and legumes involves fermentation (eg sourdough, fermented tofu, miso), which are mostly no longer done at scale. Bread that uses yeast instead of sourdough starter is often not fermented long enough to get rid of most FODMAPs (4h fermentation seems to be recommended, but this is reduced for cost reasons).

Also can't tell if you're trolling bec a use just...what?

I'd better go do some research on how to eat that salad or apple...really?

Just pkease go read the book How Not To Die.

Weston A Price is an infamous quack. I'm disappointed to see he mentioned positively here.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...

Be careful throwing around the word quack.

Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions:

> [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness.

> Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish.

Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.

Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice. Raw milk and dairy is a common source of food-borne illnesses. Pasteurisation is the main reason why consuming milk and dairy products at the scale we do doesn't cause thousands of deaths every year.

Here:

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety

tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria.

I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc.

I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.

> Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice.

Pasteurization is useful for commerce because it allows milk to be transported greater distances and stored for longer. But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.

There is some evidence that pasteurization lowers/changes the nutrient content of the milk, which is unsurprising given how many constituents are present in milk and the temperatures at which proteins denature [0].

[0] https://www.realmilk.com/pasteurization-does-harm-real-milk/

> But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.

Categorically and emphatically: N o p e. Raw milk can be contaminated at the point of collection already.

It doesn't matter if milk is fresh. Pathogenic bacteria contaminating raw milk can grow just fine in your gut and make you sick, they don't need to grow in the milk during transportation. In fact, transporation, in this day and age, is by refrigerated truck so it's a more hostile environment for many pathogens than your digestive tract.

At larger scales there is simply a larger chance for contamination, but that is mainly because large dairies collect milk from multiple smaller producers, so their milk can be contaminated from multiple sources thus aggregating both the chance of contamination and the number of pathogens. But each individual small farmer can produce contaminated milk, no problem.

If you have one animal, its milk can be contaminated and you can get ill from drinking it.

If you want to drink raw milk, go ahead, but don't go into it making false assumptions about safety and don't spread misinformation that risks harming others' health on the internet, please.

Edit: also, the "Real Milk" folks are fanatical, swivel-eye loons who don't give a shit about anyone's safety and only care about promoting their agenda of drinking raw milk. For some incomprehensible reason. No, pasteurisation doesn't damage milk. This is just rank bollocks of the lowest degree.

If they cared about "evidence" and they were in for a scientific debate, as they like to pretend, they wouldn't be promoting their Campaign for Real Milk with as much zealotry as they do, because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case. All the "evidence" that I've seen are studies by their members, or studies of others that they have grossly misrepresented, or often not even a study but a poster at a convention etc. These are textbook quacks. Stay away.

Pasteurization is not a free lunch. You also destroy enzymes, vitamins, and all the beneficial bacteria. The enzymes help to digest the milk and the beneficial bacteria compete with pathogenic bacteria in the gut (the above links to peer-reviewed studies and is by a PhD in Nutritional Immunology).

Pasteurized milk prevents illness from contamination but it may not be as well tolerated by some people. Some children show greater skin-prick reactivity to treated milk over untreated milk [0][1], treated milk tends to have a lower threshold of provoking an allergic reaction [2], and heat treatment is shown to abolish the allergy-protective effects of milk [3]. Children who were exposed to raw milk tend to have better allergy tolerance as adults compared to those who consumed processed milk [3].

There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.

Edit:

> because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case

I would also add that the burden of proof and Precautionary Principle cuts both ways. Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies. The assumption that the nutritional quality of milk (in vivo) is unaffected by flash heating is what needs to be demonstrated.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30945370/

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3284399/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29025431/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30439365/

> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive).

I know this is threadomancy, two weeks later, but - how the hell would you know that?

If a farmer in Ghana gets the shitters for a week after drinking raw milk, how would you know? If their kid gets meningitis caused by Listeria and needs to have a hand amputated, or a foot, how would you know?

You wouldn't. But the WHO and a bunch of other health agencies around the world collect data on this sort of thing. And the sad truth that emerges is that the majority of food poisoning happens in non-industrialised, developing countries.

Got that? In countries were people don't have a food industry, where raw milk and dairy is all the dairy they can consume, and where everything is fresh, as fresh as fresh can be, that's where most of the food-borne diseases happen.

You wanna know why? Because modern standards of hygiene work, bitches. That's why. And that includes pasteurisation which is basically a method to scrub milk clean of pathogens.

Sorry but that stuff about enzymes, vitamins and "beneficial bacteria" is on the level of "it's got electrolytes". If I dug a bit I'm sure I'd find the "PhD in Nutritional Immunology" is one of the swivel-eyed loons, or funded by them.

> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.

Yes, people around the world drink raw milk all the time. And they get food poisoning all the time. As the WHO link I posted above points out, raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. And a bunch of other pathogens besides, like Brucella, C. Burnetii, S. aureus, Salmonella etc.

Which, again, can contaminate fresh milk from healthy cows just fine.

Btw, you can consume raw milk that isn't fresh without trouble if it is clear of pathogenic bacteria. But you won't know that unless you can actually test its microbial load at the very least. It's not the freshness of the milk that matters, it's what's living inside it that can make you sick.

I don't understand why all this is so hard to understand. Again, atavism and return to nature. "If it's fresh, it's good".

Which brings me to your thought experiment: cows happily take a shit, step on it, smear it all over the grass and then eat the grass. Is that OK because it's fresh, what do you think?

P.S.

> Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies

Mnyeah, not really. Pasteurization kept being "standardized" well into the 1980's, when it was determined that C. burnetii (the most heat-tolerant of bacteria targeted by pasteurization) was not destroyed by heating milk to 61C for 30 minutes, as was until then standard practice targeted at Mycobacterium bovis, which was considered to be the most heat tolerant raw milk contaminant. As a result, modern practice of heating milk to 63C for 30 minutes or 72C for 15 seconds was established because it was found to destroy all individual cells of C. burnetii with good certainty. In fact there's a range of times and temperatures determined by experimentally verified heat death curves. All that is from 1986, in the International Dairy Federation Bulletin.

I wonder who told you that bit about "before biochemistry". The swivel-eye loons, I guess?

But surely there would be a great difference between milk produced on an industrial farm vs a small village with a few dairy cows?

In the same vein I wouldn't eat raw beef from a supermarket but high quality beef can be enjoyed as steak tartare without worry, same with sashimi...

> But surely there would be a great difference between milk produced on an industrial farm vs a small village with a few dairy cows?

No.

Come on, think. Why would it make any difference if the milk is from a small or big farm? Why do you think "a small village" is a less hospitable environment for pathogens than "an industrial farm"? Who do you think has more means to test the microbial load of their milk and decontaminate milking machines, animal areas etc? The large company or the small farmer?

This is just one more time the naturalistic fallacy: it's natural, from a village, so it must be healthier!

Well, it isn't. I don't know if you pay attention to dairy news items in the press. I do and every once in a while I find a news item about a batch of French raw milk cheeses being recalled because it was contaminated by some dangerous pathogen. This happens to small-scale dairies with a tiny production converting a few hundred liters of milk from their own farm-raised animals a day.

Except, when it happens to French cheesemakers, because they know their shit, they perform routine tests on their products, and they won't let them reach the consumer and cause disease.

But if you trust the "Real Milk" clowns, who happily claim that raw milk is 100% risk free and it never causes any trouble, then you're just flying blind.

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