Sally Fallon: Removing Brutality from Our Food
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In this interview with Renegade Roundtable’s Kevin Gianni, Sally Fallon (co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation) shares some of her controversial views on nutrition—including the belief that grass-fed animal meat, fat, fish, and raw milk are vital and irreplaceable parts of a healthy diet.
Regarding raw milk and raw cheese, Fallon asserts that the processes of pasteurization, and now ultra-pasteurization, are “brutal technology applied to nature’s most delicate food”—technology that deadens the milk to the point where all you’re left with is “just stuff.”
Sally: … Weston Price was actually a dentist and he had this idea of going around the world and looking at healthy people and finding out what they actually ate. The way he determined whether a population was healthy was he looked at their teeth. It’s a very accurate and easy way to see what their general level of health was. He looked in their mouth, he counted cavities and he also looked for what he called “dental deformities,” that would be crowded or crooked teeth. He found 14 population groups that had excellent dental health, that is virtually no cavities and every member of the society had broad faces and naturally straight teeth. This told him that they were healthy and that their bodies had been formed properly.
Then he looked at their diets. The diets were all very different. Some had dairy foods and some had a lot of fruits and vegetables and some up in the north had seals and fish and stuff. So the particulars of the diet were different. But he found some underlying characteristics that were the same in every diet. The key one was the very high levels of what we call fat-soluble vitamins — vitamins A, D and K — which we get only from animal fats from grass-fed animals and organ meats and certain types of seafoods, mostly foods that we’re being told we shouldn’t eat today. Dr. Price found that these were the most important foods for us to eat. So foods like liver and eggs and butter and cod liver oil, fish organs and things like that. So it’s foods that we tend to avoid in this culture because of the fear of cholesterol and saturated fats.
Kevin: What is the research that you found about cholesterol? I know that you’re very outspoken about that and I’d love to hear the details that you came up with.
Sally: This whole notion that cholesterol is our enemy was very carefully inculcated into the culture by the vegetable oil industry in order to demonize their competition, which is animal fats and to demonize the saturated plant fats like coconut oil.
It’s just completely scientific. When you look at the studies that they site in support of their argument, that cholesterol and saturated fats are bad, you find completely junk science. It’s not good science. It doesn’t dovetail with what we know about cholesterol and how important it is in the body. Every cell in your body needs cholesterol to make it waterproof and cholesterol is what we make hormones out of and vitamin D and bile salts. The brain is extremely rich in cholesterol and cannot function without cholesterol. Memory is formed using cholesterol. The receptors for the “feel-good” chemicals like serotonin cannot work without cholesterol. So it’s just a crucial component of our bodies. It’s very important for growing children, because they can’t make cholesterol very well, so they need it in their diet.
We know this. We know this from lots and lots of good science over the past 60 years. But the propaganda has tried to get people not to believe the science, or not to even know about science.
Kevin: Right. And so it’s just not sufficient, in your research, for your liver to produce the cholesterol that you need?
Sally: Well for growing children, they do need cholesterol in their diets. Mother’s milk is extremely rich in cholesterol and it has a special enzyme that helps the baby absorb all of the cholesterol. When a child is fed on low-fat dairy or soymilk or something like that, they’re not getting the cholesterol they need to form their brains and guts properly, the two areas where you need the most cholesterol.
Adults can make cholesterol. They don’t actually have to have it in their diet. But the thing is that the high-cholesterol foods are the foods that contain these fat- soluble vitamins that are so crucial. So if they’re avoiding cholesterol in their diet they will not be getting some really important vitamins in their diet.
Kevin: Gotcha. What about raw dairy?
Sally: Well, we’ve taken some very controversial stands.
Kevin: Yeah, I love it.
Sally: Very anti-establishment stands. And one of these is our endorsement of raw milk and raw dairy foods. We have been able to put together a lot of good science showing that raw milk is healthier, much healthier, and much more digestible, and also much safer than pasteurized milk. Just to give you an example, we recently posted a review of 102 studies purportedly that show that raw milk is dangerous. We went through each study and showed that in almost 95% of those studies they were just very biased and it was a foregone conclusion. They did not actually show that raw milk had caused disease. But they stated that it had in the abstract of the study. So there’s a tremendous amount of bias and prejudice against raw milk and this is reflected in the scientific literature.
