Nourishing Traditions has taken the best nutritional research available and combined it with common sense cooking. Every natural food cookbook I have read until this one has had so many unusual recipes that I wasn’t really able to get my family to eat with ingredients that I did not have readily on hand. This book takes a whole new approach that makes sense. It is my belief that the traditional recipes that people have been using for generations had their roots in healthy traditions, but over time have been corrupted by convenience foods and processed substitutes for more healthy ingredients. Traditional lacto-fermentation has been substituted with vinegar and alcohol fermentation, eliminating needed enzymes. Raw foods replaced with canned, pasteurized and irradiated foods. Natural foods are watered down and plumped out with fillers and artificial ingredients to make the texture more natural. This cookbook really cuts to the chase and gets into detail about how to make traditional foods the way our ancestors did back in a day when people were not dying in the millions from cancer and heart disease. Not only that, it provides a glossary that explains the how and why of things like hydrogenated fats, healthy fats, carbohydrates, and fat soluble vitamins. This cookbook is packed full of recipes and valuable information about healthy eating, with everything from how to make your own bone in meat stocks and vegetable broth, to condiments and healthy alternatives for infant formula. Now when I say healthy dinner, instead of ugh, my kids say yum!
Additional Comments by HerbalMom
I just wanted to add my .02$ on the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook.
This book reads like a nutrition thriller. I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. It totally contradicts much of what I learned in my college nutrition classes. The first section is about 70ish pages of nutritional info, and then you get into the recipes. All throughout the book there are interesting anecdotes and info in the margins alongside the recipes.
I had just gone through a period of fairly extreme sickness with my baby, and I was getting mastitis left and right. If I had any sugar I would very shortly have mastitis, a yeast infection and a bladder infection… all simultaneously. One time it only took 1/2 an hour after eating a candy. I was NOT a big sugar eater, either. I was getting mastitis every 5-7 days, and with about every other case I would wind up in the emergency room with a raging fever in the middle of the night. NOT FUN!
It has now been over 6 years since then, and I have not had any antibiotics, other prescription drugs or OTC’s since then. I studied and learned a lot about using herbs and got pretty good at using them. But… I came to realize that my problems lay in Nutrition. All the herbalists recommend veganism, so I figured that was the way to go. I never succeeded in becoming a complete vegan, but 12 cavities later & with my baby having huge holes in his molars soon after they erupted, I started to wonder about the direction I was headed. I started looking for someone who had the same experience as I was having, who knew about Dr. Christopher and his mucusless diet, and I wanted very much to know what they thought about it!
At any rate, that is how I got turned on to the Weston Price Foundation. I get raw milk for my family now, instead of soy milk. I supplement with Cod Liver Oil, and I use several mineral supplements in addition to a multiple. I try to stay away from sugar completely. I will in the future post my exact supplement regimen on this site. I have now successfully nursed my 2&1/2 yr old till she was 18 mos, and I have a newborn baby…. all with no more cavities for me. My 2&1/2 yr old has had her molars for a long time now, and they are fine. We just had dental appointments to prove it!
I have not implemented all of the Nourishing Traditions methods into my lifestyle, but I do some, and am gradually adding more and more. But I can say this much: I still have all my teeth! And the dentist is not asking me to put my baby completely under so he can fix gaping holes in her teeth because there ARE no holes in them!