Happy Eggs

At the farmers' market in Lausanne, Switzerland you can buy eggs that are labeled "les oeufs de poulets heureuses."

Translated linguistically, that means: "Eggs from happy chickens."

Translated nutritionally, that means: "Eggs from pastured chickens."

A pastured chicken is free to roam the barnyard, feasting upon whatever it encounters - bugs, grubs, grass, seeds, and so forth. The net, and very healthy, result is an egg which, more or less, has its Omega 3 and Omega 6 fats in balance, or a ratio of 1:1.

By contrast, an egg from a chicken raised under factory conditions, can have as much as 19 times more Omega 6's than Omega 3's.

One significant factor in cardiovascular disease is the unduly high proportion of Omega 6's which occur in the modern industrial diet.

One significant factor in protecting against cardiovascular disease is the consumption of Omega 3's in proportion to Omega 6's. Pastured eggs, raw milk, cheese and butter from raw milk, meat from pastured animals, and wild caught seafood are foods that have the proper balance of Omega 3's and 6's because they were grown in nature, not under factory conditions.

Eat naturally and you will be well - not to mention happy.

Eat Raw Cheese, Scale High Peaks

This young man is eating local cheese made from raw milk at about 7,500 feet above sea level in the Swiss Alps.

It is foods like this, whole, fresh, and local, that give him the strength to scale these mountains. It's too bad that so many people are being fed a diet deficient in so many vital nutrients by the modern food industry.

The result is a creeping epidemic of sickness, not to mention flabbiness, that precludes so many young people from even imagining climbing this mountain and enjoying a sun-splashed picnic.

It should be noted that the photographer, more than twice the age of his subject, has a similar diet, and thus was able to match him step for step on this climb.

It should also be noted that the yogis tell us that middle age - the summertime of life - only begins at 55. Eating the right foods turns such possibility into reality.

The Subject is Diet - The USDA is Half Right

Recently the USDA put out new guidelines on diet. And once again the agency is half right. It placed an emphasis on people eating less food, more fish, and more vegetables. So far so good.

It then went on to recommend that people eat less fat, with an emphasis on low fat and non fat foods. The problem is that there is no distinguishing here between good and bad fats. And that is a crucial distinction that should be made.

Numerous hunter-gatherer cultures, which never suffered from heart disease, have eaten as much fat as they could get their hands on. Look at the Eskimos subsisting on seal blubber, salmon, caribou, and little else.

These whole foods contain the vital fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K - in much larger quantities than today's processed fats. The human brain is made up of 50 percent fat. By stripping these fats out of the diet we are not only starving our bodies - ironic when you consider the obesity epidemic - but we are denying our brains their most basic fuel.

No wonder we - and the USDA - can't think clearly.

Who is Weston Price?

Virtually no one has ever heard of Weston Price, yet he wrote the most important book of the 20th century on the subject of nutrition.

That book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, was published in 1939. Based on Price's travels over a decade, it documents the diets of 14 traditional cultures from the North Pole to the South Seas. These native groups had yet to be touched by modern, industrial culture. Hence they offered, collectively, a window into what people had been eating - naturally - for millennia. (Put another way, it demonstrated what people ate to best insure their survival.)

Price found two common factors in these populations: robust good health and diets largely based on animal foods sourced from the wild. (The latter, in fact, were considered sacred by all these groups and became the objects of ritual and lore.)

Today, western societies exhibit the precise opposite of what Price observed - namely poor health and diets notably lacking in high quality animal fats. So, it is no wonder that we suffer from a range of diseases - cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, immune system dysfunction - that were scarcely known, even in urban populations, a century ago.

In 25 years Weston Price will be much better known than he is today because the collective conscious is aware of one thing at its base - its own survival. As we continue to diminish the quality of our lives and kill ourselves prematurely by eating a low quality diet the survival instinct will slowly kick in; self interest will take over.

At that point, more people will know who Weston Price is and appreciate his contribution to the subject of nutrition. They, too, will understand that what he saw, documented, and championed will make perfect sense.