Traditional Foods are Your Best Medicine: Improving Health and Longevity with Native Nutrition

Interesting read, backed up by solid research and some good photographs, it's the precursor to the Paleo Diet and my go-to volume whenever I need a refresher course in healthy eating.

Excellent reading with all the modern science information to support the whys and hows of traditonal eating. I especially like the chapter on creating a native diet that assists the reader to develop a balance in diet according to personal needs as those needs fluctuate. While this book has no recipes and no diets...if you're looking for a complete, sound nutritional guide to healing and health - buy this book.

Schmid's book was the first one I read on the work of Weston A. Price and Francis Pottenger. It is a very good overview of the subject of Tradtional diets. If you are wondering what "Traditional diets" are, they are simply the way people ate before big business took over food production, and made shelf life and profit margin more important than the nutritional quality of food.Price was a dentist who embarked on a decade long research project in the late 1930s to find the healthiest people on Earth and study what they ate and how they ate it. His studies ranged all over the world, covering all different races. Schmid has done a good job of giving an overview of Price's findings.The only issues I have with this book are that Schmid falls for the cholesterol scam in discussing heart disease, and that he also falls for the idea that the term "life expectancy" as used in statistics means the average age of death. (page 66) It doesn't. Life Expectancy as an arithmetic average would be reasonably close to the median age of death in a perfect Bell curve population sample, but such perfect samples only exist on paper, not in reality. The median age of death, that is the age by which half of the population died, was 57 in 1900. This means that half the population lived to be 57 or older. Kind of different than saying the average age of death was 45-50. In 2000, the median age of death was only 78, so there hasn't been as much gain as we are led to believe. Neither figure addresses the health or quality of life of people at those ages, either. A minor point in the grand scheme of this book. His discussion of life expectancy differences for those 40 and over on the rest of the page is still very much true and sets the record straight on the PR hype we are given about our current state of health.For more in-depth information on fats and cholesterol, I recommend Mary Enig's book, Know Your Fats.This is a great book, and will open your eyes to a better way to eat and improve your health. I heartily recommend it.

Shows allopathic medicine sucks when it comes to chronic disease. M.D.s are best at surgery and trauma medicine. I heard someone trained to be a pharmacist say that in a perfect world, allopathic physicians would be banned from treating chronic illness, and I agree.

This book was recommended to me and when I got it I was thrilled that it was on point. It was informative but not hard to read. I actually found myself highlighting certain points to go back to at later dates.