Yummy and Nourishing

In 17 years of strict vegetarian/vegan living, no-one had been able to convince me that perhaps I was doing long term damage to my body and my future children… until I attended Sally Fallon’s lecture during her 2003 Australian tour.

I’d been struggling with recurring gall bladder flare ups caused by gall stones that no amount of liver flushing and alkaline vegan dieting had been able to resolve. It had got to the stage that my body entirely rejected olive oil. Liver flushing involves drinking copious quantities of olive oil in an attempt to flush the stones out of your body. Liver Flushing had totally transformed my health ten years before when I had successfully unblocked my gall bladder and released all the pent up bile that had gone off and was poisoning my body causing chronic fatigue, acne and allergies. But I had come to the end of the line and I knew it. I had spent two years frequenting the Liver Flushing Forum on The Cure Zone really wanting to believe the senior posters there that if I just kept going, if I just kept flushing – eventually I would manage to flush all those pesky stones out of my body. But the reality was that they were just too big to exit through the bile duct of my gall bladder.

In 2003 I was seeing a holistic GP about my hormone imbalance. My period pain had mostly been resolved through liver flushing but I was having hormone rushes during my period where I would end up vomiting and be left white and shaky. My GP implored me to consider eating some kind of animal fat. “You need animal fat to produce cholesterol and from this you make your hormones”, she explained. I didn’t want to believe her but something was making me listen. Why was it that 17 years of a very clean, low fat, unprocessed vegetarian diet had led me to this? Something wasn’t working.

The proprietor of my local health food shop told me that he’d cured his gall bladder symptoms by changing his diet and drinking raw milk. Raw milk? I was terrified but willing to give it a go. I remember oh so tentatively drinking my first sip of raw milk. I remembered my father’s hatred of custard stemming from his childhood of always having to drink boiled milk – the pre-pasteurisation time when people were told to boil their milk to avoid catching TB. “Mmmm, this raw milk doesn’t taste so bad!” and I didn’t get sick and I didn’t catch TB. Raw milk quickly became addictive and I noticed my gall bladder flare ups becoming less frequent and eventually stopping altogether. The same proprietor told me about Sally Fallon and suggested I come along to hear what she had to say.

At her seminar, Sally presented the work of Dr Weston A Price – a dentist who had travelled the world in the late 1800s and early 1900s studying and documenting the diet of traditional, isolated peoples and their health and dental condition. He found that in all cases, where they followed their traditional diets, they were in perfect health with little to no dental decay. They all practised preconception diets (basically increased nutrient density for couples of childbearing age) and spaced the birthing of their babies by at least 2 years.

Price compared these people with mirror groups of the same tribal/racial stock who had abandoned their traditional diets and adopted the modern, processed diet of the time – with lots of refined carbs and sugar. In ALL cases, he documented (with photographic evidence), the narrowing of the face, crowding of the teeth, dental decay, illness and weakened immune systems, and problems with reproduction and birthing.

At the time of Sally’s seminar, we were thinking about conceiving our first child. Well I was blown away by Price’s photos. The common dietary factors of all these traditional peoples – who ranged from Gaelic islanders to Swiss Alpine villagers; Maoris and Australian aborigines to the African Masai to Eskimoes and American Indians – was that they all had some form of animal fat and indeed, went out of their way to get it. They also had a proportion of raw food (usually fermented) and their diets were ten times as nutrient dense as the modern industrialised diet of Price’s time. I was stunned and decided that I had an obligation to my as yet unconceived child to give him the best possible start in life and that meant giving up my attachment to the philosophy and religion of vegetarianism that I had espoused so passionately for so long.

I went home and told my poor husband who, only a few years before, had given up his beloved meat and fish and finally accepted the vegetarian way of life. We began to eat meat and although it was really hard for me at first (and rather a relief for my husband I think!), we have never looked back. My health didn’t fall into place straight away – my years of low fat vegetarianism had played havoc on my digestion, so it took a while to sort out issues like low stomach acid – but over the course of a year, I couldn’t believe the difference in the health, vitality and energy that I gained.

A year after attending Sally’s lecture and changing my diet, we conceived easily. I lost that first baby – who knows why … perhaps the results of my years of vegetarianism, perhaps just the usual 1 in 5 statistics for first pregnancies ending in miscarriage. Several months later, I conceived again and nine/ten months later, gave birth to a large, healthy, gorgeous baby boy.

My son is now 3 and enjoys robust health. He rarely gets sick and when he does, it isn’t serious and it doesn’t last and he bounces back from the illness healthier than ever with renewed appetite and zest for living. He’s never had any teething issues which makes me wonder if he doesn’t have the narrow face that Price saw occurring in nutritionally depleted diets. It will be interesting to see if he gets crowded teeth later.

I’m now pregnant with my second child and amazed at how well I feel. This time, I’ve stepped up my nutrition even more and have ventured into things like raw liver (!! shock horror) and nightly doses of high vitamin cod liver oil with raw milk before bed. I’m really looking forward to the labour and birth and am confident that it will be an easier experience and this will be a calmer and easier baby. My labour with my son was 36 hours – he was born naturally into water after great effort but I know it doesn’t have to be as tough as that.

I’m now passionate about optimal preconception and pregnancy nutrition, believing that parents have an obligation to put their own ideologies aside and to accept the time-honoured experiences of these traditional peoples. They knew how to grow healthy babies and it’s time for us to take responsibility for the severely compromised health of today’s generations.

About the Author...

Filippa lives in an ecovillage in southeast Queensland with her husband (K), her young son (Mr T), and "tummy bug" - due late September. She is passionate about nutrition, and enjoys nourishing dinner parties and luscious swims in the nearby waterhole. One day, she's hoping to say that she loves gardening too. First though, she's got to get past those childhood memories of Sundays spent pulling little weeds out of a manicured suburban garden bed.