Authors: Mary Enig
Butter
In his study of traditional diets, Dr. Price found that butter was a staple among groups that kept herds, and no native peoples at that time consumed polyunsaturated oils. Most highly valued (and especially beneficial for children and expectant mothers) was the deep yellow butter produced by cows feeding on rapidly growing green grass. When Dr. Price analyzed this deep yellow butter, he found that it was exceptionally high in all fat-soluble vitamins, particularly vitamin A. He called these vitamins “catalysts” or “activators” because they are needed for mineral metabolism and for the absorption of water-soluble vitamins. When cows are kept in barns and fed dry feed, the amount of vital fat-soluble vitamins is greatly diminished.
Most of us don’t keep herds these days, but the value of vitamins A and D is indisputable with respect to growth, healthy bones, proper development of the brain and nervous systems, and normal sexual development. Many studies have shown the importance of butterfat for reproduction; substitutes based on vegetable oils have led to infertility. As butter consumption in America has declined, sterility rates have increased. In calves, butter substitutes are unable to promote growth or sustain reproduction, according to an unpublished study submitted to the McGovern Committee on Dietary Goals in the early 1970s.
Although long demonized by the vegetable oil industry and the industry’s spokespeople in the universities, government agencies, and the medical establishment, butter is actually one of the healthiest fats on the planet, and certainly the most important fat in traditional Western diets.
Looking more closely at butter, we see that it has a perfect fatty acid profile. Most of the fats in butter are saturated or monounsaturated, making it very stable. You can sauté foods in butter, even at relatively high temperatures, and it will not break down. Like coconut oil, butter contains medium-chain fatty acids, although in lower amounts. Uniquely, butter contains short-chain fatty acids with immune-stimulating and antimicrobial properties. Butter also contains the right amount and the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.
Despite butter’s many health benefits, Americans have been taught to avoid it because it supposedly raises cholesterol. Instead, people have been told to consume margarine. Is that a healthy change? Margarine actually provokes chronic high levels of cholesterol and has been linked to both heart disease and cancer, studies show.
And do not be fooled by the new soft margarines or tub spreads.
Although they are lower in partially hydrogenated fats than their predecessors, they are still produced from rancid vegetable oils and contain many additives.
On the Eat Fat, Lose Fat program, you can feel free to add butter (ideally an organic, grass-fed variety) to vegetables. Spread it on sprouted whole-grain bread or crackers. Add it to meat dishes and sauces. This will help ensure proper assimilation of the minerals and water-soluble vitamins in the vegetables, grains, and meat you eat—and also make your food satisfying and great-tasting!
Cream
Cream should be avoided at all costs, according to so-called food experts; instead, they tell us to use “non-dairy creamers,” imitation foods based on vegetable oils. The anti-cream campaign has been so successful that it’s actually difficult to find good thick cream these days. Supermarkets often sell only thin, ultrapasteurized stuff, or cream with artificial thickeners added. (Fortunately, there are still a few brands of good cream available—see Resources for brand names.)
Traditional Forms of Butter
“In the high mountain and plateau district in northern India, and in Tibet, the inhabitants depend largely upon butter made from the milk of the yak and the sheep…. The butter is eaten mixed with roasted cereals, is used in tea and in a porridge made of tea, butter, and roasted grains. In Sudan, Egypt, I found considerable traffic in high-vitamin butter which…was being exchanged for and used with varieties of millet grown in other districts…. Its brilliant orange color testified to the splendid pasture for the dairy animals. The people in Sudan had exceptionally fine teeth with exceedingly little decay.” (Weston A. Price, D.D.S.,
Nutrition and Physical De generation
)
Like butter, cream is a supremely healthy food, containing all the vitamins and minerals of butter plus smaller amounts of nutrients found in the whey (water fraction) and milk solids. Price describes Swiss athletes drinking “bowls of pure cream” to fortify them during athletic contests. Cream is infinitely versatile in the kitchen—the perfect addition to soups, sauces, and gravies, a wonderful base for salad dressings and casseroles, and the essential ingredient for puddings, icings, and cakes. And what would fruit be without whipped cream? Finally, cream is the base for the planet’s most delicious dessert—ice cream.
Dishes made with cream are uniquely rich and satisfying. When you use cream in your cooking, you feel satisfied, even with small amounts, and do not overeat—the food “sticks to your ribs” and you don’t need to raid the fridge between meals.
Liver
Liver is a sacred food in many cultures. In China, it is served at weddings. Dr. Price noted that among African tribes, “The liver is so sacred that it may not be touched by human hands.” The inhabitants of the South Seas prized the livers of various sea animals, including the shark. The inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides valued cod’s liver. Cod’s head stuffed with oats and chopped cod’s liver was an important dish for growing children.
Europeans and Americans traditionally ate calf’s liver once a week. They also consumed liver and other organ meats in various sausages and patés. Until recently, pregnant women were advised to eat liver several times a week—now pregnant women are told not to eat liver, due to misplaced concerns about vitamin A overdose (see below).
Today, unfortunately, this nutrient-dense food is shunned, with doctors claiming that it contains toxins. In fact, toxins such as heavy metals and pesticides are generally stored in the fatty tissue, not the liver itself. The livers of animals raised in clean conditions, out of doors and eating green grass, are both safe and healthy to eat.
Another needless warning is that liver contains dangerously high amounts of vitamin A. Studies showing that synthetic vitamin A in large amounts can cause health problems such as bone loss and birth defects have led authorities to mistakenly condemn healthy foods containing natural vitamin A. In fact, natural vitamin A protects against bone loss and birth defects. For example, a 1999 study carried out in Rome found no congenital malformations among 120 infants exposed to more than 50,000 IU of vitamin A per day, while a 2002 study at the University of Wisconsin found that men taking 25,000 IU of vitamin A from cod-liver oil for six weeks had no alteration of bone-loss indicators. According to the authoritative
Merck Manual
, natural vitamin A from healthy animal sources is not toxic except in very large amounts (100,000 IU per day).
Vitamin A is essential for optimal health, and liver is a premier source of this vital nutrient, supplying between 16,000 (for chicken liver) and 36,000 IU (for beef liver) of vitamin A per 100-gram serving. Liver also supplies minerals and B vitamins in abundance. It’s our best source of vitamin B
12
, along with special long-chain fatty acids.
That’s why liver is the
number one traditional nutrient-dense food
. While it’s essential for athletes and those suffering from chronic fatigue, it should also be included in everyone’s diet at least once a week. And there are many ways of enjoying liver, ranging from sautéed calf’s liver, to patés, liverwurst, and spreads. (Chapter 10 provides recipes, if you are unaccustomed to preparing it.)
And don’t worry—if you just cannot stomach liver (even as a delicious paté), you can take desiccated liver tablets (see Resources).
Whole Raw Milk
Designed to nourish the young, real milk—full-fat, unprocessed, and from pastured cows—is a fully “self-sufficient” food, containing numerous enzymes that, when exposed to the specific pH of the intestinal tract, become active and assimilate the milk’s various components, making it easy for you to digest. But when pasteurization destroys these enzymes, your body must work hard to supply its own to break down the milk protein, sugars, and fat.
During the 1920s and 1930s, as health officials encouraged universal pasteurization of milk, scientists researched the effects of this new process.
Sadly, no published research comparing the nutritive value of raw versus pasteurized milk has appeared since these studies from the 1930s and 1940s, but the laws of biochemistry haven’t changed, so these findings are still valid.
Many people don’t realize that pasteurization was originally proposed as a temporary solution to the problem of dairies that existed side by side with breweries in the inner cities during most of the 1800s.
*
In these “swill dairies,” cows lived in confinement in incredible filth and were fed nothing but the swill (refuse) from the breweries. There were no standards of hygiene for milking, storing, or transportation. The milk was not only extremely dirty but thin and watery, lacking the nutrients that normally occur in milk. Some dairies even added chalk to the milk to make it whiter! Not surprisingly, the death rate among inner-city children dependent on this milk was as high as 50 percent.
Pasteurization was implemented around the same time that the swill dairies were outlawed and the invention of refrigeration made it possible to bring milk from the country safely into the city. When the children’s death rate dropped, pasteurization took the credit, but it’s more likely that the removal of cows to pasture and the introduction of more sanitary dairying methods were responsible.
By the late 1940s, increased knowledge about how to produce healthy milk and advances in technology made pasteurization completely unnecessary, but it was just then that lobbying for mandatory pasteurization began in earnest. Why? Because investors and businessmen realized that mandatory pasteurization was the easiest way to consolidate the industry. Tens of thousands of small, pasture-based dairy farms are still being put out of business as the dairy industry has become more centralized and monopolistic, with milk production increasingly transferred to huge confinement operations where cows are fed soy feed, bakery waste, citrus peel cake, and even the swill from ethanol manufacture—anything but the green grass they need to make healthy milk.
Where to Find Raw Milk
Although raw milk has been difficult to find for the last 20 years, it is now becoming increasingly available. In California, Connecticut, New Mexico, and some parts of Pennsylvania, you can buy it in stores. In many other states you can purchase raw milk directly from farmers, or through a “cow share” program (see Resources).
If you are obtaining raw milk from a farmer, be sure that the milk comes from healthy cows that have tested as disease-free. The cows should graze on unsprayed pasture for most of the year and be fed unsprayed hay or silage during the winter months when they must be in the barn. The milk should be extracted by a milking machine and stored in chilled stainless-steel tanks. To find out whether such milk is available in your area, visit realmilk.org or contact a local chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation (you can find them listed at the “Local Chapters” link on our website, westonaprice.org). These local chapters have played a key role in finding conscientious grass-based dairy farmers and setting up cow-share programs.
Coconut and Kosher Kitchens
Coconut oil is ideal for those who keep a kosher kitchen. You can use coconut oil as a substitute for butter in baked goods and
Mary’s Oil Blend
(for recipe) as a substitute for animal fat in frying. You can also use coconut milk in place of cow’s milk and coconut cream in place of dairy cream. In our shrimp and pork recipes, substitue fish and kosher meats, respectively.
Jewish cookbooks dating back 150 years recognized the nutritional value of traditional fats, including butter, tallow, goose fat, and egg yolks, and called for coconut oil as an ingredient in many baked goods, especially those that were to be served with meat.
Jewish housewives were an early target of the vegetable oil industry. A 1913 recipe book published by Procter & Gamble specifically recommended Crisco vegetable shortening to Jewish housewives as a substitute for butter in kosher cooking.
With the advent of margarines and shortenings, and the demonization of coconut oil, healthy and delicious coconut alternatives to dairy fats disappeared from Jewish kitchens.
What About Organic Milk?
Several brands of organic milk are now available in health food stores. Yet this milk is always processed. In fact, most of it is ultrapasteurized, a process that gives milk a very long shelf life but completely deadens it. You can’t make yogurt with ultrapasteurized milk, for it will not support microbial life—and it’s unlikely to support human life, either.