The Sherlock Holmes of Health

There are still people on the earth in perfect health who don’t know what a headache is, experience insomnia, period pain, depression, or anxiety. It seems hard to believe since many of us along with family and friends, have these health conditions, among others. Our guest today has indeed witnessed this beautiful picture of health firsthand. This is Episode 318. Our guest is Mary Ruddick. Mary is a seasoned medical nutritionist who specializes in metabolic microbiome immune and nervous system disorders. She travels the globe researching ancestral diets and their protective mechanisms on health. She tells all kinds of stories, from what she has learned from the Hadza and the Batwa tribes in Africa to changes in diets and lifestyles that have compromised the health of some indigenous people groups around the world. She also tells about her own health journey, how the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the GAPS diet helped her recover after years of being bedridden. Finally, she tells us about a project that she is putting into place to help children stick close to their ancestral diets.

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The Sherlock Holmes of Health

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Mary Ruddick.

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Welcome to the show, Mary.

Thank you for having me.

Some people call you the “Sherlock Holmes of Health” because you have traveled around the world much like Dr. Price. Where have you been?

I was in Tanzania, in Zanzibar throughout mainland Tanzania, Uganda, and now in South Africa.

What did you go to do?

I went to live a bit of a dream of my own of seeing some of Dr. Price’s work. I was very inspired by his book many years ago. Since then, I’ve been so interested in going and spending time with the Maasai myself, and many other tribes. He saw dozens of tribes on his African tour. I wanted to see what had changed since he had done that work, if anything had remained, and what the health was like if we still had this perfect health in certain regions. I went out of my interest in research to see what was real.

I’m extremely curious. Tell us what you found when you were in Tanzania. What was the diet like in that small village that you were a part of?

It was eye-opening. I went to so many villages and many different tribes, some of the tribes I went to multiple villages, and you find different things within the same tribe in different villages in terms of diet and health. For instance, the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe, was very interesting because I expected them to be healthier than they were, but they were still remarkably healthy. They don’t have any chronic health issues that we have. They don’t have infertility issues. They don’t get cavities. I’ve seen healthier tribes. In some of the Hadza groups, they were in perfect health, but some were not. That was surprising because of my former travels. They eat meat year-round, they do a lot of hunting, they enjoy it. What was fascinating about that was that I had assumed from much of my read research that they ate a lot more plants than they did.

They’re quite seasonal. The different tribes within the Hadza will eat varying amounts of plants depending on where they are in the mountain or the valley and how long of the year they’ll eat it for, but they eat extremely locally. What was the most interesting about the Hadza to me, I would assume with my Western mindset, that they would be concerned about food scarcity and storing food for later. They had such an abundance of food that they were never worried about getting food tomorrow. They didn’t bring snacks with them and store food. They ate abundantly and with joy. I never saw anyone hungry or thirsty. They were in an incredible state of satisfaction at all times.

People can be healthy on many different diets as long as they’re ancestral, seasonal, and local to wherethey are.

When I was in Australia, I was talking to an Aboriginal woman. She gestured to all the land. She’s like, “That’s our supermarket.” Like, “Everything that grows right here.” What do you think was compromising the health of the particular Hadza group that you were with when they didn’t seem as healthy as some of their peers in other villages?

It was mainly in the women. With women, sometimes you can see health issues a bit in younger generations, a bit more in mood and temperaments, the health of the feet and nails. It was most likely the Western influence, along with the lack of the big game. They’ve been pushed off their land, so they’re hunting very small game now. That’s all I could equate it to aside from the group that I saw that was a little less healthy were exposed to tourists more often. It could simply be the gifts from tourists that are impacting their health. They would be getting a lot of candy, smoke a lot of cigarettes, and weed. In town, they use receipts and newspapers to smoke from, which we know have a lot of toxins. Whereas, the other Hadza groups were smoking leaves instead. They were putting tobacco or wild marijuana into the leaves and smoking that so nothing was modern in that way.

Those were the two differences that I saw. You see it better with the Maasai. In the Maasai, there are three stages that they have. You have the ones that still traditionally, milk, blood and meat, and the herb stew, which is a tea that’s made with organ meats that are strained out in a bitter root, which I still cannot get an identification on, but I will. I have sent that to many botanists. There’s some Maasai that on occasion eats maize. There are other villages that eat a lot of maize and beans.

What was fascinating about that was that even despite the maize and beans, they were still far healthier than any of us in America. They had glowing white teeth, definitely of all the groups that I saw were the strongest, the most robust and looked like natural athletes. It was fascinating because many of my assumptions before meeting them in person were quite wrong from my readings. It’s fascinating when you see something for yourself, for instance. It was due to my assumptions. It wasn’t due to the authors. It was because I would read something like an herb stew. They say herbs, plural, that’s how it’s written, but it’s this one plant. It’s a root that’s steeped and the fiber is removed, so it’s just the liquid that they’re drinking. It’s not lots of different herbs. It’s that one that they have. I also didn’t realize that they rotate things so much.

For instance, they killed a goat while I was with one of these groups. We drank the blood fresh, it was delicious by the way. Please don’t think I’m a vampire, but it was genuinely delicious. We drank the blood. We ate some of the organ meats raw, the liver and kidney. We cooked everything else. We would eat it around a fire. The goat gets eaten on the first night. After that, they would do three days of raw milk with the blood. That tastes quite different when you mix the blood with the milk as opposed to blood by itself. It was really interesting to go through that. After that, they would slaughter a cow or a goat and would do three more days of meat. It was quite fascinating because I hadn’t realized how opposed to things like fish or chicken they were. They’re very much just red meat.

Isn’t that funny? They had assumptions of you as a Westerner, didn’t they?

They were quite surprised at my desire to drink the blood and eat all the parts of the animal. I think when they’ve had visitors in the past, they’ve mostly done barbecued meats. To have all of us very interested in eating all of those things, they looked at us a little funny. They were like, “Are you sure you want to eat like us?”

Speaking of your situation, did you and your team stay in homes, how did that go? Did you need a translator with you?

Luckily, we had wonderful translators from all the villages that we went to. If anyone wants to do this, I suggest you do what we did. We got a translator from someone who grew up in the neighboring village. Because often, the children will play together, there will be so fluent in the other languages that they can joke and laugh. You need a very deep translation for many of the kinds of questions that we would want to ask. That worked out well. We had these wonderful guides who had lived with these guys their whole life. They had been playing since they were in non-diapers since diapers aren’t used, and have this great rapport with them so that we could ask awkward questions. I was even asking the chief things like, “How many stools do you have a day?” Normally you can’t ask the head of any society something like that, but luckily, they laughed and allowed me to ask, which is quite nice.

WT 318 | Traditional Health Ways — Traditional Health Ways: In these regions, no one gets malaria or diphtheria. They don’t get sick until they start implementing modern foods, and then they become very prone to those things.

Mary, what are you doing with all the information that you’re accumulating?

I’m doing this for my interest. I’m dying to understand what makes people so healthy and resilient to disease. I’m so fascinated by, the fact, that in these regions, no one gets malaria, diphtheria, they don’t get sick until they start implementing modern foods, and they’re very prone to those things. Having spent so much of my life sick, I’m very fascinated by what makes us better, especially with Weston A. Prices’ work. What I love about what he did was that he wasn’t saying everyone needs to eat this hammer and nail diet. It was very much the way that the food is produced and all of these small menu-type things impact how your health is, and that we really can be healthy on lots of different diets as long as they’re ancestral, seasonal, and local to where we are right there. I’ve been going out of my interest. I have been documenting everything in quite thorough notes. I’m loosely working on a book, but it will be years before I’m done because there are so many more groups of people I would like to spend time and study with.

You had a very involved healing journey, which is how you came across the Western A. Price Foundation. Tell us more about that, Mary.

Western A Price Foundation quite literally saved my life along with their book. I owe everything to you all, and you help all my patients find proper food. I’m very grateful to this organization. I was a healthy kid, but I was studying Marine biology in The Bahamas when I was eighteen at a field station and got an infection that went to my brain and caused a condition called dysautonomia, which until COVID, very few people had heard of it. It’s a post-infection nervous system disease. That’s what long COVID is essentially, or long Ebola as well. It’s not unusual to get these with these tropical or very serious infections, but it deregulates your hypothalamus and autonomic nervous system. You stop sending blood to your organs and you get nerve death.

I had neuropathy from the neck down, very severe kidney, liver, lung, thyroid disease, and stopped absorbing food. I looked a bit like a skeleton and spent many years in bed. It was 7, 8 years into this journey about a year into being bedbound when we stopped looking at doing the normal things. We went to Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, and all these different clinics and hundreds of doctors. My parents spared no expense. When I had been bedbound for a year, I was seven years in. I was on seventeen medications. I couldn’t put a sentence together at that time. We started looking at other things. My parents started doing a lot of research. Luckily, some of that research was dietary, which got me well enough to get my brain back to where I could read.

My body was still pretty broken, I was still in bed, but my brain works. At that point, I started reading all these books that people that had reversed conditions. Anyway, it was a long story because it goes over twelve years. I’ll save you the whole thing. Ultimately, I did what most people do. I went plant-based, vegan, raw, these kinds of different things. I stumbled on Weston A. Price’s work, and it toppled the whole paradigm for me. When I’ve read about the Maasai, I was like, “Wait a second.” If these people are in peak health and they’re enduring the worst infections, which the infection area interested me, given losing my health due to an infection, then something is wrong.

I went back to eating meats and I joined my local Weston A. Price Foundation. I started doing liver, ferments, and all these things, and I started to get better. I went to Weston A. Price Foundation where Sidra McNeely, the local GAPS diet chapter head, was giving a presentation on the GAPS diet. She agreed to mentor me on a diet. I did, we did. A year later, I was in for remission from everything. With a very religious fervor, I went back to school for nutrition for my post-grad, and I’ve been fascinated by traditional diets ever since.

You are glowing and healthy. Do you get nervous with all the travels you do? Like, “I’m going to end up with something like what happened to me back in The Bahamas, some infection that’s going to get into my brain.”

I would certainly deserve it if I did. I often think sometimes, when I’m in some of these regions, I am asking for it. I should be in some suburb somewhere in a glass bowl. I don’t worry about it. I honestly feel very resilient now. It took about six years after I was in for remission to short my health with traditional foods and a very relaxed lifestyle. Now, I feel even more safe going into these regions than most people that I go with, simply because knock on wood so far I don’t get sick. I don’t get colds and flu. I feel more resilient. I do eat extra well when I’m doing these trips, get lots of sleep and do all that I can for my immune system. I do avoid swimming in freshwater when I’m in tropical regions.

Eat nothing but truly local foods.

You’ve got a better starting point, number one, but number two, you’re doing what Zach Bush always talks about. You’re diversifying your microbiome by traveling and engaging with other people. You’re eating that diet that keeps different people so robust, so no wonder it’s working for you.

I’m so lucky because I get to see people get better all the time, as we all do in this group. I have full faith in the human body to heal. If I am to get something again, I do feel like it won’t be a death sentence.

You know how to manage it. You have been to so many parts of Africa and also lived in Greece. Wasn’t there a Greek island featured in The Blue Zones book by Dan Buettner?

It’s the island of Ikaria.

Is the lifestyle there the one depicted in the book?

Not at all. It’s almost like he didn’t go to the same island.

Are you kidding?

I do see some things, but he missed the mark on that one.

Tell us more.

First of all, you almost don’t see any beans served. The Greeks, in general, eat very seasonally, locally and traditionally, minus the new influx of the squashes and the nightshades. Those are all new within the last 50 to 100 years, depending on the region of Greece coming from the Americas. They eat an enormous amount of organ meats from nose to tail. Everywhere I went, the liver was the first thing they give you, followed by a whole block of fried cheese, that’s an emote of olive oil, and they serve wine. Everyone at the cafe is smoking, no one exercises. Even the lifestyle things weren’t on par.

There’s this bakery he keeps talking about. I tried to find it. I was there for the bulk of the summer, which is the high plant season. Greeks eat a good amount of plants in the summer and very little in the winter. It fluctuates. It depends on what’s growing. It was completely different. I could not find these bakeries. There were only two, which were almost never open. I didn’t see people going in and out. They were tiny. They do the three-day ferments on that island like the French, the 72-hour ferments of bread, which is lovely, but I didn’t see many people eating it. While it was served at restaurant tables, it would usually sit there, not too many people would go for it.

The priorities at home and all the houses we went to were the cheese making, organ meat consumption, stews. They eat a lot of pork there. The pork head stew was a very big feature at the time and fresh fruits for dessert was what they would typically go for. It’s not the beans and rice. It makes sense. I had an inkling about that, having spent so much time in Greece because the island of Ikaria is full of rocks. That topography is inappropriate for raising cattle or for raising things like rice and wheat. The Ikarians are known for not trading with other islands or the rest of the world. They’re very local. It made sense that they didn’t have the abundance of those foods, but it was even more animal-based than I had thought it could be, honestly.

It’s interesting that you say animal-based because we know that one of the principles of the Wise Traditions diet is to include animal products. Especially indigenous people groups that were thriving as some of those you described that are still thriving, included animal products in their diet. A lot of bone broths and using all the organ meats, they would often choose the organ meats over the muscle meats. Since you know that, and because of what you’ve learned in your travels, I understand you’ve started a Cows 4 Kids non-profit. Tell us a little bit about that and why you started it?

Many of these villages that I go to are still in incredible perfect health on a level that we can’t even relate to. Their children are going to government-mandated schools that are feeding them corn, beans, and vegetable oil. I’m very concerned that this pocket of perfect health or these pockets that we have around the globe are going to be lost and only going to be a thing of history. I spend my life reversing illness. I love doing that, but it’s so exciting to see places in the world that don’t have an illness at all. It’s important for us to have that as our knowledge that it’s the normal human state and not accept all of these chronic diseases that are coming in such waves.

I want to let that sink in for a minute, the normal human state is wellness. I was thinking if we interviewed people walking down the typical American street, I bet every single person would have some condition, maybe not evident to the naked eye, but if you asked them, they’d say, “I do have joint pain. I have Hashimoto’s.” There’s always something. You’re saying there are still people somewhere on this planet, who are living a vibrant, full life, and that is where we should all be headed.

Yes. They don’t know what a headache is, insomnia is. They’ve never had period pain. It’s truly incredible the level of their perfect health. There’s no depression or anxiety, no introverts, difficult teenage phase, crying babies. Everyone is happy.

I’m thinking about a friend of mine who went to Kenya years ago. She said it was really weird because all of the foreigners, “Our kids would cry, but the babies there wouldn’t cry.” She couldn’t quite pinpoint why, but it may have to do with exactly that the fact that they’re raised on all their traditional local foods, in the sunshine, and all these things. Some people might say, “You’re idealizing these people. You don’t know them very well. You’re saying there is no depression, no anxiety. How can you be so sure?” What would you say to the skeptic?

I often get that, but it’s easy to think that way until you spend time with these people. I’ve been to so many of these schools working with this organization. It’s fascinating because all of these kids make perfect eye contact, all have an easy time with friends, none are socially awkward. You don’t see any of the things that have become normal in our children in those kids. They don’t have sniffly noses. They don’t have watery eyes. They don’t have any of the issues that we’re starting to think of as normal. You’d have to spend time there. I realized I’m going to come off as a Pollyanna, but it’s come out of my experience, not because of romanticism.

The perfect state of health and community of tribespeople must be cherished, and this wisdommust bekept alive and not just in books.

Let’s go back to Cows 4 kids. Why Cows 4 Kids?

What I wanted to do was keep traditional diets alive in these regions. In most of these schools, it’s one tribe going to them. It will be the Chaga tribes’ school with 300 children, the Maasai school with 100 children. I thought, “Why don’t we raise money and provide animals so that these different tribes can have the exact diet that they’re having at home and keep their health alive, keep them perfectly healthy in these regions.” That’s what we decided to do. We called it Cows 4 Kids because we started with the Maasai, the Chaga, and the Batwa, and the Maasai’s golden animal is the cow. What I liked about this idea was that all of these regions already take care of these animals, so there’s no education that needs to go in place.

What’s also lovely and something that perhaps, one would have to experience themselves, is that when you go to these regions, the animals are in the best care I’ve ever seen. They’ve prized these animals because they are their livelihood. They’re almost kept on saintly like quality. Their skin and fur are like velvet. They’re very happy, cuddled and snuggled. They’re treated very well. A lot of these places rely heavily on milk and other regions on eggs. I thought at the very least we can get milk and eggs in these schools and when we raised more money, we were like, “No, we’re going full hog.” We’re going to do the full schools.

Now we’ve raised enough to fund three full villages, one from each of those tribes. We’re now working on another Maasai tribe. We’re at about 1,200 children now, which is great. The cool thing about that is that it’s a one-time donation because those animals have babies. It’s not like donating corn, where you have to keep coming up with bags of corn. It’s self-sustaining so they can be pridefully taken care of themselves. We want to move on to South America and some of the other continents and more tribes here. That’s the long-term goal. I’d like to take it worldwide and keep all the traditional diets alive that are still functioning.

It’s such a simple concept and yet so important. If I heard you correctly, in their homes, the kids are eating their traditional local diet. In the schools, the government or other countries are sending rice, maize, or other things that wouldn’t necessarily be a part of their diet naturally.

There’s a lot of soft selling. As soon as you go into the city, it’s healthy vegetable oil, merger, oats. I want them to have a way to keep the wisdom of their culture alive. We wanted to do this so that they’ve realized the value of what they have. The more and more I’ve experienced more communities, I find they have so much to teach us and we have nothing to teach them. They are in a perfect state of health and also of community. They get along with each other so well. I want to keep that wisdom alive and not just in the books.

Since you have had so many experiences in so many villages, it might be hard to narrow it down to one, but tell us a story of an encounter where you did learn something from someone that you found very profound.

I don’t know if this is what you were looking for, but this is definitely my biggest takeaway, which was very shocking. One of the most recent communities I went to was the Batwa, which is in Uganda. They’re in this remote region over by the gorillas. They’ve been kicked out of the forest. They lived in the windy forest for millennia. I had expected them to be about as healthy as the Hadza because they’re also hunter-gatherers. They were far superior in health and to such a level that I didn’t even know was possible with all my travels and studies. The Batwa elderly is in incredible health. They can hop two feet off the ground over and over for fifteen minutes. These are people that are over 100 years. We saw families with seven generations where the oldest three generations were doing this dance for fifteen minutes. They would do it every day.

The most remarkable part was that they’re not out of breath when they’re done. Here I am at my age, I work out every day and I was huffing after one minute laughing and playing. Their incredible fertility was also shocking. For many of the women, they look to be in their 50s with brand new babies that they were nursing. Their fertility range was much longer than other communities that I’ve seen as well. It wasn’t so much what they said, more so what they displayed.

I’m excited that you’re going to continue traveling, compiling resources and working on that book. We don’t care how long it’s going to take you to get it out. We want to check it out for sure. Are you driven to help people in North America? Are you trying to lift up this ancient wisdom for people around the world? Who is your target audience when it comes to lifting up this wisdom?

It’s the entire world. Spending those twelve years so sick and seeing all the poor individuals I work with are so sick, I feel that all this illness can be avoided and treated immediately, that when you do get sick, if you have this knowledge, you can do something about it in the first year, instead of waiting for twelve as I did. If you have this knowledge, you can potentially avoid it altogether. I’m working on getting this worldwide. I have a couple of people translating some of my videos. I’ve documented thousands of hours’ worth of both studies in Greece, some of the villages in Europe, all throughout Africa, and other regions of the world. I’m not a video editor, so I don’t know how to cut up all the footage. I have friends and clients from all over the world who have offered to translate it for me. I’m starting a big diabetes program online that is already translated into several languages. Collectively, we can all be healthy together.

At the end here, the question I often pose, if the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

I would recommend that they eat nothing but truly local foods. Things that are in season at that moment and look into the traditional processing of that food and implement that.

Thank you so much for our conversation and for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. This is a true honor. I can’t tell you how highly I hold Weston A. Price.

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About Mary Ruddick

Dubbed the “Sherlock Holmes of Health,” Mary Ruddick is a seasoned medical nutritionist who specializes in metabolic, microbiome, immune, and nervous system disorders.

She is the Director of Nutrition for CaptainSoup.com and the creator of EnableYourHealing.com. She currently travels the globe researching ancestral diets and their protective mechanisms on health. She has been featured with the book, “Beat Autoimmune” and she can be found on several productions from GundryMD, Food Lies, and MeatRx.

Mary is establishing the non-profit “Cows 4 Kids” to help children eat their traditional diets, worldwide.