SPRING WATER
Norm LeMoine’s feature on filthy water and filtration options really hit home. Especially the dizzying number of filtration options. Over the past eight years I’ve tried many with varying success. While spring water was mentioned as being one of healthiest waters you can consume, little information was given on how and where to procure.
There’s a wonderful website, www.findaspring.com, that contains a Google map interface with locations of springs around the world. It’s entirely user-driven, meaning health conscious folks like us add and update the various spring locations. If you’re lucky enough, there’s a spring not far from where you live. Thankfully, I was finally able to locate a spring near my home.
For those who don’t have access to a spring, what do the water experts think about commercial spring waters such as Mountain Valley? While these are treated, it seems this is a better option than filtered toilet water replete with chemical additives that’s delivered via ancient water piping, no matter how good the filter on the other end is.
An article exploring all of the benefits and properties of spring water is welcomed. Considering all the toxins and pollutants that bathe our planet, spring water that hasn’t seen the light of day for hundreds or even thousands of years could be the one truly “clean” thing we can consume. I also trust mother nature’s filtering and cleansing over anything manmade.
Ryan Carmody
Cement City, Michigan
THYROID MALFUNCTION
“Sewage in a Glass? Technologies for Cleaner, Safer Water” (Winter 2015) discusses the adverse health effects of chlorine and fluoride, but misses one adverse effect entirely: thyroid gland (mal)function! If you look at the periodic table you will find the halogen group (column) with fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. The laws of nature dictate that fluorine, chlorine and bromine will displace iodine in a chemical reaction.
Iodine is necessary in the body for the thyroid gland to work properly. The thyroid gland regulates metabolism; so maybe our weight problems aren’t all due to calories. We’re probably looking at a three-factor interaction as a cause of obesity: calories (sugar calories are probably the worst); metabolism (thyroid gland functioning and couch potato behavior); and fats (lowfat diets replacing fats in the diet with carbs, which is doubly bad because you need fats in the diet to lose weight).
Roger A. Wacek
Owatonna, Minnesota
LACTATION FAILURE
In “The Scandal of Infant Formula” (Fall 2015), I discussed infant formula—the past, present and future, and negative implications for the health of our children.
Today, lactation failure, or inability to breastfeed for whatever reason, is a common occurrence. Some physicians think formula is as good as breast milk so help may not be provided on that front. In addition, many of our mothers did not breastfeed so we have no role models.
Dr. Mary Enig, an expert and pioneer in the field of trans fats, tackled this problem in her book, Know Your Fats (2001). “Why is there so much lactation failure today?” she asks. In this section of the book (page 190), she explains that trans fats in the diet of the nursing mother translate into trans fats in the breast milk, which can decrease the overall level of fat in the milk. Nature intended that fat be the major component of breast milk.
Much of the fat quantity and quality of breast milk is related to diet. But some saturated fats are “must-haves” and so important that the body will make them in order to supply the baby if they are not supplied in the diet.
If the infant does not receive enough fat in the breast milk, she will not be satisfied, will cry and be fussy. “A typical parental response is then to feed formula, which in turn decreases milk production by the mother,” said Dr. Enig, who advocated actively avoiding trans fats.
Trans fats are still used in foods in the U.S., especially snack foods, baked goods and the like. Even if not named on the label, they may still be lurking in that item. Studies show that removing trans fats from the food system has been helpful in European countries in reducing the amount that shows up in breast milk.
The entire text of “The Scandal of Infant Formula” can be found on the WAPF website at http://bit.ly/1PzfBld.
Sylvia P. Onusic, PhD, CNS, LDN
University Research Associates
Portage, Pennsylvania
THE FRENCH PARADOX
On a recent episode of my podcast, “The Nutrition Heretic,” I was excited to interview a woman who had a phenomenal health and weight loss turnaround following the advice I had written in a little book called Frenching Your Food. Prior to reading my book, this woman had been bouncing back and forth with vegan and other diets that called for the removal of animal fats and other animal foods, calorie counting and all the usual gimmicks that deprive the body of nutrients. She did lose twenty-five pounds on those diets, but it took a whopping two years! And nobody noticed.
She decided to follow my diet to maintain her twenty-five-pound weight loss—adding back butter and other animal foods, working out less and following other strategies in the book. Two months later, she found she had lost an additional fifteen pounds completely by accident. This time, people began to take notice and some have even cautioned her that she was losing too much weight!
At almost fifty years old, she is finally able to enjoy her meals without guilt. In fact, she eats anything she wants and is thinner, looks younger and has more energy than before.
Frenching Your Food reveals the secrets to remaining (or getting) thin on such a heretical diet in a way that other books about French eating habits fail to grasp. It all starts with developing a better relationship with food. Don’t we all deserve a healthier relationship with our food?
It’s time we put to rest the horribly flawed concept that the French live long, healthy lives and remain thin despite a diet that includes plenty of animal fats and organ meats. It would make more sense to admit that these foods contribute to the health of the French instead.
Adrienne Hew
Kamuela, Hawaii
VITAMINS FOR WARTS
In the 1970s The father of one of our employees went to the hospital to have surgery—he had many plantar warts. He was put on an IV and ten days later the warts were gone. After investigation we found the IV consisted mainly of vitamins A, E, and C.
Over the next forty years we suggested to more than twenty people to take 25,000 IU of vitamin A, 400 IU of vitamin E, and 2000-4000 of vitamin C daily. Every person reported favorable results except an Australian sheep shearer who was a big man and a hard worker. After six months he called me and said it wasn’t working. I told him to keep on and after an additional six months when he came to shear the sheep again, the warts were all gone. (Would a higher dose have shortened the duration of healing?)
Our neighbor had a wart problem. She always went to the doctor to have them frozen off and also burned off, but they always came back. I told her about her lack of vitamins but she did not do anything about it. So I took three bottles of these (good quality) vitamins and gave them to her. After seven days the warts got itchy and in ten days the warts disappeared.
Let us stop begging God to heal us and use the brain he gave us. Remember what God teaches: seek and you will find.
Ivan W. Martin
Millersburg, Pennsylvania
TEENS ON DRUGS
For years, my husband was a youth director and I was a volunteer at his side for just about everything. Together, the two of us chaperoned teenagers on trips all through the 1980s and 1990s. We took teens on weekend retreats, weeklong camp trips, and overseas work trips.
At the beginning of any trip, we would collect the students’ permission slips before boarding the buses and then head on our way. I took a short break from youth work, but volunteered to chaperone a trip again in 2008. The contrast with previous trips I had taken was stark. Before the students could board the bus, they had to stop by a card table that the trip coordinator had set up. There she was collecting and organizing the students’ medications. My jaw dropped as I saw her gather baggie after baggie, filled with the drugs the teens were taking. And this was a middle school trip, with students ranging from twelve to fifteen years of age. We had one hundred twenty kids or so going on this particular trip and about twenty-five of them were on medications. The medications were for allergies, ADD, long-term illnesses and other conditions, and included antibiotics and antidepressants.
On the trip itself, my colleague kept careful track of dosages and the timing of passing them out. She seemed more like a nurse than a trip logistics coordinator. I had never seen anything like it ten years earlier. The teens back then were on nothing. Now, a shocking percentage of them were on one drug or another.
I’m grateful to the Foundation for its efforts in education for our children’s sake. I am eager to see this disturbing trend reversed.
Hilda Labrada Gore, Chapter Leader
Washington, DC
A FAD?
The paleo diet may seem like a fad to some, but a number of the populations visited by Weston Price would have fit the paleo description to a tee. Although living grain-free or low-carb may not be for everyone, there are many conditions that respond to it beautifully. Cutting out all grains and sugar (but not dairy) halted my mother’s lifelong crippling rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and even corrected her vision within just a few weeks. For me it resolved my agonizing periods due to endometriosis.
I had been following a mostly organic, gluten-free Weston Price type diet for years, but my period pain was just getting worse. It wasn’t until I cut all grains and sugar that my health took a turn for the better. Don’t be fooled by “paleo bars” which completely miss the point of the paleo principle. A paleo approach is just another tool in our arsenal for health.
Carmen Lyman
Kauai, Hawaii
Editor’s Response: While descriptions of the paleo diet vary, most versions are lacking in adequate levels of vitamins A, D and K, so do not fit the description of what Price found among primitive peoples. And with few exceptions, the diets he described contained either grains or tubers. But everyone needs to determine individually a diet that works for him or her. For some people this means avoiding all grains, for others it may mean avoiding all dairy or even seafood.
GARDASIL TRAGEDY
Thank you for sharing the dangers of HPV vaccine. I read your article and these are my findings also. My daughter received a Gardasil vaccine in August 2014. Within ten minutes, as we were walking out of the exam room, she said she couldn’t walk. She had an ataxic gait and her pupils were so dilated that her eyes were black.
I’ve been a RN for nineteen years and I am appalled that this information regarding adjuvants, deaths and adverse reactions had been kept from the teaching curriculum. Even though the doctor and nurse witnessed this event, they said nothing and remained quiet. It was seven months after that I discovered that the cause of her near death was this “safe and effective” vaccine.
Within ten days of receiving the vaccine our journey began—twenty ER visits via ambulance along with transfers to hospitals offering higher levels of care. I nearly lost my daughter by being tossed from doctor to doctor and prescription after prescription.
Diagnosis included unexplained tachycardia, POTS, dysautonomia and autoimmune dysfunction of unknown etiology. With my research and determination I found the cause and implemented an intensive course of vitamin supplements and detox. I removed all chemicals from our home and began a gluten-free diet of chemical-free foods. My daughter improved. It was nearly a two-year recovery.
I began getting a tremendous amount of social media attention with my bold post of “Do vaccines cause autism?” I’m well known in my community as I have been in pharma and medical sales for the past fifteen years. I have gained much respect working alongside physicians and other health care personnel to assist with their patients. Needless to say, people knew this was not something I would make up.
Prior to the mandated Tdap booster, Menactra and HPV vaccine, my daughter was homecoming queen at her school. She was titled Ms. West Lauderdale for winning a beauty title pageant. She was an honor student, tutor, a leader for social clubs and captain of the dance competition team. After these vaccines her cognitive abilities began to decline, she developed symptoms of arthritis, unexplained tachycardia, hypotension decreasing to 60/40—to name just a few of the adverse effects. She then displayed hypersensitivity to sound to the extent that placing keys on a table caused a fight-or-flight response. She became like a ninety-year-old with Alzheimer’s, rheumatoid arthritis, endstage congestive heart failure, and was a hospice cancer patient candidate.
I’m a member of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights and I am lobbying for some type of religious or philosophical exemption. In Mississippi our children must be injured from a vaccine before we can get some type of medical exemption. This process also is near impossible. In my community of approximately four hundred preteens and teens, approximately twenty have been affected not only by Gardasil but also from the Tdap booster mandated by our state in 2012.
I’ve been speaking out on social media for about a year. People are now paying attention. Legislatures are listening.
I felt I would share my story in hopes of saving a child’s life. Feel free to contact me if I can help take the HPV vaccines off the market. These pharmaceutical companies need to be held accountable for their misleading information. This is fraud by any description.
Wanda Hughes, RN, Owner
Hughes Healthcare
Meridian, Mississippi
HOMEOPROPHYLAXIS
Thank you very much for covering the topic of vaccination in your Summer 2015 issue. I was especially happy to see the article on homeoprophylaxis (HP) and the publicity for the HP Worldwide Choice conference last fall. As a longtime member of WAPF and a homeopath, I was also very grateful that WAPF sponsored that conference. I enjoyed meeting the Texas chapter leaders at that event and was happy to see the photo of the organizers and all the presenters featured in your latest issue.
I think WAPF members would like to know about another non-profit in North America focusing on homeoprophylaxis: Free and Healthy Children International. Founded in 2011, this organization is dedicated to research, education and access to HP and offers a program for childhood disease that is based on the work of Dr. Isaac Golden. FHCI trains homeopaths in North America and world-wide in this program and also in the use of HP for travel. Over six hundred children are enrolled in a study in the hopes of making HP part of the public health care model. Over one thousand children in total are enrolled in the FHCI program. More information about Free and Healthy Children International and a directory of homeopaths certified in HP can be found at: freeandhealthychildren.org. Thanks again for being such a great resource for the community.
Deborah Landowne, CCH, RSHom(NA), C.HP
San Rafael, California
COD LIVER OIL AND DEPRESSION
I am on parole after eight years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit. As you can imagine, whenever I thought about my situation, I felt very depressed. Recently I started taking cod liver oil, and I have noticed that I don’t think about my situation as much, and when I do, I don’t feel depressed about it. So I would say that cod liver oil works very well for obsessive thoughts and depression.
Name withheld
WAPF IN KENYA
As a result of WAPF’s sponsorship of a teaching trip to Kenya, lots of good things are happening. My Maasai friend Dickson, who helped coordinate the trip, is the chairman of a local conservation group for a specific hill (small mountain) in their area. The Maasai want this preserved so that in times of drought, they have a place to graze their cattle and get water.
Recently UNESCO sponsored the workshop he attended which was about local conservation efforts for Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania. Dickson was invited to speak for thirty minutes because he’s the chairman of their conservation group. About sixty people attended.
He spoke for twenty minutes about their conservation group and the last ten minutes on Weston Price and traditional diets. He made one hundred copies of the WAPF brochure to hand out. He told the workshop attendees that they will not be able to conserve the land if the people are sick. Actually, he said that the people must be conserved first so that they can then conserve the land. Then he spoke on the change in diet and why their people are sick and how they need to return to their traditional, God-given diets.
He said the response of the participants was amazing. They told him, “You should have been given the full time to talk to us about traditional diets, not just ten minutes.”
There was a Kenyan university professor of commerce attending who found Dickson afterward and said he wanted to see the book Dickson had talked about (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration). I sent Dickson this book a year and a half ago through a friend and that’s what then sparked his asking for WAPF to send people to Kenya.
The professor gave Dickson bus fare so that Dickson could bring the book to him in Nairobi so he could borrow it for about a month. The professor was very interested in Price’s book!
Dickson told me that he wanted everyone who came to Kenya to know that what he received from them, he is passing on and will keep passing on.
My family sent him a laptop last summer and he wanted me to know he’s been so proud to have it and it has been very useful even for his work as chairman of the conservation group. Now, he is wondering whether there might be some type of projector so that WAPF pictures could be used in a presentation and shown on a wall. He said for those who are illiterate, the brochures aren’t as useful as seeing the pictures would be. I think this is such good news!
Lisa Schnoor
Silver Spring, Maryland
The WAPF delegation led by Hilda Gore will return to Kenya in May, and we can certainly take a projector for Dickson to use!
EASY DELIVERY, HEALTHY BABY
It was 2006 when I first stumbled upon the WAPF website and the baby photo gallery, and started learning and changing my diet. I have been looking forward to writing this letter ever since.
After my wife and I decided to try for a baby, I fed her as much raw milk, butter, pastured eggs, bone broths, and occasional organ meats as she could stand. I also convinced her to take high-vitamin cod liver oil and butter oil, along with folate, K2, D3, and collagen supplements.
She had an easy pregnancy—hardly any sickness (mild nausea but no vomiting)—and was still walking around the city even in late pregnancy. (Getting compliments from strangers like “Well, look at you strutting around all pregnant!”) She was still doing housework and baking treats for my co-workers the day before the birth. The placenta was in a good location and the baby turned himself into an ideal launch position a few weeks before the birth.
A week before the due date, my wife’s water broke early in the morning (4 am) and we went back to bed, intending to save energy because everybody warned us that labor would take many hours.
However the labor proceeded very quickly and we had to rush to the hospital in an ambulance. The baby was born at 10 am, without any meds or “assistance” such as vacuum or forceps. The nurses commented that such a speedy and easy delivery was rare. My wife described the birthing pain as “a six out of ten” and “easier than I expected.” She came home the next day. She did not complain of any pain in the weeks after. We can’t know whether this easy pregnancy and delivery was simply my wife’s genetics, which I believe probably helped somewhat. It certainly gave me a lot of confidence knowing we were eating right, and I think my wife absorbed some of that.
Our baby boy is very cute, and his default mood is happy and alert. He does not cry except for good reason and after we address the cause, he settles down quickly. Mom’s milk supply was not enough so for a few weeks we supplemented with the WAPF cow milk formula and pumping. He likes the formula just as much as the real thing and gained weight very quickly with it (sometimes two ounces per day). His doctor said he had a perfect latch and was thriving.
I’m very grateful to the WAPF for providing the nutritional advice and formula recipe. There is no greater gift than a healthy baby!
Name withheld
GOITROGENS
Thank you for your link regarding anti-nutrients in certain vegetables. (westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/bearers-of-the-cross-crucifers-in-the-context-of-traditional-diets-and-modern-science/.) I was unaware of the goitrogens these contain.
I now make the following observations: My wife’s parents operated a market garden and her family easily consumed at least several servings of raw cabbage and cooked cauliflower per week. My mother-in-law was operated on for goiter in her early thirties and my wife has had Hashimoto’s disease since about age forty.
My father has cultivated broccoli since I can remember, and we easily consumed several servings per week. He always enjoyed eating the raw stems, simply peeled. He too has been operated on for goiter and I have been hypothyroid since my early forties.
Name withheld
Editor’s Response: Another goitrogenic food is kale—the current darling of health gurus—eaten uncooked in smoothies and as kale chips. Kale is also high in oxalic acid, which can cause stones in the kidneys and many other parts of the body. Cruciferous and high-oxalic foods should be eaten in moderation and always well cooked and with plenty of fat.
FERMENTED HERRING
Thank you for your article on fermented fish foods from around the world (Fall 2015). Northern Sweden still has a tradition of eating fermented herring—which is not the same as pickled.
Just yesterday my husband was looking at old photos from our friends’ place in northern Sweden and came upon two photos of me with my friend Inga-Lena eating surströmming (literally translated “sour herring”) together with “almond potatoes,” chopped onion, tunnbröd (“thin bread” which is made with barley flour) and gräddfil (a fermented cream, kind of like crème fraîche). The addition of fresh parsley chewed afterwards freshens the breath. Notice, we are seated outside since nobody will open a can of surströmming inside the house as eating it inside makes the room smell too strongly. Eating this fermented fish in this way is a tradition for many in late summer. The cans, before being opened, are bulging outward from the gases produced by the fermentation.
You can find a description of the process for making surströmming on Wikipedia. There you can read: “The fermentation starts from a lactic acid enzyme in the spine of the fish, and so the fermentation is by autolysis; together with bacteria, pungent smelling acids are formed in the fish such as propionic acid, butyric acid and acetic acid. Hydrogen sulfide is also produced. The salt raises the osmotic pressure of the brine above the zone where bacteria responsible for rotting (decomposition of proteins) can thrive and prevents decomposition of fish proteins into oligopeptides and amino acids. Instead the osmotic conditions enable Haloanaerobium bacteria to prosper and decompose the fish glycogen into organic acids, making it sour (acidic).”
Ingun Schneider
San Francisco, California
and Torekov, Sweden
DECLINING POPULATION?
I have been fighting alongside people of conscience for a vaccine-free New York City and world. It’s certainly been a worthy fight but what if future children who we are trying to protect from vaccination are never even born? This is altogether likely!
The first indication I had of the reality of this supposition was when I realized that a vaccine mandated at birth in New York State (where I live), the vitamin K vaccine, contains polysorbate 80, a sterilization agent. It is the number one component in this vaccine!
The second indication, which also made me pause, was the fact that a pediatric professional society had indicated concern over one outcome from the HPV vaccine. Now there are innumerable reasons to object to this vaccine, since many of the girls who have received it are suffering and dying, but only one issue was being brought up, and it was “early ovarian failure” (early menopause). Why would the American College of Pediatricians be concerned about this lone issue? Simple: no babies, no business.
One acquaintance told me that among three young women in her family who had been pregnant, there had been seven miscarriages and no live births. The woman said that all three of these would-be mothers received all the recommended vaccines on the CDC schedule plus three shots of the HPV vaccine. The young women are currently between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-seven, which means that the vaccine schedule they were administered would have been post-liability for the drug companies, so the dosage through the age of eighteen was at least twenty-four doses. Survival and fertility are lessening with each year as illustrated by the 2016 vaccine schedule of seventy-four doses through age eighteen.
I have been informed that instead of the world’s population being at 7.4 billion and growing, it may be at 3.9 billion and diminishing. This seems quite plausible to me, and to everyone else I have mentioned it to as well.
Sallie O. Elkordy
New York, New York
WAPF AND MAJOR HEALTH TRENDS
WAPF is to be commended for sticking to its scientific principles, even when they were not politically correct. Even though the Foundation often does not get credit, it has been the impetus for many health trends in the last fifteen years: trans fats banned; butter consumption growing; fermented foods now popular and available; kombucha now popular and available even in regular grocery stores; huge interest in bone broth; resurgence of coconut oil; soy foods in decline; cholesterol now declared OK to eat; raw milk demand growing and doctors recommending it; and many books on gut health and the connection between gut health and mental illness.
Working quietly in the background, WAPF has had a huge influence on modern dietary trends!
Janice Curtin
Alexandria, Virginia
ACTIVIST STANCE
Thank you for everything you do at the Weston A. Price Foundation. I particularly enjoy the quarterly journal. Everything—from the letters to the editor to the ads—is worth reading. I often tell people I find information in the journal I find nowhere else. I also appreciate the more activist stance the Foundation has taken in the past two years or so on issues that affect us all in this society and around the world, such as vaccinations and GMOs.
Gary Roush, Chapter Leader
Miami/Miami-Dade County, Florida
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