Secret Saboteurs Of Health

MSG. Sulfur. Vitamin D deficiency. Sunscreen. These are just some of the potential health saboteurs covered by Sally Fallon Morell, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, in today’s episode, as she highlights articles from the summer 2022 issue of the Wise Traditions journal. She discusses how hidden MSG has been linked to obesity, how sulfur in garlic may compromise some people’s health, and how vitamin D deficiency can affect jaw structure and, of course, mood and overall wellbeing. She covers how sunscreen can interfere with our hormonal function. She also offers simple steps to counteract these saboteurs in your own life and your family.

Check out her website and blog: nourishingtraditions.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Sally Fallon Morell.

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Secret Saboteurs Of Health

The secret saboteur of our diets, the reason for narrow jaws and facial structure, and why we may need to eliminate garlic from our diets for a time. This is episode 385, and our guest is Sally Fallon Morell. The President of the Weston A Price Foundation. She is a prolific author and a fervent advocate for real food, raw milk, and healthy living according to ancestral wisdom.

Sally discusses topics covered in our Summer 2022 Wise Traditions Journal. The topics run the gamut from those I mentioned at the top to how to protect your children from sunburn without sunscreen and the wonders of cholesterol for growing babies. We talk about everything under the sun, with the exception of COVID. Thank goodness.

Before we dive into the conversation, I want to invite you to the Wise Traditions Conference coming up this October 2022. It is the conference that nourishes in every way. Sally will be there along with old friends like Dr. Andrew Kaufman and Dr. Tom Cowan and new friends like Tommy John and Catherine Austin Fitts. We get to connect together as friends and enjoy nourishing meals together. I plan on being there too. Join me. It’s from October 21st to the 23rd, 2022, in Knoxville, Tennessee. There’s still time to register. Go to WiseTraditions.org and secure your spot.

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NourishingTraditions.com

Wise Traditions Conference

Branch Basics

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Welcome to the show, Sally.

Hilda, it’s nice to be back. Thank you.

I love talking with you. It has been a little bit since we’ve covered one of our journals. We took a little break, but now, we are back, and tell us why this one, in particular, is special.

We got a letter from someone saying, “I’m tired of all this stuff about COVID, and you’ve strayed from your message,” I wrote back and said, “I agree with you. We had to cover COVID because it was a health issue at the moment. There was no way we could not do that but this issue has no major articles on COVID. I’m glad to say. We are getting back to our core of nutrition and health.” Our lead article is very interesting but first, I want to talk about a couple of the costs of commentaries.

The cost of commentaries was all quite interesting, I thought in this issue but one was about malocclusion, crooked teeth, overbites, or underbites. There are all these theories out there that it’s hard food, thumb-sucking or whatever. This was a study that found that a large portion of people with narrow jaws had vitamin D deficiency. They likened the narrow jaw to a type of rickets. That is a good way of thinking about it. The bones are a little bit soft, and they can’t be broad away like a good hard bone can be.

First of all, this is a tremendous step forward for conventional scientists to be looking at fat-soluble vitamins. The warning I have is that people are going to be taking vitamin D pills. They need all three fat-soluble vitamins together in the food because when you take vitamin D by itself, you create an imbalance and a deficiency in vitamins A and K.

I feel like we’ve said this so many times but people are like, “Vitamin D, I will pop some pills,” but they don’t understand that the food works together. These vitamins work together in concert in food.

I talked to a person who’s very dear to me, and she had been prescribed 10,000 IU per day of vitamin D by her doctor. She’s a cancer survivor and said she was exhausted all the time. I said, “Get off the D. Get on cod liver oil instead and see if that helped.” I was a little bit shocked that she had been given so much vitamin D. Conventional doctors are trying to overcome their education and surroundings, and peer pressure. The very first thing they go to is something like a vitamin D supplement. Unfortunately, it’s like taking 1 step forward and 2 steps backward because it’s very counterproductive.

Remind us of the foods that are rich in vitamin D. You already mentioned cod liver oil which Dr. Price said was food and not a supplement. What other sources can we get?

Animal fats, so butter, lard, poultry fats, and then liver of pigs and birds. The liver of ruminants is very high in vitamin A, and that’s why we always recommend cooking it in lard, so they have that balance of A and D.

Thank you for that reminder. This food is so amazing. Let’s talk about the lead article that we are excited about.

This was a very interesting article, and I’ve gotten feedback that’s very similar to my reaction when I heard the talk given by Greg Nigh at our conference on The Devil in the Garlic, and he’s written a book about this too. He’s worked with Stephanie Seneff. Why would garlic, which we think of as healthy food, have problems? It’s all about sulfur metabolism. We need sulfate in our body, and that’s a form of sulfur with four oxygen added to it. There are other forms of sulfur, and apparently, if you overdose on sulfur, you block the pathways in your body that you need to produce sulfate. We need sulfate for mucus membranes, hormone production, and for lots of things.

There’s sulfur in garlic, and that’s good for us but there are some problems with garlic.

There could be. He’s found in his practice that garlic is the most problematic food for disrupting our sulfur pathways. It’s not that we don’t need sulfur. We need sulfur. It turns out that we need a lot more sulfur than most of the other elements.

What’s the part that’s problematic?

The other problematic practice is all this kale and rough leafy greens that are high in sulfur that we are eating in smoothies, chips, and things in excess can also disrupt the sulfur pathways. What happens when we don’t make enough sulfate? We need sulfate for lots of things. The body has several backup plans. The first thing it does is have a proliferation of sulfur-producing bacteria, which is a lot flatulent in digestive problems. That’s what comes first. That’s one of the body’s attempts to get the pathways right again.

The second thing is that we produce a lot of inflammation because inflammation helps produce sulfate. The third thing the body does is produce a lot of mucus because mucus helps us get on those pathways. Mucus has sulfate in it. If those three don’t work, the last thing the body does is create tumors because tumors produce sulfate.

This is so shocking.

It’s like the symptom as the cure. It gives you respect for how the body acts to get what it needs.

If you want the children to express their masculinity or femininity, sunscreens will make that more difficult.

Does Greg offer solutions about how to manage this?

Yes.

I love garlic, and this is bringing me down.

It’s funny because I’ve never liked garlic very much. When I eat garlic, I don’t feel very well after I eat it. This article struck me. The four things that people are complaining about are digestive disorders, inflammation, mucus, and tumors. The tumors are the last and the most serious. He has a protocol that he uses, and it’s first to go on a low-sulfur diet for about two weeks. Unfortunately, that means reducing a lot of meat but there are certain meats you can eat. You can eat fish and use butter. You can still follow our principles but no garlic, onions, kale, and chard. None of those high-sulfur foods.

You take molybdenum, which is necessary for one of these enzymes that convert to sulfate. There are other things too but the last important thing you do is Epsom salts baths because Epsom salts are magnesium sulfate. It’s exactly what you need as the sulfate. This is why they are so healing to things like inflammation and mucus, even for cancer patients. For anyone with cancer, I would recommend doing this protocol, cutting back on the high sulfur foods for short a while, and doing the Epsom salt baths.

What if you are not feeling particularly symptomatic? Is this still possibly problematic? What if you don’t have inflammation, a lot of mucus, and digestive issues?

You don’t have to worry about it. You are doing fine but it’s good to be aware of the fact that overconsumption of things like garlic, kale, and even onions could lead to problems.

I’m going to have to look at my diet a little more closely. I will pay attention.

I was blown away when I read the transcript of his talk because this is something that Tom Cowan and I have been saying for many years. When you have a fever, the symptom is therapy. He was giving all these things that people complain about and their therapies. They are the body’s therapy. They are not there to be welcomed as a way of getting your body to be back in balance.

I see what you are saying is that the body is responding appropriately. We get mad at it. “Why are you inflamed?”

“This is a sickness,” but it’s the therapy.

We will have people look into that. By the way, I will make a little segue, if you want to get your hands on a journal, all you have to do is become a member. For our readers, it’s only $30 a year. I get blown away every time I say that because gym memberships that are $30 a class. It’s $30 a year, and use the code POD10, and then you get the journal, and you are supporting our work of education, research, and activism, but now, let’s get to another article.

The next article is about MSG. It’s called Getting to the Root of Obesity, and it’s by Adrienne Samuels, PhD. Adrienne was married to the late Jack Samuels. Jack was the one who put Mary and myself onto MSG because he was extremely sensitive to it, so much so that he had to quit his job. He was a hospital administrator. He couldn’t eat out anymore. He would pass out because he was so sensitive to the MSG.

To be clear, he didn’t put you on MSG but alerted you.

He alerted us to MSG. Adrienne has carried on his work, and she still keeps up his website. It’s about what MSG does to the hypothalamus in the body and affects the body’s ability to handle food, and makes a lot of people vulnerable to weight gain, even if they are not eating more.

MSG is used by the industry as a flavor enhancer.

It gives us the umami taste. For most people, there’s nothing wrong with that taste in natural foods but when it’s added to processed foods, it gives us a fake umami taste. It seems to predispose you to weight gain, especially if you’ve started this very young. It could be in baby food, for example. It’s in the formula because MSG is in powdered milk.

I was going to ask you what foods it’s found in.

Starting a baby on formula, powdered milk or processed food is making them vulnerable to weight gain. As a sidebar, we put in a description of a study that was done in China because the MSG industry says, “It’s because they are eating processed food. It has nothing to do with MSG.” The MSG is put in processed food to make it addictive and make you eat more and so forth.

WT 385 | Saboteurs — Saboteurs: Garlic is the most problematic food for disrupting our sulfur pathways.

This was a study in China comparing two groups of people. One group did not use MSG in their cooking, and the other group did use MSG in their cooking, and neither of these groups ate processed foods. It was all home cooking. The group that added MSG to their food was heavier. They were eating the same things and about the same amount of calories but were overweight when they added MSG to the food.

This is like a secret thing that’s sabotaging people’s health that they are not even aware of.

This is why when you go on a diet and want to lose weight, you cannot eat processed food. You have to eat real food that you’ve prepared yourself and know all the ingredients.

By the way, everything that we buy in boxes and bags, I’ve come to discover that you can make it. You can get tortillas from nixtamalized corn and make them into chips.

Yes. I do it all the time.

Fried in lard.

The way they are supposed to be.

It tastes so much better too.

You can make French fries. I make French fries with duck fat. It’s so easy.

It tastes so much better.

You can make hamburgers with pickles, French fries, bun, and everything.

Make a shake with raw milk. We are going strong, Sally. I love it.

I’m excited about this next article. Anybody who knows me knows I’m big into the sun.

This is about sunscreen by Elizabeth Plourde, and she’s written for us before on this subject but it is so important that we repeat and she has a lot of new information here. Everybody is using sunscreen. I’ve even seen moms put it on their children in the winter.

Several times a day.

We’ve made an enemy of the sun like we’ve made an enemy of cholesterol, saturated fats, raw milk, and all that. First of all, sunscreen does not protect you from melanoma. Melanoma rates have gone way up since people started using sunscreen but the serious thing is that it’s estrogenic. The skin does absorb these estrogens. Some of these sunscreens contain not only estrogens but testosterone blockers. This is not a good thing for your growing children, especially if you want to have grandchildren. You want the children to express their masculinity or femininity. Sunscreens are going to make that more difficult.

Huge hormone disruption. I interviewed Elizabeth for an episode. We called it, Is the Sun to Blame? Or is it the Sunscreen?. You would think we are all following doctor’s orders and putting on a lot of sunscreens, and the incidence of skin cancer will go down but instead, it’s going up. That must mean that sunscreen isn’t working.

It’s worse, it makes you vulnerable.

It’s making things worse.

Human babies are not getting the cholesterol they need when given formula.

What do you put on your skin? First of all, protecting your skin has to do with your diet. You don’t want to eat any industrial seed oils and no polyunsaturated oils because they get incorporated into your cells, and then your cells don’t work right and are vulnerable to burning. If you are eating a lot of saturated fats, you will be a lot safer in the sun, which doesn’t mean that fair people won’t burn, and you have to build up slowly. Another great thing you can put on your skin is coconut oil.

Thank you for saying that. She also recommends a diet high in antioxidants, is that right?

Possibly, yes. There’s your fruits, vegetables, and things like that.

Going back to what you were saying about burning, that’s the skin’s warning system. To tell you to get out of the sun or wear long sleeves. Instead, we try to get away from that so that we can be in the sun for hours, and maybe our bodies need a break every now and then.

Also, it is a myth that non-industrialized people, so-called primitive people, spend a lot of time in the sun. They were not so foolish as to work out in the bright sun. They went in the shade at midday and slept, talked, gossiped, ate or whatever. They did their work in the morning and the evening, not in the bright noonday sun.

It’s such a good point. I have a friend who was in Kenya one time, and she, her father, and her sister were sweating. They were in this sweltering sun. They looked around and noticed that all the indigenous people were in the shade. They were like, “We are being so foolish now.”

Only mad dogs and English men went out in the sun. The colonialists accused the native people of being lazy because they were wise. They didn’t work in the bright sun. You can get heat stroke and lose too much salt. That’s another thing I’ve become aware of. A lot of people are trying to do low salt diets in this heat, and you need more salt when it’s hot.

To hold onto your water.

Yes, exactly. You are giving up salt when you sweat. You need more salt. I put a pinch of salt in my water, especially in the summer.

That’s smart.

I will go to one other article. There are a lot of good articles on this issue but I did an article for a campaign for real milk. It’s about the animal formula. When you give cows what they call milk replacers, and it’s shocking, that’s what’s done in the dairy industry. They don’t let the cows nurse. They don’t give them their mother’s milk. They give them this thing called formula and call it a milk replacer.

I happened to look at a bag of milk replacer when we were in a feed store. The third ingredient in milk replacers is animal fat. That’s what it says. That’s ingredient number three because these animals will not grow without animal fat. There’s no animal fat in the human formula. It’s skim milk and vegetable oils. What’s in the animal fat that these babies need? It’s vitamins but the main thing is cholesterol. Animal babies get cholesterol because they need it to grow their brains, nervous system, digestive tracts, and hormone creation. Human babies are not getting the cholesterol they need when they are given formula.

Cholesterol does come in the mother’s milk.

Mother’s milk is very rich in cholesterol and has special enzymes to ensure that the baby absorbs 100% of that cholesterol. That’s true of cow’s, goat’s, sheep’s, and camel’s milk. They are all high in cholesterol and have these enzymes to ensure that the infant absorbs it. This is why we are so insistent on raw milk for babies if they can’t get their mother’s milk and not the formula.

When they were coming up with a recipe for commercial baby formula, didn’t they try to replicate mother’s milk? How could they have missed this ingredient?

You would think but they define fat as an oil thing. Years ago, Mary Enig was an expert witness in a case on baby formula. A woman told her who worked in the formula industry and took her aside. She said, “We know there should be cholesterol in the formula, but we are not allowed to put it there because of all the anti-cholesterol propaganda.” Why are our children having lowered IQ, learning disabilities, and problems concentrating? It’s because they are not getting the cholesterol they need during these critical development periods.

The irony of all ironies to me is that when they are giving the calves the milk replacement, they are giving them exactly what they know they need.

They know that this is needed for the animals to grow. There’s no money for sick animals but there’s a lot of money for sick children. Also, the dairy industry, which is probably the most corrupt industry in the world. They want to make the maximum profit on the milk. The maximum profit on the butterfat portion of the milk comes if they put it in ice cream. Why waste this precious butter fat on growing children or on school children? They give skim milk to babies or infants and school children because they don’t make a lot of money on the butter fat compared to when they put it in the ice cream.

I’m grateful you were getting this information out. For folks who want more on the problems with commercial formulas, they can read the episode that we published. Thank you for getting this out.

In fact, our page on the homemade formulas based on raw whole milk had a 1,000% increase in traffic since the formula shortage came on.

There’s a silver lining for folks looking for alternatives. That’s awesome. Sally, we are both going to be at the conference in October 2022. I cannot wait. Can you give us a little preview of some of the things we might see or hear there?

We are always excited about our conferences but I’m especially excited about this one. We have a full slate of speakers. We have some important returns. Tom Cowan will be there, and he’s such a popular speaker. Natasha Campbell-McBride will be there. Our keynote speaker is Catherine Austin Fitts, who has been writing about the financial system and has a very interesting take on why we shouldn’t vaccinate our children, which she will be speaking about at the Awards Banquet. Bill Schindler is going to be a speaker. He runs the Food Lab over on the Eastern Shore. Another talk I’m looking forward to is Christine Muldoon. She’s a board member and speaking on picky eaters. This is something that a lot of parents have to face and deal with are picky eaters.

That’s a problem for a lot of young parents. How do we get food that’s nutrient-dense for these kids who only want to eat macaroni or bread?

It’s a full slate of speakers and plenty of old favorites but lots of news speakers too, that you haven’t heard before. By the way, Greg Nigh will be back. He’s the one who wrote this article, The Devil in the Garlic. If you have questions about what I’ve said and his article, you can ask him directly.

This is one of my favorite things about the conference is that the speakers aren’t cordoned off in a VIP section. They mingle around and share meals with the attendees. It’s a wonderful family feel. You guys go to WiseTraditions.org to sign up. We will see you in October in Knoxville. Thanks for your time, Sally.

Thank you, Hilda. Thanks for having me.

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Our guest was Sally Fallon Morell, the President of the Weston A Price foundation. Check out her blog at NourishingTraditions.com. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com. Now, for a review from Apple Podcast.

One listener had this to say, “After listening to the interview with Emilie Toups, I started buying the Toups balm for faces. I am on my second jar. The product feels so good on my skin. Also, Toups has a sun protection product as well.” Thank you so much for this review. By the way, if you are curious about who has placed ads on the show and what their discount codes are, simply go to the About The Show section of the show on the website, WestonAPrice.org, and you can find it under frequently asked questions the whole list of sponsors and their discount codes. I hope that’s helpful for you. Thank you so much for reading, my friends. Stay well. Remember that all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

About Sally Fallon Morell

Sally Fallon Morell is the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and editor of the Foundation’s quarterly magazine. The Foundation has thirteen thousand members and over three hundred local chapters worldwide. The Foundation has changed the conversation about what constitutes a healthy diet and has stimulated many fine writers to challenge the legitimacy of the low-fat, low-cholesterol paradigm. The Foundation has also alerted the public to the dangers of modern soy products, especially soy infant formula.

Sally is also the author of “Nourishing Traditions.” Her latest book, co-authored with Thomas S. Cowan, MD, is “The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (including “Coronavirus”) Are Not the Cause of Disease.”

In 2009, Sally and her husband Geoffrey Morell embarked on a new venture: they purchased a farm in Southern Maryland. P. A. Bowen Farmstead is a mixed-species, pasture-based farm that produces award-winning artisan raw cheese.

Sally received a Bachelor’s Degree in English with honors from Stanford University, and a Masters Degree in English with high honors from UCLA.

She lives in Brandywine, MD with her husband Geoffrey Morell. She is the mother of four and has four beautiful grandchildren, all brought up according to Nourishing Traditions® principles.