How to Incorporate Weston Price's Nutritional Principles into Modern Life

The body's default is to heal and thrive. We just have to give it the raw materials to function at peak performance.

This post is part 3 of my Weston Price series. Here’s

Part 1: All My Life I've Wondered What's Wrong with My Immune System

Part 2: Weston Price: In Tireless Pursuit of the Principles of Human Health

Part 4: Anecdotes from Weston Price's Book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Substack hot-tip: if something ever seems wonky in the email, click the title and this will take you to the live web page version where I will have hopefully corrected any mistakes. Sometimes there’s a typo, sometimes there’s a broken link. Whatever the case may be, it will hopefully be correct there. If it’s not, please leave a comment. I don’t make enough income on Substack yet to hire a copy editor so there are a few blips every now and then. Just keeping it real.

How to Put the Principles of Weston Price into Practice

Two weeks ago I outlined how I’m a year into a complete health transformation after implementing Weston Price’s health ideas. Last week, I gave a summary of what Weston Price discovered when he spent ten years traveling the world with his wife to study isolated indigenous groups eating ancestral diets. He found they had incredibly strong bones and teeth and remarkable resistance to disease (I almost just typed susceptibility instead of resistance—like last week 🤣).

Today, I’d like to outline how someone living a modern lifestyle can incorporate more fat soluble vitamins, particularly A, D, and K, into their diet, which was what Price identified as the secret to many isolated people’s resistance to disease and strong teeth and bones.

It would be ideal if we could all have access to that high-vitamin milk, cheese, and butter from those lush Swiss valleys where the cows are eating rapidly-growing green grass rooted in mineral rich soil. But alas, we can’t all move to the Lötschental Valley in Switzerland, as quaint as that would be. (It would no longer be quaint after hoardes moved there.)

So is there any hope for us right where we are?

Well yes. Here are some things any person can do.

Step 1: Cod Liver Oil

This is what Weston Price used for his patients to supply the vitamins that were lacking in modern foods including many dairy products. When the isolated people groups he visited who didn’t have access to dairy, they figured out that they needed either fish livers or the organs of ruminants such as cattle, deer, or elk to get their vitamins.

Price discovered through experimentation that the cod liver oil worked best when combined with concentrated butter oil. This delivers a food form (and therefore highly absorble form) of the MK4 form of vitamin K2 which Price referred to as Activator X (since vitamin K had not yet been officially labeled). When eating cod liver oil with butter oil, you get a potent dose of the three synergistic fat soluble vitamins A, D, and K that are necessary for full immunity. The indigenous tribes had numerous rich foods that supplied vitamin K2 that we are lacking so we need the butter oil.

This Green Pastures brand has products inspired by the work of Weston Price. You can buy a liquid cod liver gel that you drink or a capsule that you swallow.

The reason I like their fermented cod liver oil is that other companies use heat processing to remove the oil from the liver, and this destroys some of the vitamin D. Fermentation is the most gentle extraction method and so preserves the vitamin D. Note that the oil itself is not fermented since oil doesn’t ferment.

Step 2: High Quality Dairy

Buy the highest quality dairy products you can afford. If possible, spend extra to get an organic heavy cream. I’ve noticed the organic brands are more yellowish than the cheaper brands of cream which are bluish white. Also, prioritize the best butter you can afford. I’ve switched to Kerry Gold. Cheese, especially hard cheese such as parmesan, can be rich in vitamins if it comes from a good source.

Get raw milk if possible. We are blessed in that we have a goat farm seven minutes from our house, but you’d be surprised where all you can find it. When I was visiting Los Angeles recently, I found raw cow’s milk at Whole Foods right in the center of the city.

Visit realmilk.com and type in your zip code to find raw milk near you.

Normally raw milk farms give their animals more access to higher quality foods than conventional dairies making the milk more nutritious. Although raw milk is illegal in some states, there are often workarounds. For example in Florida, you can buy raw milk for your pets, and then you can just have super healthy pets. 😉

In Colorado, you are allowed to get raw milk if you have some ownership of the animal. Many farmers set up a system where you own a share of a cow through a monthly fee and then pick up “your own cow’s milk” each week. (The sale of marijuana is legal in CO but not the sale of raw milk? 🤔)

Step 3: Bone Broth and Bone Marrow

Get habits in place for making bone broth a regular part of your life. Start here with my Bone Broth Boot Camp. You can also roast beef bone halves and eat the marrow straight from the bone or mix it in a sauce. Nearly all the indigenous groups used bones, and they made sure that children and women of child-bearing age got plenty of marrow.

Step 4: Eat Animal Organs (You knew it was coming)

You need to figure out a way somehow to get some animal organs into you. Quit taking those poorly absorbed multivitamins—organs are where all the real nutrients are at.

I know that most people will never, ever—not in a box, not with a fox, not in a house, not with a mouse, not on a boat, and certainly not with a goat—sit down to a nice slab of delectable beef liver. (Although all our grandparents used to. I eat it 🫣 but no one else in my family will).

So there are other options.

You can swallow organ capsules. I use a grass-fed source, and we use both plain liver capsules and the combo of organs.

You can also buy something called a beef renegade blend—85% ground beef with 15% ground liver, kidney, and heart mixed in. If you season it by making taco meat, chili, etc, you will not taste a difference. If you are able to buy a quarter or half cow, ask the butcher to grind some organs into your ground beef. When we ordered a local half cow recently, we got all the organs for free since the people purchasing the other half didn’t want any. (Score!)

You can also add freeze-dried beef liver powder to your soups, stews, and sauces. (I have a friend who gave me a big jar of freeze-dried beef liver, and it looks exactly like a hot cocoa mix sitting in our pantry. 🤣 BTW, I have some pretty great friends who are as crunchy as I am, if you can believe it. We once got together and filled empty gel capsules with our freeze-dried liver powder for fun 🤣. You might think that living in northern Idaho is dull but you have no idea of the fun we have LARPing Weston Price’s isolated tribes.)

Step 5: Free Range Eggs

Make an effort to get local eggs from a place where you know the chickens can do some grazing most of the year. The problem with store-bought eggs that claim to be free range is that a company can put that on the label if there are hundreds of chickens that have access to only a one-foot-by-one-foot area of dirt or gravel for only a few minutes a day.

I noticed that my local eggs have varying colored yolks, some brighter orange than others. But when I buy “free range” eggs from the store, the yolks are all the exact same bright orange color. Farmers can put dyes in the feed to make the yolks darker orange, and because the yolks are all the exact same color orange, I’m afraid that’s what’s happening.

What Is a Loading Phase?

Whether you’re completely depleted of fat soluble vitamins or have just been slightly low for years or decades, you may need a loading phase. The signs that you’re low are cavities, frequent viruses or illnesses, low energy, and any kind of autoimmunity or allergies.

Researcher Dr. Chris Masterjohn explains in this post New Evidence of Synergy Between Vitamins A and D: Protection Against Autoimmune Diseases how adequate amounts of vitamin A keep a fighter T cell from becoming a hostile Th17 autoimmune cell. I want to discuss this topic in a later post because Masterjohn’s work can be difficult to follow since he goes so in depth into the biochemistry. But I love taking this kind of research and making it so the common person can follow it.

In the loading phase, you probably need to take cod liver oil with butter oil every day for a few months. I know it’s expensive. But keep in mind how expensive healthcare is. Do you have a $50 copay to see the doctor? If so, an ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure.

My migraine medication copay (that I no longer need) was $50/month, and my husband’s Prilosec (which he’s no longer on) was close to that. His company’s healthcare premium for their low deductible plan costs $1200/month for a family. But since we’re so healthy now, we pay $200/month instead for the high deductible plan. We save $1000/month on health insurance premiums since we took back our health. It makes cod liver oil not seem so expensive.

For those who get their health under control but don’t have the low-cost cost high deductible option we have, you can always consider health-sharing options such as Samaritan’s Ministry. These companies operate similarly to high deductible plans but keep in mind they do have pre-existing condition exclusions.

I call this a loading phase because you may not need to take cod liver oil daily for life (although it wouldn’t hurt since we know from Price’s data that the people groups ate this way their whole lives.) Since even raw local milk is not going to be as vitamin-rich as it could be, we likely need the cod liver oil to make up for deficiencies. I plan to do the higher-quality dairy and eggs for life, but I may eventually scale back on the cod liver oil.

The incredible thing about fat-soluble vitamins is that they are stored within the body for times of distress. But that’s why a loading phase is so important—you need to load up while healthy. Keep in mind that the more often you get sick with a virus, the more the fat soluble vitamins get drained fighting it off. Most people who fought off multiple rounds of COVID are likely depleted.

When I used to have cold and flu viruses continually, I’d always hope after a severe one that I’d have some immunity for awhile. But it never seemed to work that way. The more often I was sick, the more likely it seemed that I would catch the next thing going around.

Keep in mind that you may not see drastic changes in your immunity for several months. It takes time for your body to replenish its stores of vitamins. When you start noticing that you can be around people who are sneezing, coughing, sore throats and you’re not catching it, you’ll know you’re on the mend. But keep going for a while longer with the regimen.

About Vitamin A Toxicity

Many people are concerned about vitamin A toxicity but this is only a problem when you are supplementing in pill form and not food form. Furthermore, the body expects the three fat-soluble vitamins to come as a package so supplementing with just one, such as vitamin A alone, is never as effective at raising immunity as taking all three together. Toxicity can happen when you supplement one in isolation of the other two but consuming them together protects from toxicity.

In this article, Masterjohn explains a study showing how toxicity happens when vitamins are given in isolation but not when taken together:

Irwin G. Spiesman published a trial showing that massive doses of vitamins A and D caused toxicity when either vitamin was provided alone and failed to protect against the common cold. When massive doses of both vitamins were provided together, by contrast, they failed to induce any toxicity and offered powerful protection against the common cold.¹⁸

Spiesman’s original research (linked here in JAMA) says:

During their various studies of the clinical use of massive doses of vitamin D, Reed and associates¹ noted that many patients receiving large doses of vitamin A and vitamin D claimed that both the incidence and the severity of their colds were appreciably reduced. No accurate statistics were kept, but it appeared to them that only those subjects receiving both vitamins were thus benefited.

This observation was not surprising since many investigators have noted great reduction in the incidence of colds and respiratory infections through the use of fairly liberal quantities of cod liver oil. Holmes and his colleagues,² for example, reviewed the subject and showed a reduction of about two thirds in the average "lost time" of industrial workers due to colds and respiratory diseases when cod liver oil was furnished. In general Holmes felt that the reduction in colds was due to the vitamin A content.

Cod liver oil has dramatically reduced my incidence of colds and flus. It costs money but so do cold medicines, cough drops, doctors visits, and time off work.

For more on vitamin A and immunity, see this article from the Weston Price Foundation.

Here are some quotes to get you started:

“Illnesses actually use up one’s vitamin A in the process of combatting the disease.”

“The more vitamin A you have, the more natural killer cells you have, and the better they work. Natural kill­er cells are a type of lymphocyte that provides protection against viral infections and cancer. With adequate vitamin A, they can work within three days to destroy targeted cells, including cancer cells.”

“Vitamin A increases the number of B-cells by supporting their maturation and their survival. This is essential for production of all the antibodies. It helps you convert T-cells into T-regulatory cells. These T-regs activate B-cells. Vitamin A induces gut homing, which helps your T-cells know it is time to go to the gut and take care of business there.”

Lastly, consider picking up a copy of Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook inspired by the research of Weston Price. The author, Sally Fallon, is president of the Weston Price Foundation.

This cookbook not only has great recipes to get you started on the living the lifestyle, it also has informative side bars about health and nutrition. It’s basically an encyclopedia for health living. I can’t think of a more important cookbook.

Until next week, do some healing fasting followed by some healing feasting!

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice or to treat, diagnose, or cure a medical disease. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes or starting fasting, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]

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