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Home » 3 Diet Changes to Improve Your Health

3 Diet Changes to Improve Your Health

Posted May 18, 2024
in Healthy Living, Podcast, Thrive

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With more and more illnesses and diseases, we have to look at our diets. Here are the top three changes we can make to our diet to drastically improve our health, according to Sally Fallon Morell.

A woman standing beside a counter full of homemade dairy products.

About Sally Fallon

As the author of the best-selling nutritional cookbook Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon Morell is the leading spokesperson for a return to nutrient-dense diets, including raw milk, animal fats, organ meats, bone broths and lacto-fermented foods.

She is the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and a founder of A Campaign for Real Milk. She is also president of NewTrends Publishing, which publishes books on diet and healthy living, including books in the Nourishing Traditions series.

In 2009, she and her husband Geoffrey Morell purchased P. A. Bowen Farmstead, where they produce award-winning artisan raw milk cheese, woodlands pork, and pastured eggs and poultry.

The video interview gets frozen on my end, but you can still see Sally throughout the entire episode. If you’d rather download the podcast and just listen, you can do so below.

Who Is Weston A. Price?

“Dr.Weston A. Price (1870-1948), a Cleveland dentist, has been called the ‘Isaac Newton of Nutrition.’ In his search for the causes of dental decay and physical degeneration that he observed in his dental practice, he turned from test tubes and microscopes to unstudied evidence among human beings. Dr. Price sought the factors responsible for fine teeth among the people who had them – the isolated ‘primitives.’

Price traveled the world over in order to study isolated human groups, including sequestered villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the Indians of South America. Wherever he went, Dr. Price found that beautiful straight teeth, freedom from decay, stalwart bodies, resistance to disease and fine characters were typical of native peoples on their traditional diets, rich in essential food factors.” (Source)

A woman pouring a glass of raw milk into a Mason jar.

Three Changes to Make to Your Diet

Generally speaking, many households are eating a Standard American Diet that recommends a diet based on low-fat, highly processed foods. Sadly, this has led to 66% of American adults relying on prescription medications. (Source)

When speaking with Sally Fallon Morell, she said there are three main changes that can be made to one’s diet that will drastically change their health. Getting your fats right, eating raw dairy and consuming bone broth daily.

This information is based primarily on the findings of Weston A. Price, along with the continued research done by Sally, the Weston A Price Foundation and A Campaign for Real Milk.

A woman scooping fat off the top of a jar of bone broth.

Get Your Fats Right

Back in the 1960s, a low-fat diet started being recommended for high-risk heart patients as a way to improve heart health. By 1980, the low-fat approach was being recommended as good for the whole nation. It was being promoted not only by physicians but the federal government, the food industry and the popular health media. (Source)

Unfortunately, this movement toward a low-fat lifestyle also highlighted a diet filled with industrial seed oils. Sally recommends the exact opposite.

This is why her number one change is to get your fats right. Ditch the highly processed oils, sprays and butter-like substances and instead eat real butter (ideally from grass-fed cows). Beyond butter, she recommends using lard, tallow and poultry fats. Eat the skin on your chicken and make a pan sauce with the fat drippings.

The best way to source high-quality fat is to raise fat sources on your homestead.

A woman with twelve half-gallon jars of milk on the counter in front of her.

Go Raw (With Dairy)

Sally’s second step is to swap out all pasteurized dairy products for raw, grass-fed dairy. Consume raw cheese, raw milk and raw cream.

Sadly, there’s a lot of misguided fear surrounding the dangers of consuming raw dairy products. But what people are forgetting is that dairy, when pasteurized, is heated to a temperature that denatures the proteins in the milk. We’ve seen a rise in dairy allergies linked to milk processing. (Source)

Anecdotally, Sally has even seen an almost immediate reversal of her grandson’s asthma once he switched to raw dairy.

Even worse is ultra-pasteurized dairy, which stays “fresh” much longer than raw or regularly pasteurized milk. Ultra-pasteurized milk (which, according to Sally, makes up 95% of milk on the market) is heated to 284°F, which is way above the boiling point. Some studies show heating the milk to this high of a temperature causes mutagenic and genotoxic changes in the milk. (Source) Since ultra-pasteurization for human milk consumption hasn’t been around very long, it’s impossible to say what long-term side-effects this processing may have.

Essentially, when you drink a glass of pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized milk, you’re consuming foreign proteins with enzymes that have been destroyed, making it impossible for you to absorb the nutrients.

To quote Sally Fallon herself, “Pasteurization destroys the enzymes and carrier proteins needed to absorb calcium, folate, B12, B6, vitamins A and D, iron and many other minerals. To absorb these nutrients in pasteurized milk, the body has to produce its own enzymes, something that takes a lot of energy to do, especially in amounts required to ensure 100 percent assimilation.” (Source)

And finally, the idea that whole milk is causing obesity in children is also a misnomer. In fact, during our podcast conversation, Sally told me that to fatten pigs up, they actually feed them skimmed milk. If they feed their pigs full-fat milk, they won’t fatten up!

Unfortunately, we’re being told this lie to line the pockets of those who benefit from it. The butterfat is the most valuable part of the milk. The food industry has figured out that by removing the butterfat from the milk and making ice cream instead, they can make much more money on the butterfat. They know that Americans will still buy skimmed milk (especially when told it’s healthier), then when the sugar cravings hit in the evening from a lack of satiating fat, they’ll crave ice cream and buy that, too!

A woman holding a spoon of gelled broth with a gallon of broth and an instant pot on the counter in front of her.

Drink Broth Daily

You know, Grandma sure knew what she was doing when she fed us chicken soup when we got sick. Broth that’s allowed to simmer for a long time will contain collagen, proline, glycine and glutamine released from the bones.

It also contains minerals easily absorbed by our bodies, including calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, and sulfur.

Research also shows that bone broth can help with allergies, asthma, and arthritis. Because of the anti-inflammatory properties of bone broth, it’s very useful in building up a strong immune system and helps ward off the cold and flu. (Source)

You can make homemade bone broth from beef, chicken and fish bones. Sally even combines bones from different animals for a variation in flavor.

If you’re not a fan of drinking bone broth straight from a mug, you can get more broth into your diet in many ways. Try cooking your rice in broth instead of water. Make sauces and soups. I do encourage you to give it a try. After Josh visited Sally Fallon in 2023, he’s been drinking a mug of broth every morning.

Not only is it super healthy, but it’s a great source of protein!

And there you have it, Sally Fallon’s recommendations for the top three diet changes that can improve your health.

A woman in an apron standing in the kitchen.

Where to Find Sally

If you’ve never read Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions, I can’t recommend it enough. It changed the way our family looks at food and, in my opinion, has kept our entire family healthy and free from food allergies. Sally also wrote a book called Nourishing Broth, that’s filled with incredible broth recipes as well as soups and sauces.

Find Sally at the following places: