Wise Ways Cooking School

Wise Ways Cooking School helps individuals and families nourish themselves with real traditional foods and traditional foods preparation. We don’t follow the latest trends or fashionable diet plans; instead, our food philosophy is guided by the age-old nutritional wisdom of traditional cultures from around the world and the pioneering work of Dr. Weston A. Price and his study of healthy traditional communities. Dr. Price did not make up a theory of what a healthy diet should be: rather he sought out healthy peoples who had produced healthy children generation after generation and documented the underlying factors that conferred fertility, beauty, strength, and freedom from disease.

Dr. Weston A. Price was a dentist who practiced in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Price was well known and well respected in his day, and widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He was the author of a textbook on dentistry used by the U.S. Navy and served as head of research for the National Dental Association. Over time, Dr. Price became concerned about the increasing number of dental deformities (i.e., crooked teeth) and poor health that he was seeing in his patients, especially children. He also became intrigued by the reports he was hearing about isolated non-industrialized peoples with beautiful teeth and seemingly stellar health.  

In the early 1930s, Dr. Price began traveling the world studying traditional peoples and their diets. In the course of more than ten years, his research took him to isolated Swiss villages, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, indigenous peoples of North and South America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori. In all the places that he visited, Dr. Price found beautiful straight teeth, freedom from tooth decay, good physiques, and resistance to disease among the peoples who only ate their traditional diet of real, unprocessed, and unrefined foods. This was in stark contrast to peoples of the same ethnic background who had started turning away from their traditional diet, instead eating processed and refined foods such as white flour, white rice, jam, canned foods, condensed milk, and sugar. Those who had started eating a modern "civilized" diet had tooth decay and crooked teeth, and suffered from degenerative modern diseases previously unseen in these communities.  

new zealand maori, traditional diet

In his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Price wrote about the nutrient-dense diets of traditional peoples. His research showed that these diets contained vastly more concentrated amounts of vitamins and minerals compared to the American diet of his day. Traditional diets provided at least FOUR times the water-soluble vitamins, calcium, and other minerals, and at least TEN times the fat-soluble vitamins, from animal foods such as butter, fish eggs, shellfish, organ meats, eggs and animal fats – the very foods that are now demonized as unhealthy. Modern science proves what these traditional peoples instinctively knew: the foods which are rich in the fat soluble vitamins A and D are vital to our health because they act as catalysts to mineral absorption and protein utilization.

In every traditional culture that he visited, Dr. Price found that provisions were made to ensure healthy future generations. Every culture had special or “sacred” foods that were reserved for parents-to-be, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and growing children. The foods often included butter, liver, egg yolks, and seafood, especially fish liver and eggs. These “sacred” foods are rich in minerals and fat-soluble vitamins that provide essential nutrients to support conception and a healthy baby.

The work of Dr. Price offers important lessons for our modern lives. In order to be healthy, it's crucial to stop eating processed and refined foods such as sugar, candy, chips, white flour, and other processed foods, and start eating a diet based on real traditional foods, including pasture-raised and grass-fed meat and poultry, wild seafood, healthy fats, eggs from pastured hens, properly prepared whole grains and legumes, and organic vegetables and fruits. Traditional foods made from scratch using time-honored preparations are the clearest path to good health, well-nourished families and children, and strong local sustainable communities.