Product Description

This book traces the cause of many chronic health problems to our modern diet and shows how a return to traditional foods can improve one's well-being.

Modern medicine now recognizes that the present-day Western diet is responsible for many of today's chronic illnesses. Nutritionists and anthropologists have noted the decline in health that accompanies indigenous peoples' transition from traditional to modern diets. In Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine, Ron Schmid explains how a return to a traditional diet can help you reduce your risk of heart attack by 50 percent; fight allergies, chronic fatigue, arthritis, skin problems, and headaches; recover from colds and flu in a day or two; and increase your life-expectancy. Chapters focusing on the major food groups, common diets, and health goals enable you to tailor a diet to your special needs.

New edition, previously titled Native Nutrition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123766 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-01
• Released on: 1997-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
A provocative contribution to the debate on what constitutes a healthy diet. It deserves to be widely read. -- The Boston Herald

An excellent, comprehensive book. Dr. Schmid blends the wisdom of traditional eating patterns with modern scientific knowledge. -- Annemarie Colbin, author of Food and Healing

I've reviewed dozens of books on nutrition over the years, but Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine put a lot of things in perspective for me. -- Irene Alleger in The Townsend Letter for Doctors

Review
"A provocative contribution to the debate on what constitutes a healthy diet. It deserves to be widely read."
(The Boston Herald  )

"In our rapidly changing world where technology is king, we have forgotten that native peoples once thrived, disease-free, until the introduction of refined foods into their diets. This is dramatically revealed in Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine. . . . I've reviewed dozens of books on nutrition over the years, but Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine put a lot of things in perspective for me."
(Irene Alleger in The Townsend Letter for Doctors  )

"An excellent, comprehensive book. Dr. Schmid blends the wisdom of traditional eating patterns with modern scientific knowledge."
(Annemarie Colbin, author of Food and Healing )

About the Author
Ronald F. Schmid, N.D., a licensed naturopathic physician and Jungian psychotherapist, is a graduate of M.I.T. and has taught at naturopathic medical schools in Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. He lives in Connecticut and practices in Westport and Greenwich. He is the host of "Just Past High Noon," a radio show about alternative medicine and psychology.

Customer Reviews

Good Book
I am a Registered Dietitian that uses a holistic approach to nutrition and I feel this book is a valuable addition to any nutritionists library. Lacks a bit of detail in research areas, but is a good branch of the Weston Price tree.

Great Compliment to Nourishing Traditions!!
Awesome book on the principles of traditional healing foods. This is a great addition for anyone who wants to learn true nutrition and about the great discoveries by Weston. A Price. I highly recommend it!

good introduction to Traditional nutrition
Schmid's book was the first one I read on the work of Weston A. Price and Francis Pottenger. It is a very good overview of the subject of Tradtional diets. If you are wondering what "Traditional diets" are, they are simply the way people ate before big business took over food production, and made shelf life and profit margin more important than the nutritional quality of food.

Price was a dentist who embarked on a decade long research project in the late 1930s to find the healthiest people on Earth and study what they ate and how they ate it. His studies ranged all over the world, covering all different races. Schmid has done a good job of giving an overview of Price's findings.

The only issues I have with this book are that Schmid falls for the cholesterol scam in discussing heart disease, and that he also falls for the idea that the term "life expectancy" as used in statistics means the average age of death. (page 66) It doesn't. Life Expectancy as an arithmetic average would be reasonably close to the median age of death in a perfect Bell curve population sample, but such perfect samples only exist on paper, not in reality. The median age of death, that is the age by which half of the population died, was 57 in 1900. This means that half the population lived to be 57 or older. Kind of different than saying the average age of death was 45-50. In 2000, the median age of death was only 78, so there hasn't been as much gain as we are led to believe. Neither figure addresses the health or quality of life of people at those ages, either. A minor point in the grand scheme of this book. His discussion of life expectancy differences for those 40 and over on the rest of the page is still very much true and sets the record straight on the PR hype we are given about our current state of health.

For more in-depth information on fats and cholesterol, I recommend Mary Enig's book, Know Your Fats.

This is a great book, and will open your eyes to a better way to eat and improve your health. I heartily recommend it.