Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

This book is my favorite nutrition book. If you want to learn about how the body processes different types of foods and about how to become the healthiest version of yourself read this book!

First of all, this is THE best book on nutrition out there. Get this book. I own three copies: one for my own reference, and two to lend out. It's that good.Deep Nutrition is an easy read, witty and engaging. It reads more like a novel than a nutritional text. You will find yourself turning the pages and wishing for more. It will change the way you look at food forever. It has for us.The main premise is that you can change your life and the lives of your children by following the principles of traditional eating. In a society riddled by adult and childhood health problems, this is good news indeed! For the couple looking to conceive, it means having tools to have a healthy and beautiful child. For both children and adults with current health problems, it means hope for recovery. By eating a traditional diet, we can change how our genes work and how our children's genes work.We can also change the way our children look. Using principles from Stephen Marquardt and from modern scientific research, Catherine Shanahan shows us how beauty is objective, transcending all cultures and races. There is a certain dynamic symmetry that the human brain looks for and recognizes as beautiful. I know this sounds abstract, but the book provides some very convincing pictures. Especially interesting are pictures of siblings showing that the later born siblings have less dynamic symmetry, presumably the result of less optimal maternal nutrition. The latest born siblings have features similar to fetal alcohol syndrome. Could second sibling syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome both be related to maternal malnutrition? See for yourself, but you will not be able to look at facial features the same way again.So what is Deep Nutrition? What is traditional food? It's the food our grandparents and great grandparents grew up eating. It's soups and sauces made from bone stocks and broths, pasture raised meats and organ meats, fish, fresh vegetables, fermented vegetables, raw milk, nature made fats and fruits. Compare this with the modern American diet of frozen dinners, Pop Tarts, Cap'n Crunch, Doritos, Oreos, Gatorade, soy milk, "vegetable" oil, and Coke Zero. Our ancestors would not have recognized these products because they didn't exist until recently. So, how do traditional foods help us? OK. I'm in my 30's and I grew up thinking that soup had to come out of a can or a little envelope full of powder. My husband's mother made homemade chicken soup out of a real chicken, bones and all, for her children as they grew up. My 92 year old father-in-law tells us over and over about how, as a child, his mother made them real homemade chicken soup every Sunday and how they would eat the leftovers all week. He still walks without a cane. People cannot believe that he is 92. My husband is in his 40's and is as strong as he's ever been. He looks to be following in his father's footsteps. I grew up being overweight and plagued by soft tissue injuries, including injuries to the tendons in my arms, a ligament in my knee, and problems with my lower back. I was given an honorary t-shirt at the local physical therapy practice and told I had been there so long that I was considered to be part of the family. After learning that the Deep Nutrition in broths and stocks made from bones contain substances that help the body heal tendons, ligaments and joints, you'd better believe I learned how to make these stocks and broths myself. It's easy, by the way. I now use homemade stock in everything I can. It makes an ordinary meal taste extraordinary, makes delectable sauces and gravies, yummy soups, and my soft tissue injuries are finally healing! Talk about a win, win scenario! Oh yes, that's the other thing. Deeply Nutritious food tastes GREAT! Those little envelopes full of flavored powder that promise to become tasty if you will only add water and heat them up taste nothing like the real food that is Deep Nutrition. Expect to be inspired to spend more time in the kitchen crafting the foods that will craft and heal you and will deeply satisfy you and your family.Deep Nutrition is not a cookbook. It's a unique guidebook to traditional foods - what they are and why we should eat them. Whether you are already experienced in cooking these foods, or like me believed that soup came out of a can or a little packet, Deep Nutrition has something for you. I have not seen such clear explanations in any other book. Much research went into this book, and while scholarly, it is amazingly accessible. Also included are lists of good foods to include in your diet which have the power to transform your health, foods to avoid and why, a list of baby steps to help you change your diet to healthier traditional foods, and even tips on using nutritional know-how to lose weight and stay young. You need this book! While you are at it, just order two. You're going to want to share this with all the important people in your life. Seriously. Happy reading!

This is a book destined to radically alter our view on nutrition. Along with Primal Body, Primal Mind, this book represents the best nutritional information one can currently get in a book. I highly recommend getting these two books together if you want to create the best health you can.One distinguishing characteristic of this book is the incorporation of the breakthrough science of epigenetics in nutrition and health. Combining the recent discoveries in epigenetics with the landmark work of Price and Pottenger, creates the most complete picture of our diet and nutrition available to date.The fact that recent research in many areas of health has vindicated Price's work is an important addition to our health knowledge. This author presents even more of that research in a very powerful synthesis. Taking the information about the dramatically superior health of previous generations and finding scientific grounds for understanding that will go a long way toward undoing the tremendous damage that last 150 years of commercial interference has wrought on our population. This book is a full-on broadside in that battle.As the author (an MD) describes her own struggle to understand her own experience and that of her patients, she also treats the reader to a clear view of the corruption of modern science, the lack of proper nutritional information in our medical schools, and the wisdom of our ancestors, which "modern society" prefers to ignore (at its peril.)She also exposes some of the corrupt junk science which has ruled nutrition for the last 60 years or so, especially taking time to thoroughly document the atrocity of Ancel Keys sloppy pseudo-science, which still rules dietary recommendations of backward and corrupt organizations today. It is high time we call to accountability people like Keys, who have caused more pain and death than Hitler and Stalin combined.She explains how epigenetics shows us that genes are not set in stone, but can be changed by environmental conditions, especially nutrition. All throughout the book, she cites research and gives ample end notes and references.She also goes into detail about proportion and symmetry in biological forms, and introduced me to Marquardt's Mask, a geometrical construct based on the Golden Mean, which formalizes the physical patterns of symmetry and "beauty" in the human face.It is in this research that we find the refutation of the Eugenics crowd, much as Price showed over 50 years ago - genetic expression depends more on environmental conditions than on "racial purity." The idea that malformed poor people are that way because they are racially inferior is now completely shown to be false - it is clear that their genes cannot express properly because of conditions such as poor diet, usually caused by poverty, not the other way around.Another topic she discusses is one of my favorites in which to rub the noses of the mainstream types - the fact that our quality of health has been decreasing over the last 100 years, not increasing. The percentage of the population living to 100 years has been declining over the last 180 years, drastically so in the last 20. This is in direct opposition to the idea that we are living longer, healthier lives today. The figures are usually skewed by the use of "average" life expectancy, which is open to numerous errors in addition to the usual problems with using the arithmetic mean. The median age of death is much more telling than average life expectancy, and those figures don't tell us as much about health as does the dramatic rise in chronic disease striking a greater proportion of the population at ever earlier ages. She cites similar information about height changes.She also discusses birth order and spacing along with nutrition, and its impact on long term health over many generations.All this is in addition to discussing what a really healthy diet looks like, and the science and history behind that. The science vindicates what Weston Price and others like him taught, based on research done around the world at a time when "the disruptive foods of commerce" had not yet had time to destroy many people's health, and there still existed large numbers of truly healthy people to study (no longer the case today).She concludes with great advice on how to adjust one's diet to the greatest advantage, including some meal plan ideas.As I said, along with Primal Mind, Primal Body, this will give you the best grounding in truly healthy nutrition possible today. I would strongly suggest reading both together for the best nutritional information. I also recommend books by Ron Schmid, Mary Enig, Sally Fallon, Bruce Fife, and Uffe Ravnskov.You are responsible for your health today. Doctors are mostly drug pushers, drug companies only want your money, organizations and governments are thoroughly corrupt, and insurance companies only want your money as well. They couldn't care less if you live or die.Learn the facts and take control of your health.

Generally a good read. Questionable science. Strong opinions not all that well backed up. Still working on getting to the end- could be many fewer pages and still would get the point across!