What to Know About Raw Milk, Seed Oils, and the Food Pyramid | Sally Fallon Morell

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell.

For decades, Morell has led a grassroots movement to see healthy foods in every household in America.

“You need to get in the kitchen. [It] doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitchen and learn how to produce healthy food for your family,” she says.

In this episode, she explains what’s wrong with our modern diet and calls for a return to traditional, nutrient-dense foods for better health.

“Animal fats are good for you. They’re not going to give you heart disease. Quite the opposite—they’re very stable, and they support good health. They support heart health,” Morell says. “Our mission is to bring people back to these foods, to get people to eat butter again, whole milk. By the way, egg yolks are a sacred food as well, very rich in nutrients and fat-soluble activators.”

Morell is the President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of, “Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Sally Fallon Morell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Ms. Morell:

Thank you, Jan. I’m very pleased to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

So not too long ago, I had never heard about any issue with seed oils. Today, we’re constantly hearing about seed oils and potential problems with them. And it turns out that you had something to do with this, your work. So what’s going on with seed oils?

Ms. Morell:

Yes, one of our founders was Mary Enig, a lipid scientist who had been beating the drum about the dangers of seed oils ever since she got her Ph.D. And she had done research on them. She did a lot of work on trans fats, which, by the way, led to their being banned from the food supply. But the liquid oils and the sort of thickened liquid oils that we get in spreads, they’re still here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why should we be concerned about seed oils?

Ms. Morell:

Animal fats are expensive, and the food industry needs a cheap oil. And this started in the 1890s when they developed the stainless steel press, which allowed them to get oil out of seeds that they couldn’t do before. So the first one was cottonseed oil. And then they could get oil out of corn, which had never been done before. And then canola, which is rapeseed, and soybeans. So they started using these instead of animal fats. And they had a big campaign to make you think that these seed oils were a healthy alternative to animal fats. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But they’re not somehow? 

Ms. Morell:

No, they’re not. The problem with the oils is that they’re fragile. Any liquid oil is fragile, and it oxidizes easily, and it breaks down in the body into simple molecules called aldehydes. Not to get too technical, but there is an aldehyde that you know about. It’s called formaldehyde. 

And I think it’s very interesting that the undertakers are saying they don’t need as much formaldehyde anymore to cure or preserve these bodies. It’s already there, and this is coming from the seed oils. They have been implicated; they’re carcinogenic. They know that they have been implicated in heart disease and many other conditions, and infertility is another thing that they lead to. These things are ubiquitous. They are everywhere.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, so you don’t, I’d never heard anything about, like, why would you have something that’s known carcinogenic? Like, this doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense to most people, so we have to kind of back up a little bit, right? 

Ms. Morell:

Follow the money. I mean, it’s much less expensive to use soybean oil or corn oil than butter. Butter is a very expensive fat, or lard or tallow. Those are the three main ones. And then there’s also what I call the fruit oils: just palm oil, coconut oil, and palm kernel oil. These are much healthier than the seed oils because they’re more saturated. And you know the saturated fats have been demonized, but the saturated fats are the good fats. They’re the stable fats that don’t break down. And the fats that traditional people prized and always made sure they ate with their food.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, I’m thinking back to growing up in the 80s. We were literally taught the exact opposite thing, right? That margarine is better. It’s like as a society, we agreed to believe this.

Ms. Morell:

It was a tremendous marketing campaign, starting with Crisco, which means crystallized cottonseed oil, and it was a partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. This was pushed relentlessly, starting with a book called The Story of Crisco, in which they said that American housewives, if they used Crisco instead of lard, they were more modern, their houses would smell better, they were cleaner, they had a cleaner house, and their children would have better character if they used Crisco instead of lard. I mean, it was a brilliant advertising campaign. And that book, The Story of Crisco, is still used in classes on advertising today. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the evidence that, and we’re saying this kind of broadly, seed oils that have all these problems that you’re talking about? What is the evidence base for that? 

Ms. Morell:

There is a lot of evidence. I talk, I give it all in my book, Nourishing Fats. But, for example, in the early days, and this is about the time you were going to school in the 1980s, they gave animals a carcinogen, and one group was fed saturated fat, and one group was fed unsaturated fat, like a seed oil. And the ones who were fed saturated fat did not get cancer, and the ones who were fed the seed oils did get cancer. So there were a lot of studies like that. There were several groups in the country who were doing these studies, but you never hear about them. But they’re there; they’re right in the literature. 

Mr. Jekielek:

What about, you know, actually I think my favorite oil, olive oil, how does that fit into the picture? That’s ancient, right? 

Ms. Morell:

Yes, olive oil is a fruit oil, and it’s easy to get out of the olive with a stone press, so you don’t have to heat it to remove it. And as soon as it comes out of the olive, it smells good and tastes good. Olive oil is also very stable. It’s not saturated, but it’s monounsaturated, which is just about as stable as saturated fat. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So really, it all comes down to, just going back to what you said earlier, it’s about the stability of the oil, ultimately.

Ms. Morell:

Exactly. And in the seeds, it’s tightly held in there. When you eat the seed, it hasn’t oxidized. But when you crush these seeds with a stainless steel roller press, you get this polyunsaturated oil. And by the way, what comes out of the seeds is a foul-smelling gunk that has to be further processed, heated very hot several times. And remember, these oils are fragile, and then when you get the oil in the bottle, you’re told it’s okay to cook with it. So you’re heating it again.

Mr. Jekielek:

Then you would distinguish between what they call extra virgin, which is this cold-pressed olive oil, and the hot-pressed, which is still more common, I think.

Ms. Morell:

Yes. You do want the extra virgin; you want the cold-pressed.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it’s always the least processed thing. That’s what we’re going for here.

Ms. Morell:

And I would say the most traditional thing. Palm oil is traditional in Africa. Coconut oil is traditional in the tropical regions. And olive oil is traditional in the Mediterranean. Mankind has used these oils for thousands and thousands of years. And they’re still here. So it hasn’t wiped them out, you know. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s this huge focus on looking at traditional ways, but give me a sense of where this whole idea came from. This has been around for quite some time. And for full disclosure, I only heard of it for the first time about six months ago when we met at an event. 

Ms. Morell:

The Weston A. Price Foundation was set up to honor and disseminate the work of Weston Price, a dentist who had this unique idea back in the 30s and 40s to study isolated people. He called them primitive people, and that was a compliment. He was not trying to put them down. And to see what their health was like and if he could find healthy people, especially people with healthy teeth—he was a dentist—what were they eating? 

He found 14 groups throughout the world who had perfect teeth, no cavities, no infection, and very broad faces so their teeth were naturally straight. Nobody needed braces. And along with this, they seemed to be perfectly healthy, no degenerative disease. The other thing that was noticed at the time was how easily the women had their babies. 

So he found 14 groups, and then the question was, what were these people eating? Now, the diets were very different. You had Alaska and you had the South Seas. But there were some commonalities. And the real commonality was these diets were very high in minerals and particularly high in what we call the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K. 

And where do we get these fat-soluble vitamins? We get them from animal fats. We get them from organ meats. We get them from shellfish and certain seafoods. These are what we call the sacred foods and they were highly prized, especially prized for having healthy babies. 

And so our mission is to bring people back to these foods to get people to eat butter again, whole milk. By the way, egg yolks are a sacred food as well, very rich in nutrients and fat-soluble activators. So it’s going back to the type of diet that nourished obviously healthy people. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Did people traditionally really have better health? Right now we have a life expectancy that has been starting to come down in the U.S., but for the longest time it’s been going up.

Ms. Morell:

Two things going on here. First of all, in the 1700s and 1800s, life in the cities was filthy. You had piles of stinking horse manure everywhere. No sewage, no water treatment, no refrigeration. And the lifespan, the death rate of children up to the age of five was 50 percent. So that’s a factor that brought the longevity down. 

But if you were raised in the country on real food, raw milk, and ate butter, which all Americans did, that we did have a long lifespan. And among these traditional people, although we don’t know the lifespan, nobody was keeping records, but there were elders in every community and they played a very important role in these communities. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and also you had a higher likelihood of, you know, dying due to accidents or, you know, carnivore attack or something. Carnivore attack,

Ms. Morell:

Yes. It was a dangerous, dangerous lifestyle, especially for the men. They took great care about having children. They spaced their babies so they were three years apart. They had special foods to prepare them for pregnancy. And Price did not observe any infant mortality, actually.

Mr. Jekielek:

Basically, you’re saying there’s a side effect of civilization, so to speak, or certain ways in which it manifested which became really bad for people, which of course we know is true in these types of scenarios you were describing. 

Ms. Morell:

With their introduction to the West—what did the West bring them? They brought alcohol, sugar, white flour, and tea, and all of these things they gobbled up immediately. They tasted so different. And what he observed was in the first generation of eating these foods of commerce, as he called them, the first thing that happened was rampant tooth decay, causing a tremendous amount of suffering because the foods had gotten there, but not the dentists. And then the second generation—it took just one generation—and the children born looked different. They had more narrow faces and less space in the sinus passages.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because he was watching the teeth very closely, right?

Ms. Morell:

And the teeth were crooked. They were crooked and crowded. And that’s when TB [Tuberculosis] came along. He thought that TB was due to a malformation of the lungs. The lungs hadn’t been formed properly, just like the mouth hadn’t been formed properly.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. And so, has there been further work done to look at this?

Ms. Morell:

Nobody really followed Dr. Price. There were a few doctors who did implement his diet. One was Dr. Pottenger in California, who wrote a very interesting book. He did studies with cats, and he noted that in cats, if you give them a diet that’s not the appropriate diet for cats, you get degeneration for three generations, and then the fourth generation, there are no more cats. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So there’s a fertility effect, basically. 

Ms. Morell:

By the third generation, and that’s where we are here. And what are we seeing? We’re seeing a decline in fertility. We believe we’re at the 11th hour, and we’re highly motivated to bring our message to prospective parents so they can feed these nutrient-dense foods to themselves to prepare for pregnancy and then to their children as they grow.

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is really important, actually, because I think I see the argument now. The argument is basically that in earlier civilizations or earlier, you know, what Weston Price called, you know, kind of primitive living groups, so to speak, people ate as well as possible. Then they figured out, given what was available, that would maximize their ability to have children. That was, you know, probably one of the most important things you could actually do.

Ms. Morell:

When they killed an animal, the first thing they did was eat the organ meats. The organ meats are 100, even 1,000 times more nutritious than the muscle meats. And then they ate the muscle meats. They always ate muscle meats with the fat; they never ate lean meat. And we do have a scientific reason for that. 

The plant foods were there. In almost every diet, there were plant foods, carbohydrate foods. It’s not like we’re saying don’t eat vegetables or don’t eat sweet potatoes. But the animal foods were primary, and they were the chief source of nutrition.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. What about you? What is your backstory here? I mean, how did you get involved in working with the foundation?

Ms. Morell:

I came from an interesting family. I would say my parents were probably the first foodies in the world. They were very interested in food, and they traveled a lot. My mother was a great cook, so she’d come home and make cassoulet or filet of sole meuniere. She always used butter, and I’m very grateful. We grew up on butter. 

I had a daughter who was a beautiful little girl, and that’s when this message started to come out. Don’t give your kids whole milk, and don’t give them butter, and don’t give them eggs; give them cereal, not eggs. And I knew that this was wrong. I felt it inside. And it was just around that time I read Dr. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. And it just showed me that I was on the right path. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You mentioned raw milk earlier. You know this has become such an amazingly controversial thing, and I’ll tell you something about when I grew up, right? My mother actually had been an agricultural inspector in Poland, and the sanitation was not good. For her, if milk was not pasteurized, that was, you know, a death knell. That’s kind of what I grew up with. Okay, I still remember, I’m going to tell the story. 

I was in France. I had made a deal with a woman who lived in Paris to help her out in her summer cottage, and I would get to stay and sort of, you know, check out the countryside. She took me to a farm, and, you know, I tried raw milk, but I almost didn’t because I said, wait, wait, you can’t just drink it straight. You remember what your mother said: you can’t drink it straight from the cow. And she’s like, are you crazy? Anyway, so apparently in the French countryside, it was a perfectly normal thing to do. But why is raw milk so controversial?

Ms. Morell:

We know a lot more about milk today than we did in the 1960s, let’s say, where it was just assumed to be dangerous and full of germs. We now know that there’s a large number of antimicrobial compounds in raw milk that kill pathogens but support the growth of the good guys in the gut. These components protect the gut wall, and we just keep finding these wonderful things in raw milk. And they’re all destroyed by pasteurization. 

What happens in pasteurization, we now know, is that the proteins are so warped and distorted that they become allergenic. So more and more people are allergic to milk. It’s the number one allergy. Consumption of pasteurized milk is relentlessly declining in spite of all the publicity campaigns, the milk mustache campaign and everything. Because it makes the kids have a tummy ache or makes them break out in a rash.

The other thing about raw milk is that every single vitamin and mineral in the milk has a special enzyme to ensure a hundred percent assimilation, and we don’t have that in any other food. So 100 percent of the iron, 100 percent of the calcium, 100 percent of the B1, they’re all absorbed and nourish the infant. I wish someone would do a study comparing our Weston Price babies brought up on raw milk and babies brought up on pasteurized milk. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I heard from the NIH director that they’re looking to do all sorts of studies these days on health. So maybe you could make a proposal, perhaps. 

Ms. Morell:

I would love to. But what we have done at the Weston A. Price Foundation is work on the state level to liberalize the laws. When we started, only 27 states could farmers provide raw milk in some form or another. Now it’s 47 states. So we’re just lacking three states now. And there’s what I call the Amish Empire. The Amish are taking raw milk all over the country. It’s wonderful.

Mr. Jekielek:

So tell me about your relationship. Because this is exactly what I was thinking. When I think of raw milk, I think of Amish production. And so what’s the connection? Does every Amish person know about the Weston A. Price Foundation?

Ms. Morell:

No, they don’t. But I would say the Pennsylvania Amish started this delivery system, and it just grew and grew, and I think this is why it’s actually been legalized in many states because it was there anyway. When we got the first pet milk permit in the state of Maryland, there was already pet milk in Maryland from Pennsylvania. 

What does that mean? That means it has to have a label on it. It says it’s for dogs and cats, kind of a little loophole. I said, look, you’re allowing Pennsylvania farmers to sell this milk in Maryland, but you’re not letting a Maryland farmer do this. And so they had to. They had to give us the permit. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I see. And so you’re saying it’s pet milk, but if someone happens to drink the pet milk, that’s up to them. Yeah, it’s up to them.

Ms. Morell:

I see. And I have to say, Jan, I am a big advocate for strict cleanliness in the dairy. We can teach farmers how to produce milk. We get zero coliform when we test it. So our milk is clean, as clean or cleaner than pasteurized.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now you’re saying ours—I mean, like milk that you are producing on your farm?

Ms. Morell:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So tell me about that, too. 

Ms. Morell:

For my husband and I, this is our folly of buying this beautiful little farm. We have a small dairy herd. We produce raw cheese. And somewhere along the line, I was able to get the pet milk permit.

Mr. Jekielek:

But I guess refrigeration is an important component here. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, absolutely. Because even if your milk starts off clean, if it’s not refrigerated, it will ferment. By the way, when raw milk goes off, shall we say, it ferments. It actually becomes safer because it becomes more acidic. But when pasteurized milk goes off, it rots, and that is not safe. So in many ways, raw milk is actually safer than pasteurized milk.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’ve covered at the Epoch Times a number of controversies, I think, about raw milk in Pennsylvania, the Amish communities. People have been threatened even with jail for this kind of thing. Why is that? 

Ms. Morell:

It’s so foreign to the health departments, and they think they’re protecting the public. And I’m not criticizing anybody; they’ve just had the wrong education. They haven’t kept up with the science. But nothing gets the dander up of the public more than going after raw milk because you have what I call the raw milk moms who see how healthy their children are on this product, and they get out there. They get on the phone. They protest. They go to the trials.

Mr. Jekielek:

And I guess this raw milk—you’re talking about cow’s milk here. I guess it’s because it’s close to human mother’s milk. 

Ms. Morell:

All mammals produce milk, and it’s all close to human milk. Some milk has more fat. Camel’s milk has more salt in it, which is kind of interesting. But all over the world, mankind has nourished themselves with the milk of mammals: cows, goats, sheep, camels, water buffalo, reindeer. And the cultures that have herds are at an advantage because they always have this healthy food available.

Mr. Jekielek:

Which has this unbelievable absorption that you described that I didn’t know about. And so you’re saying all milk basically functions like that. 

Ms. Morell:

Yes. I prefer cow’s milk to goat milk because it’s richer in B12 and B6, but some people find that goat milk is easier to digest. So everyone is different. 

Mr. Jekielek:

At Weston A. Price, you do advocacy for raw milk, obviously. And you know, that’s part of your own interest as well. What other work do you do, and of course, there’s the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, which I know many people have been using, but it’s become incredibly popular.

Ms. Morell:

It came out in 1996, and my co-author Mary Enig and I felt that we needed something else to look at the science to keep this in front of people all the time. So we set up the Weston A. Price Foundation, which publishes a journal. So our number one role is education. But we also do advocacy. 

It’s not just telling people about the good foods; it’s helping them find these good foods. Because let’s face it, you can’t look in a newspaper and find raw milk, you know. So we set up a website, realmilk.com, to help people find raw milk. And then we have over 400 local chapters who keep a local food list.

So let’s just say you move to Alameda, California, and you want to find raw milk; you call your local chapter, and they’ll tell you where it is. Or you want to find pastured eggs or some kind of food delivery group or whatever. The local chapter will help you find that. 

A lot of people think we’re sort of this homesteading movement, but I have to always correct that. Not many people can afford the luxury of being homesteaders. What I’m concerned about is getting these foods to the single mom living in an apartment in Brooklyn. This is the group that we need to meet, and this is what we’re trying to do. 

Mr. Jekielek:

This is a great point. How available is it in situations like that? 

Ms. Morell:

It depends. You hear about food deserts, for example. We do have a lot of deliveries. I believe there was a delivery in Brooklyn to a church basement for a while. I’m not quite sure what’s going on now, but there’s definitely food deliveries all over the country. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And so it’s realmilk.com where people who are interested can visit. Presumably, if you’re not convinced, you’re watching this and you’re like, I don’t know about this raw milk thing. This lady’s crazy. Well, not quite. But I feel like I really want to read the science. Is that on realmilk.com? Do you have that information provided? 

Ms. Morell:

Absolutely. We have a lot of articles about the science. Ted Beals, who did some great epidemiology for us, has articles there.

Mr. Jekielek:

So pretty much all your questions about milk will be on the website. Fantastic. What are the sort of biggest lessons? One lesson I just got is that raw milk is good; it’s healthy, and you know, as long as it’s refrigerated. But what would other sort of top-line lessons that we could learn from?

Ms. Morell:

Animal fats are good for you. They’re not going to give you heart disease. Quite the opposite; they’re very stable, and they support good health; they support heart health.

Mr. Jekielek:

And where did that idea come from? I mean, I started learning this maybe a decade ago that this was wrong, or maybe even a little more than that. 

Ms. Morell:

You’re going to promote your product, which is vegetable oils, and the way it’s done is you demonize the competition. What’s the competition? It’s animal fats, butter, and lard especially. So how are you going to demonize butter and lard? 

Well, you’re going to pick things that are in butter and lard that are not in vegetable oils: saturated fats and cholesterol, and you’re going to make those into a villain. And that’s exactly what they did. I have written extensively on this, showing how the early science they used to justify the demonization of the fats that had kept us healthy for thousands of years was just very flimsy science.

Mr. Jekielek:

As we’re filming, we’re kind of days away from an initial report on, you know, tackling chronic disease, right, from HHS, going to come out on the 22nd. This is all your answer here, right?

Ms. Morell:

Yes, it’s to go back to the foods that didn’t give us chronic disease, that kept us from having chronic disease. These traditional people who were eating liver and raw milk and animal fats, they didn’t have heart disease. They didn’t have cancer. Dr. Price talked to a doctor who’d been among the Eskimos for 40 years. He said he never saw a case of cancer or heart disease or kidney trouble or anything. And these people who were eating their traditional diet—80 percent of their calories were animal fat—and he had never seen any chronic disease.

Mr. Jekielek:

So raw milk is good. Animal fats are good.

Ms. Morell:

The other big campaign that we’ve had is about soy and the problems with soy. Not just the soybean oil, but the soy protein that they’re putting in all the foods—all the fake foods made out of soy. Soy, first of all, is very difficult to digest. It has enzyme inhibitors in it that depress pancreatic function. Very difficult to digest. It’s also a goitrogen. It’s hard on the thyroid gland; it depresses thyroid function. And the third thing is soy contains plant types of estrogens. 

We had a very terrible experiment take place in the prisons in Illinois. We corresponded with a lot of these prisoners. And when Blagojevich became governor, he wanted to reduce the budget, so they served the whole diet with soy: fake soy meat, soy in the baked goods, you know, soybean oil. And what happened was tremendous health problems occurred, especially thyroid problems. The men grew breasts. They called it chemical castration, actually, is what happened to these men. 

And when they got out, they were so sick that they had to go on disability. Now, they finally stopped because—and I don’t think it was really because of our efforts, but because it just got too expensive to deal with the health problems associated with that diet. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, there are millions, if not billions, of people that are eating tofu daily. Frankly, they seem to be in better health in some cases.

Ms. Morell:

We hear from the ones who get really sick. But you have to distinguish between soy consumption in Asia today, which is much higher than it was traditionally. Traditionally, it was about a tablespoon in Japan per day, usually tofu cut in little cubes in the fish broth, and the fish broth supports thyroid health, so they kind of balanced each other out. And then in China, it was about a teaspoon a day as a flavoring, as a sauce. So it wasn’t a source of protein in these diets.

The main source of calories in the traditional Chinese diet was pork, and the main source of calories in the traditional Japanese diet was fish. It wasn’t soybeans. The soybean industry blames us for killing their big campaign to get everybody eating soy.

Mr. Jekielek:

Any other kind of top line?

Ms. Morell:

Another one is salt. Traditional cultures all had a source of salt they valued. Salt consumption in America at the turn of the century was about three teaspoons a day, with very little heart disease. Now it’s a teaspoon and a half a day, which does satisfy our requirements for sodium and chlorine, but they want to cut this in half. We need salt. And by the way, babies need salt for the growth of their brains and for all sorts of things, for hormone production. You need salt for hormone production. So salt is basic; it’s very important. We need salt in the diet. And that’s been another campaign that we’ve carried out.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m very happy to hear that because I always feel that food is under-salted. 

Ms. Morell:

There is a reason we can taste for salt. The creator didn’t put that there to torture you, but because we need to put salt on our food. The chloride part of salt is what we make hydrochloric acid with in the stomach. We could not digest protein without salt. The sodium part activates enzymes for carbohydrate digestion. So salt is essential for digestion.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and then there’s this whole other dimension that when you’re eating these, you know, ultra-processed foods, which of course you’ve just made the case, you know, are going to be high in these seed oils and other things, that also changes how you feel hunger. It changes a lot of things, right? It kind of deregulates you somehow?

Ms. Morell:

This industry is very good at addiction technology, making you want more. They have things that stimulate the taste buds, then one that hasn’t been studied at all is the fake salt that’s being put into the processed food. It’s called simonix. It’s not labeled. All they have to do is call it an artificial flavor. It’s in everything, Jan. It’s in soft drinks. It’s in chips. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Why is it fake salt? What does that mean?

Ms. Morell:

It stimulates a salt taste in your mouth, but it doesn’t give you the salt that you need. And the obvious thing that’s going to happen is more obesity because your body really needs salt. And people will just eat and eat and eat until they get the salt they need. They have to eat twice as much to get the salt they need if they’re putting this artificial salt flavor in. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So I’m thinking back to, there was this South Park episode a while back where the kids call up the, I think it’s the FDA, and they’re like, it’s an emergency. The food pyramid is inverted. I forget exactly. It’s a very kind of a funny moment. But is that the case?

Ms. Morell:

The food pyramid came out, and it’s actually the USDA that put this out. And it put the carbohydrates at the base, white flour. And of course, they give lip service to whole grains. But what happens is people eat a lot more white flour, which is kind of an empty food. It gave Americans the green light to eat all the carbohydrates they want. 

And we do need carbs in our diet, but not to the extent that we’re eating them. And the idea was that this was going to curb disease, curb obesity. But obesity rates have tripled since the food pyramid came out. Then at the very top, they have fats and oils. 

Well, I think the oils should be minimized. I agree with that. But the thing is, the oils are hidden in the food. You don’t know they’re there. But you know when you put butter on your vegetables, you see the butter. So it’s very mendacious, this whole thing.

The thing about fats, Jan, is that they’re satisfying. And you don’t get hungry as quickly when you eat a lot of fat. So you end up eating less. And when you don’t get the fats, let’s just say you eat a pastry with sugar and white flour, you’re going to get a big spike in blood sugar and then a precipitous drop, we call that the blood sugar roller coaster, and then you’re ravenously hungry again and you have to go out and eat something else. 

Whereas, if you eat a breakfast with eggs and bacon and toast with lots of butter on it, you’re not going to be hungry till one o’clock in the afternoon. You don’t need to go to the vending machine.

Mr. Jekielek:

I read something in some of your materials about politically correct nutrition.

Ms. Morell:

That’s the USDA food pyramid. Lots of carbs, a little bit of lean meat, skinless chicken breasts, which are disgusting, and no butter. And if you drink milk, it’s got to be pasteurized skim milk.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why is that called politically correct nutrition?

Ms. Morell:

That’s what the USDA is pushing on us with the food pyramid, except what they’re not telling you is there’s a lot of seed oil in there, but it’s hidden, hidden in the food.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what do you want to see happen with the USDA, the FDA? What are your hopes here?

Ms. Morell:

Jan, I don’t think it’s going to come from the government. It’s got to be individual parents, individual families. The children today are not healthy. We all know this. One in two has some kind of disorder. We’re seeing autism in up to one in ten children and it just, it can’t go on. 

So with all the possible educational materials we can give them, with support from our chapter leaders, we’ve made raw milk available, we’ve taught people about taking cod liver oil, which is another big issue with us, very important, and we’re there when people are ready.

Mr. Jekielek:

But wouldn’t you want, let’s say, the government messaging to change based on everything you told me? 

Ms. Morell:

Of course I would, but I’m a realist. I don’t think it’s going to happen, not in our lifetimes. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Why do you say that? 

Ms. Morell:

There’s too much money riding on what we’ve got today. There’s too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food, without the seed oils.

Mr. Jekielek:

You have a very dark view of the whole food industry, in other words.

Ms. Morell:

Yes, but I don’t think that’s where we should look. You need to get in the kitchen. And it doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitchen and learn how to produce healthy food for your family.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re speaking to my own, sort of my own inclinations, as always the bottom-up approach is the one that’s going to change things.

Ms. Morell:

We’re definitely grassroots. It’s got to come from the bottom. We have something called the Healthy Baby Gallery. We publish photographs of healthy babies. Parents have followed our suggestions.

Mr. Jekielek:

I guess when it comes to this crisis in fertility, which of course is very real, it’s not just about diet. There are environmental pollutants. There’s, you know, the kind of medicines people are taking. There’s injectables, you know, and so on. And there’s fluoride in the water. There’s fluoride in the water. There’s all sorts of things. I mean, this is presumably what, you know, it seems like this current U.S. administration is interested in figuring out some of these things. 

Ms. Morell:

That’s all good, but when you’re well-nourished, you can deal with a lot of these things. Traditional people, it’s kind of a myth that they lived in this pristine environment. They were breathing smoke all the time. They had smoke in their huts and their teepees. They wanted to be around smoke because it kept the mosquitoes away. 

And smoke is a deadly pollutant, but they had no lung disease, no fertility problems, nothing. And that’s because the diets were extremely rich in vitamin A, which they got from the liver and the animal fats. And vitamin A is our number one protection against toxins. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Sally, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. Thanks for coming to visit us. I’m excited to try the raw cheese that you brought. I’m a huge cheese fanatic in general, but a final thought as we finish? 

Ms. Morell:

Yes. There’s a lot of diets out there. There’s the pyramid diet, which people are realizing is not healthy. And there’s all these dietary schemes, there’s paleo, and there’s keto and all this. But our diet is, you don’t have to give anything up on our diet. It’s really delicious. 

You can have naturally sweetened desserts, we have healthy soft drinks like kombucha. We have gravy and sauces. I always like to stress that it’s not renunciation. It’s just different, different. It means that you have to think about what you’re creating and what you’re putting in your mouth.

Mr. Jekielek:

Sally Fallon Morell, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Morell:

Thank you so much. I was happy to be here.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.