And yes, that’s me (Paul Yeager, author of Immune: How I Beat AIDS in My Kitchen) playing the violin in the zebra jacket btw. 
In case you’re wondering, “so what does this guy eat?” I’d like to tell you. It’s a lot more fun, epicurean, and ridiculously luxurious and multi-ethnic than you could possibly imagine. I literally live like a SULTAN when it comes to food, and I routinely fantasize about taking people in for a few days just to expose them to my little private heaven of epicurean and VERY HIGH HEALTHY dietary hedonism.
More precisely, I live like a sultan would have lived *many hundreds of years ago* (or at least prior to to the industrialized agribusiness production wave of the 1930’s, and more on that in a second)–perhaps like Rumi and Hafiz, definitely a little like the Mongol conquerors or the Viking seafarers or the Sioux hunters, or like many other traditional, isolated, indigenous peoples–BUT just not so restricted to the same food groups or locale or *restrictive cuisine*. The point is, I eat much like ancient royalty.
I’ll let you all in on a little secret. The ideological basis of my traditional foods diet isn’t just foods for a healthy immune system and it’s a VERY FAR cry from living like what people think of as a yogi (although a yogi I indeed am). It’s also a diet for REALLY OUTSTANDING SEX (and did I mention stellar girth? wait sorry, TMI sorry sorry) and being able to DANCE FOREVER at groovin trance dance festivals in Marin County where I know bliss like no other.
Don’t think that kind of energy can come from food? Well, first I’ve gotta write a little about the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from the 1930’s (okay, so sorry for this abrupt change of subject, but don’t despair: we’ll be retapping Kundalini in just a few paragraphs, lol). To not write about him would be not to give credit where the credit’s deserved.
Dr. Price saw an exponentially increasing number of dental patients come into his practice with CAVITIES, so many new cavities that he must have begun to wonder something like”what ON EARTH is going on? I have never seen this many cavities in my career as a dentist!” So being naturally inclined to science, he wanted to know WHY.
He knew that studying all of his patients and the details of their lives (i.e. their diets and lifestyles) would be an extremely burdensome task, one which he was not prepared to take on, and more scientifically speaking, one which he knew he couldn’t place the necessary experimental controls upon in order to understand just what was the CAUSE of this new surge of cavities.
And like with many scientists, then some magic happened called a hunch. He had this hunch, “I wonder what kind of cavities isolated tribal cultures have? Like the ones so cut off from the outside world that modernity hasn’t crept in yet to any degree?” This put him on a crusade for the next ten years of traveling all over the world with his wife, studying indigenous, isolated cultures who were completely cut off from modern transportation and industrialization, and documenting their diets, lifestyles, CAVITIES, and many other facets of their health. He also studied the less indigenous counterparts of each individual tribe he encountered, in other words the next of kin who lived down the valley say, where modern transportation and industrialization and modern medicine HAD appeared.
He did this with 14 different ethnic groups in 14 different vast regions of the globe. Some tribes included the Loetschentaal Swiss, the Eskimos, the Maasai of Africa, South American indians, North American indians in the far northwest, and many others.
The results of his studies were extremely telling. The isolated half of the tribal region were ALWAYS healthier. They often had ALMOST NO CAVITIES or simply NO CAVITIES. They had superior bone health, meaning no osteoporosis, osteoarhtritis, or other osteopathologies. The women had remarkable ease of childbirth, hardly ever died during labor (not akin to common perceptions!), and the babies were born healthier. They had no troubles from ALLERGIES, and they all had remarkable physical stamina and vibrant mental health. They were all in more direct contact with the sun, and got exercise through cultivation and caring for livestock. Heart disease was unheard of, and so was cancer.
Let’s think about this for a second, because either everything I’m telling you in the last paragraph about the superior health of ancient “primitive” peoples is unprovable bullshit or everything we’ve been led to believe about the supposed progress of modernity is, well, shall we say A LITTLE OFF?
Our current stigmatized understanding is that modern medicine and the industrialization of agriculture took us out of the dark ages, but Dr. Price’s work stands in clear contrast to that conclusion. That’s not to say that polio vaccine didn’t stop polio, that antibiotics didn’t stop acute infection, that it wasn’t modernity that successfully vastly eradicated much of tubercolosis, leprosy, hepatitis, malaria, typhoid fever, plague, etc.
But that’s simply not enough to throw out the baby with the bath water. NO ALLERGIES. EASIER CHILDBEARING. NO DENTAL DECAY (and these people mostly didn’t brush their teeth). VIBRANT MENTAL HEALTH AND PHYSICAL STAMINA. FEW DEATHS FROM HEART DISEASE (for instance, one person told Dr. Price that their tribe hadn’t seen someone die suddenly in the way he was describing cardiac arrest to them in many generations), FEW KNOWN DEATHS FROM CANCER. Isn’t there something we’re VERY CURRENTLY after here?
I figured there had to be something to this body of information. So I got my hands on everything that had anything to do with figuring out how to make and eat the traditional, nutrient-dense foods that Dr. Price was talking about in his observations. Now, a lot of people start to doubt that they could do what I do at this point in a conversation and they become disinterested like you might be now–which is where I have to interject with what they’re missing: you see, ALL FOODS *USED TO BE* TRADITIONAL FOODS. Don’t think that hamburger is a traditional food? Think again.
Part II coming soon. ;b
Love and Blisses,
Paul
