WAPF Conference: Day Two
Another great breakfast and opportunity to meet people, then
it was off to the lectures.
There is always a short talk on traditional diets and the
research of Dr. Weston A. Price on Saturday morning by Sally Fallon Morrell. It is a great reminder of the work of this
great researcher.
This was followed by a speech by Dave Wetzel, CEO of Vital
Choice Seafood. It was a very moving story of the ups and downs that he has
experienced in the seafood industry.
One important topic he covered was the ingestion by humans
of methyl mercury that is present in fish.
While there is heavy metal present in fish, high levels of selenium are
also present, which protect your body from the methyl mercury. Compared to most fish, salmon and tuna have
the highest amounts of selenium.
On a side note: The high
level of mercury in the oceans and in seafood is not a new thing. Geologists are positing that the
concentrations of mercury found are not from industrial toxic runoff, but from
the emissions of ancient volcanoes. It seems
to me that the massive volcanic earth changes associated with a global flood
would explain this very well.
Another point that Mr. Wetzel made was that our brains seem
to be “Teflon” for good news and “Velcro” for bad. We remember bad news quite easily, but it
takes hearing good news at least 5 different times for us to remember it. We seem to remember that the omega 3 fatty
acid content of salmon has gone down. We
forget that this is in farmed salmon.
Wild salmon still has a 6-3:1 ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 and Sockeye
salmon having a 9:1 ratio of these fatty acids. So read this five times and
remember!
The next talk was on the Acid/Alkaline Myth. Many people seem to think that we can change
our metabolism by ingesting foods that determine whether our metabolism will be
acid or alkaline. The speaker made several
good points, including the role of biological buffering agents that our bodies
were designed to produce by our Wonderful Creator.
One point that really hit home to me is the neoplasic cells (cancer
cells) need the same environment as normal cells. In college, I made
physiological phosphate buffers as an environment in which HeLa cell (cancer
cells used to grown viruses) could grow. These buffers are much the same as the
ones our bodies make to keep the body’s environment in balance. If I made them too acidic or too alkaline,
then the cancer cells would die. Then I’d
have to do the whole thing over again. The
point of this is that our bodies are designed by Our Creator to keep the pH
balance in check. Amazing!
If you were able to change your body’s metabolic pH, you
would disrupt bodily processes enough that it could result in death. For example, if you drank too much water at
one time, you could kill yourself. A little lemon juice in water is not going
to change your physiological pH.
However, it can be refreshing!
After this lecture, we heard another on “The Science of
Broth.” Yes, this is the broth that we all should be drinking or using in soups
and cooking with very day.
Broth is high in the amino acids glycine, proline and
glutamate. Amino acids are building blocks for our body. A vegetarian diet is
low in all three of these amino acids.
Many other interesting and important topics were discussed,
but in the interest of brevity, I’ll just say that more information can be
found on the Weston A. Price Website (www.westonaprice.org) or in Kaayla Daniels,PhD and Salley Fallon Morrell's newly-published book, “Nourishing Broth.”
The last lecture (long day) was by the author of “The
Vegetarian Myth.” This was another emotionally moving and hard-hitting speech. The
main point of both the book and the lecture was that the production of mono-crops,
such as is the case with grain, is crippling the ability of people around the
world to feed themselves and a vegetarian lifestyle supports the deforestation
and the destruction of topsoil on our planet.
Then we were off to rest up for the last event of the day,
the Awards Banquet.
The Awards Banquet was great and the food wonderful, especially
the big bowls of whipped cream from pasture-raised cows. Several awards were given out, but one in
particular was given to the keynote speaker, one of my heroines, Debra Meiger
who debunked “The China Study.” This
book is a mixture of bad science that was made to look legitimate by bad
statistics. Her speech was “Death by the Food Pyramid.” She traced the origins
of the USDA’s Food Pyramid. This was a
fascinating speech by a great speaker.
Graft, politics, obfuscation and greed were all involved in the story.
Then it was off to bed, to be ready for another day!
