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!