Nora Gedgaudas – Primal Body, Primal Mind

Jonathan: So excited about this week’s special bonus Smarter Science of Slim podcast because we have a woman with us who has been out there on the frontlines doing what I think we’re all here to do, but sometimes we may lose sight of, and that’s to help people, help make people happier and healthier. It’s really not about any agenda. It’s not about whose Science can beat up whose else’s science. It’s about enabling people to live better lives, and that wonderful woman is Nora Gedgaudas.

She is the author of a wonderful book Primal Body, Primal Mind, which is all about going beyond the Paleo diet finding something that’s wonderful for you to enable you to live your best life and also the proprietor of the website of the similar name, primalbody-primalmind.com, a stand up woman, a wonderful researcher, a great author. I’m just so thrilled to have you on the show, Nora. Welcome.

Nora: Jon, thank you so much for that very kind and generous introduction. I appreciate it.

Jonathan: Well, it’s my pleasure because I really think that individuals such as yourself… I’m intentionally generous with that introduction because truly you are doing… I’m going to get a little Wax Philosophical for a second, because I was just talking with my family on the phone and I was just talking how nutrition… and they were like, “You are into this, Jonathan.” I’m like, “What I’m into, I’m into not watching people die; and I don’t want to be morbid, but some of the stuff you’re seeing, I just got forwarded this documentary that’s coming out of Brazil about what’s taking place in Brazil with improper diet and nutrition.

I cannot wait for this video to go viral, because it absolutely will; and it is just heartbreaking. You’re one of those individuals who are out there on the frontlines enabling people to literally save their own lives, save themselves from this environment they’re being brought up in. I kudos to you for that.

Nora: Well, thank you and yeah! What’s overwhelming to me and what I’m exposed to day to day is the incredible range of suffering. It’s absolutely palpable to me, and I get couple of hundred emails a day from all kinds of people. I get really exciting emails from people who have been implementing things that they read on my book for some time now and are seeing all kinds of dramatic changes that they’re just so excited to share with me. It’s thrilling to hear, but then I have new people maybe who have maybe they just read the book or they’re confused or they’re lost or they just heard something about me and they thought that they would try to reach out, and, of course, I can’t respond to all of these folks. I just can’t be doing free consultations over email, but I’m constantly monitoring what’s happening out there; and what’s happening isn’t good.

It is really an immense amount of suffering of a lot of problems that people are having, everything from weight metabolic issues and immune system problems and mood issues, mood-related things, psychiatric disorders, the stuff that people just don’t even know how to identify these things like “look at this and this, and things are going on with me nobody ever been able to figure this out; and ‘I can’t live this way anymore.’ Its epidemic. It’s everywhere.

Jonathan: It’s unfortunate, because it’s becoming the new normal. There’s this assumption that we all know that taking all these medications and not being able to sleep it’s just part and parcel or maybe it’s even thought of as a badge of honor like ‘look, I can deal of all of this stuff,’ and also what has becomes so commonly accepted is that this is so complicated and this is hard to be healthy.

We’re trying harder and harder and harder. If you go to Europe, for example, and you see how they perceive food and you see they perceive going to the “gym,” and then you look at their disease rates and their obesity rates. Wait a second! How are these people not trying as hard and doing so much better and while we try harder and harder and harder and get worse and worse and worse. What’s going on here, Nora?

Nora: Well, as long as the Europeans are sticking to their more traditional diets, they are doing better; but, of course, increasingly with multinational corporate influences changing the way food is grown and changing the way food is advertised, changing the way food is accessed, if things like this are changing rapidly in Europe as well and elsewhere in the world, we’re kind of on our own a little bit, having to be responsible a little bit more for our own health and wellbeing.

If you’re leaving your health and wellbeing as the responsibility of some other authority figure, or if you’re trying to trust the media to tell you, you’re unlikely to get what’s best for you so much as what’s best for whatever financial interests that they might have. We’re all kind of having to make choices now where we in the past those choices came very naturally. Our very ancient ancestors didn’t have these problems. They didn’t ask these questions. For them, the grocery store was whatever they walked out the door and into the woods to find. They consumed whatever plants might have been available given whatever time of year it was or period in our climatic history. They enjoyed a very wide variety of animals source foods and seafood and all kinds of things, and they just simply did not… they weren’t that concerned about saturated fat and cholesterol, and they also didn’t have running shoes and gym memberships. They did what came naturally to them, and it’s served them incredibly well for an incredibly long period of time. By the way, these ideas that somehow people, our ancient ancestors died when they were like, they died when they were 30, so therefore they didn’t live long enough to develop these physiques — that’s really a myth.

The average age of mortality that gets talked about sometimes in this context is just exactly that. It’s an average age of mortality which also includes things like infant mortality, which ends up skewing these numbers quite a bit. The fact of the matter is that our most distant Palaeolithic ancestors from three million years on up on to about 10,000 years, that they were capable of living every bit of as long a life we do today, only they did it without chronic and degenerative diseases. The more we can go back and repeat what they did by far the better off… that’s the simplest thing you can do to radically improve the way you feel and function in the world.

Jonathan: Well, I love that you brought up those. Let’s get the facts on the table about this whole ‘ our ancestors didn’t live as long as we do,’ so hold on a second here. Anyone who says that, hold on a second, because we have diabetic children, like we have teenagers that are having heart attacks; so if your 6 year old is pre-diabetic, there’s no ‘well, they didn’t live long enough.’

That just shows what’s going on here really transcends these flippant arguments, and I think it’s also important just to note that why push back on something when what we were clearly… what we’re doing right now is clearly not working. What do we risk by moving away from what we’ve been doing for the past 40 years? It’s not like it’s working, so what are people fighting against? I don’t get that.

Nora: Well, I think what people are fighting against are their taste preferences, and, perhaps to some degree, their addictions to foods that, by the way, have been designed to be addictive. Now, there’s probably not a single multinational corporation on the planet right now that isn’t heavily invested in every single man, woman, and child on this planet being dependent on carbohydrates and other sugar starches of primary source of fuel.

It’s profitable, and it keeps you hungry, and it keeps us people malleable. They’re constantly looking for where is that next handful of fuel is coming from to keep their fire burning, where if you were instead dependent on fat as your primary source of fuel in the way we’re actually designed, eating becomes more of a choice; and you’re able to make healthier choices because you’re not creating constantly. That’s a big difference. It’s a potentially threatening difference, not to get overly conspiracy theorist, but you know logically and rationally, it is a potentially threatening thing for the public to be making smart choices.

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely! To those who would bring up thoughts of conspiracy theory, it’s not… let’s just pop out a level here. I think we can all agree that if you just put yourself in the mind of someone who sells pharmaceuticals or who sells food products and needs to distribute on a national scale, if an individual is sick you can sell them things to make them better and if an individual… and if you’re trying to sell food, would you rather have to sell things that spoil within a matter of days, need to be refrigerated throughout transportation, or would you rather be able to mass produce homogenous things that can be shipped all around the world — and let’s not make claims about whether or not those people are evil or not – but just from a rational perspective, if your goal is to make money, sick people who eat primarily starches and sweets are “Fact” more profitable than healthy people that eat primarily fresh things you could just find in nature.

Nora: Right, and that’s just plain logical for anybody willing to be honest with themselves about it, but we’ve been conditioned to think of food as this nutrient-devoid source of entertainment. Food for us, it’s supposed to be tasty, it’s supposed to be exciting, it’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be part of our social context; and we don’t think of it as being primarily something designed to nourish us; and, by the way, you can have extraordinarily nourishing, far more nourishing food that in my view tastes a heck of a lot better, and in fact ends up being less expensive in the long run, even in and of itself, not even counting the savings on your medical bills; but we’re not conditioned necessarily to think of whole unprocessed foods that way. They’re not advertised.

Jonathan: Nora, you hit the nail on the head there, because, if you go into a gourmet restaurant, if you look at traditional French cooking example in many instances these are made with few high quality, very natural, very fresh ingredients. This is no way shape or form about deprivation. In fact, the things that we are wired to crave, like the taste of sweet and salty and the fatty taste or ‘umami’ or maybe you know the word.

Those things are all available to us in this more — I like to call it both ancestral and very modern way of eating. Ancestral, because it’s borne out by our ancestors and modern because the modern nutritional research backs it completely. This is a delicious way of eating and a way of eating that we can do forever. It’s not like no sweets or no fats or.. it’s just, ‘get those from the right places.’

Nora: Yeah, Right. I think the myth that gets me the most frustrated and the most angry and that is the most wrong is also the idea that in order to eat a healthy diet, you have to be wealthy. I have a good friend that wrote an EBook that I actually have available for sale on my website called Primal Tightwad, and one of the things… she basically outlined all of the ways in which you can get by so cheaply. This is a person, by the way, who can live comfortably on about $20,000 a year. She owns her own house almost outright at this point.

She does whatever she pretty much wants. She has a lot of days a week off, because she has figured out how to make the most of every dollar that she spends. She literally keeps track down to the penny every single month what she spends on food. I got on bended knee, because she eats the diet that what we’re talking about, the one that I advocate specifically in my book; and I got on bended knee, and I said would you please write a book about this, because she was going on and on and on about how much money she saves eating this way; and so she did, and it’s brilliant.

One of the wonderful things that she did was that she took a week’s worth of menu from the standard American diet. We’re talking about your hamburger helpers and your trips to McDonald’s and your sodas and your chips and whatever, and she calculated down to the penny, one tablespoon of ketchup, two cents, whatever, calculated it all out and totaled it up at the end of the week. Now, this is all for one person, and then she went and created another week’s worth of menus based on the information in my book. At the end of each of those weeks, it was actually less expensive to eat the way that I talk about.

Not only that, but it literally worked out to being calculated out to be $1,500 per person, per year, cheaper. It is a total myth. See, a lot depends, people assume that if you’re going to eat well, you have to go places like Whole Paycheck, or, not to name names, but there are a lot of expensive and sort of ‘boutique’ natural food stores that put high price tags on food items, and that’s not your only choice.

There are many, many ways of obtaining these foods that are extremely affordable, and you can get together with family and friends and with other neighbor, things like that. You can pull together and go out to these farms and do CSAs or maybe buy a cow together from a ranch or whose raising the animal in a healthy, organic grass fed sort of way, then split it up amongst yourselves. It works out to be pretty cheap per pound when you do it that way, and shopping farmers markets, shopping natural food cooperatives, which are kind of a dying breed; but they’re still around.

They are worth seeking out, I wish there were more of them and I hope that there will be. Thinking in terms of community, joining organizations like the Weston Price Foundation, which has different chapters in pretty much every city in the country now, you can connect with those groups; and they have weekly pot lucks and things like that where you can go and connect with other people trying to make positive changes in their health; and you can share ideas and share recipes. There are all kinds of ways of doing this in a way that is fun, that is easy to do, and that is affordable.

Jonathan: Absolutely, when you approach it from a conscious perspective, which I think is just a great way to approach life in general, be conscious, think about what you’re doing. If we approach it from that perspective, there is no question, we can find ways to make this, not only affordable, but more affordable. Let’s get back to logic that people who are selling the traditional cookies and cakes and whatever, the point of selling those products is to extract as many dollars and cents as possible.

I don’t mean again that it’s not about a conspiracy theory. It’s about saying, for example, you basically know how much, let’s say, spinach and a pound of grass fed-beef should cost. It’s commodity. You should know how much it should cost, but if I can invent the ‘wizzledings,’ and I can charge whatever the heck I want for it, because you don’t know what a ‘wizzleding’ is supposed to cost, and it’s sure tastes good, so, even the internet I found for me personally, you’d be surprised how much you can get wonderful things delivered to you with dry ice and such in bulk quantities.

It’s very affordable, and even things like… while canning is not the best thing ever, it’s certainly better than the standard American diet, and again, if we can get vegetables right out of field, that would probably be ideal, but some of these options are things that are flash frozen are certainly going to be better for us than a lot of these other things available to us.

Nora: Yeah, our ancestors never would have thought to get meal out of the cardboard box, yet were trained to think that’s the way it’s supposed to come now. This is all conditioning. The corporations have but one obligation and that’s to their investors. Their obligation is… their primary incentive is profit. It isn’t your health and wellbeing, it isn’t to create healthier, more natural or whatever product.

They’ll say whatever have to, to get you interested in creating profit for them; so you have to become savvy enough to be able to read between the lines, know how to read labels, and understand the message. Better yet, avoid purchasing too many things require labels, although certain things should require labels, and that’s genetically-modified foods we can start foaming at the mouth over. The fact is, that healthy food mostly resides around the outside edges of the grocery store, and the more you can avoid the central aisles in your average grocery store, the better off you’re going to be.

Jonathan: What I love about in what you are doing Nora is this isn’t so much about… what I don’t hear you saying, and I’m not saying either — please correct me if I’m wrong — is, corporations are bad, and these are evil people because in some ways, people sell what people buy. We’ve already seen, for example, with the green movement as consumers started to demand more green things, people who are interested in making money said, “Well, the only way we can make money is by providing things that are more environmentally friendly.”

The thing that is key, and the thing that I do think we do need to watch out for, and we do need to be militant about is — I like to use the analogy of smoking, where nobody smokes today thinking that that they’re doing anything other than killing themselves. No one gives cigarettes to their children thinking they’re doing something good for their children; however the nutritional dialogue has gotten so discombobulated that often people are eating things that they believe are healthy and are actually not.

That’s where I think it’s really that empowerment and that education is so important because if truly… I hope people don’t hear this and think, “Oh, my God. We’re all just victims,” that we vote with our dollars every day and where the dollars goes, the people selling stuff will follow; but we first have to get educated so that we can know how to allocate our dollars properly.

Nora: Right now, ninety cents out of every food dollar is actually being spent on processed food, or shall we say food-like substances; and so that needs to change, and the more we can become individually responsible for our own health… Look, nobody will ever care more about your health and wellbeing than you, and so it’s a matter of basically taking responsibility for your own health and wellbeing in a way that you’re making the choices, you recognize that you’re making a choice every time you spend a dollar on anything in any grocery store or any restaurant or whatever else so that you make the best possible choice for your own health and wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of your family. And, you’re right. I’m not saying that everybody that operates within the framework of corporations and even this big huge multinational corporations are evil.

I actually have close friends that have spent time within some of the very high echelons of some of the very biggest of these corporations, and I’m here to tell you, they don’t all necessarily understand that what they’re doing is bad. They’re just… everything is kind of very compartmentalized within these corporations. They are all doing their own thing, and they don’t necessarily have an awareness that what they are selling is necessarily killing people, but you’re not terribly likely to get accurate information from the mainstream media or mainstream educational sources really.

A lot of these things are really controlled by these corporate interests who have invested interest in you wanting to buy from them, and so you really have to use your own common sense here. In my mind, if it wouldn’t have looked like food to somebody wandering around 40,000 years ago with a loin cloth and a spear, it’s not food for us now either and that to me, is the simplest way to think about it. Every time you go and you look at the label or whatever, would an ancestor 50,000 years ago, whatever, would they have seen this as food?

Jonathan: I love that focus on food, because even getting back to the corporations not necessarily knowing they’re doing something bad as soon as we made a shift as a culture from thinking about food, to thinking about calories, it becomes very easy to do things which are very bad for people without even knowing what you are doing is bad. For example, if you just think that the body is a mathematical equation, and it’s just about having same number of calories as you get out and that’s all that matters, well then it’s totally reasonable for Coca-Cola to say, “Guys, a Coke has only 180 calories in it or whatever, its only 180 calories. Seriously, calm down. Why is everyone freaking out?”

If they actually believe what we are all taught, which is really just that a calorie is a calorie just about eating less, that is a totally rational position to have but it’s not about calories, it’s about food and clearly a can of coke isn’t the same as spinach. Those foods are not the same. When we turn it into a math problem about what’s the lowest common denominator, everything has calories that’s when things get complicated and go off the rails.

Nora: Well, look, the whole calorie theory assumes that we basically function like a heat engine, and we’re not a heat engine. We’re a chemical factory, so when we take in calories from proteins, fats or carbohydrates, they’re not necessarily utilized in the same way, and a greater percentage of certain macronutrients might be inclined to be utilized as calories than others. Fat and protein primarily goes to structure first, structure hormones, neurotransmitters, cell membranes, maintaining all of these things throughout our body, where carbohydrates really… carbohydrates are basically less than one percent or maybe two percent… our entire physical structure is actually made out of carbohydrates, and we don’t have to eat any in order to generate those. You can make all of the glucose and all of the other glyconutrients that you need from a combination of protein and fat in your diet. You don’t ever have to eat it, so every molecule, carbohydrate, for instance sugar and starch, in other words that you eat over and above what you need outrun a charging rhino right now, is much more likely to get stored as body fat on you than actually fat would, because fat is used for more things. Your brain by dry weight is roughly 80 percent fat, and so your brain and nervous system have to have fat in order to function well.

They have to have cholesterol in order to function well, and we have been eating those things by the way for a little over three million years now; and to no apparent detriment, until apparently recently. I’ll tell you the number one source of fat calories right now in the American diet is actually partially hydrogenated and genetically modified soy bean oil. I think canola oil is probably running a close second on that, and those are foods that were never available to our ancient ancestors. They would not know what those things are.

Jonathan: Nora, that is such a critical point, because I frequently get asked questions of, “Well, there was this study over here where the higher fat group had these problems and the lower fat group didn’t, but when you look at the study and you look at where the higher fat group was getting their fat from, they would obviously have terrible health problems because they weren’t eating high quality natural fats. They were eating… if you eat more French fries fried in high temperature vegetable oil, you’re going to have all kinds of problems.

Nora: Well, yeah, and it’s true. A lot of times those studies don’t take into account, either, what else you were eating besides that fat. If you’re eating a high-starch diet along with that fat, it’s much more likely to cause you problems than if you’re eating a fat-rich diet that largely excluded sugar and starch. It’s very, very different.

Jonathan: Well, I love what you were saying earlier about protein and fat and carbohydrates just being different in the sense that we have all heard of essential amino acids. We’ve heard about that. We need them. They’re essential. We’ve all heard essential fatty acids. We need them. They’re essential. There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate.

Nora: That’s right. Of the three macronutrients — proteins, fat and carbohydrates — the only one for which there is literally zero human dietary requirement, is carbohydrates. All of the glucose we need from that combination of protein and fat in the diet, we don’t ever have to consume it, ever.

Jonathan: Folks, that’s not just Nora or Jonathan Bailor’s opinion. Even the document the USDA recommended whatever, it is a 1200 page document, and it breaks… it’s what the guidelines, the pyramid, all basically all the curriculum, the American Dietetic Association gets all based on what this document says. That document acknowledges that there is no absolute requirement for humans to consume carbohydrate, and it says… and it’s funny because when it says like apparently, like as if it’s reticent to admit that, but it does.

It even says there is no absolute human requirement, so I always like to think of carbohydrate, food that is basically mostly carbohydrate as an effective delivery mechanism for essential vitamins and minerals, so then you have to say like, “If I’m going to eat a food which is a primarily carbohydrate, let’s eat the foods that do provide essential things; so things like non starchy vegetables are great sources of essential things along with those non-essential carbohydrates, but things like sugar provide nothing essential, nothing! It’s just waste, and it causes hormonal badness; so it’s bad on many fronts.

Nora: Yeah, just don’t even get me started on all the bad things that it causes. I actually think that fibers, vegetables for instance and greens are probably far more important to us now than they were to our distant ancestors, because one of the things that I explore in my book is the fact that the world that we live in now is very different from the world of our ancestors. We are in a far more stressed out and toxic environment than they ever could have imagine.

We have things that are impacting us daily and affecting us daily that our ancestors couldn’t have even begun to have imagined, and so I think that a lot of fiber nutrients and anti-oxidants that are present in these fibrous vegetables and greens are much more important to us now perhaps in some ways than they ever used to be, and so on my mind, eat as many of those as you want for bulk and for their anti-oxidant value and nutrient value, but where sugar and starch is involved, in my personal view, and there’s a lot of controversy about this, but in my personal view, there’s no requirement for any of that whatsoever.

Jonathan: It’s brilliant. Its brilliant, and Nora, I want to make sure we have time because there is a page on your website, which I think should be required reading. When you get your driver’s license, they should say, “Here’s this page. You need to go read this, because it’s your top ten…” let me make sure I’m saying this correctly. I don’t think we have time to go through all ten. I could talk to you about it for days.

Nora: You have to go to the website to look them over.

Jonathan: Well, the one that I wanted to focus on, because there’s two, but I don’t think we have time… I’ll have you back on the show to talk about them both, but I want to talk about myth or item number eight, which is believing that junk food in moderation is okay. Let’s talk about that. Nora, Nora, isn’t it all about moderation? Like you go on any major talk show, Nora, they’re going to say, “Well, that was nice, Nora, but it’s just about moderation, isn’t it?

Nora: Right, and they know that is very PC. That is, you know, the nutritional politicians mantra, the one who wants to make everybody happy because it helps people rationalize their bad habits, but how much metabolic chaos and inflammation in the logic reactivity or compromise to your health do you really want to enjoy in moderation? I think that again with what I just mentioned about a lot of the stressors that we’re exposed in today, and nobody is exempt, these stressors in our environment, and I can go on listing them all day long. In my personal view, again, I think that what we’re left with is almost no room for error in terms of what we need to do try to maintain any semblance of health, much less be optimally healthy.

We’re all either getting better or worse every moment of every day with every choice that we make, and so if you can’t afford… For instance right now, the number one source of bankruptcy in the United States is a bad diagnosis, so if you can’t afford that bad diagnosis, and I don’t know who can, then you can’t afford not to eat optimally well; and you’re going to have to do a little homework. In my view, I think it’s really important to have some understanding of all of this. You don’t to have Ph.D. level understanding, this isn’t hard, but it’s basic information that we have never been asked to really understand before.

We’ve always just trusted whatever the authorities had to say. I thinks it’s time we start trusting ourselves and that we start going and doing just a tiny a little bit of leg work, a tiny little bit of research. Read my book. Read anything John Bailor has to say and absorb the common sense of that and understand that the choices that you make, every time you pick up a fork, are going to either take you closer to hell or further away from it. Simple as that!

Jonathan: What Nora just said, which is so critical about doing a bit of legwork… the other thing Nora… the angle that I love about this is people will come back and will say, “I have friends who eat garbage, and they live until they’re 120; and they never had any problems. The thing I would say back to those people is there are people that smoke and never get lung cancer, too. That doesn’t mean we should recommend smoking, and that’s the key thing. I think what we’re talking about here are recommendations. What should the USDA be recommending that we do, and the recommendation should not include garbage in moderation, just like the recommendations your children isn’t only smoke during social occasions. Smoking is bad, so the extent that you can avoid it is good; so that’s the message. They’re bad, and that doesn’t mean that if you eat it once, you’re going to die; but they are bad, and they will do to your metabolic systems what smoking does to your respiratory system. So just like you try to avoid smoking as much as possible, you should try to avoid these things as much as possible. What do you think?

Nora: If you’re waiting for the USDA to give you the right information understand that USDA is the U.S Department of Agriculture, so they are basically beholding to the interests of big agriculture. Where they tell you to eat eleven servings of grains a day, where do you think that comes from? Certainly not human history. There’s no human people group that has ever eaten a diet that remotely resembles anything that the USDA pyramid suggests as optimal. The idea is to start thinking foundationally, and one of the things that I love about the palaeolithic approach to things, for me, it’s a critical starting point; because human beings have evolved over the last 3.2 or so million years, and during the course of our time on this planet, we have had access to certain things as sources of food and whatever it was that we had access to are largely just logically and rationally, those are the things that established our nutritional requirements. Those are the things that established our physiological make up.

The more closely we can stick to what our ancient ancestors would have seen as food, the more naturally our body is going to be able to make use of those things; and anything that was introduced more recently, say within the last 10,000 years, is going to be something that just by logic, your body is going to be less well adapted to. We had agriculture now from 0.4 percent of our entire evolutionary history, and we’ve only changed maybe genetically maybe 0.05 percent in that same amount of time; and, by the way, within that same window, we’ve actually lost 10 percent of our brain volume.

It started declining very rapidly after we started adopting brains, so we need to… I think the more foundationally you can think about this, the easier it becomes. If you can pick up a piece of what somebody is trying to call food, and say, “Well, would my distant ancestor have thought this as food or not, you know, cardboard box and fine prints and little warnings and all natural on the label or whatever else?

If it’s in the cardboard box, chances are it’s not something your ancestor would have seen or would have recognized as food. That’s all that I’m saying. Stick to whole, natural foods, organic wherever possible because you’re less apt to get genetically modified things in there. You’re less apt to get pesticides in there and things that could be potentially toxic to you. When it comes to the animals, again animals that we normally think of as our food animals all had their humble beginnings eating what was natural for them to eat, which was basically green grass; and they’re designed to live out in fresh air and sunshine and eat a diet of green grass.

What we’ve done, again, something that U.S Department of Agriculture also supports is, we’ve taken cows out of the pasture… at some point they get taken out of the pasture, and they get thrown into congested feed lot and fed a lot of grains and things that they were never designed, they were not designed to eat either. There’s chock full of gum wrappers and cement dust and all kinds of other things, too, that get their weight up and chock full of hormones and antibiotics. None of these things are natural and so the quality of meat we consume depends entirely on the quality and the health of the animal that meat came from, and that’s something else we need to starting thinking about.

You can have two steaks side by side that might look like steak, but one from the grass-fed animal, that’s actually going to have more omega 3’s per gram than a piece of wild salmon might have, and the one that came from the feed lot might not have any. It may have a whole lot of traces of other things you wouldn’t want to put in your body or your child’s body.

Jonathan: It’s all about understanding that quality, understanding where the food is coming from. It’s just getting back to basics. I love that, Nora. Where can folks get more information? What I love about what you do is, you do not hesitate to call a spade a spade. I think Nora id going to tell you the truth, whether you like that or not, that’s what you’re going to get; and that’s what I love. Where can people learn more truth?

Nora: Well, they can come to my website which is www.primalbody-primalmind.com, and you can sign up for my newsletter there, and the name of my book also is Primal Body, Primal Mind, Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health And A Longer Life and that’s available. You can click the link on my website to find my book. You can also find it in all the book stores. It’s on Amazon. There are too many places where you can’t find it, but that book represents better than 10 or 15 years worth of my whole life and my research; and, yes, you can trust me to tell you the truth.

Jonathan: I love it, Nora. Well thank you so much. What’s next for you? What’s on the horizon?

Nora: Oh well, I’m about to go out to Spokane, Washington. I’ll be speaking at Become Superhuman Live event at Greenfield.

Jonathan: The Greenfield conference?

Nora: Immediately following that, I will be going down to Paleo Effects in Austin, Texas. I have quite actually a number of speaking engagements this year, which includes some things locally. I’ll also be going to speak, yet again… I was in Australia last year where I spoke with three Universities. I’ll also be speaking at The Mind Foundation Forum in Sydney, Australia.

In May, I’ll be doing some online summit types of appearances. There’s also a traditional diet symposium happening in Vermont in mid June, and let’s see, I may possibly be attending The Ancestral Health Symposium at Amber University in August. I also will be attending and speaking in New Zealand in October, so no rest for the weary here, that on top of a full time private practice here in Portland, Oregon.

Jonathan: Goodness, well, when you come up to Spokane, if you’re coming through Seattle, you should let me know, we could grab some high fructose corn syrup and grass-fed beef.

Nora: Yeah, sounds real, and couple of Coca Colas.

Jonathan: Nora, that sounds awesome. It sounds like you have a really awesome year planned, and I really encourage everyone, if you don’t do anything else, go to primalbody-primalmind, grab a copy of Nora’s books, and just to wet your whistle, check out that there’s a link that says top ten nutritional mistakes which you should literally print out and put on your wall, because it is just fabulous. Nora, thank you very much for being with us it’s been a pleasure.

Nora: Thank you, Jonathan, you have been a very kind and very generous, and it’s an honor to be here.

Jonathan: Thank you, Nora. Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed today’s show and again please do go check out Nora’s work, just an awesome teller of truth. Definitely something I wholeheartedly recommend, and we’ll see you next week and while you’re at it remember to eat more and exercise less but be sure to do that smarter.