Nourishing Diets: How Paleo, Ancestral and Traditional Peoples Really Ate

Nourishing Traditions is primarily a cookbook that includes introductory and contextual information about traditional diets. While Nourishing Diets includes many recipes that aren't in Nourishing Traditions, I wouldn't characterize it as a cookbook. The recipe section is about 40 pages long and includes recipes for grains, soups and stews, nutrient-dense snacks, organ meats, cooking with blood, seafood, vegetables, fermented condiments, and desserts I am excited to try. It comes after almost 200 pages of detailed information on ancestral diets.  We learn about the nourishing diets of the Australian Aborigines: The Most Paleo of Them All, Native Americans: Guts and Grease, The Far North: Seal Oil and Whale Blubber, The South Seas: Abundance and Beauty, Africa: The Land of Fermented Foods, Asia: Variety and Monotony,  Europe: The Foods We Like to Eat. In addition Sally writes about "True Blue Zones: How Long- Lived People Really Eat", and "What to Eat? Translating the Wisdom of Our Ancestors into a Healthy Modern Diet". Nourishing Diets does include highlights of Dr. Weston A. Price's research, yet it expands far beyond it with a wide variety of references and geographic areas.

For those of us who have a keen interest in how people nourished themselves historically, I highly recommend this book as an incredibly well-researched companion to Nourishing Traditions.  Having said that, I want to clarify that having the book Nourishing Traditions is not necessary to read and understand Nourishing Diets. My point is for all of us who already have Nourishing Traditions, this new book is different enough that I think it is a very worthwhile read. I found it to be very well-written and quite fascinating! Even though I have read a fair amount on this subject, I learned a lot more! We will read the book as a community in our Nourished Book Club on Facebook now that it has been released!

There is a lot of misinformation out there about diets since Ancel Keys foisted his flawed fat-is-bad-hypothesis on the people. Since then, obesity and metabolic disease rates have exploded in our population. As Catherine Shanahan, MD, pointed out in Deep Nutrition, any true traditional diet is likely to be a healthy one. This book examines such diets and also exposes the bias of people reporting traditional diets that makes them overlook the obvious in order to support a priori concepts of what a healthy diet should be. For example, I lived in Italy for 17 years. The Mediterranean diet as espoused by many never existed. The peoples of that area eat fish, to be sure, but also a lot of pork fat and dairy products. Similarly, the artificial construct of a "paleo" diet misconstrues realities. This book will at least raise healthy questions. I highly recommend it.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learned so much about the ancestral cultures. I am a student of history, genealogy is my hobby and I'm a devotee to cooking. To put all of my favorite things in one easy to read book is delightful. I am on my second read of the book because I want to make sure I pick up all the details. This book will be extremely helpful for someone eating in the Ancestral Way. Fad diets come and go but the old ways endure among those willing to seek them out.

It was well written and ultra fascinating. The thing that stands out to me and resonates is the variety of foods all these different cultures ate. Yet, I consistently read from mainstream media how we once used to eat mostly plant-based foods. All these wild and interesting foods they ate are nothing I've ever heard before, but whole-heartedly believe it. They had to eat from the land and ate what was available. Surely, lots of plants, but not primarily as mainstream media would have us believe. I love Sally's books. I own every single one and frequently refer to them. Thank you very much for educating me.

I found Sally Morell's NOURISHING DIETS fascinating. As CEO of the National Billiard Academy, diet is extremely important for athletes, so I read much about diets. This book takes all the guess work out of what we should be eating because Sally has done incredible research. It's also an easy read if you like history and learning about people's all over the world and then learning that there is a common denominator to all the diets - fat. Thank you Sally for another great book.

It is a unique book about traditional diets and very interesting. I liked very much the section about Australia, which so much contradicts the common view of traditional Australians not tending the land. The chapter about Asia is disappointing and unclear. On one hand side, she mentions that people mostly ate rice and other grains (little meat or vegetable), probably mainly because of poverty, but then she loosely adds all sorts of animal foods they ate. No mention of how much they ate these and what were the consequences of the mainly rice diet, if at all. For Japan, she mainly cites statistics of modern Japan, but there was little information on how traditional people really ate, how much meat or fish they got. She cites modern dairy consumption but fails to mention that many Asian people cannot digest dairy properly.
All in all, it is still a very interesting book, the main reason I gave it four stars was:
1.) She did not travel herself, it is a literature study only.
2.) She cites Weston Price over and over (she did that in her other books and probably every word he'd ever written is cited by now)
3.) Ancient people did often not live all that long, if they did have such a healthy diet - why? And she does not cover areas with poor soils and people with probably less than ideal diets. She does not cover frequencies of famines either.
4.) The recipe section could be way better, this section is VERY disappointing (as has been in her other books).

Great compilation to understand historical nutrition based on thousands of years and not the gimmicky and corporate diet we eat now extracted from abused soils.

I like everything about the book. One just has to sit down and read it and once you start it's hard to put down.

This is an amazing book about how our ancestors really ate with details about groups around the world. It is fascinating to read about the lives and habits of the Aborigines of Australia, the American Indians, the Eskimos, and on to Europe, Africa and Asia. This supplements her original book, Nourishing Traditions, which has many recipes. It makes sense to me to follow what our ancestors learned about the proper preparation of food which they developed over time.

Book had input from many deep researching individuals of many world cultures.Lot of insight and wisdom from peoples around the world. Along with agriculture thank goodness we also domesticated the animals and were creative to make milk, butter, yogurt, kefir, cottage, soft and hard cheese and more, using the animal head to tail our true source of nourishment.