At the recent Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) conference in Dallas, I found myself surrounded by more than a thousand other people interested in traditional ways of eating. I happen to be a rookie fermenter, and 5 months pregnant. Great, I thought, this is a perfect time to glean some dietary wisdom from ancient societies – it will help me properly nourish this little human inside of me.

When it came time for the traditional pregnancy diets talk by Sally Fallon Morell, author of the WAPF bible Nourishing Traditions, I squeezed my way into the packed room to hear what she had to say. Her advice made a lot of sense to me. Get plenty of enzyme-rich raw milk and cheese, she said, and certainly don’t skimp on your fermented foods. Animal fats are important because they help build everything from the bones to the vital organs, but avoid industrial vegetable oils at all costs. With a good diet and a daily dose of cod liver oil, you can even avoid taking a prenatal vitamin supplement.

A week later, I found myself back home in Vancouver, sitting in the office of a Registered Dietitian (RD) and listening to almost the opposite advice.

Be sure to avoid unpasteurized cheeses, he said, because they can contain dangerous bacteria.

You mean those unpasteurized cheeses that I’ve been hoovering all week at the conference? I thought.

As for fats: don’t worry if you go a little overboard on the potato chips and French fries, since you fit the criteria for being underweight.

You mean those chips fried in vegetable oils that are manufactured using the petroleum derivative hexane?

And cod liver oil is a big no-no in pregnancy because, as everyone knows, its high vitamin A content can cause birth defects.

You mean the cod liver oil that Fallon Morell says will supply me with a balanced mix of 20,000 IU vitamin A and 2,000 IU vitamin D per day? (Because Vitamin A is actually only harmful in the case of Vitamin D deficiency.)

Now, I’m not knocking RDs – they’re fine folks with a fine profession. (And in fact, some RDs do give advice that’s consistent with traditional diets.) It’s just that, for someone trying to navigate the very complicated terrain of what to eat every day, especially while thinking of a future child’s health, there’s a pretty glaring gap between mainstream and traditional advice.

I’ll admit, I’m a science girl at heart. I’d really like to put all my faith in the dietitian’s advice, since RDs keep up with the latest studies in peer-reviewed journals and give evidence-based advice that’s supposed to be backed by the most important nutritional research organizations on the continent.

But here’s the reason I’m continuing to eat according to Fallon Morell’s traditional diet advice: nutritional research is a young science, limited by the particular studies completed to date. Which means it’s highly likely that the mainstream scientific research at this particular moment in 2011 gives an incomplete, or even skewed, picture of the optimal diet for human health.

Here’s a good example: it’s widely accepted by mainstream health professionals that vegetable oils like safflower and canola are among the healthiest kinds of fats to consume. At first blush, the science seems to support it. Yet in a “Fat Myths” talk at the WAPF conference, Nutritional Sciences PhD candidate Chris Masterjohn cited the major studies that support the consumption of polyunsaturated fats (including industrially-processed vegetable oils) over saturated fats. He pointed out potential flaws, either in study design or interpretation, for every single one. According to Masterjohn, reliable research on the subject of polyunsaturated versus saturated fats just doesn’t yet exist. He believes the evidence will one day show the unmatched benefits of saturated fats.

By choosing a traditional diet, I’m operating on the belief that the science just hasn’t caught up with the nutritional truths that humans have operated on for millennia. Until science is able to capture the complicated picture of nutrient interactions and their effects on the human body, I’ll stick to what got me here in the first place: good grains, good fats, and good bacteria.

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