This podcast is a digital production using Ai text to Tanja's voice. The original Dutch spoken podcast interview with Tanja can be found on "De Tekentafel": https://rumble.com/v3s3j7k-de-tekentafel-006-tanja-stevens.html
“Tanja Stevens is a naturopathic practitioner, health therapist, nutritionist, and chapter leader of the Western A. Price Foundation. She has a passion for nutrition and health, which runs like a common thread throughout her life.
She reads everything she can find on these topics and attends numerous courses. She completed training as a nutrition, health, and lifestyle consultant and later earned a higher education degree as a health therapist at the European Academy for Natural Health.
We’ve actually known each other for quite a few years now, which stems from a network of beautiful initiatives in Limburg where we met several times. Over time, I came to the slightly embarrassing realization that I didn’t fully understand what you actually did.
But when I found out all the things you’ve done and achieved, I thought, "That’s definitely something worth sharing on the podcast."
So I’d say, please introduce yourself further. Who are you, and what do you do?”
Tanja:
I’m Tanja Stevens. I’m a mother and I run my own business, GezondGestel.nl . My work mainly focuses broadly on health. I’m a holistic practitioner, you could say. I always try to find the root cause of illnesses and do my best to uncover it, as much as possible.
In the meantime, I also collaborate with others where I am hired, you could say. So, I’m currently working in three places: for myself, for Volzicht, and for Praktijk Beaumont. We might get into that more later.
I am busy. And I also have two daughters. And a cat.
Yes, that’s a brief snapshot of my daily life and what I do.
I’ve always had a sort of fascination with healthy eating. I was conscious of it from an early age. Part of that came from my mother; she was always interested in healthy food. My father, on the other hand, was more of an epicurean, you could say. He loved going out for good meals.
I think I’ve managed to combine those traits nicely. I also really enjoy cooking. From a young age, I decided to go vegetarian because I wasn’t comfortable with industrial farming. I’ve since veered away from that quite a bit. But I was aware early on of the importance of watching what you eat.
I also knew what good food tasted like. So, even in the supermarket, I would often think, "Hmm… something’s not quite right here." But that awareness never extended much beyond my personal habits. However, I always soaked up information like a sponge. If I came across something from, say, Dr. Vogel, I could later tell you all about what it said.
The first books on health? I devoured them. They were all about...
Fasting, vegetables, colors, or what’s in a tomato?
I devoured that information—I found it absolutely fascinating.
But at that point, I mainly applied it in my own surroundings and for myself. I was great at cooking, so I translated that information into delicious dishes. I was more known for being culinary-oriented than truly health-focused.
But then, when I started thinking about having children, I thought, "I need to prepare well for that." So I began working on my health. I dove deeper into it.
When I had a child who didn’t entirely meet my health ideals, I started questioning things. How was it possible that I lived so healthily, yet she still had, for instance, skin issues? That’s when I started digging even deeper.
I began taking courses in vitamin therapy, experimenting with herbal remedies, and exploring traditional folk medicine. I consulted many therapists for advice on how to do things better. And yes, I started reading everything I could—more books on nutrition and scouring the internet. Back then, you still had to dial in, but the first websites were starting to pop up.
That’s when I started asking myself, "Should I vaccinate my child?" Those sorts of questions began to trigger something in me. I realized, "A lot doesn’t add up here." I already felt that way about food, but now it extended to vaccinations, health, and doctors. I really started to think.
At some point, I had an entire bookcase full of books, and I thought, "There’s something more to all this. What is it?" So I decided, "You should go to school, to someone who actually knows about this." That’s when I decided to take a course.
Everything sounded so logical, like a good story. But honestly, I felt that way about many of those books too. "It’s a good story," I thought. And I always tried to live according to it. If someone said, "You should try this," I’d try it.
I’ve experimented with everything—from raw vegan to carnivore and everything in between. I’ve tried it all. I didn’t necessarily feel unwell—I wasn’t sick or anything—but I was curious about how it would affect me. So I tried everything, from eating 30 bananas a day to starting my day with a steak.
And I thought, "Well, I don’t feel much worse—or dramatically better either." The quality of how I felt mainly depended on whether I avoided junk food. If I ate junk, I felt a bit greasy and sticky afterward. But if I made healthy choices, I generally felt better.
Eventually, during school, I was pushed back toward the vegetarian approach because it was quite vegetarian-oriented there. I thought, "Maybe I didn’t do it right before; I’ll give it another try." So I stopped eating meat and fish entirely—also cutting down on eggs and cheese. I thought, "Let’s see how this goes."
But that’s when I started feeling a bit off—I became anxious, which was unusual for me. I’ve always been quite relaxed, but suddenly I turned into a nervous type.
From a lack of?
Fat.
I remember one time I had an exam at school, and I had to run to the bathroom three times beforehand. I had diarrhea from the stress. My hands were sweaty and sticky, and I couldn’t hold my pen properly anymore. That’s when I thought, "Wait a second, what’s going on here?"
I went home and immediately made myself fried eggs with cheese and bacon.
I thought, "What are you even doing to yourself?" For three or four weeks, I’d been eating lots of greens, raw fruit, vegetables, and nuts. And I realized, "No, this isn’t it. At least, not for me."
That was my exploration journey, so to speak, but at that point, I still didn’t know.
I was still in that naturopathic mindset of acidic-alkaline balance and eating lots of fruits and vegetables. Then, one day, I attended a lecture, and they presented a completely different story. So once again, it was another perspective, but it was so contradictory.
Most of those books are very vegetable-focused, I’d say. They all agree on that—fruits and vegetables are super healthy. But then, this speaker started saying you need more fat, meat, and even milk. I was still very much in the mindset that milk is for calves and that meat rots in your intestines. Everything in me resisted this.
I kept raising my hand, saying, "But isn’t that acidic?" And he was very good at explaining it. That’s when I thought, "What book have you been reading?" It turned out to be Mike Donkers, who had translated the book *Nutrition and Physical Degeneration* by Weston Price. So I decided, "Well, I’d better read that book too."
And that’s when I had a real epiphany, so to speak. All this time, I had been searching, living in confusion. I could experiment and experience things myself a little, but still… When I read that book, I thought, "We’ve known this all along." All these books... We’ve been on this planet for quite a while. Back then, we didn’t have books. Instead, we had our ancestors who passed down their wisdom—traditional knowledge passed from father to son, mother to daughter, over thousands of years of experience.
But we’ve tossed all of that aside in favor of gurus, hypes, and books. Sometimes these books are sprinkled with ideas from nutrition centers, Wageningen, or other vested interests, but sometimes they come from genuinely good intentions. Yet, it always has to be "scientific," because, you know, science.
But science has done a lot of research into disease and ill health, not so much into health itself. Prevention, sure—but what is truly healthy nutrition? What causes cancer? What’s good for diabetes? What works if you have this or that condition? But they’ve never asked, "What do healthy people eat?"
And that’s the difference. Mr. Weston Price went searching for healthy people to uncover their secrets. He conducted very thorough and ethical research.
The speaker at the lecture, I let him explain quietly, had essentially translated what Weston A. Price had written into something more accessible.
He translated the book. He literally translated the English book into Dutch.
Weston Price was actually a maxillofacial surgeon and dentist. Back then, those professions were often combined. He was trained in the 1920s and 1930s, and he noticed that his profession was suddenly growing in popularity—very rapidly. More and more people needed a dentist, teeth were increasingly misaligned, and cavities were on the rise.
So, we’re talking about 100 years ago. As a diligent researcher, he thought, "I need a control group—people without cavities, with straight teeth." But he couldn’t find one in his area. He lived in the U.S., and he started asking around, "Do you know of any group of people without cavities?" But there weren’t any—not in America at that time, not anymore.
However, this was also the era of explorers, and they returned with stories about people on tropical beaches with pearly white teeth and broad smiles. He thought, "They must exist, but I’ll need to search further."
So, for ten years, he worked nine months of the year and traveled the other three months with his wife and the very early beginnings of photography. He brought a camera and visited isolated indigenous peoples who were reported to have very few cavities.
He couldn’t make sense of them at first. For example, he visited the Inuit, who ate only dried fish dipped in seal fat, three cranberries, and a bit of seaweed—hardly any fruits or vegetables. Then, he visited people in the South Pacific who ate mainly crab, fish, tropical fruits, and coconut. He also studied Swiss mountain communities who ate bread with cheese. And if there’s one thing I’ve read repeatedly in my books, it’s that bread and cheese are supposedly terrible.
But this Swiss mountain folk baked their own rye sourdough bread and made cheese from the milk of their mountain cows, and they were also extremely fit and healthy. So, it wasn’t all about traveling far and wide.
His research was initially centered on cavities. But through his studies, he concluded that dental health is central to overall health. He observed that people with beautiful teeth were also robust and healthy. For example, in those isolated communities, while there was a tuberculosis epidemic elsewhere, these mountain people were unaffected. They had no mental health issues, no prisons, and no dentists.
In fact, in those Swiss communities, they sometimes had to scrape off green deposits to see what was underneath—and they’d find hardly any cavities. They didn’t even brush their teeth or have dental hygiene practices.
What struck me was that in the nearby village, where a train connection or a missionary post had been established, meaning their isolation was broken a few years earlier and they were introduced to modern Western processed foods, things went downhill quickly. It wasn’t genetic—it wasn’t, "I inherited crooked teeth from my grandfather," or, "I have weak teeth because it runs in the family." No, the decline happened rapidly.
On a remote South Pacific island, if you arrive with sacks of flour, sugar, vegetable oil, jam, and condensed milk, the people—who I always say would make pancakes with the flour and sugar and then add jam—would quickly develop health problems. And the decline would be dramatic. The purer these people were, the faster they’d deteriorate when introduced to modern foods.
For example, if you’ve never consumed milk or grains because you’re an Aboriginal person who eats meat, grubs, and root vegetables but has never farmed grain, and then you’re suddenly given bread with sugar, you quickly develop diabetes. The decline happens so fast.
But he observed that these people were incredibly robust. They won athletic competitions in places like Switzerland. Their physical development, their musculature, their tissue health—just their overall well-being—was exceptional.
Everything.
And they saw that within just one generation, those teeth would deteriorate. For example, a mother would have one healthy child, and then a missionary post would be established, bringing sugar, flour, jam, and condensed milk. The next child would have no room for all their teeth, a narrower jaw, and a narrower nose—resulting in less oxygen intake.
You often see this in the faces of older generations. If you think of people like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, they had a certain healthiness, with beautifully rounded faces, strong jaws, and plenty of room for their noses. Now, no disrespect, but if you think of, say, Keanu Reeves—there are a lot of narrow jaws.
He also studied old skulls from burial sites, so his research was partly historical. Those skulls were so thick compared to today’s thinner skulls. And they still had all their teeth. Some people lived to be 95, and while a few teeth might have been lost due to wear—perhaps from tanning leather or cracking nuts—they still had intact molars and no cavities.
So he thought, "Something is going very wrong here." That’s modern nutrition. But they also had incredibly strong teeth. So he began to investigate their diets everywhere, asking, "What do you eat?"
And what did they eat?
It varied widely. Like I mentioned before, he couldn’t easily make sense of it. But what was the common factor? They consumed enormous amounts of fat-soluble vitamins and minerals. In his time, 90 years ago, there were ten times more fat-soluble vitamins—A, D, E, and K—in their diets.
Why do I specifically emphasize fat-soluble vitamins?
Because those four vitamins are critical. At the time, they hadn’t discovered vitamin K yet, so he called it "Factor X." This Factor X, as he named it, was responsible for building a strong body with enough room in the skull for all the teeth. It also prevented the narrowing of the face.
I always say it’s like building a wall where you need 100 bricks, but you’re only given 80. It’s not going to be a very sturdy wall. Today, we’re building children with fewer building materials. As a result, the children aren’t as robust, with narrower hips, which makes childbirth more difficult, less room for wisdom teeth, and limited space for proper breathing.
This leads to people becoming, as they’re sometimes called, "mouth breathers"—those who must breathe through their mouths because there isn’t enough airflow through their nasal passages. This makes them more vulnerable to diseases since nasal breathing acts as a filter.
So, everything started to fall into place for me. But I did have to let go of my previous beliefs. It was a challenge because fat-soluble vitamins—where do you find them?
In animal foods.
Not in spinach and not in avocados. Vitamin E is found in plant-based products.
Many people then say, "But it’s in carrots, right? Vitamin A? And it’s in tomatoes."
Well, that’s *pro*-vitamin A. What is "pro"? It’s the precursor to actual vitamin A. Carotene, beta-carotene. But your body still has to convert that into retinol.
If your body isn’t able to process it well. For instance, if your stomach and intestines aren’t functioning optimally, or if your teeth don’t allow you to chew properly. It’s all interconnected. The body can convert and produce a lot on its own, but why would you make it harder for your body when it can also be provided ready-made?
We’re quite programmed to believe that animal foods are not good for us. I really had to examine my own programming on this as well. Because fat-soluble vitamins are found in butter, cream, lard, beef tallow, fatty fish, and eggs. Basically, everything the government says isn’t good for you—fat and cholesterol.
The other factor? Ten times more fat-soluble vitamins but also four times more minerals. And what have we been taught to fear? Fat and salt. These traditional diets consisted of exactly what we’ve been told to avoid because they supposedly lead to cardiovascular diseases, kidney problems, high blood pressure, and all kinds of issues.
It’s not just the government narrative either; even alternative views lean heavily toward vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. I really had to recalibrate, so to speak. But it resonated with me because I thought, "This is just old knowledge. It’s nothing new."
My grandmother also cooked with real butter and fried meat in it. That’s what we’ve always done. But we’ve been heavily swayed by science, new ideas, and insights.
Yes, me too. I also found it all incredibly fascinating. But then I thought, "We don’t need to reinvent the wheel." And that’s always been a bit of my motto: let’s not think we know better. We’ve known this for a long time, and nature provides us with the things we need in our environment. If we just leave it as it is, it often works out better.
Weston Price essentially came to two key conclusions: avoid refined junk and focus on more fats and minerals. He translated that into one of his "pots of fat," so to speak, which he put on the table—a combination of cod liver oil and butter oil.
He was, indeed, looking for Factor X, which turned out to be vitamin K2, another fat-soluble vitamin, alongside A and D. Vitamin E is somewhat found in plant-based sources, but A and D? Those came from cod liver oil. That was already quite common back then.
For the vitamin D.
And again, nature has beautifully provided it in the right amounts and the correct composition. Together with butter oil, it gave a full spectrum of healthy fats in one jar. He started giving it to children, for example, to see if they could heal their cavities by providing them with extra fat.
He also looked into how grains should be freshly milled, without removing the germ, so the wheat germ—and therefore vitamin E—remains intact. At that time, the focus was purely on shelf life. Everyone started producing long-lasting products, and we sacrificed nutrient density in the process. We stripped everything down, so to speak. We removed all the minerals from sugar, leaving us with white crystalline sugar, and did the same with flour.
Now, I’m not someone who insists that everything has to be whole grain—that’s not always the ultimate solution. But the over-processing is where the problem lies.
So he tried to restore this and see if it could reverse the damage—whether people’s teeth could heal and whether the next generation or the next birth could show a difference. Indigenous peoples already understood this well. They took great care of the next generation. They always gave their most nutrient-rich foods to newlywed couples, young families with growing children, and pregnant women.
It was a deeply forward-thinking approach. They even spaced out their children by several years so that the mother could replenish her building blocks—recovering the nutrients she had given up in building a child. It’s such a beautiful thing to see.
It makes sense.
For example, the Maasai only marry during the rainy season. They wait to conceive until after they are married, ensuring they are well-nourished to build a baby. You see this reflected in many cultures—a focus on eating well at critical times.
There were seasonal festivals dedicated to this purpose. We still see remnants of it in celebrations like Christmas or Easter, but in the past, it was more focused on ensuring healthy offspring. If you don’t have hospitals or daycare for disabled villagers, everyone needs to be in top health. That’s what they prioritized.
And how did Weston A. Price convey these ideas to the society he wanted to reach? Because what he was saying—eat more animal fats—wasn’t really in line with the trends of that time.
That was precisely when the shift toward leaner, more plant-based diets and sunflower oil began. The first margarine was just coming onto the market. He wrote the book *Nutrition and Physical Degeneration*. He warned, “Within four generations, we’ll be infertile.” He conducted extensive scientific research and collaborated with Price-Pottenger, conducting many animal studies to support his insights.
For instance, they studied what happened when pigs were deprived of vitamin A entirely. Piglets were born blind. But when one of those blind piglets was given vitamin A again, healthy piglets were born from that same animal in the next generation.
It wasn’t pleasant for the animals, of course. They also experimented with cats, feeding some pasteurized milk and others raw milk to observe the differences. The cats that drank pasteurized milk didn’t fare well.
Within just four generations, they degenerated so much that they were no longer viable. You see this happening with us as well.
There’s been a massive decline in fertility.
We solve it in hospitals with IVF and various hormonal therapies. But yes, he saw it coming. There are many things that nothing has been done about, and they’ve only gotten worse. For example, the fat phobia came later, making things even worse.
I don’t even want to know which factors we are now deficient in, 100 years later.
And many of these things have already been debunked. The cholesterol myth has long been debunked. And salt? Well, it depends on the kind of salt. If you’re using table salt, sure—it’s 100% sodium. But sea salt contains 70 to 80 minerals that have been removed.
Some people got sick right away, for example, with thyroid issues. So they added iodine back into the salt. But how are things now? Well, now it’s "fine." So, they removed all the minerals, and when one deficiency caused issues, they added that one mineral back.
Now, many people are told, "If you don’t eat enough bread, you’ll develop thyroid issues because that’s where you get iodized salt." That’s completely upside down. If you eat a complete, unrefined salt and unprocessed foods, you’ll be fine. But we don’t do that anymore. Everything is shelf-stable and stripped down.
So, my conclusion is that we’ve done nothing with his information. We’ve only strayed further from the path. And in my practice, I still have to tell people daily: please eat more salt. People get very sick from mineral deficiencies.
The eleven principles of Weston Price well, from memory: they say eat unprocessed foods, eat enough, and all traditional peoples consumed animal products. Animal products—fat, meat, and fish.
Meat, fish, eggs, insects—anything that crawls or runs. They also ate things raw, like raw milk, raw meat, and raw fish. And they ate from nose to tail—the entire animal. These days, we eat just the filet, the tenderloin, or the steak. But the rest of the cow or the chicken? It’s often turned into animal feed now.
They always made broths from the bones as well. That’s something I’ve adopted in my practice. Yes, I always say, there are two pillars in my book and in my vision, and those come back to these principles: using the bones, the marrow, but also the brains and the tails.
This approach also addresses the problem of whether we should eat so much meat. If we go back to eating the whole animal, nothing goes to waste. Nowadays, much of it is turned into pet food.
The funny thing is that, in the past, we used to give muscle meat to the dogs and eat the rest ourselves.
And now we’ve reversed it.
Now we eat the muscle meat, and the rest goes to the dogs. Yet the most nutrients are in organ meat, marrow, and liver. That’s one of the things we’ve lost, and I think it has caused the most damage.
Broth is exactly what he emphasized. It contains everything—the good fats and minerals. He even started serving children in schools stews and slow-cooked broths filled with meat and vegetables, along with sourdough bread, to test the impact. He wanted to see how giving children a full, nutrient-dense meal once a day would affect their health.
Even serving school meals like that—just one meal a day—was his way of applying real science. If you have a hypothesis, test it and see if it works. And he achieved significant success, even with sick children who he was able to restore to good health.
He stated that dental health is central to the rest of the body. We now know that crooked teeth can lead to misalignment in the spine, and even a small millimeter in your mouth can affect your entire body.
So he used dental health as a starting point, you could say, but it was representative of the entire body.
And the principles—you don’t have to follow all eleven to the letter. But if you incorporate more salt, more fat, fermented foods, broths, and organ meats as five key components into your diet, you can regain much of the nutrient density we used to have. This will make you feel stronger again.
I sometimes say it feels like a conspiracy, as if they want to weaken us. The very things we’re told not to eat are what make us strong.
In my own practice, I now see many people with neurological complaints. We’re all becoming overstimulated so easily. People can’t tolerate bright lights, music, or noise. They’re quickly overwhelmed—"No, it’s too much for me"—in a shopping mall or supermarket. People can’t handle it anymore. They become immediately exhausted from overstimulation.
Many people are hypersensitive to textures in clothing, for example. There are so many people now who are highly sensitive (HSP, or however you want to label it). There’s also an increase in neurological conditions. You can’t always call them "diseases" anymore, but there are so many children with autism, ADD, and ADHD.
Where does it come from?
Our brains are no longer properly nourished. That wall of bricks applies to us too. The building blocks are missing not only for creating but also for maintaining. Our bodies are constantly renewing, continuously breaking down and rebuilding.
All of our cells renew themselves, and in seven years, you’ll have an entirely new arm. So if you start eating well now, in seven years, you’ll have a better arm than you do today. It’s never too late to start, so to speak.
But I’d much rather work with people before they get sick to see if we can prevent it.
The nervous system, well, your brain is made of fat—pure fat and cholesterol. So if you don’t eat that, you can’t think properly.
I’ve written one book that I co-published with Karin Hogeboom.
During my search for health, I came across Weston Price’s work. Karin is the daughter of a friend of my mother’s. And those mothers said to each other, "Oh, this is interesting. My daughter is talking all about this Weston Price, and yours is too, coming home with the same story."
I thought, how funny. So I emailed Karin—or maybe I sent her a message, anyway, we got in touch. I said, "Hey, I hear you’re into that dentist’s philosophy too. There’s a Weston Price conference happening soon in the Netherlands—are you going?"
Since then, we’ve stayed in contact. Karin works in eye health and runs retreats focused on that, where she also teaches courses. She needed a chef for her retreats in France, and at the time, I was very busy with cooking and teaching cooking courses.
I felt everyone needed to relearn how to make soup and ferment foods because everyone had forgotten. So I was teaching classes again. Karin said, "You’re so into this—can you come cook for us?"
"Yes, let’s do it." So I provided breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and herbal teas for a week, so to speak. Everyone wanted the recipes.
I said, "It’ll take some effort to write them down if you want them." Then I asked, "Do you want something polished or just links to the websites where I got the ideas?"
"No, no, we want real recipes."
So I sat down with Karin and asked, "How do we tackle this?" She said, "Write them down, and we’ll make an e-book."
So I turned the retreat recipes into an e-book. But then I thought...
A book belongs on the kitchen table, with stains and post-it notes in it. That’s a cookbook—not a stupid laptop on your countertop.
But the first book had, I think, 27 recipes. If you make a little book out of that, it’s just a thin booklet. So more had to be added—more information, more recipes, more knowledge. And that eventually grew into *Geef je ogen de kost* (Feat Your Eyes).
I always say it’s the same story as with teeth. Your eyes are also central to the health of your entire body. Healthy eyes reflect the health of your body. That doesn’t mean that if your eyes are perfectly healthy, your body is entirely tip-top, but it’s definitely connected.
Eyes are very sensitive to deficiencies, stress, and other factors.
What are healthy eyes? Eyes that don’t need glasses, perhaps?
Yes, well, eyes that feel good too. Not dry, not under too much pressure. It’s not just about sharp vision. That’s something I learned from Karin. I went with her to work with many people who had vision problems.
Her training involves taking off your glasses, relaxing, walking barefoot, and reconnecting with the earth.
But also doing a lot of exercises. You might call it "eye yoga," but they’re relaxation exercises. It’s not about straining your eyes with effort—it’s actually the opposite.
We’re starving our eyes by not giving them enough vitamins and minerals. And we’re exhausting them by staring at screens all day. But eyes need to be outside—looking at horizons, birds, and flowers.
Darkness is also nourishment for the eyes. Light nourishes the eyes, but so does darkness. And many people aren’t used to it anymore, plus the lighting we have has become increasingly harsh.
An incandescent bulb wasn’t so bad.
LED lights and energy-saving bulbs—they flicker, even if we can’t see it. That’s very exhausting for our eyes. Natural daylight is fine, but all these artificial lights, combined with the blue light from our screens, disrupt everything.
A lot of information enters our bodies through the eyes and gets processed in the visual cortex, which also needs fat to function. We take in so much information that we’re not even aware of, and it all has to be processed, which also depends on the nervous system.
This is the connection Karin makes between eye health and nutrition. Properly nourished eyes.
Like me, Karin went through a vegetarian phase. She thought vegetables and fruit were the key. She was working on healing her own eyes because she realized she could see quite well without glasses.
We focus so much on sharpness, but what can you see without glasses? It may not be sharp, but you can still see. People often say they’re blind, but they can still perceive colors and shadows. Sure, over time, it gets harder as your arms grow "too short" to hold things far enough away, but you can still see.
Karin wanted to learn how to see without glasses again. She started reading books and taking courses to gain more insights. She also attended a lecture by Mike Donkers, where she had a breakthrough.
For her, it also resonated. She thought, "Well, duh, it all makes sense." It’s nothing new—that’s why I say you just need to remember it. Think back to your grandmother’s Sunday soup or the slow-cooked stews found in cultures all over the world.
We’ve traded all that for a bouillon cube, which has left a massive gap in our nutrition. Collagen, connective tissue, mucous membranes—these are vital not just for your eyes but for your nose, mouth, and everything from your mouth to your intestines.
Those gelatin-rich broths are exactly what your mucous membranes need to stay fresh and healthy—to regenerate.
We’ve also faced more challenges, not just with stripped-down food. There’s the impact of cosmetics, cleaning products, chemicals, and pollution from household products. Our bodies have to process so much, but we no longer have the tools because we’ve been scared away from them.
For example, heavy metals like mercury from dental fillings can damage the nervous system. If your body is fully saturated with minerals—if every cell has the minerals it needs—there’s no room for heavy metals. Heavy metals only settle where there’s a deficiency.
It’s the same with bacteria in your gut. If your gut is balanced and healthy, you can eat a rotten fish, so to speak, and your body will either vomit it out or pass it through quickly. You won’t suffer for days.
When your body is fully nourished, that’s the beauty of the synergy between minerals and vitamins. You need fats to absorb minerals. If you eat a diet rich in minerals but lack fats—or if you rely on mineral capsules but have poor nutrition—your body won’t absorb them.
Supplements often don’t work. I call it "new pharma." It’s a booming market with plenty of knowledge, insights, and fascinating studies about how things work. It’s the only area of science still exploring vitamins and minerals.
But the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Just like Weston Price with his "Factor X," we still have many "Factor Xs" today. Tomorrow, we might discover a new mineral or vitamin.
And where will it be found? In food—everyday, natural food.
You might say, "Well, I’ll just take a multivitamin, and that’ll cover everything." But factory-made, petroleum-based food supplements miss the point. If it comes from a factory and isn’t real, living food, it doesn’t work.
Michael Pollan puts it beautifully: "If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, don’t bring it home." That’s how you should approach the supermarket—no fruit squeezes or yogurt popsicles. Keep it simple.
If you want to supplement, do it through food. Choose nutrient-dense options like cod liver oil, caviar, or liver.
Think about what the wealthy used to eat. Nobles in their castles weren’t eating oatmeal and vegetable soup like those in the huts. They were roasting pigs on spits, feasting on pheasants, caviar, cream, and honey.
Nowadays, we voluntarily choose to eat what was once considered "poverty food"—thinking we’re saving the world, avoiding animal suffering, and doing something healthy for ourselves. But we’re just eating the watery soups and oatmeal that people used to eat out of necessity.
Meanwhile, in the castles, they ate rich foods. I say, eat as if it’s Christmas—but skip the dessert because it’s full of sugar. Focus on rich foods. In English, "rich foods" often means fatty foods with plenty of butter and cream.
Tanja Stevens
Contact Email: info@gezondgestel.nl
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