Good food article

This article was posted on the Ohio Westen A. Price Foundation Yahoo group.

Got (Raw) Milk? Kenyan challenges Western nutrition

October 17, 2007 By Mike Ding

Living on an organic diet saved his life, Kenyan native Willson Kimeli Naiyomah told students and faculty Tuesday night in alecture in the Geology Corner. Upon arriving in America for his studies, Naiyomah, who is now pursuing a M.S. in Biology at Stanford, was struck at the culture of abundance.

I expected nobility,” he said. “So I went to Albertson’s. And lo and behold, the fruits were ripe; they looked like they had just dropped from the tree. I’d never seen such round, nice looking fruit. I went to the milk aisle, which is what I wanted, and there was milk! Milk everywhere!?

But Naiyomah’s enthusiasm abruptly ended the minute he drank the processed and pasteurized milk.

“It hit me so hard,” he said. “It tasted terrible. You know when you anticipate something you want so much and it anticlimaxes like that? It was awful.”

Naiyomah was used to the non-processed milk he drank while growing up in the Massai village of Enoosaen, Kenya. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Oregon after a 1996 Washington Post article prompted Americans to contributefunds.

Soon, Naiyomah realized that all the food he ate in America, which had been processed and sterilized for longer shelf lives, was not the virile, life-giving food that he had eaten from his youth in Kenya. Before long, he developed both lactose intolerance and Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract.

“It was quite ironic,” he said. “I was being buried in food. But I was starving in plenty.”

Lactose intolerance did not simply deprive Naiyomah of his favorite beverage; it also struck him psychologically.

“That was the disease of very few people who lived in cities, those who wore suits and glasses. So we in the villages thought of it as the ‘disease of the important people.’ I was supposed to go back to my village and build a hospital, but now Iwas dying in America. I began to think that maybe I had sinned and brought a curse upon myself.”

Before long, he could hardly be recognized as the lean, healthy young Massai man that first stepped off the plane to America.

“When I came from Africa, I was only 105 pounds —chiseled, skinny, healthy, and, though you could almost see my bones, very strong. Soon I blow up to 169 pounds, after my first girlfriend introduced me to Big Mac.”

After offering the gift of a cow to America after 9/11 on behalf of his tribe, Naiyomah, now withering away in a dorm room at Stanford, found out about a man in Fresno called Mark McAfee who produced raw, organic milk.

“It occurred to me that there’s something about the natural state of things,” he said. “Life begets life; living food gives life to living things.”

Naiyomah said that when he first drank the raw milk, he expected to become very ill. However, the taste in his mouth reminded him of his childhood days in Kenya, when he would take care of other villagers’ cows. At these jobs, he would often drink fresh milk from the cows’ udders. That was the exact same taste he experienced now.

“I did not feel an upset stomach,” he said. “I was emotional. I felt like something had finally come to save my life.”

Soon Naiyomah ate only organic foods, and his recovery was nothing short of astounding.

Through his experience, Naiyomah realized that — though the western world’s diet had managed to rid food of all bacteria,thus eliminating any chance of infectious diseases — it had also taken away the beneficial bacteria that also existed in foods.

“The problem is that microbes are not really our enemies,” he said. “Certain vitamins such as vitamin K can only be made by bacteria."


”Though Naiyomah did not outright advocate all individuals to switch to the diet of indigenous African tribes, he did challenge the audience to think about what they eat.

“In western eating, you always have things in nice cute packages, it’s offered to you, you don’t know where it came from, you just believe, and eat it. It’s not going to kill you, maybe later, but not now,” he said. “We are what we eat.”