As a real food blogger who has actively endorsed and recommended fermented cod liver oil (FCLO) for the past several years, I wanted to share my thoughts on the recent FCLO scandal.

If you’re too impatient to read this whole thing (and I don’t blame you – it’s long!), make sure you scroll down to the last paragraph. I have a big announcement about tomorrow’s post.

As a real food blogger who has actively endorsed and recommended fermented cod liver oil (FCLO) for the past several years, I wanted to share my thoughts on the recent FCLO scandal. If you’re too impatient to read this whole thing (and I don’t blame you – it’s long!), make sure you scroll down to the last paragraph. I have a big announcement about tomorrow’s post.

I know there are many readers out there who started using fermented cod liver oil because of my recommendation, so I feel that it is my obligation to share my thoughts. My integrity is everything. If you can’t count on my word, then there’s no reason for you to read this blog or listen to anything I have to say.

I’m honestly surprised that more bloggers who have been promoting the FCLO over the years have not yet posted about this issue. A few people posted articles right after the report came out, but since then it’s been crickets. I know people are busy and I totally get that. But I have a feeling a lot of people out there are nervous about posting anything because it’s such a controversial issue.

A few bloggers did write about it. Notably David Gumpert’s Complete Patient blog — he’s done a ton of coverage and I’m so grateful for his reporting. If you want to learn more about this issue, I recommend that you check his blog out because there are a number of posts.

There were also posts on Modern Alternative Mama, Wellness Mama, Balanced Bites, and Nourished and Nurtured, who boldly wrote about her concerns about FCLO way back in 2013.

(My blog has been down since May. After the crash of my business in 2014, I couldn’t afford to host it anymore. So that’s why I haven’t posted about this yet.)

So anyway, here we go…

Before I get into the fermented cod liver oil scandal, I want to start by saying that I am deeply indebted to Sally Fallon Morell and all the people who started and grew the Weston A. Price Foundation. I have learned so much about nutrition and health from WAPF in the past several years and will always be grateful to Sally and the Weston A. Price Foundation.

The Fermented Cod Liver Oil Scandal

For those of you who haven’t heard, in August, Dr. Kaayla Daniel, former Vice President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and winner of the WAPF Integrity in Science Award, sent the FCLO to 5 different labs and got 9 different reports, which she then interpreted and published her own findings, Hook, Line and Stinker!: The Truth About Fermented Cod Liver Oil. If you haven’t read it yet, click this link to get a free download.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I’ve been a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation since my daughter, Kate was born in 2007. I started taking and promoting the Green Pasture Products’ fermented cod liver oil in 2008 when I first tried it at a WAPF conference.

We stopped taking the FCLO a few years ago, due to my concerns of rancidity. I’ll elaborate on that below. I also quit paying Weston A. Price Foundation membership dues a few years ago, for different reasons which I will explain below.

My History with WAPF

So let’s get on to this whole fermented cod liver oil business, shall we? In order to do so, I need to talk about my history with the WAPF organization and its members, since fermented cod liver oil was founded by Green Pasture Products, part and parcel with WAPF.

I feel it is necessary to tell the history of my involvement with WAPF and Green Pasture because this scandal has rocked the community, and many of the players in this tragic unfoldment of events are very close friends of mine. You can skip ahead over this part if you want, but I feel it is necessary to talk about the history of these people and how connected we are.

I became a member of the WAPF and later became a co-chapter leader in Los Angeles with my dear friend, Victoria Bloch. I was an enthusiastic WAPF advocate and did a lot of work over the years to promote the organization and help others to promote the organization and their work. I started Real Food Media, which later became Village Green Network.

Village Green Network

At the height of that company’s success in 2013, we had nearly one thousand blogs in the network and many of them were strong advocates of the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can read my post here on the history of Village Green Network and how that played out.

I attended the annual November WAPF conference every year from 2008 until 2013. For me, the conference was the best time of the year, second only to Christmas. The annual WAPF conference was like a huge extended family reunion. I used to always say I got more hugs in November than I got the rest of the year combined.

I found out about the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2007 when my daughter was 4 months old. I was having trouble producing enough breast milk (I later found out this was due to the fact that my doctor put me on the birth control pill after she was born and I did not know this could negatively impact your breast milk supply).

So I had to start supplementing with formula, which I made me feel awful. Not being able to exclusively breastfeed my baby was devastating to me. My mom breastfed all of us kids and was a member of La Leche League back in the late 60s. I really didn’t want to feed my baby that nasty formula powder with soybean oil and additives.

Raw Milk

When I posted on my blog that I was having trouble breastfeeding, my Great Uncle Roy (who has since passed away) sent me an email with a link to an article on the WAPF website about the dangers of soy formula. I read many of the articles on the site and was very excited about the organization.

I have been a believer in the power of diet and nutrition for many years. I overcame health challenges in my twenties when I graduated from college. With changes to my diet and probitoics, I was able to cure my Rheumatoid Arthritis, gluten intolerance, chemical sensitivities and chronic sinus infections and seasonal allergies. For me, the Weston A. Price Foundation really put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

I then read Dr. Ron Schmid’s excellent book, The Untold Story of Milk which convinced me to start buying raw milk for our family. Instead of store bought formula, I started supplementing with the WAPF raw milk formula (in addition to breast milk — I was producing milk, just not enough). I started buying grass-fed meat and dairy products, and switched from 2% organic milk to full fat organic raw milk. I started making my own kefir and kombucha, soaking nuts and oatmeal, sprouting flour, and making bone broth. And we started taking taking cod liver oil.

Health Benefits from a Weston Price Diet

So many good things happened as a result of making these changes to our diet. I stopped getting cavities. I used to get a cavity every other year or so, and I have 2 root canals.

After I changed my diet, my tooth sensitivity and pain disappeared, the brown spots of decay turned white, and I haven’t gotten a single cavity. I also have a lot more energy and better moods, and I get a lot more done.

It makes sense to me that traditional foods are the key to good health. Look at all the healthy people who have lived for centuries on traditional foods like butter, cream, fish, meat, whole milk, cheese, eggs, coconut oil, lard, and homemade chicken stock. Degenerative diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke were rare until the past few decades, when many of these foods began to disappear from our plates.

To this day, I continue to follow a Weston Price diet and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. I am teaching my daughter and son how to eat and how to cook. I am teaching them how real food is healing and nourishing and how processed junk food makes you sick. For these reasons, I will always be grateful to Sally Fallon and the Weston A. Price Foundation and everything I have learned from them.

My Friends in the WAPF Community

In 2008 I went to my first conference which was not an official WAPF conference, but rather the Deirdre Currie Festival. This was a conference in honor of Deirdre Currie, the wife of Archie Welch. They were very early chapter leaders of WAPF.

Dee had recently passed away due to a pulmonary embolism during the birth of their first and only child, Jack. You can read about it in my post here.

Archie stood on stage with his baby Jack and talked about how much the WAPF community meant to him and how much it had meant to his wife, Dee. At that conference, I got to know Archie and his business partners Dan Corrigan and Karen Myers of Corganic (which had just been founded in 2007).

I also met a lot of the members of the WAPF community including WAPF President Sally Fallon, Jerry Brunetti (who has also since passed away), Natasha Campbell-McBride, and blogger, Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

It was at that conference that I decided to start a blog network. Thanks to WAPF member, Jonathan Drake, who gave me the idea and also the domain name, Realfoodmedia.com. We started out as partners but he realized soon after that it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He went on to do other things and I went ahead with Real Food Media.

I’ll always be grateful to Jonathan for his encouragement, for his enthusiasm for business and new media, and for his and his wife Heather’s friendship.

I went to my first WAPF conference that fall of 2008 in San Francisco and met lots of other members of the WAPF community.

Mark McAfee and his daughter Kayleigh, of Organic Pastures Dairy (where I had been buying my raw milk), Dr. Ron Schmid, Dr. Kaayla Daniel, Will Winter, Randy Hartnell of Vital Choice Seafood, Sandeep of Pure Indian Foods, Tim Wightman of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, and Dave Wetzel of Green Pasture Products. And many others.

Many of these people became business colleagues and many of them became my friends. Seems like a lifetime ago when I think about how much has changed since then. Real Food Media grew from a few blogs in 2008 (Kelly the Kitchen Kop was our first) to 5 blogs in 2009.

In 2010, we grew to a few more blogs including Sarah Pope of The Healthy Home Economist, who eventually grew to the biggest blog in our network. That was the same year I won the WAPF Activist Award (along with Sarah Pope).

The CLO “Reformation”

In 2012, I attended the WAPF conference that fall in San Francisco. That was the year Archie Welch distributed a pamphlet he wrote about the history of cod liver oil.

I remember at the time telling Archie that he was like Martin Luther and the 95 Theses that sparked the Protestant Reformation. Little did I know at the time how true that would become a few years down the road.

First of all, let me tell you why Archie wrote this pamphlet, and why he did the research. Because many people are saying he did it in order to sell his competing product, Corganic’s EVCLO (extra virgin cod liver oil).

As I mentioned above, Dan and Archie were very active members in the early days of WAPF and volunteered a lot of their time to help grow the organization. In 2007, Dan Corrigan founded Corganic, which was a online store he started to sell real food and supplements, including the Biokult supplement and Green Pasture fermented cod liver oil.

Corganic was focused especially on people and kids on the autistic spectrum. Their tagline is “Real Food for Autism”. You can read more about the history of Corganic on the Thinking Mom’s Revolution blog (one of my favorite blogs).

When he was running Corganic in those early days, Dan noticed that a number of kids on the spectrum had trouble with Biokult, the probiotic developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, author of The Gut & Psychology Syndrome and creator of the GAPS Diet. Natasha healed her own son of autism with the GAPS diet and probiotics.

Corganic was getting a lot of customer service calls from parents whose children had trouble with Biokult. This is what led Dan, partnering with Archie and Karen, to found a supplement company, Organic 3, Inc. in 2009. In 2010, Organic 3 launched a new probiotic supplement called GutPro, which was designed specifically for their customers who had difficulty taking Biokult. I have recommended both Biokult and GutPro to my readers over the years, and continue to do so.

It was the customer service calls at Corganic, fielded for the most part by Karen Myers, that led Archie to investigate the history of cod liver oil. Many of the Corganic customers reported that they and their children were not getting better, even though they were following a strict GAPS diet. Many people could not tolerate the FCLO. When they would go off the FCLO, they started improving.

Archie wanted to find an alternative high quality cod liver oil, so he began doing extensive research online about the history of cod liver oil.

The History of Cod Liver Oil

Here’s a brief summary of Archie’s History of Cod Liver Oil, the pamphlet that he distributed to the attendees at the 2012 WAPF Conference (you can read the whole thing online here):

Cod liver oil is a traditional food. It goes back to ​Viking era​. However, fermented cod liver oil is not a traditional food, as people have only been consuming it (via Green Pasture Products) for the past decade.

According to Archie’s research, the Vikings consumed cod liver oil, but it was always consumed fresh, especially during the long and dark winter months of Northern Norway. After the Viking era, cod liver oil was used for commercial purposes. Fishermen would rub the oil on their skin to soothe sore joints and muscles.

The infirmaries and apothecaries picked up on the topical usage of cod liver oil and began using it topically on patients with rheumatism. In the late 1700s, a patient at the Manchester Infirmary in the UK was told to rub some cod liver oil on her joints and also take some internally. She was cured within two weeks. That started the cod liver oil boom.

The pale oils from the first week or so of the putrefaction process was called medicinal cod liver oil. Unfortunately there was not enough to meet demand so some of the brown industrial oils were used medicinally with mixed results.

In 1850, Peter Moller invented the process of steam rendering fresh-caught livers displacing the poorly prepared industrial cod liver oils. The putrefaction process or “fermentation” of the livers had a very short window as a medicinal. Most assuredly our ancestors consumed fish oils fresh, and when it smelled and tasted rancid they steered clear of it. ​

Was This Attack on Green Pasture a Plot Hatched By Corganic to Sell More EVCLO?

I want to address this argument – I see some people online in comments saying this whole thing was a money-making plot cooked up by Dan and Archie of Corganic. Dan didn’t start Corganic it to make money. I mean, yes, it’s a for-profit business so they have to make a profit – that’s the point of doing it. But Dan launched the company to help kids on the autistic spectrum. That is what Corganic’s tagline has always been “Real Food for Autism”.

Corganic is an extremely small company and none of the owners makes much money from it. Dan Corrigan still to this day works a full time job and runs the company in his spare time (nights and weekends). He’s the father of two kids. Archie and Karen also have other work outside of Corganic. They are not getting rich of of this — far from it.

As I said, I have known all the players in this drama for years. Archie published the original pamphlet about the history of cod liver oil which never mentioned FCLO.

The reason this all came to a head three years later is not because Archie and Dan are so powerful that they were able to orchestrate a huge conspiracy against Green Pasture.

Problems with Fermented Cod Liver Oil

No, what happened, as you will read below, is that many, many people started having serious problems with FCLO. And many people found that when they stopped taking it, their health improved. Archie and Dan noticed it because they were selling the FCLO and their customers were complaining weekly.

After that, things unfolded which Archie and Dan had nothing to do with. Dr. Ron Schmid’s advanced heart failure, hospitalization and prognosis of death, and his realization (totally independent of FCLO) that maybe he had been taking too much CLO (he never blamed FCLO).

Meanwhile, Dr. Kaayla Daniel was hearing multiple reports of people experiencing health problems from FCLO. She felt the obvious need to look into it. It was October 2014 that Dr. Kaayla Daniel brought her concerns to WAPF, and her concerns were dismissed. When she discussed it with Dr. Ron, he offered to help her fund the tests, mainly because he wanted to see the FCLO come out clean!

These things all happened independently of Corganic, Archie and Dan. There is no way this could be a conspiracy — unless Archie and Dan have the ability to telepathically mind-control people. I say that jokingly but come on, people. It’s absurd.

Look, I deeply appreciate Green Pasture’s efforts to produce a quality cod liver oil. I really do. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to try to create a nutritional supplement and get it on the market.

However, if a company gets reports from customers who are having problems, those concerns should not be taken lightly or ignored or written off. Dan and Archie did not take it lightly. After they got repeated calls from customers who were experiencing problems with the FCLO, they stopped selling it and looked for an alternative.

I for one, am grateful that there is an alternative raw cod liver oil available, since my family stopped taking the FCLO, as I will explain below.

You Can’t Ferment Oil

When I spoke to Archie about his research at the conference in 2012, he said, “You can’t ferment oil.”

This hit me like a thunderbolt. It’s true. You can’t ferment oil.

I’m not a lipid scientist. But you don’t have to have a science degree to undertand that polyunsaturated oils (polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs) are damaged very quickly, within hours, by heat and light and air.

According to Connie Leas in her book, Fat: It’s not What You Think, “…the double bonds of polyunsaturated fats oxidize within a few hours of exposure to air.”

Fermented Cod Liver Oil is Not Probiotic

When I first started buying FCLO in 2008, I was led to believe that the probiotics in the oil protected the oil from going rancid.

But according to Dr. Kaayla Daniel’s report, the lab reports showed that there was no probiotic bacteria in the FCLO. Green Pasture confirms this.

Owner Dave Wetzel said, “Fermented cod liver oil has no bacteria, as bacteria need water, protein and sugar to live. Bacteria do not survive in oil.”

So if the oil is not probiotic, then what is protecting the oil from heat, light and air?

And even if the FCLO were probiotic, how would probiotic bacteria protect oil from rancidity?

Do you know of any other fermented oils? There has never been such a thing in all of history. Because you can’t ferment oil.

How is the FCLO Protected from Rancidity?

So how is the oil protected? Even Sally Fallon says we need to refrigerate PUFAs. But Dave Wetzel told me at one of the conferences that it was safe to leave FCLO in the cupboard for “months”. I believe he said I could leave it in the cupboard for 6 months to a year.

At the time he said that, I figured it made sense because the oil was fermented or probiotic. Only it’s not. If the oil sits in their facility for months on end as the livers are putrefying, then isn’t the oil already rancid when you buy it?

I don’t know if the Green Pastures fermented cod liver oil is rancid or not, but logically I don’t see how it can NOT be rancid. I’d rather err on the side of caution, which is why I stopped buying it in 2012. After it was clear to me that “you can’t ferment an oil”.

We switched to Carlson’s cod liver oil at that time, and then last year when the Rosita EVCLO sold by Corganic came to the U.S. market in the fall of 2014, we started taking that. I chose it because it is raw, it is not heat-treated and does not contain synthetic vitamins as most other modern cod liver oil brands do.

First, Do No Harm

I do still very much believe in the benefits of cod liver oil, but as Dr. Weston Price said, you need to make sure to avoid rancid oil. He also never recommended fermented cod liver oil.

Dr. Weston Price said we should avoid rancid fats because they destroy vitamins A and E:

“Freshness and storage of the oil is important, he continued. Even though an oil may have a high vitamin content, if it is oxidized or rancid, it will not have the desired effects. “The available evidence indicates that fish oils [including cod liver oil] that have been exposed to the air may develop toxic substances.… Rancid fats and oils destroy vitamins A and E, the former in the stomach.” — Dr. Weston Price, as quoted on the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation article, Cod Liver Oil: A Historical Perspective.

Rancid or oxidized oil causes cancer, heart disease and many other health problems from arthritis to Alzheimer’s to premature aging.

Sally Fallon, President of the WAPF, also said we should avoid rancid fats:

“One reason the polyunsaturates cause so many health problems is that they tend to become oxidized or rancid when subjected to heat, oxygen and moisture as in cooking and processing. Rancid oils are characterized by free radicals—that is, single atoms or clusters with an unpaired electron in an outer orbit.

These compounds are extremely reactive chemically. They have been characterized as “marauders” in the body for they attack cell membranes and red blood cells and cause damage in DNA/RNA strands, thus triggering mutations in tissue, blood vessels and skin.

Free radical damage to the skin causes wrinkles and premature aging; free radical damage to the tissues and organs sets the stage for tumors; free radical damage in the blood vessels initiates the buildup of plaque.

Is it any wonder that tests and studies have repeatedly shown a high correlation between cancer and heart disease with the consumption of polyunsaturates? New evidence links exposure to free radicals with premature aging, with autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and with Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s and cataracts.” — Sally Fallon Morell and Mary Enig Phd, The Skinny on Fats,  January, 2000

Why We Don't Take FCLO

So, that is why we no longer take fermented cod liver oil. I don’t know if it is rancid, but I’m not willing to take the risk. I’ve spent the past few years thinking about it and I can’t figure out how it is not rancid.

Not to mention the reports we’ve been hearing from many people who had health problems and serious, even fatal conditions after taking the FCLO. And when they stopped the problems miraculously went away.

The argument some people have made, “I don’t have any health problems and I take FCLO” is absurd. Lots of people eat genetically modified food and they don’t have health problems — until one day they get cancer.

First, do no harm. Considering that this is a very recent food (it’s only been on the market for less than a decade), we really have no track record so we should proceed with caution. Plus, Green Pasture Products is the ONLY company in the world making this product.

And If this product is harming people’s health and endangering their lives, that’s extremely frightening to me. Especially since so many of us give it to our children. If there’s even the slightest doubt, it should be avoided. In fact, I personally think all sales of FCLO should be halted until further research can be done.

I’m just one person. You don’t have to believe what I say about FCLO. I have opinions, and I most certainly could be wrong.

Instead, listen to the stories of the people who have been intimately involved in this scandal.

Starting tomorrow (Wednesday), I will be posting video (Skype) interviews with these people over the next week on my blog. Including longtime (former) WAPF member, sponsor and honorary board member, Dr. Ron Schmid who was hospitalized for advanced heart failure and given a prognosis of 3-6 months to live. And former WAPF staff member, Cathy Raymond, who had a terrible head-to-toe rash and 30 pounds of weight gain due to inflammation. And many more.

Why I Left WAPF

Okay, so I promised to elaborate on why I am no longer a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation, this organization and community that I loved so much and have always considered to be an extended family.

Over the years, I have watched Sally Fallon attack members in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. I felt that her attacks were damaging to our community and our movement. I have heard that the WAPF community has not been growing over the past few years and I personally believe this is one of the main reasons.

Almost every year, usually just before the annual fall conference, Sally would do something to attack someone (a person or an organization) publicly.

These have all been leaders in the real food movement, people and organizations many of us revere. Usually it was in the form of a “thumbs down book review” in the quarterly journal.

2000 – Michael Eades, MD and Mary Eades, MD
2002 – Loren Cordain
2002 – La Leche League
2007 – Marion Nestle
2009 – Dr. Joe Mercola
2009 – Nina Planck
2009 – Michael Pollan
2010 – Michael Pollan again
2010 – Michael Pollan again
2011 – Jordan Rubin
2011 – Tim Ferris
2012 – Dr. Cate Shanahan
2012 – Marion Nestle again
2012 – La Leche League again
2013 – Robb Wolf
2013 – The Paleo movement
2014 – Robert Lustig, MD

Public Shaming

I see these attacks as a form of public shaming. These people and groups should be honored, not shamed and ridiculed.

I was a victim of public shaming recently (read about it here), and it was hands-down the most painful experience in my life. I would not wish this experience on my worst enemy.

I also think it’s hard to grow an organization when the leader is making so many enemies. I’m not saying you should never say anything wrong about anybody else. It’s good to have conflict, and it’s fine to express opinions, and negative reviews are to be expected. But these negative reviews, if you take the time to read them, are extremely short-sighted.

The La Leche League book, for example, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding.

OK, yeah, their diet advice is bad. But does that mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and trash their work? It’s a critical work on the importance of breastfeeding. One that helped me and many of my friends. Why trash La Leche League? If it weren’t for them, my mom would have never breastfed me.

And just LOOK at all those names in that list. I honestly began to feel ashamed to be associated with WAPF.

John Moody’s 2011 attack on Tim Ferris’s book, The 4-Hour Body was especially bizarre. The 4-Hour Body was a NY Times #1 Bestseller and was one of the top 5 top selling books on Amazon for two years running.

And it featured a whole section recommending Green Pastures’ fermented cod liver oil. Seems like WAPF would want to thank Ferris, not denigrate him. He sure gave Green Pasture a ton of free advertising!

For me personally, Robb Wolf was the last straw. I just couldn’t keep paying dues to an organization that was doing this. And I’m not the only one who felt this way. Just check out some of the comments on the WAPF Facebook page.

Not to mention that Sally’s post about Paleo was wrong on multiple counts. For example, she said that the Paleo diet advocates “Only lean muscle meats, no added fat.”

What? A quick internet search will tell you that’s ridiculous. Just look at the recent book by Matthew and Stacy Toth, authors of the Paleo Parents blog, Beyond Bacon.

A Big Tent

I remember on Robb Wolf’s Facebook page, when he posted about it, he was very much a gentleman and took the high road.

He simply said, “We need to build a bigger tent.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I don’t remember what year it was that I first spoke at the WAPF conference — either 2010 or 2011… that was the year I met a number of Paleo/Primal folks Nora Gedgaudus, John Durant, Melissa McEwen, Stephan Guyenet…

I think maybe it was the next year that Diane Sanfilippo of Balanced Bites came to the conference with Liz Wolfe. And the year after that Michelle of Nom Nom Paleo came.

Building Bridges

But they stopped coming and they never came back. And why? Well, why would they come back? Sally made them feel unwelcome. Which is really sad to me because they tried so hard to build bridges.

The truth is, Weston Price and Paleo communities have so much in common.

Animal foods – check
Saturated fats – check
Bone broth – check
Grass-fed meat and dairy – check
Pastured eggs – check
Fermented foods – check
Supporting small farms – check
Organic foods – check
Non-GMO foods – check

Okay, so Paleo doesn’t allow grains (with the exception of “safe starches” like white rice in moderation) and Dr. Weston Price did recommended grains (freshly ground whole grains). So there’s one difference. I can’t think of any others.

And isn’t the GAPS Diet, which WAPF endorses, extremely similar to the Paleo and Primal diets? Broth, saturated fats, meats (including organs), seafood, fruits and vegetables, fermented foods, dairy (for some people, if you can tolerate it). How is GAPS different exactly?

I have WAPF friends who don’t drink wine and I do. Does that mean I can’t be friends with them?

Heck, I have vegetarian and vegan friends, too. Can’t we be friends? There are lots of vegetarian people whose diets are very traditional.

I’ve met a number of people from India who grew up on vegetarian diets and had teeth like piano keys and had never been sick in their lives.

The whole thing is silly. Not only is it silly, it’s detrimental and destructive to our movement. Think of the impact we could make in the world if WAPF and Paleo came together. And what if the vegetarians eating grass-fed butter and eggs joined us, too?

I think Robb Wolf is right. If we really want to impact more lives, we need a bigger tent. Why not join forces and create a health movement that more people can connect with?

But I don’t think that will ever happen with WAPF. Because Sally has made her mind up. And she’s not one to easily change her mind. And it seems like when this whole FCLO thing blew up, she just dug her heels in harder.

What I see with WAPF is an excellent organization with exemplary values and really wonderful people. But it has a terrible structure. WAPF is run like a dictatorship or monarchy. Sally has decided to do a lot of things that a lot of the members do not agree with. I know this because in my position as a blogger and owner of a blog network, over the years I heard from many, many members. But the members have no voice.

An organization needs checks and balances. You need people within the organization to be able to express opinions. They need to be listened to and acnowleged. We need multiple points of input. Especially when you have lots of smart, compassionate people in the group.

You can’t rely on one person to be right all of the time. Because humans are flawed. We don’t know everything. And we make mistakes. Which is why we need the checks and balances. The more our voices are heard, the more we can communicate and work out conflicts, the more we will innovate and grow and do awesome things.

“But We Are Dividing the WAPF Community”

This is one of the arguments I keep seeing online. People saying that Kaayla was wrong to publish her report because it was damaging to the WAPF community.

At the end of the day, this is not about keeping the community together. This is about truth. It’s about protecting people’s health. If the community has to be divided to protect people from dying, then yeah, let’s divide.

And it is about making a bigger space for more people. A bigger tent.

I think we should all respect Kaayla’s and Dr. Ron’s and David Gumpert’s bravery to question the status quo and to challenge authority. They may not be right. The FCLO may be perfectly safe. But what if it is isn’t?

In a healthy community, people can express opinions, even if they are unpopular, and not be shunned and quieted and kicked out. In a healthy community, members should be able to question authority and not be punished. In a healthy community, the health and happiness of the members, not the leaders, is the most important thing.

This is why I found it alarming when Sally Fallon said what concerned her most about this whole thing was Dave Wetzel’s family. Shouldn’t her primary concern be about the health of the members of WAPF?

I think a new organization will evolve from this… it’s just a matter of time.

Check Back Tomorrow for Exclusive Video Interview with Dr. Kaayla Daniel

As I said above, tomorrow I will be posting the first video interview with Dr. Kaayla Daniel in a week long series on my blog. Subsequent video interviews with all of the “amigos” and a number of others will go live each day for the next week.

If you want updates, please just add a comment below and I’ll send you email updates when the videos go up. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel and/or Facebook page for updates.

Postscript: Major Problems with Lab Tests from WAPF

Okay, so there are some really major problems with the lab tests WAPF has been citing. I mean like, serious issues.

I really wanted to be able discuss this in this post — I have a lot of information I feel it is necessary to share. However, I’ve been working on this post for several hours now and in order to get it up today, I need to wait and write a second post getting into this information. If you want me to post more about this, please comment below and I’ll do it.

Oh and if I got anything wrong in this post… please comment or email me at annmarie @ annmariemichaels dot com. Humans are fallible and I may have mistakes in this post. Typos, wrong on dates, what have you.

Or whatever – let me know so I can fix it. Thanks.

Fermented Cod Liver Oil Scandal Archive

Here is the link to the full archive of posts about Fermented Cod Liver Oil Scandal.