Ancestral nutrition for women: the basics

Ancestral nutrition is a loose term for eating the way people ate before industrial food: whole foods, the whole animal, and very little that is manufactured. For women it gets discussed a lot and defined rarely. Here is the plain version.

What the term covers

At its core it is three habits. Cook most food yourself from recognizable ingredients. Use the whole animal where you can, which is the nose-to-tail eating pattern. And favor foods that kept people fed for a long time: meat, organs, eggs, dairy where it suits you, seasonal plants, and fats rendered from animals or pressed from fruit.

Where organs fit

Organs are the piece modern eating dropped and ancestral eating kept. In a muscle-only diet, nutrients concentrated in organs, like the vitamin A and B12 in liver, show up in much smaller amounts. The organ meat benefits page goes through organ by organ what that concentration looks like as food.

What it is not

It is not a recreation project. Nobody sane is churning butter in a cave. It is also not a single strict plan: versions of it differ on grains, dairy and almost everything else. The shared ground is whole food and the whole animal, and beyond that, households adapt it.

An ordinary week on it

In practice it looks undramatic. Eggs and meat cooked at home, broth from bones, pate or a ground organ blend once or twice, vegetables cooked in real fat, fruit in season. Supplements of dried organs appear in this picture for the same reason they appear anywhere: the weeks when fresh organs are not happening.

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Nothing on this site is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Talk to a qualified professional before changing your diet or starting a supplement.