Jan 31, 20195 min read

Tara Couture on Nutrient Dense, Ancestral, and Optimal Eating, Farming, and Life

Tara Couture R.H.N. - Peak Human Podcast

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Welcome back everyone, I’m Brian Sanders and I quit my job and have dedicated my life to the investigation of nutrition and lifelong health. I’m creating the feature length documentary Food Lies, this podcast, and a health technology company here in Los Angeles with a doctor and 2 other partners.

Today I’m talking to Tara Couture who is a certified nutritionist, homestead farmer, expert in nutrient dense cooking and living, and maybe my new favorite person ever.

She’s raised her family for 25 years on the most amazing, nutrient dense foods you can imagine using her nutrition background, teachings from Weston A. Price, raw milk from farmer friends, and mostly her own animals she raises. She butchers her own animals, churns her own butter, makes her own head cheese, etc., etc. She is the real deal. Check out what I’m talking about before you even listen to this episode on her amazing Instagram account @slowdownfarmstead http://instagram.com/slowdownfarmstead.

She’s a wealth of information and I genuinely enjoyed our talk. We get into vegan lies, the Canadian mafia-like police arresting people for selling food they produced by hand, crazy family members refusing to eat her food, and a lot more. Her husband is an ER doctor and deals with some of this insanity as well.

Don’t forget you can still preorder the Food Lies film on Indiegogo to support its creation and this podcast. Thanks again for everyone’s support so far and please enjoy this great episode with Tara Couture.

BUY THE MEAT NosetoTail.org

Support me on Patreon! http://patreon.com/peakhuman

Preorder the film here: http://indiegogo.com/projects/food-lies-post

Show Notes

She has the best Instagram account in the game http://instagram.com/slowdownfarmstead
She lives on a homestead farm in Canada and raises basically all her own animals and food
She eats the most glorious, nutrient food you can imagine
Tara and her husband (who is a doctor) were in the military and moved around for many years. Every place they went they immediately found local farmers to supply them with the nutrient dense food they needed
She bought deep freezers on Craigslist for $50 and bought bulk animals for the whole year
People in cities can go to farmers markets or get involved with a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) https://www.localharvest.org/csa/
Her daughter is living in a small apartment and buying bulk meat from farmers and deep freezing as well
It doesn't have to be all or nothing - do what you can
Daughters went off and ate normal food with friends as teenagers and felt sick and hated it
She’s eating an animal food-only diet currently but doesn't like to call it carnivore or keto because that’s not what she’s after - she’s going after nutrient density
She lists some of the things she eats daily - duck confit, head cheese, rabbit liver, kidney, adn heart pate, duck prosciutto… the list goes on
Duck prosciutto sounds fancy but is actually super easy to make
We’ve been sold a bunch of lies by big food producers making it seem like they’re the only ones that can feed us and it’s so hard to cook on your own
She inexplicably has a 26 year old daughter while looking 26 herself
Her daughter was misdiagnosed with a rare disease which made her go vegetarian. Her health fell apart despite doing it very well with all the right food combinations
All her daughters were raised on organic foods, raw milk and cream, lots of animal fats and they are all beautiful and lean
They’ve never had antibiotics and none of them even have a doctor
The younger 2 daughters have never had a cavity (Tara was eating vegetarian when she had the oldest so…)
Her youngest is on the boys hockey team and squats 225 lbs and was born 10 lbs 6 oz
She thinks their calm and even-keeled temperament is very noticable and attributes it to a very healthy diet
They bring big coolers of real foods (meat) to hockey tournaments
Youngest daughter has never had fast food before - she says she wants that to be on her tombstone “the kid that never went to McDonalds”
They have a beautiful organic garden and eat fermented plant foods like sauerkraut and kimchi
She’s temporarily eating only animal foods because she has zero inflammation that way, feels great, and has no gut issues
She lives near Ottawa on the Canadian Shield which has thin soil and is very rocky. There’s also trees everywhere. This land cannot be used for crops. The only good use for it is animals.
They wander the forest and eat a really diverse variety of forage
She does rotational grazing with her cows in the warmer months
“The idea that grain or vegetarian diets will save the earth is so nonsensical. Anyone that works on the land can explain to you in one sentence why that can’t happen”
Vegans have the loudest voices so people think it’s the majority
People like Bill Gates think they know how to save the world - he’s some nerd who started a computer company - what does he know about farming?
Don’t wait for these changes to come from the top - get your own well-sourced meat today
She raises dairy cows, beef cows, ducks, meat rabbits, and heritage breed pigs (off and on)
She makes her own butter which destroys any store bought grass fed butter
Animals have instincts, just like humans, of what’s good for them
She is working outside the system regarding insurance, so if anything happens she’s screwed
They have a quota system for milk where you have to buy the right to sell milk for tens of thousands of dollars
It’s like a mafia. They raided her neighbor and took him to court
It would be illegal for her to serve me milk if I visited
Her slaughter story
7 min documentary on mobile slaughter called “I Kill” https://vimeo.com/118461898
The first animal she was around for the end of life was a bison she butchered with her mentor
She develops relationships with these animals. This is part of life. We have a disconnect with death, and it’s not good
For some reason we’re trying to rewrite nature and evolution with our current “me” oriented thought patterns
An unnamed person in her life came over for dinner and brought her own diet yogurt, 7up, and granola bar to eat and refused to eat her farm grown, handmade food
Her dad has major health problems
Her husband is a doctor but doesn’t want to be part of the system pumping out drugs
People go to the hospital for a common cold and demand antibiotics
So much depression, ADHD, and anxiety in children these days, it’s crazy
When he asks people what they eat they're offended
Our society is soft
We need to start with our community food system first - not the big food companies or policy at the top level
https://www.westonaprice.org
http://www.eatwild.com
“It’s been the great con job of our century to make us think that all this stuff is hard and foreign and out of reach”