Traditional, nutrient-dense whole foods rotated with the seasons and your local environment (Price, Fallon, WAPF).
In the 1930s, the dentist Dr. Weston A. Price traveled the world looking for groups that industrial food had not yet reached: Swiss mountain villagers, Gaelic communities on the Outer Hebrides, Inuit, Pacific Islanders, African tribes, Aboriginal Australians. He found, again and again, the same thing: excellent teeth, broad facial structure, strong bodies, and freedom from the chronic diseases of modern life. And he watched that health collapse within a single generation when white flour, sugar, canned goods, and vegetable oils arrived.
What these groups had in common was not a particular food. It was extraordinary nutrient density, and a willingness to eat whatever their land and season provided. This approach brings both halves back: real traditional foods, prepared traditionally, rotated with where and when you live.
Price's central finding was that the healthy traditional peoples he studied ate diets dramatically richer in nutrients than the modern one: by his measures, at least four times the minerals and water-soluble vitamins, and at least ten times the fat-soluble vitamins. Modern foods minimize nutrients. This approach does the opposite.
Vitamins A, D, and K2 (Price called K2 "Activator X") act as the catalysts that let the body absorb minerals and use protein. They come from cod liver oil, fatty fish and shellfish, organ meats, and the butterfat of grass-fed animals, highest in spring and fall when grass is growing fastest. Per the framework, they must come together, not in isolation.
Traditional fats, butter, tallow, lard, are how the fat-soluble vitamins travel into the body. They aren't feared here. Industrial seed and vegetable oils are avoided entirely.
Organ meats, especially liver, and bone broth are staples, not afterthoughts. Healthy traditional peoples ate the whole animal, and so does this approach.
For those who tolerate it: raw milk, cultured butter, kefir, and raw cheese. Price treated grass-fed dairy as a foundational nutrient-dense food. Raw dairy is restricted or illegal in some places and carries food-safety considerations, source carefully.
Sauerkraut, fermented vegetables, and cultured dairy show up daily, both for the gut and as the traditional way of preserving the harvest through winter.
If included, grains and legumes are soaked, sprouted, or sour-leavened to unlock minerals and reduce anti-nutrients. This is Fallon's addition: Price documented people eating grains but not how they prepared them, and traditional cultures essentially always pre-treated them.
Every traditional culture Price visited cooked most of their plant foods but ate at least some animal foods raw: raw liver, raw fish, raw or fermented dairy. The pattern is striking enough that the framework treats it as deliberate, not incidental.
This is not an elimination diet. Meat, dairy, fat, salt, grains, fruit, vegetables, all welcome through wise choices and proper preparation. Real sea salt over refined, unrefined sweeteners in moderation, no refined sugar, no ultra-processed foods.
Traditional cultures, in Price's observation, fed their most nutrient-dense foods to young couples before conception and to growing children. The framework treats nutrient density as an investment in the next generation as well as in oneself.
Traditional eating was never a fixed plate. It moved with the year. This is the part of the framework that distinguishes it from any static nutrient-density protocol, and it's also where BasedCal does its most distinctive work for this preset.
The cultures Price studied ate wildly different diets. Arctic peoples ate mostly fat and almost no plants; South Seas peoples ate a great deal of carbohydrate from fruit and tubers. The macro balance followed the land. No single ratio is universally "ancestral."
More fresh fruit, vegetables, and carbohydrate in the warm, abundant months. More meat, fat, roots, and preserved or fermented foods in the cold months. Colder and harsher climates lean toward fat year-round; tropical climates stay more carb-friendly year-round.
What is in season where you are right now is part of the philosophy. In BasedCal, this preset's targets shift continuously with your latitude and the time of year, and the app surfaces what is in season near you. Those exact percentages are BasedCal's design built on Price's principle that climate and season shaped the diet, not a formula Price himself published.
Fermented vegetables, aged cheese, cured and preserved meats: traditional peoples preserved the harvest to eat through winter. Out-of-season eating via traditional preservation is itself part of the tradition, never penalized in this preset.
The signature trio: liver, raw dairy, fermented vegetables. Around them, the rest of the larder fills in: cod liver oil for the fat-soluble vitamins, bone broth for minerals, traditional fats, pastured eggs, grass-fed and wild meats, shellfish, and whatever local produce is in season right now.
Because this approach rotates with the season, a single sample day misses the point. Here are two, for the same person in the same temperate climate, six months apart.
Pastured eggs cooked in butter with a little liver, or a few forkfuls of sauerkraut on the side. A spoonful of cod liver oil for the morning's vitamins A and D.
A slow-cooked fattier cut, or a bone-broth-based stew with root vegetables. A piece of raw cheese to finish.
Grass-fed meat with its rendered fat, fermented vegetables, and stored or root vegetables: potato, carrot, beet, cabbage. Rich, warming, deeply seasonal.
Richer, more fat and meat, more preserved and fermented foods. The day leans into the cold season instead of pretending it isn't winter outside.
Eggs with fresh seasonal fruit and raw cream. Same cod liver oil habit. Lighter, brighter, faster.
Grilled fish or a lighter cut of meat with a generous serving of fresh in-season vegetables, and a small fermented side for the gut.
Seasonal produce front and center: a lighter protein, vegetables at their peak, fresh berries for dessert.
More fruit, more vegetables, more carbohydrate. The same person, the same climate, but a noticeably lighter and more plant-forward plate.
Nutrient-dense animal foods and the fat-soluble vitamins (liver, butter, cod liver oil). Fermented foods daily. Traditional fats only, no seed oils. Real salt. And a preference for what is local and in season right now.
Price's observations are historically influential, and the traditional-foods movement has real adherents, but some specific WAPF positions are debated and not mainstream consensus. Honest framing: a coherent, time-tested-foods framework with genuine debate, not settled medical fact. Not medical advice.
Two halves are stitched together here. The nutrient-density and traditional-foods half is Price and Fallon and the foundation that carries their work. The seasonal and local rotation half isn't owed to any single modern thinker: it's how traditional peoples necessarily ate, and Price documented it in passing, climate by climate, culture by culture.
The 1939 book and decade of fieldwork that started it all: fourteen isolated traditional cultures, before and after industrial food.
The cookbook and manifesto that translated Price's findings into a modern kitchen: soaking, sprouting, fermenting, broth-making, the lot.
The non-profit carrying the work forward. Position papers on raw milk, the fat-soluble vitamins, traditional preparation, and more.
BasedCal presents this as a framework, not medical advice. Claims here are attributed to Weston A. Price, Sally Fallon Morell, and the Weston A. Price Foundation, not the app. The exact seasonal macro percentages this preset uses are BasedCal's design built on Price's principle that climate and season shaped the diet, not a formula Price himself published.