Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
by: Weston Andrew Price
Topics include: primitive racial stocks, high vitamin butter, deformed dental arches, dental arch deformities, modern physical degeneration, fine dental arches, dental arch development, animal life from the sea, modernized primitives, modernized groups, modernized foods, had dental caries, straight rooted teeth, dental caries problem, modern degeneration, broad dental arches, activated ergosterol, many primitive races, contact with modern civilization, modernized districts, soluble activators, dental arch forms, rampant tooth decay, sea animal life, including dental caries
First Sentence:
Some of the primitive races have avoided certain of the life problems faced by modernized groups and the methods and knowledge used by the primitive peoples are available to assist modernized individuals in solving their problems.
Reviews:
rare and important research
This book distills the research of Weston A. Price, a dentist and independent nutrition researcher. In a decade of travel around the world, Price and his wife studied the health, dietary habits, and chemical composition of food of dozens of traditional peoples of various racial backgrounds. His research was done at a time when many such groups still lived free of the influence of Western civilization and what he called "foods of commerce," i.e. heavily refined and denatured foods.
One could question whether 60 plus year old research is relevant today, but I found his work powerful and persuasive for a very simple reason.
Health problems sent me on a quest to find the best dietary information, but I soon found myself mired in contradictory claims, opposing research and special interest groups, as well as outright deceit. First I would read about how one vitamin or mineral was good for this. Then I would read that the very same item was bad for that. You shouldn't combine X with Y, or needed to add tons of Z or W, except on Sundays when the moon was almost 3/4 full. I became very disillusioned with the incredible complexity of nutrition. As I read more and more deeply, I also became annoyed at all the disinformation and profiteering behind much of the so-called research.
I reached this bottom line: While we understand proteins, carbs, and fats reasonably well, and have a pretty good handle on most vitamins and about a dozen minerals, there is simply an immense amount we just don't know. We are researching minerals at about 5 per decade (around 50 to go - a hundred more years at our current rate). There are around 5000 enzymes in bee pollen alone, and few of them have been researched. There are an unknown number of phytochemicals and other things we have yet to discover that have been constituents of our food for perhaps millions of years. Science moves very slowly, and it could easily be several hundred or 1000 years before we get it all sorted out. And that doesn't take into consideration the power groups who insist on muddying the waters for profit's sake. Modern science is quite obviously incapable of giving us complete answers to our nutritional questions. It just plain doesn't have them to give, nor will it for a long, long time.
Then I found Price's work. Basically, he was the Tony Robbins of diet - he sought out the healthiest people on Earth and studied what they had done for hundreds and thousands of years to stay healthy. He looked at their Traditional diets as well as what happened when they adopted Western diets. The results are in this book, and it is well worth your taking the time to read. While others have followed his work, the changing nature of the world now make it impossible to duplicate his research today. His work stands as a pivotal piece in science and health as well as in history. This represents the cumulative knowledge of millions of people over thousands of years in a laboratory that includes the entire world. Definitely non-trivial.
There are also books by Ronald Schmid and Sally Fallon that introduce and give overviews of Price's work. I recommend them also. Today, when we must all become advocates for our own health, arming yourself with the best information is vital.
Dr. Price hoped to influence the world to change their dietary habits. With just his wife and whatever bearers, guides, and drivers he could find, he single-handedly proved the diet-health link and backed it up with meticulous records and photographic evidence. He traveled to the far corners of the world to find the most primitive cultures on each continent, and compared their traditional diets to the standard Western diet. Photo after photo in his book points up the glaring difference between the health and APPEARANCE of the natives of whatever culture nourished on their traditional diet and those whose diets had been disrupted and "displaced" by the "white diet"...a diet high in refined foods like white sugar, bleached white flour, polished rice, and synthetic fats. He also carefully laid out the guidelines for a natural unrefined diet that would be suitable for modern Americans. Too bad all that careful research and excellent advice has been ignored. Today's SAD (standard American diet) is a god-awful, unbalanced grain-heavy (65% "complex carbohydrates") piece of tomfoolery that bears no resemblance to the diet that nourished and nurtured our ancestors. If you never buy another book about nutrition, you owe it to your children and your grandchildren to buy THIS book, READ AND REREAD IT, and pass it down to your posterity.
Dr. Price was a retired dentist who toured the world for a few years to find out why some native people escaped tooth and bone problems, including crooked teeth. His conclusion was that it had to do with eating nutrient rich food (not the calorie rich food of the modern diet). Whether this is the case or not may be disputable. What is not disputable is the fact that teeth and bone problems developed within a generation of modern food becoming available to the natives, which can be readily seen in the numerous pictures taken by Price. My own conclusion is that eating a diet of only nutrient rich food, as FRESH as possible, will produce the healthful results observed by Dr. Price if practiced from birth (and practiced by the parents before engendering children).
Chilling, mind-boggling warning on causes of modern foods
Perhaps one of the greatest books of the 20th century. Though it was written in the 1930s, it is nonetheless eerily prophetic of the ominous trends that punctuate modern technology, namely the changing nature of how humans and animals eat. There is a "Twilight Zone" sense of foreboding as Dr. Price's research and findings unfold, chapter after chapter. What this book amounts to is a convincing, virtual warning on what is happening to the planet, and the humans and animals that inhabit it. The information contained within is so compelling, riveting, meticulously documented, and palpably thorough in its research, I have no reservations about saying that this may be the most crucial piece of work on nutrition to ever have been written. But it's more than a book on nutrition. It deals with the cultural, technological, global, and (latently) political ramifications of manufactured food. There are so many angles - such as soil depletion, corruptive changes in the human form and the catastrophic physical decline of the species - and complications stemming from the changes wrought in the way humans and animals eat, one needs to read the book. There is no guesswork here. Price, like a true scientist, made acutely sure to back up his assertions with chemical analyses, tests and rigorous collection of data.
Price's findings are amply illustrated with an astonishing collection of photos. The people that pass for humans is plainly frightening. The "before and after" aspect of the hundreds of photos leave the reader in abject shock. There is a real sense of horror, chapter after chapter, of seeing the after-effects of modern foods on various peoples. After reading this book, one may surmise that several factors have fallen into place. That is, the realization of why, despite "advanced" technology, medical care and knowledge, the nation and the world continue to be plagued with disease, degeneration, obesity and ill health. As Dr. Price puts it, the majority of plagues, and infectious diseases have been largely dealt with, but now in its place are degenerative ailments, and the
The most chilling realization of all is the very real possibility that pre-natal "germ plasm disruptions," coming from parents who lack the proper means of health through nutrition to create ideal offspring, may be taking place in epidemic numbers. What this is tantamount to is the actual de-evolution of a degenerated human race. Price's main observation on the healthy primitive peoples is how they respect the laws of nature. What modern technology does not recognize is that many primitive societies have knowledge that have been passed on from millenia in which to base their vital health. What Price does here is to show the effects of "modern foods of commerce" (as he calls it) on these primitive societies. You see, in mind-boggling photos, how healthy, disease-free primitives look; the ones who have been subsisting on their own diets for millenia have beautifully formed faces, palates, jaws and teeth that are totally devoid of caries. Then, there are, among these same peoples where white man and their modern foods have taken over. Children (and the adults they become) with birth defects, deformed palates, rotted, missing teeth and ill-health. Even more scary is the possibilty that "pre-natal disruptions" could cause impaired brain health. Dr. Price very meticulously documents all his findings, which include, specifically, what kinds of foods cause the best health, and, conversely, the worst. He backs up his findings with x-rays, photos and all kinds of data that can't easily be refuted. The common sense and logic which prevails throughout can't be shaken off; these details are disturbing and unsettling. We see proof of how nature is being corrupted by an unnatural means of eating. It all falls into place. The untainted foods of God are what we're meant for. The moral is clear: take the foods of God, alter it, chemically process it, and feed it to people, and witness the catastophic destruction of what nature intended. If this continues, we're done for.
The other real, sobering possibility is that information like this will be constantly scuppered by prevailing dietary trends, and misinformation. Fortunately there is an active society, based on the author's work, which can be found at www.westonaprice.org - this organization is promoting wholesome eating, good health and vitality through the foundations of good nutrition, which Dr. Price endorsed. Eventually, with any luck and perseverance, the truth will prevail, and the one vestige out of Pandora's Box - hope - can morph into a tangible reality. One can get a head start, armed with this knowledge, through several important books: number one, and the most crucial, Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions," Mary G. Enig's "Know Your Fats," Enig and Fallon's book "Eat Fat, Lose Fat," Bruce Fife's "The Coconut Oil Miracle," Kaayla Daniel's "The Truth About Soy," and Jordan Rubin's "The Maker's Diet."
This book is a spectacular read. Though it does deal primarily with Dr. Price's research, findings and discoveries on nutrition and physical degeneration, there are so many rewards otherwise. This is a first-rate travelogue, superb cultural anthropological study, and an astonishingly thorough analysis of human behaviors. Moreover, Price is a wonderful writer, matter-of-factly genteel, dispassionate and duly concerned all at once.
There are no words adequate to convey the the impact, importance and timeliness of this book.
I owe a great debt to this book. Back in 1977, I ran across an old battered copy of Nutrition & Physical Degeneration, and it became the second book I ever read on the diet-disease connection. I had just finished my first major change in diet, a 5-week cleansing program, and the results (loss of acne and a growing sinus problem) so stunned me that I was looking around for anything that further explained this diet-symptom connection. Price's book hit me like a ton of bricks, but it wasn't his words that I remember reading; it was the shocking photographs- traditional people's faces juxtaposed with those that had moved to the cities and modern diets-that spoke volumes.
Two years later, in 1979, I left home for what would be a 3-year hitchhiking trip around the globe. A year was spent traveling through Africa, and not a day would go by went I didn't see examples of what Weston Price was pointing out. Deep in Mali or Senegal or the Ivory Coast, you would see a vibrant health in people. Then go into the cities like Dakar or Bamako, and the bone structures and teeth and skin would have deteriorated. Just like Price's photographs. I remember thinking that this doesn't take a scientist or nutritionist to see this. Anyone, even a traveling hippie, could spot what was happening when humans moved from a whole foods diet, to a one filled with fake foods.
If you have any doubt that virtually every skin and digestive problem is related directly to the sludge-producing, historically new diet that we have been consuming since about the 1930s, read Weston Price's book. Heck, just look at the pictures. Because until our medical profession stops its unholy relationship to the pharmaceutical industry, it is up to each of us to uncover and remember this diet-disease/diet-health relationship.