A Review of Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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A book review by

Steve Solomon

 

It is a truth: " In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is

king. " Even more certainly--a one-eyed king is going to feel very

alone. Different than everyone else. Like what happened to me twenty

years ago after Weston Price's book had opened both my eyes.

I discovered Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in when I began to

reconsider and then to reject the conventional and unexamined answers

I'd been given about health, and healing, and doctoring. Like most

people who are glad to accept their smoothly-running body without

question or concern, I only got curious about my health after I first

noticed the onset of middle-aged degeneration. I visited the medical

doctor in town who was generally regarded as the most progressive and

least likely to prescribe drugs, to ask why I was feeling " off " such a

large proportion of days during the week. His answer mainly it

consisted of 'get used to it,' and 'it's middle age, everyone goes

through it,' and 'take two aspirin when it gets bad and don't worry

about it.'

But I felt I was entitled to enjoy physical well-being and could

not accept an increasingly hopeless, ever-worsening prognosis. So I

then asked the advice of a very wise, and very old gardener in my

neighborhood, who lent me his treasured first-edition copy of Price's

book and referred me to a naturopath practicing nearby, Dr. Isabelle

Moser. Isabelle became my doctor, taught me how to repair much of the

degeneration that had already happened, and some years later, became

my wife.

Life has never been the same since I read Nutrition and Physical

Degeneration. Price started me observing the bone structure and state

of constitutional degeneration of most of my neighbors. I found myself

noticing peoples' teeth and jaws and faces and how many of them had

crooked, crowded, irregular teeth, narrow jawbones, thin, pinched

noses, and flat, nasal voices that derive from small, inadequately

developed sinus cavities. Instead of admiring only the hefneresque

charms of the young women, I began to observe and catalog the size of

their pelvic girdles, to note if their " ovens " were adequate for the

purpose of baking babies. Most were too small. I stopped thinking

thin, aristocratic faces were beautiful and began considering that

broad faces with flat noses were. I put new significance on the small

number of children younger married couples were having, the difficulty

their young parents had with the raising and management of even one

child, the uncooperative and unfocused behavior of these kids, and how

often the children around me were seeing the doctor, and how many of

them seemed to suffer from a ever-ongoing series of physical

complaints. And I contrasted this with how it had been for my parent's

generation, where three children per family was normal. Or with my

Grandparent's generation, where four or five kids per family was

typical.

And my increased understanding has created a wide gulf between me

and most of my neighbors, who are lost in a confusion over why they

and their loved ones get sick and who depend on medicine and medical

doctors for their cures when they should be focused on their nutrition

and life-styles.

 

•

 

Most writers of books on health and alternative medicine mainly

offer prescriptions and explanations to overcome degenerative

complaints, of which most of us have no shortage. The Hygienists (my

favorite of all the holistic approaches) at least have a systematic

theory that explains how and why the body gets sick and offers a

method of remedy that is the logical response to the cause of illness.

But almost none, including some of the Hygienists, offer a standard of

comparison which one can hold up and say, " This is an example of what

true health would look like. "

Others in other fields have stressed that when studying some aspect

of life how essential it is to have a standard of comparison--a

control group--and that without a control group it is virtually

impossible to grasp significant truths. For example, Abraham Maslow

wisely tried to envision what a psychologically-healthy human would be

like before figuring out what we might do to become better beings. He

called this ideal a " self-actualizing " person. Maslow contested that

if one knew what a person should try to become, then one could

recognize a person who had grown to realize our potentials--and then

could have a target to aim at for improving their own life. L. Ron

Hubbard, another person who was deeply interested in achievement of

the full human potential, created a dozen or more of these targets

with his scales of various aspects of experience, from the most

desirable state to most undesirable. G.T. Wrench did a similar thing

when he stressed so strongly that if no one around you has had a good

nutritional " start " in life, it is virtually impossible to recognize

what a truely healthy person looks like. (You can read Wrench's book,

The Wheel of Health, in this Longevity Library collection.

Unfortunately there aren't many really healthy bodies around and they

don't carry prominent labels. So we muddle in a morass of medical

confusion.

Weston A. Price did humanity a great and largely-unappreciated

service by establishing an easily-understandble standard of human

health, clearly demonstrated with photographs. A really good picture

really is worth many thousands of words and Price offers the reader a

narrated slide show of over a hundred photos, many of them of

extremely healthy people contrasted with degenerated ones, photos

taken all over the world, of people of different races living in

climates eating totally different dietaries, accompanied by sensitive,

compassionate narration. This coupling of the visual image with

narration increases the power of Price's argument by a hundred-fold.

Price's book is basically a photographic travelogue, the story of a

world-wide search for a standard by which to judge human health. This

makes Nutrition and Physical Degeneration the most convincing and

powerful awakener of health-consciousness I have ever encountered.

As I stated at the beginning of this essay, I was never the same

after reading his book the first time. Only a handful of other books

have so strongly influenced how I understood life. So I have gone back

and re-read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration periodically--about

once every five years it seems. I have lectured about Price's work,

promoted the Foundation that tries to continue it, and have deeply

wanted to make Price's book a central part of the Soil and Health

Library. But have not been able to obtain permission from those who

control the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. They have denied my

requests because a reprint of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is

still being sold by the Foundation and income from these sales are a

major sustainer of that group. However, under the rules of " Fair Use "

regarding copyright protections, one is allowed to quote from a book

for the purposes of book reviewing or scholarly discussion. This is

what follows below, a book review.

Now, dear reader, comes a caution, and what I hope will be taken as

a strong suggestion. Long ago before the university-trained,

academic-minded English majors completely took over the editorial side

of publishing business, writers were allowed to repeatedly restate

their themes. If clever about how they go at this, an author can

restate their restatements many times without seeming to be repetative

or redundant. Restatement can be a useful technique and often

necessary because most people do not really read carefully and don't

fully grasp a concept the first time they are exposed to it. However,

a book review must, by definition, be concise. If the reader wishes to

achieve full understanding of what the book under discussion is about,

they are almost required to go slow, to think the ideas over as they

occur. I suppose what I am trying to communicate here here is a plea

that you take your time, and think over the small portions of Price's

book that I am able to excerpt here--look long and hard at the few

photographs that accompany this article. Then, I hope you will be

inspired to visit http://www.price-pottenger.org/ and order yourself a

copy. And study it!

 

•

 

Weston A. Price was a successful midwestern American dentist

practicing during the 1920s. He could have merely enjoyed a

financially-comfortable life ameloriating the ravages of rampant

dental decay and facial deformity in those upper-crust mid-western

Americans who were able to pay his fees. Instead, he worried about the

marked degeneration he saw occuring in modern civilization. Though by

Price's time mainstream medicine had largely ceased causing increased

mortality from ordinary infection, the incidence and severity of many

forms of degenerative conditions were increasing. The recent reduction

in infant mortality from innoculation and sanitation made the

statistics appear to show that we were living longer, but Price felt

that as individuals we were not enjoying the same good health and

well-being enjoyed by previous generations. Nor were we probably

living any longer as individuals. The amount of dental decay and

frequency of malformed facial bones, Price's direct day-to-day

concern, also seemed to be increasing rapidly. A third area of

degeneration Price discussed with considerable worry, will probably

cause the readers of his book the most difficulty to accept--he

perceived and agonized over a marked decline in the overall character

of people in the " civilized " world.

The academic will probably conceed that Price might have been

qualified to evaluate mass dental health. However, it is all too easy

to glibly dismiss worry over " moral decay " because for thousands of

years the middle-aged portion of humanity has been complaining that

the young are not the equal of their parents, yet the species still

has gone on. It is not the purpose of this article to convince the

unconvinced of modern moral decay, but to quickly transmit the essence

of Price's work in a positive way such that the reader of this article

will be motivated to obtain the book and read it. I observe that

Price's vague worry about the degeneration of modern character

solidified into a strong concern only after his searches in " primitive

groups, " where he noted that people isolated from modern civilization

seemed to have a higher intelligence and more refined moral/ethical

presence. In essence, Price concluded that healthy, well-nourished

persons tend to be brighter, more honest, and happier. Or, physical

nutrition is senior to spiritual health. Price said of this:

" The origin of personality and character appear in the light of the

newer data to be biologic products and to a much less degree than

usually considered pure hereditary traits. Since these various factors

are biologic, being directly related to both the nutrition of the

parents and to the nutritional environment of the individuals in the

formative and growth period, any contributing factor such as food

deficiencies due to soil depletion will be seen to produce

degeneration of the masses of people due to a common cause. Mass

behavior, therefore, in this new light becomes the result of natural

forces, the expression of which may not be modified by propaganda but

will require correction at the source. " (p. 4) Price thought we were

wasting our efforts at reforming antisocial behavior by mental therapy

or punishment. The cure rested in nutrition and to be effective,

proper nutrition had to begin before birth.

Another who saw this same reality from a very different starting

point was the German mystic and spiritualist Rudolf Steiner,

inspiration of the Waldorf method of education and founder of the

Anthroposophical philosophy. Steiner wondered why so many involved in

his spiritually-oriented communities demonstrated such reactive,

irresponsible, virtually criminal behavior, when these, of all people,

were the ones who had focused so hard on self-improvement. Why,

Steiner wondered, were his communities such hot beds of internicine

strife, such deep-seated backstabbing and covert politics? He finally

concluded that the problem was not in his teachings or in the methods

he was suggesting for self-improvement. The problem lie in the

nutrition of those who were his followers. Until the body was well

nourished, there was little or no point in talking about spiritual

nourishment. So Steiner began to study agriculture, and the result was

Biodynamic farming and gardening.

Price said of his book:

" In my search for the cause of degeneration of the human face and

the dental organs I have been unable to find an approach to the

problem through the study of affected individuals and diseased

tissues. . . . The evidence seemed to indicate clearly that the forces

that were at work were not to be found in the diseased tissues, but

that the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of

something, rather than the presence of something. This strongly

indicated the need for finding groups of individuals so physically

perfect that they could be used as controls. In order to discover them

I determined to search our primitive racial stocks that were free from

degenerative processes with which we are concerned in order to note

what they have that we do not have. These field investigations have

taken me to many parts of the world though a series of years. The

following chapters review the studies made of primitive groups, first

when still protected by their isolation, and, second, when in contact

with modern civilization. (p. 21) "

What proved to be the something missing was nutrition. Remember,

dear reader, that Price (and interestingly, Rudolf Steiner) began

practice shortly after a massive change occurred in peoples' food

habits. The degenerations observed during the 1920s came about thirty

years after the introduction of the roller mill and the consequent

wide-spread consumption of denatured white-flour products. Price

started researching Nutrition and Physical Degeneration around 20

years after nationally-distributed devitalized brand-name prepared

packaged food products began to dominate the food shops and peoples'

dietaries.

Proving his points by argument or data when faced with the intense

opposition from powerful vested food interests and contrary

established medical viewpoints was obviously beyond his (and probably

anyone's writing skills). So Price took a different tack. " In

presenting the evidence I am utilizing photographs very liberally. A

good illustration is said to be equivalent to a thousand words of

text. This is in keeping too with the recent trend in journalism. The

pictures are much more convincing than words can be, and since the

text challenges many of the current theories, the most conclusive

evidence available is essential. " (p. 4)

 

•

 

Price began nearly a decade of travels and research by journeying

to Switzerland, where, on his first " expedition " he began to sort out

a mish-mash of suspected causes of superior dental health. He

initially supposed that living at high elevations might produce

greater physical health. Better food also would have something to do

with it. He said:

" In order to study the possibility of greater nutritive value in

foods produced at a high elevation, as indicated by a lowered

incidence of morbidity, including tooth decay, I went to Switzerland

and made studies in two successive years, 1931 and 1932. It was my

desire to find, if possible, groups of Swiss living in a physical

environment such that their isolation would compel them to live

largely on locally produced foods. . . . at a little less than a mile

above sea level, a group of about 2,000 people had been made easily

accessible for study, shortly prior to 1931. Practically all the human

requirements of the people in that valley, except a few items like sea

salt, have been produced in the valley for centuries. " (p. 23)

Price discovered that he accorded the people of this valley

unusually deep admiration.

" The people of this valley have a history covering more than a

dozen centuries. The architecture of their wooden buildings, some of

them several centuries old, indicates a love for simple stability,

adapted to expediency and efficiency. Artistically designed mottoes,

many of them centuries old, are carved deep in the heavy supporting

timbers, both within and without the buildings. They are always

expressive of devotion to cultural and spiritual values rather than to

material values. These people have never been conquered, although many

efforts have been made to invade their valley. " (p.23)

" If one is fortunate enough to be in the valley in early August and

witness the earnestness with which the people celebrate their national

holiday, he will be privileged to see a sight long to be remembered.

These celebrations close with the gathering together of the

mountaineers on various crags and prominences where great bonfires are

lighted from fuel that has been accumulated and built into an enormous

mound to make a huge torchlight. These bonfires are lighted at a given

hour from end to end of the valley throughout its expanse. Every

mountaineer on a distant crag seeing the lights knows that the others

are signalling to him that they, too, are making their sacred

consecration in song which says " one for all and all for one. " This

motive has been crystallized into action and has become a part of the

very souls of the people. One understands why doors do not need to be

bolted in the Loetschental Valley.

" How different the level of life and horizon of such souls from

those in many places in the so-called civilized world in which people

have degraded themselves until life has no interest in values that

cannot be expressed in gold or pelf, which they would obtain even

though the life of the person being cheated or robbed would thereby be

crippled or blotted out.

" One immediately wonders if there is not something in the

life-giving vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not only

great physical structures within which their souls reside, but builds

minds and hearts capable of a higher type of manhood in which the

material values of life are made secondary to individual character. "

(p. 27)

Price began to notice certain themes in his first journey of

exploration that would replay themselves as he visited other areas of

the planet in subsequent years. The first and most important factor

common to all healthy environments seemed to be isolation--from

" civilization, " from the modern foods of industrial civilization, and

perhaps from the stresses of industrial life. And the next recurring

aspect of living in such isolation was the absence of social problems

and degenerative diseases of all sorts.

" The people of the Loetschental Valley make up a community of two

thousand who have been a world unto themselves. They have neither

physician nor dentist because they have so little need for them; they

have neither policeman nor jail, because they have no need for them.

The clothing has been the substantial homespuns made from the wool of

their sheep. The valley has produced not only everything that is

needed for clothing, but practically everything that is needed for

food. It has been the achievement of the valley to build some of the

finest physiques in all Europe. This is attested to by the fact that

many of the famous Swiss guards of the Vatican at Rome, who are the

admiration of the world and are the pride of Switzerland, have been

selected from this and other Alpine valleys. It is every Loetschental

boy's ambition to be a Vatican guard. Notwithstanding the fact that

tuberculosis is the most serious disease of Switzerland, according to

a statement given me by a government official, a recent report of

inspection of this valley did not reveal a single case. " (pp. 24,25)

Though Price noticed the absence of illness in general, he focused

on teeth and jaws, his specialty:

" We are primarily concerned here with the quality of the teeth and

the development of the faces that are associated with such splendid

hearts and unusual physiques. I made studies of both adults and

growing boys and girls, during the summer of 1931, and arranged to

have samples of food, particularly dairy products, sent to me about

twice a month, Summer and winter. These products have been tested for

their mineral and vitamin contents, particularly the fat-soluble

activators. The samples were found to be high in vitamins and much

higher than the average samples of commercial dairy products in

America and Europe, and in the lower areas of Switzerland. "

" Hay is cut for winter feeding of the cattle, and this hay grows

rapidly. The hay proved, on chemical analysis made at my laboratory,

to be far above the average in quality for pasturage and storage

grasses. . . . In the summer the cattle seek the higher pasturage

lands and follow the retreating snow which leaves the lower valley

free for the harvesting of the hay and rye. The turning of the soil is

done by hand, since there are neither plows nor draft animals to drag

the plows, in preparation for the next year's rye crop. A limited

amount of garden stuff is grown, chiefly green foods for summer use.

While the cows spend the warm summer on the verdant knolls and wooded

slopes near the glaciers and fields of perpetual snow, they have a

period of high and rich productivity of milk. The milk constitutes an

important part of the summer's harvesting. While the men and boys

gather in the hay and rye, the women and children go in large numbers

with the cattle to collect the milk and make and store cheese for the

following winter's use. This cheese contains the natural butter fat

and minerals of the splendid milk and is a virtual storehouse of life

for the coming winter. . . . The natives of the valley are able to

recognize the superior quality of their June butter, and, without

knowing exactly why, pay it due homage.(p. 26)

In my opinion the dairy products were superior because the soil of

this valley was extraordinarily fertile and the farming system used

was entirely natural--it must have been without any access to

industrial materials. I ask the reader to beware at this juncture, and

not to conclude as many have mistakenly done, that natural farming

will create fertile soil. It will not. There is a belief in the

Organic Farming and Gardening " religion " that you can take any old

clay pit or gravel heap and turn it into a vertible garden of 'eatin

if only enough compost is added. The actuality is that there are some

places (unfortunately not the majority) where the soil is naturally

very fertile and there are others where the soil is quite infertile.

Proper farming techniques can preserve and enhance fertility that is

already there. Modern civilization, with its ability to move huge

quantities of materials at a relatively low cost, now has the ability

to take less-than-ideally-fertile farmland and make it produce much

more nutritious food than it otherwise would, but rarely does modern

farming do this, because our focus is on profit and bulk production,

not on health and quality production.

Over the course of several succeeding years, Price visited the

African highlands, very isolated Peruvian coastal settlements, Native

Americans in the Arctic and Seminoles in the swamps of Florida,

Gaelics living on the Outer Hebridies of Scotland, Melanisans in Fiji

and Polynesians in Polynesia, the Maori of New Zealand, aboriginals on

the mainland and the Torres Straits Islanders living north of

Australia. In each local he found people who, due to extreme

isolation, were restricted to a self-sufficient dietary which also

happened to be of high nutritional quality. Price found the same

qualities of health in all these places and realized that no one diet

can be prescribed as the ideal human diet and that extremely healthy

people were found eating all sorts of dietaries. Some of these people

were primarily flesh and seafood eaters, others vegetarian, others ate

large quantities of dairy. Some wheat, some oats, some vegetables and

sea foods. Each people's dietary is described and considered in

detail. His description of the highland Swiss will serve to illustrate

the richness this book holds to those who will study it in its

entirety.

" The nutrition of the people of the Loetschental Valley,

particularly that of the growing boys and girls, consists largely of a

slice of whole rye bread and a piece of the summer-made cheese (about

as large as the slice of bread), which are eaten with fresh milk of

goats or cows. Meat is eaten about once a week. In the light of our

newer knowledge of activating substances, including vitamins, and the

relative values of food for supplying minerals for body building, it

is clear why they have healthy bodies and sound teeth. The average

total fat-soluble activator and mineral intake of calcium and

phosphorus of these children would far exceed that of the daily intake

of the average American child. The sturdiness of the child life

permits children to play and frolic bareheaded and barefooted even in

water running down from the glacier in the late evening's chilly

breezes, in weather that made us wear our overcoats and gloves and

button our collars. Of all the children in the valley still using the

primitive diet of whole rye bread and dairy products the average

number of cavities per person was 0.3. On an average it was necessary

to examine three persons to find one defective deciduous or permanent

tooth. The children examined were between seven and sixteen years of

age. . . . " (pp. 26-7)

" As one stands in profound admiration before the stalwart physical

development and high moral character of these sturdy mountaineers, he

is impressed by the superior types of manhood, womanhood, and

childhood that Nature has been able to produce from a suitable diet

and a suitable environment. Surely, here is evidence enough to answer

the question whether cereals should be avoided because they produce

acids in the system which if formed will be the cause of tooth decay

and many other ills including the acidity of the blood or saliva.

Surely, the ultimate control will be found in Nature's laboratory

where man has not yet been able to meddle sufficiently with Nature's

nutritional program to blight humanity with abnormal and synthetic

nutrition. When one has watched for days the childlife in those high

Alpine preserves of superior manhood when one has contrasted these

people with the pinched and sallow, and even deformed, faces and

distorted bodies that are produced by our modern civilization and its

diets; and when one has contrasted the unsurpassed beauty of the faces

of these children developed on Nature's primitive foods with the

varied assortment of modern civilization's children with their

defective facial development, he finds himself filled with an earnest

desire to see that this betterment is made available for modern

civilization. . . . " (p. 31-32)

 

•

 

Price also demolished any notion that these isolated groups of

unusually healthy people somehow had a unique hereditary resistance to

disease and degeneration. He reasoned that had superior genes been the

case, then following up people who abandoned life in a healthful

community for the life of " civilization " should find them continuing

in the same good condition. If genetically determined, then not only

the adults who left should continue to be healthy, but when a married

pair left, their children, carrrying the exact same genetics, should

also be foundto be in good fettle. This proved not to be the case.

Resistance to dental degeneration was actually based on diet, not

genes. Here are three little snippets from the book concerning this

area of interest:

" Again and again we had the experience of examining a young man or

young woman and finding that at some period of his life tooth decay

had been rampant and had suddenly ceased; but, during the stress, some

teeth had been lost. When we asked such people whether they had gone

out of the mountains and at what age, they generally replied that at

eighteen or twenty years of age they had gone to this or that city and

had stayed a year or two. They stated that they had never had a

decayed tooth before they went or after they returned, but that they

had lost some teeth in the short period away from home. " (p.32)

" At this point of our studies . . . Dr. Gysi accompanied us to the

Anniviers Valley, which is also on the south side of the Rhone. The

river of the valley, the Navizenze, drains from the high Swiss and

Italian boundary north to the Rhone River. Here again we had the

remarkable experience of finding communities near to each other, one

blessed with high immunity to tooth decay, and the other afflicted

with rampant tooth decay.

" The village of Ayer lies in a beautiful valley well up toward the

glaciers. It is still largely primitive, although a government road

has recently been developed, which, like many of the new arteries, has

made it possible to dispatch military protection when and if necessary

to any community. In this beautiful hamlet, until recently isolated,

we found a high immunity to dental caries. Only 2.3 teeth out of each

hundred examined were found to have been attacked by tooth decay. Here

again the people were living on rye and dairy products. We wonder if

history will repeat itself in the next few years and if there, too,

this enviable immunity will be lost with the advent of the highway.

Usually it is not long after tunnels and roads are built that

automobiles and wagons enter with modern foods, which begin their

destructive work. This fact has been tragically demonstrated in this

valley since a roadway was extended as far as Vissoie several years

ago. In this village modern foods have been available for some time.

One could probably walk the distance from Ayer to Vissoie in an hour.

The number of teeth found to be attacked with caries for each one

hundred children's teeth examined at Vissoie was 20.2 as compared with

2.3 at Ayer. We had here a splendid opportunity to study the changes

that had occurred in the nutritional programs. With the coming of

transportation and new markets there had been shipped in modern white

flour; equipment for a bakery to make white-flour goods; highly

sweetened fruit, such as jams, marmalades, jellies, sugar and

syrups—all to be traded for the locally produced high-vitamin

dairy

products and high-mineral cheese and rye; and with the exchange there

was enough money as premium to permit buying machine-made clothing and

various novelties that would soon be translated into necessities. "

(pp. 32-3)

Ane here's another additional bit of evidence disproving the notion

that certain small groups of onlyhighland Swiss had especially good

genetics:

" It is reported that practically all skulls that are exhumed in the

Rhone valley, and, indeed, practically throughout all of Switzerland

where graves have existed for more than a hundred years, show

relatively perfect teeth; whereas the teeth of people recently buried

have been riddled with caries or lost through this disease. It is of

interest that each church usually has associated with it a cemetery in

which the graves are kept decorated, often with beautiful designs of

fresh or artificial flowers. Members of succeeding generations of

families are said to be buried one above the other to a depth of many

feet. Then, after a sufficient number of generations have been so

honored, their bodies are exhumed to make a place for present and

coming generations. These skeletons are usually preserved with honor

and deference. The bones are stacked in basements of certain buildings

of the church edifice with the skulls facing outward. These often

constitute a solid wall of considerable extent. In Naters there is

such a group said to contain 20,000 skeletons and skulls. These were

studied with great interest as was also a smaller collection in

connection with the cathedral at Visp. While many of the single

straight-rooted teeth had been lost in the handling, many were

present. It was a matter of importance to find that only a small

percentage of teeth had had caries. Teeth that had been attacked with

deep caries had developed apical abscesses with consequent destruction

of the alveolar processes. Evidence of this bone change was readily

visible. Sockets of missing teeth still had continuous walls,

indicating that the teeth had been vital at death. " (pp. 33-4)

 

•

 

One of the most valuable lessons to be found in Nutrition and

Physical Degeneration comes from studying its many illustrations and

learning to immediately recognize what a healthy face and bone

structure looks like. This is demonstrated by contrasting numerous

pairs of photographs. Price introduces the lesson in this way:

" The reader will scarcely believe it possible that such marked

differences in facial form, in the shape of the dental arches, and in

the health condition of the teeth as are to be noted when passing from

the highly modernized lower valleys and plains country in Switzerland

to the isolated high valleys can exist. Fig. 3 shows four girls with

typically broad dental arches and regular arrangement of the teeth.

They have been born and raised in the Loetschental Valley or other

isolated valleys of Switzerland which provide the excellent nutrition

that we have been reviewing. They have been taught little regarding

the use of tooth brushes. Their teeth have typical deposits of

unscrubbed mouths; yet they are almost completely free from dental

caries, as are the other individuals of the group they represent. In a

study of 4,280 teeth of the children of these high valleys, only 3.4

per cent were found to have been attacked by tooth decay. This is in

striking contrast to conditions found in the modernized sections using

the modern foods. " (p. 34)

 

 

 

FIG 3. Normal design of face and dental arches when adequate

nutrition is provided for both the parents and the children. Note the

well developed nostrils.

 

" It is of significance that a study of the child life in the Rhone

valley, as made by Swiss officials and reported by Dr. Adolf Roos and

his associates, shows that practically every child had tooth decay and

the majority of the children had decay in an aggravated form. People

of this valley are provided with adequate railroad transportation for

bringing them the luxuries of the world. As we pass eastward over the

pass through Andermatt, we are reminded that the trains of the St.

Gotthard tunnel go thundering through the mountain a mile below our

feet en route to Italy. To reach our goal, the beautiful modern city

and summer resort of St. Moritz, we enter the Engadin country famed

for its beauty and crystal-clear atmosphere. We already know something

of the beauty that awaits us which has attracted pleasure seekers and

beauty lovers of the world to St. Moritz. One would scarcely expect to

see so modern a city as St. Mortiz at an altitude of a little over a

mile, with little else to attract people than its climate in winter

and summer, the magnificent scenery, and the clear atmosphere. We have

passed from the communities where almost everyone wears homespuns to

one of English walking coats and the most elegant of feminine attire.

Everyone shows the effect of contact with culture. The hotels in their

appointments and design are reminiscent of Atlantic City. Immediately

one sees something is different here than in the primitive localities:

the children have not the splendidly developed features, and the

people give no evidence of the great physical reserve that is present

in the smaller communities.

" Through the kindness of Dr. William Barry, a local dentist, and

through that of the superintendent of the public schools, we were

invited to use one of the school buildings for our studies of the

children. The summer classes were dismissed with instructions that the

children be retained so that we could have them for study. Several

factors were immediately apparent. The teeth were shining and clean,

giving eloquent testimony of the thoroughness of the instructions in

the use of the modern dentifrices for efficient oral prophylaxis. The

gums looked better and the teeth more beautiful for having the debris

and deposits removed. Surely this superb climate, this magnificent

setting, combined with the best of the findings of modern prophylactic

science, should provide a 100-per-cent immunity to tooth decay. But in

a study of the children from eight to fifteen years of age, 29.8 per

cent of the teeth had already been attacked by dental caries. Our

study of each case included careful examining of the mouth;

photographing of the face and teeth; obtaining of samples of saliva

for chemical analysis; and a study of the program of nutrition

followed by the given case. In most cases, the diet was strikingly

modern, and the only children found who did not have tooth decay

proved to be children who were eating the natural foods, whole rye

bread and plenty of milk. " (pp. 36-7)

 

 

 

FIG 4. In the modernized districts of Switzerland tooth decay is

rampant. The girl upper left, is sixteen and the one to the right is

younger. They use white bread and sweets liberally. The two children

below have very badly formed dental arches with crowding of the teeth.

This deformity is not due to heredity.

 

" Another change that is seen in passing from the isolated groups

with their more nearly normal facial developments, to the groups of

the lower valleys, is the marked irregularity of the teeth with

narrowing of the arches and other facial features. In the lower half

of Fig. 4 may be seen two such cases. While in the isolated groups not

a single case of a typical mouth breather was found, many were seen

among the children of the lower-plains group. The children studied

were from ten to sixteen years of age. . . .

" Bad as these conditions were, we were told that they were better

than the average for the community. The ravages of dental caries had

been strikingly evident as we came in contact with the local and

traveling public. As we had at St. Moritz, we found an occasional

child with much better teeth than the average. Usually the answer was

not far to seek. For example, in one of the St. Moritz groups, in a

class of sixteen boys, there were 158 cavities, or an average of 9.8

cavities per person (fillings are counted as cavities). In the cases

of three other children in the same group, there were only three

cavities, and one case was without dental caries. Two of these three

had been eating dark bread or entire-grain bread, and one was eating

dark bread and oatmeal porridge. All three drank milk liberally. " (pp.

39-40)

 

•

 

One of the most valuable things I gleaned from Nutrition and

Physical Degeneration occurred because of data that came from another

small book called Pottenger's Cats, also published by the

Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. By combining the two books into

one understanding I have obtained an ability to see how the human body

adapts to inadequate nutrition, especially inadequate mineral

nutrition. I suppose that's why the PPNF keeps Pottenger's Cats in

print and why Francis Pottenger gave his support to the foundation.

Francis Pottenger was a medical doctor who probably lacked a

sympathetic, profit-making bedside manner. So he developed a

successful medically-related business instead of a clinical

practice--he set up a testing laboratory behind a big old house in

Pasadena, California, where he assayed the potency of adrenal hormone

extracts. In his time (1920s) medical adrenalin was extracted from

animal adrenals, but the potency of the extracts varied enormously. To

be safely used in clincial work these extracts had have a measured

potency.

To accomplish this with the technology available during the 1920s,

Pottenger had to remove the adrenal glands of cats, and then find out

how much of a particular batch of extract it took to keep his cats

alive and in good condition. These cats, being precious to Pottenger,

were given every possible support to health and longevity. They were

carefully and hygenically housed, and Pottenger fed them on a diet of

slaughterhouse meat and organs, carefully cooked to prevent parasite

infestation. They were given Grade-A pasturized whole milk and dosed

daily with cod liver oil to prevent vitamin deficiencies.

Unfortunately, despite all this good care, the cats frequently

sickened and died, and generally did poorly. Pottenger attributed this

to having no adrenals and to the cats having been through surgery to

remove their adrenals.

But Pottenger's business did well anyway, and his need for cats

grew and grew. Eventually he was housing so many that he build a new

pen to hold the most recent lot of them, and to feed this batch, being

overworked, he did not bother to cook their meat, but just fed it raw

as it came from the slaughterhouse. Amazingly this batch of cats, even

without adrenals, thrived and were very healthy. Francis Pottenger

noticed this remarkable occurrence and decided to do a small cat

nutrition study. He divided up his cats into four groups to observe

the result of feeding the entire matrix of possibilities: raw meat/raw

milk; raw meat/pasturized milk; cooked meat/raw milk; cooked

meat/pasturized milk.

Not surprisingly, he found that the cats fed on cooked meat but who

got raw milk did a little better than those on all cooked food. The

ones on raw meat and pasturized milk did pretty well; the ones on all

raw food did great. Pottenger concluded that cats have a digestive

system that is not really capable of assimilating nutrition from

cooked protein foods. He concluded that the cat illnesses he had been

fighting were caused by mal-nutrition.

Dr. Pottenger also noticed that cats on raw food lived very long,

often 20 years. They also had good temperments and bred very

successfully. When a cat that had been on raw food was placed on

cooked food, its life was greatly shortened. The progeny of these cats

began to change their appearance. Their overall size lessened, their

teeth got poor, their reproductive organs did not develop well, they

had smaller litters, and within three generations on all cooked food,

they would barely reproduce, the females often refused to nurse or

mother their young if they did get pregnant, and cooked-food cats

developed nasty temperments.

The one study Pottenger reported that had the most profound effect

on my awareness was when he took some cats that he had intentionally

degenerated by feeding all cooked food for three generations. This

group worsened to the point that they would barely reproduce.

Pottender then took some of their young and began to feed them the

ideal all-raw diet. After four generations of perfect feeding, only

some of them began to look like fully-healthy cats. Degeneration is

much easier to create than it is to recreate perfect health from

degenerated stock. If these phenomena are expanded to include humans,

then we could guess that after creating mass degeneration from mass

mal-nutrition since the turn of the twentieth century, it will take

humans several generations of near-perfect feeding to begin to

virtually overcome the effects.This also suggests to me the reason why

someone who has already developed a degenerative condition often can't

cure it simply by adopting dietary reforms.

Pottenger also provided photographs of his groups of cats. They are

amazingly like the photos in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The

bodies of those humans Price studied expressed the same forms of

degeneration when the humans were given inadequate nutrition.

 

•

 

Virtually all human bodies carry genes that would create a jawbone

large enough to hold all the teeth the body is programmed for.Would

create a large-enough dental arch if they could create one. When the

body is starved for the raw materials to build its structures, at

first it wisely robs areas that aren't immediately vital to survival

and usually does so according to a sort of scale of " vitalness. " At

any price, the blood chemistry must be maintained perfectly, and the

nervous system kept entirely intact. These can't be shortchanged, not

at all. Then, the vital organs: heart, lungs, kidneys, etc, can't

really be scrimped on either, or the body won't survive to reproduce.

The bones that move the body, allow it to work and fight and flee,

these must also receive as large an allocation of reserves as

possible. But certain bone structures aren't nearly so vital. These

include the jawbone, the facial bones, and the pelvic girdle. When a

developing fetus is semi-starved during pregnancy, the result is a

narrow, pinched face, small jaw and pelvis--an aquiline nose and

crooked teeth. When that fetus is well-nourished and created by a

mother's body that also has had a lifetime of good nutrition, a body

carrying sufficient nutritional reserves in its tissues, the result is

an infant with a broad face, wide jaw and broad hips--a stocky, stout

appearance. If after being born, a well-nourished person is deprived

of good nutrition during childhood, the result is not quite as bad, as

this body at least had a good " start. "

One nutritionally-oriented dentist who wrote prolifically named

Melvin Page, concluded that when the body received at least 75% of

ideal nutrition, the teeth and bone structures were maintained intact.

When nutrition fell below 75% of ideal, dental disease manifested

rapidly.

Please study the pictures that are to come and learn to notice the

size of jaws and width of hips, the thin, delicate look or the strong,

stocky look. (If you can't " see " what I am referring to after studying

the photos I have reproduced to accompany this book review, I suggest

you buy Price's book, wherein you'll find many other photos, including

many of skulls and jaw bones that graphically explain the dental arch

and how it functions.) What I find most remarkable is when I look at

all the pictures of healthy people, of whatever race, nation, color,

they all look fundamentally the same. They have a broad flat nose

because narrow noses are caused by facial bones failing to be broad,

thus pinching the nostrils together. The tend to be shorter and

stockier. The females, even as children, all have adequately-sized

" ovens " for the baking of babies. They all look alike except for skin

color and hair texture.

 

•

 

Price also wondered if there were some special types of soils that

made for good teeth? Regarding Switzerland, he said:

" It is of interest that the southern part of Switzerland including

the high Alpine country is largely granite. The hills in the northern

part of Switzerland are largely limestone in origin. A great number of

people live in the plain between these two geologic formations, a

plain which is largely made of alluvial deposits which have been

washed down from the upper formations. The soil is extraordinarily

fertile soil and has supported a thrifty and healthy population in the

past.

" When I asked a government official what the principal diseases of

the community were, he said that the most serious and most universal

was dental caries, and the next most important, tuberculosis; and that

both were largely modern diseases in that country.

When I visited the famous advocate of heliotherapy, Dr. Rollier, in

his clinic in Leysin, Switzerland, I wondered at the remarkable

results he was obtaining with heliotherapy in nonpulmonary

tuberculosis. I asked him how many patients he had under his general

supervision and he said about thirty-five hundred. I then asked him

how many of them come from the isolated Alpine valleys and he said

that there was not one; but that they were practically all from the

Swiss plains, with some from other countries. " (p. 41)

Price concluded of all this data:

" High immunity to dental caries, freedom from deformity of the

dental arches and face, and sturdy physiques with high immunity to

disease were all found associated with physical isolation, and with

forced limitation in selection of foods. This resulted in a very

liberal use of dairy products and whole-rye bread, in connection with

plant foods, and with meat served about once a week.

" The individuals in the modernized districts were found to have

widespread tooth decay. Many had facial and dental arch deformities

and much susceptibility to diseases. These conditions were associated

with the use of refined cereal flours, a high intake of sweets, canned

goods, sweetened fruits, chocolate; and a greatly reduced use of dairy

products. " (pp. 42-3)

In this respect, I feel Price missed a vital truth about soil

fertility and human health. Price can easily be excused for this

limitation, after all, he was a dentist, not an agriculturalist.

Fortunately the relationships between soil and health were fully

appreciated by another remarkable being who also maintained an

association with the Price-Pottenger circle--William A. Albrecht.

Albrecht found that the nutritional qualities of foods and the

consequent health of the animals who ate these foods were enormously

effected by the intrinsic fertility of the soil that grew them. And

sadly, that most soils on Earth are not fertile enough to produce

maximally nutritious food and thus, most regions of Earth will not

produce the longest-possible living people whose health is maximized.

Albrecht also provides insights about how to manage soil with the aim

of improving the nutrition of the food it grows. But Albrecht's

remedies for lack of soil fertility do not exactly allign with the

Organic Farming and Gardening Religion as defined by J.I. Rodale and

successor company. During his lifetime J.I. Rodale denegrated Albrecht

for non-conformity with organicism, and so, even today, Albrecht's

writings are often overlooked.Fortunately, William Albrecht's works

are kept in print by an organization called Acres, USA.The Albrecht

Papers, all three volumes of them, are available for order through any

book store or at Acres' website, and many libraries have them or can

get them through their interelibrary loan service. For starters I

particularly recommend reading volume two.

 

•

 

In the next section of this book review, I have reproduced a small

selection of the photographs and a bit more narrative from Nutrition

and Physical Degeneration. They'll take you a few minutes to download,

but I strongly recommend that you do so and then study them, and the

comments Price made about them. Then, go out to your local food market

or mall or where ever people gather and observe faces, dental arches,

and crooked teeth. If you see someone with perfect-looking straight

teeth, but their face is narrow, take a chance, walk up to the person,

introduce yourself as a student of human health, and ask if you might

ask a somewhat personal question: have they been to an orthodontist?

And also please do this website a service. If you decide to buy a

copy of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration from the PPNF, please tell

them where you first learned of the book.

 

Thank you for reading this book review!

 

Steve Solomon

 

Exeter, Tasmania

February, 1999