Review by Sally Fallon - Nutrition & Physical Degeneration

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Nutrition & Physical Degeneration

 

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By Weston Price, DDS

Review by _Sally Fallon _

(http://www.westonaprice.org/bookreviews/napd.html#author)

More than sixty years ago, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price decided

to embark on a series of unique investigations that would engage his

attention and energies for the next ten years. Possessed of an inquiring mind

and a

spiritual nature, Price was disturbed by what he found when he looked into

the mouths of his patients. Rarely did an examination of an adult client reveal

anything but rampant decay, often accompanied by serious problems elsewhere

in the body such as arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, intestinal complaints

and chronic fatigue. (They called it neurasthenia in Price's day.) But it was

the dentition of younger patients that gave him most cause for concern. He

observed that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along

with what Price called " facial deformities " --overbites, narrowed faces,

underdevelopment of the nose, lack of well-defined cheekbones and pinched

nostrils. Such children invariably suffered from one or more complaints that

sound

all too familiar to mothers of the 1990s: frequent infections, allergies,

anemia, asthma, poor vision, lack of coordination, fatigue and behavioral

problems. Price did not believe that such " physical degeneration " was God's plan

for

mankind. He was rather inclined to believe that the creator intended

physical perfection for all human beings, and that children should grow up free

of

ailments.

Price's bewilderment gave way to a unique idea. He would travel to various

isolated parts of the earth where the inhabitants had no contact with

" civilization " to study their health and physical development. His

investigations

took him to isolated Swiss villages and a windswept island off the coast of

Scotland. He studied traditional Eskimos, Indian tribes in Canada and the

Florida

Everglades, Southsea islanders, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New

Zealand, Peruvian and Amazonian Indians and tribesmen in Africa. These

investigations occurred at a time when there still existed remote pockets of

humanity

untouched by modern inventions; but when one modern invention, the camera,

allowed Price to make a permanent record of the people he studied. The

photographs Price took, the descriptions of what he found and his startling

conclusions

are preserved in a book considered a masterpiece by many nutrition

researchers who followed in Price's footsteps: Nutrition and Physical

Degeneration.

Yet this compendium of ancestral wisdom is all but unknown to today's medical

community and modern parents.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is the kind of book that changes the way

people view the world. No one can look at the handsome photographs of

so-called primitive people--faces that are broad, well-formed and

noble--without

realizing that there is something very wrong with the development of modern

children. In every isolated region he visited, Price found tribes or villages

where virtually every individual exhibited genuine physical perfection. In such

groups, tooth decay was rare and dental crowding and occlusions--the kind of

problems that keep American orthodontists in yachts and vacation homes--non

existent. Price took photograph after photograph of beautiful smiles, and

noted that the natives were invariably cheerful and optimistic. Such people

were

characterized by " splendid physical development " and an almost complete

absence of disease, even those living in physical environments that were

extremely harsh.

The fact that " primitives " often exhibited a high degree of physical

perfection and beautiful straight white teeth was not unknown to other

investigators

of the era. The accepted explanation was that these people were " racially

pure " and that unfortunate changes in facial structure were due to " race

mixing " . Price found this theory unacceptable. Very often the groups he studied

lived close to racially similar groups that had come in contact with traders or

missionaries, and had abandoned their traditional diet for foodstuffs

available in the newly established stores--sugar, refined grains, canned foods,

pasteurized milk and devitalized fats and oils--what Price called the

" displacing

foods of modern commerce. " In these peoples, he found rampant tooth decay,

infectious illness and degenerative conditions. Children born to parents who

had adopted the so-called civilized diet had crowded and crooked teeth,

narrowed faces, deformities of bone structure and reduced immunity to disease.

Price concluded that race had nothing to do with these changes. He noted that

physical degeneration occurred in children of native parents who had adopted the

white man's diet; while mixed race children whose parents had consumed

traditional foods were born with wide handsome faces and straight teeth.

The diets of the healthy " primitives " Price studied were all very different:

In the Swiss village where Price began his investigations, the inhabitants

lived on rich dairy products--unpasteurized milk, butter, cream and

cheese--dense rye bread, meat occasionally, bone broth soups and the few

vegetables

they could cultivate during the short summer months. The children never brushed

their teeth--in fact their teeth were covered in green slime--but Price found

that only about one percent of the teeth had any decay at all. The children

went barefoot in frigid streams during weather that forced Dr. Price and his

wife to wear heavy wool coats; nevertheless childhood illnesses were

virtually nonexistent and there had never been a single case of TB in the

village.

Hearty Gallic fishermen living off the coast of Scotland consumed no dairy

products. Fish formed the mainstay of the diet, along with oats made into

porridge and oatcakes. Fishheads stuffed with oats and chopped fish liver was a

traditional dish, and one considered very important for children. The Eskimo

diet, composed largely of fish, fish roe and marine animals, including seal oil

and blubber, allowed Eskimo mothers to produce one sturdy baby after another

without suffering any health problems or tooth decay. Well-muscled

hunter-gatherers in Canada, the Everglades, the Amazon, Australia and Africa

consumed

game animals, particularly the parts that civilized folk tend to avoid--organ

meats, glands, blood, marrow and particularly the adrenal glands--and a

variety of grains, tubers, vegetables and fruits that were available. African

cattle-keeping tribes like the Masai consumed no plant foods at all--just meat,

blood and milk. Southsea islanders and the Maori of New Zealand ate seafood of

every sort--fish, shark, octopus, shellfish, sea worms--along with pork meat

and fat, and a variety of plant foods including coconut, manioc and fruit.

Whenever these isolated peoples could obtain sea foods they did so--even Indian

tribes living high in the Andes. These groups put a high value on fish roe

which was available in dried form in the most remote Andean villages. Insects

were another common food, in all regions except the Arctic. The foods that

allow people of every race and every climate to be healthy are whole natural

foods--meat with its fat, organ meats, whole milk products, fish, insects,

whole grains, tubers, vegetables and fruit--not newfangled concoctions made

with

white sugar, refined flour and rancid and chemically altered vegetable oils.

Price took samples of native foods home with him to Cleveland and studied

them in his laboratory. He found that these diets contained at least four times

the minerals as the American diet of his day. Price would undoubtedly find a

greater discrepancy in the 1990s due to continual depletion of our soils

through industrial farming practices. What's more, among traditional

populations, grains and tubers were prepared in ways that increased vitamin

content and

made minerals more available--soaking, fermenting, sprouting and sour

leavening.

It was when Price analyzed the fat soluble vitamins that he got a real

surprise. The diets of healthy native groups contained at least ten times more

vitamin A and vitamin D than the American diet of his day! These vitamins are

found only in animal fats--butter, lard, egg yolks, fish oils and foods with

fat-rich cellular membranes like liver and other organ meats, fish eggs and

shell fish.

Price describes the fat soluble vitamins as " catalysts " or " activators " upon

which the assimilation of all the other nutrients depended--protein,

minerals and vitamins. In other words, without the dietary factors found in

animal

fats, all the other nutrients largely go to waste.

In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price discusses another fat soluble

vitamin that was a more powerful catalyst for nutrient absorption than

vitamins A and D. He called it " Activator X " . All the healthy groups Price

studied

had the X Factor in their diets. It could be found in certain special foods

which these people considered sacred--cod liver oil, fish eggs, organ meats

and the deep yellow Spring and Fall butter from cows eating rapidly growing

green grass. When the snows melted and the cows could go up to the rich

pastures

above their village, the Swiss placed a bowl of such butter on the church

altar and lit a wick in it. The Masai set fire to yellow fields so that new

grass could grow for their cows. Hunter-gatherers always ate the organ meats of

the game they killed--often raw. Liver was held to be sacred by many African

tribes. The Eskimos and many Indian tribes put a very high value on fish

eggs.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration has as much relevance today as it did 60

years ago. The book includes Price's unforgettable photographs showing the

superb dentition and facial development of peoples living on nutrient-dense

foods. All who plan to bear children and everyone in the practice of medicine

should read this book. Now available in affordable soft cover from _Radiant

Life_ (http://www.4radiantlife.com/) or the _Price-Pottenger Foundation_

(http://www.price-pottenger.org/) .

About the Reviewer

Sally Fallon is the author of _Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that

Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats_

(http://www.westonaprice.org/bookreviews/nourishing_traditions.html) (with Mary

G. Enig,

PhD), a well-researched, thought-provoking guide to traditional foods with a

startling message: Animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital

factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain

and

nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels. She joined

forces with Enig again to write Eat Fat, Lose Fat, and has authored numerous

articles on the subject of diet and health. The President of the Weston A.

Price Foundation and founder of _A Campaign for Real Milk_

(http://www.realmilk.com/) , Sally is also a journalist, chef, nutrition

researcher, homemaker,

and community activist. Her four healthy children were raised on whole foods

including butter, cream, eggs and meat.