Ancient Dietary Wisdom for Tomorrow’s Children
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, South Seas 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–nonexistent. 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
Weston A. Price Foundation was founded in his honor in 1999. They've also been advocating eating healthy fats and probiotic rich foods since their inception (which has been central to their message), and especially that dietary cholesterol (like in eggs) and saturated fats (like those found in olive oil, avocados, butter and animal meats) aren't as evil as "conventional" belief and nutritional science had made them out to be. In fact, they're incredibly beneficial and crucial to good health, something that science is only now coming around to recognize/accept. Of course, they have been (and still are) much maligned and disregarded as "woo" in the supposedly scientific community, but evidence like this keeps rolling in to prove them correct.
And, it's not just refined sugar, but refined grains (especially in the large amounts we consume) that's the culprit - which the body essentially treats as sugar/metabolizes as glucose when digesting.
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