Wordsmith Wednesday: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

My friend Kelly and John Coles (of illegal-raw-goat-cheese-at-the-C'ville-farmer's-market fame) introduced me to Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (Weston A. Price, MS., D.D.S., F.A.G.D., 1939) about five years ago, and since reading it, I have referred to it frequently. It is worth getting for the pictures alone. Whenever I pull it off the shelf, I get lost for a while examining the photos.
Weston Price was a dentist who in the 1920s and 30s went around the world searching for healthy people. His main measure of overall health was dental health including the number of teeth with caries per person and jaw/palate/facial development. He studied isolated populations of Swiss, Gaelic, Inuit and other Native Americans, Melanesians, Polynesians, Africans, Australian Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, New Zealand Maori, and native Peruvians eating traditional diets and compared them to genetically similar populations who were eating modern diets. Although their diets varied greatly, he found that the isolated peoples eating traditional diets were in good health and had very low incidences of caries. They also had wide palates that appropriately accommodated all of their 32 adult teeth (no need for braces or removal of wisdom teeth or as in my case 4 other teeth that were likely not going to fit in there properly. Incidentally, he noted that even when he had to clear a layer of slime off of the isolated people's teeth, they were generally healthy and white beneath this layer; these people were not brushing their teeth.) The modernized counterparts who ate many processed foods had rampant tooth decay, poorly formed dental arches, narrowed nostrils, difficulty birthing, diseases such as TB, and generally poorer health.
All of the healthy populations he found got much of their nutrition from animal foods. He had samples of the foods tested for various nutrients and found that the varying traditional diets were all very high in vitamins A and D. He also postulated that another vitamin which he called activator X (what we now call vitamin K2) was important for the use of the other fat soluble vitamins. He noted that people eating sea food were particularly healthy: "During these investigations of primitive races, I have been impressed with the superior quality of the human stock developed by Nature wherever a liberal source of sea foods existed."
He was acutely aware of the malnourishment of dental patients in his care in the US and conducted trials with poor populations of children - feeding them one meal a day (in addition to what they ate at home) of stew, whole grain bread (made from freshly ground wheat which is high in phytase to break down phytates which block mineral absorption), butter, milk, cod liver oil, and high vitamin butter oil. He found that their dental carries healed and that often their academics and conduct improved. One good meal a day was enough to make a difference!
Here are some of the fascinating photos:

The Swiss

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.

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.

Wakamba Africans

FIG. 41. The development of the faces and dental arches in many African tribes is superb. The girl at the upper right is wearing several earrings in the lobe of each ear. The Wakamba tribe points the teeth as shown below. This does not cause tooth decay while they live on their native food.

FIG. 44. Wherever the Africans have aidopted the foods of modern commerce, dental caries was active, thus destroying large numbers of the teeth and causing great suffering. The cases shown here are typical of workers on plantations which largely use imported foods.

The entire book can be read here, but in my opinion, this one is worth buying. The Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation continues to keep it in print. I am amazed at the extent of Price's research, and hope that we will realize the wisdom of traditional diets sooner rather than later. I think that change is coming. I think people really are starting to get that it matters what you eat, but I wonder if we can learn quickly enough.