Weston Price and Other Nutrition
Pioneers
My answer has been to apply the
principles I learned from these men. Perhaps most
important is the research and teaching of Weston
Price. Dr. Price's most famous book is Nutrition
and Physical Degeneration, first published
in 1939. Price traveled the world in the 1920s
and '30s, living amongst and studying people in
so-called primitive cultures. He documented in
great detail that as long as these people ate
their native diets, they lived in splendid good
health, with literally none of the medical problems
of people eating modern foods.
That is a critical point. Dr. Price's
work proved that people in native cultures everywhere,
before contact with European conquerors, enjoyed
incredibly good health. Here are several examples:
- When Dr. Price interviewed a surgeon named
Josef Romeg in Alaska in 1933, Dr. Romeg had
been for 35 years caring for both the native
people and the settlers who inhabited the seaport
trading villages. Price wrote that Romeg told
him that in those 35 years, he'd never seen
a single case of cancer among the native people
living in remote areas where they ate none of
the white man's foods—sugar, flour, canned
goods, and vegetable oils. These were what Price
called the "foods of commerce," which
the white men traded for animal skins. Dr. Romeg
said that when the native Alaskans began eating
these refined foods, they became subject to
all of the diseases the white men suffered with-dental
disease at first, then rheumatoid arthritis
and tuberculosis, and after a few years, cancer.
Romeg said that he had taken to sending the
sick ones back to their native villages, far
from the white man's foods, where they often
recovered.
- Dr. Price traveled to Switzerland in 1931,
to the Loetschental Valley, high in the Swiss
Alps. Until just a few months before, when a
tunnel had been built, the villages in the Valley
had been inaccessible most of the year because
of heavy snow, and the people had always lived
on their indigenous foods. Price learned that
there were no policemen, jails, doctors, or
dentists, and no need for them. Meticulous records
had been kept for many years about births and
deaths in the valley. Price discovered that
there had never been a single death from tuberculosis.
That's truly amazing, because in those years,
tuberculosis was the leading cause of death
throughout the world, including the rest of
Switzerland.
- Another study of the health and vigor of
people living on traditional foods was done
by a group of Soviet scientists and doctors
who examined large numbers of old people in
Georgian Russia, in the Caucusus Mountains,
in the 1970s. This is an area that's renowned
for the strength and vigor of its old people.
The doctors could find no evidence of the usual
chronic diseases in the hundreds of people they
studied - no heart disease, no cancer, no intestinal
problems, no diabetes, and none of the marked
mental decline so typical in cultures eating
refined foods.
- Fascinating research was done by a Harvard
team of scientists and doctors who traveled
to southern Africa in the 1970s to study the
Kung people in the Kalihari Dessert. About 12%
of the people were over 60, about the same percentage
as in America at the time. The doctors found
no evidence of any chronic disease in any of
over 200 people they examined.
- Paul Dudley White was President Eisenhower's
personal physician in the fifties when the president
had two heart attacks. White was a Harvard educated
heart specialist. He'd published a textbook
titled Heart
Disease in 1943. In that book, Dr. White
wrote, "When I graduated from medical school
in 1911, I had never heard of coronary thrombosis."
Now this was the President's doctor. The reason
he'd never heard of coronary thrombosis in 1911
was because the first article about it, detailing
four unusual cases of this new phenomenon, was
published in the Journal
of the American Medical Association in
1912. Coronary thrombosis is a heart attack. This
is a modern disease that is caused by refined
foods. We don't call these problems the "diseases
of civilization" for nothing!
The point is that diet and disease are intimately
related, and so-called "primitive diets"
are associated with freedom from modern diseases.
My own version of primitive nutrition forms the
basis the type of diet I follow and recommend.
Our supplements are designed to work together
with such a diet to achieve health.
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