Supplements, Special Foods
and Optimal Nutrition
Quality supplements are absolutely
critical as a complement to even the best diets
today. Price's analysis of the foods of native
people is highly relevant to why supplements are
so important today. His studies revealed that
these people consumed at least ten times more
of all of the then known vitamins and minerals
than people eating refined foods. For many nutrients,
the figure was thirty, forty, or fifty times more.
The implications of this are staggering.
This enables us to understand in historical terms
why so many nutrients, including many discovered
since Price's times, are so effective in seemingly
large doses. Of particular importance are animal
source vitamins A and D. Many published studies
have shown that the synthetic versions of these
vitamins cause problems when taken even in moderate
doses. They are different biochemically from their
natural counterparts, which appear to both safe
and highly beneficial in reasonable doses.
The emphasis native people placed
on certain foods shows the importance of substantial
amounts of key nutrients. Native people used all
of the animals they ate. But specific parts, especially
the eggs of sea foods and the organs of land animals,
for example, were considered essential to making
perfect babies generation after generation. These
foods are now known to contain the extremely high
concentrations of critical nutrients.
Optimal nutrition has a profound
effect on people. Some stories from Price’s
writings illustrate this. One tells of an Eskimo
man in a time when food ran short during the long
winter night north of the Arctic Circle, when
for months there is no daylight. He takes to stormy
seas in a kayak to hunt seal with a harpoon. In
darkness, bitter cold, high winds, and rough seas,
he searches the dark waters for food. A wave crashing
over a kayak can snap even a strong man's back;
as breakers approach, the kayaker rolls the vessel,
submerging himself. The tight fit of seal skins
between the upper edge of the kayak and his waist
keeps water from entering. When the white water
passes, he flips upright and continues the hunt.
Finally he kills a seal and returns home with
food for his family.
As impressive as Weston Price found
the physical strength of primitive Eskimos, he
was even more impressed with their character.
He wrote of their courage, honesty, openness,
dedication to family and community, and their
ability to survive and thrive in their harsh northern
environment.
Another of Price’s stories is also set in
the far north. Great, unexplored areas of northern
British Columbia and the Yukon Territory were
still inhabited by Indians in the 1930's when
Price visited. Groups of Indians lived in the
regions inside the Canadian Rockies in the far
north, where winter temperatures of seventy below
zero precluded the possibility of growing cereal
grains or fruits, or of keeping dairy animals.
The diet of these Indians was thus almost entirely
limited to wild animals and some plants and berries
in the summer.
One old Indian was asked through
an interpreter why Indians did not get scurvy,
which is caused by vitamin C deficiency. He replied
that scurvy was a white man's disease; while it
was a possibility for Indians, they knew how to
prevent it and white men did not. When asked why
he did not tell white men how, he replied white
men knew too much to ask Indians anything. Asked
how, he went to his chief for permission to tell.
Upon returning he explained that when an Indian
kills a moose, he opens it up and finds the small
ball in the fat above each kidney. He cuts these
balls – the adrenal glands – into
pieces that are immediately eaten, one by each
Indian in the family.
The adrenal glands, we now know,
are among the richest sources of vitamin C in
all animal or plant tissues. Cooking destroys
vitamin C. The Indians' empirical knowledge and
use of different organs and tissues of animals
has certainly been verified by modern methods
of analysis. Their wisdom preceded these methods,
and the discovery of vitamin C, by thousands of
years.
Such wisdom is again demonstrated
in a story of a white man running out of supplies
while crossing a high plateau in the far north
country just before the fall freeze-up. He was
a doctor of engineering and science, and he was
forced to hike out of the wilderness when his
prospecting plans fell apart. While crossing the
plateau, he went almost blind with a violent pain
in his eyes that persisted for days. He nearly
ran into a grizzly one day, and an old Indian
tracking the bear recognized the white man's plight.
The old man led the prospector
to a nearby stream, and with a trap of stones
caught some trout. Throwing the fish on the bank,
he told the prospector to eat the flesh of the
head and the tissues behind the eyes. In a few
hours the prospector's pain was largely gone,
and in a day his sight was returning. In another
day, it was close to normal. He'd been living
on refined flour and sugar, and was suffering
from xeropthalmia, due to vitamin A deficiency.
The fatty tissue around the eyes is one of the
richest sources of vitamin A in any animal's body.
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