Health, and Why We Don't Have Any (Part 1)

Since health is the foundation of everything else that comes out of your body and mind, and since I've got the subject fresh in mind, I figure this would be a great place to start. There are really two aspects to health. The first is eating the right foods, and the second is the way in which the food is produced and processed. I mentioned this briefly before, and today I'd like to discuss that more in depth, and hopefully toss in some pictures to illustrate clearly what I'm talking about.

Around the 1930s and 1940s, the US government (and members of the medical community) were in a panic over the dust bowls and other disasters that were threatening to consume society. Crime was rising, heart disease and cancer were rising, farmland was disappearing overnight, and people were losing teeth to tooth decay as never before seen in history in spite of the new hygiene practices including toothbrushes and toothpaste. It was during this time that soil science was first born.

A dentist by the name of Weston A Price decided that he would try to determine what it was that was causing the sudden outbreak of dental caries by looking at groups of people and comparing people who got caries to those who didn't. Dr. Price quickly discovered that he could not find anyone in the western world without tooth decay that he could use as a comparison. He knew from fossil records that humans historically did not have dental problems, or at least not to nearly the degree that he was observing, and so he decided to seek out groups of isolated people who were not subject to the influence of the western lifestyle. Keep in mind that white flour was only invented in the late 1800s, and I double checked and there was no change in the use of pesticides or similar chemicals during that time period that might explain the rises in disease.

As expected, he did find such groups scattered around the world, and was able to study them quite easily in most cases. These included the isolated people of the Alps in Switzerland, the people of the harsh fishing islands off the coast of Ireland, many tribes in Africa, the Native Americans and Eskimos, Polynesians, Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, the Maori of New Zealand and both ancient (fossil) and modern Peruvians. Some of the groups he saw had been exposed to western culture for a generation or more, while others were still eating a traditional diet. This gave him the opportunity to compare people of the same genetic background and isolate the effect of diet. What he found was both disturbing and profound. I think the pictures can tell the story better than anything I could write.

Here's what people eating their native, non-western diets look like:

Keep in mind that at the time these were taken, "Orthodontics" was a completely new field, even in the US. These people have never had braces, and most of them have never seen a tooth brush.

Now some pics of people from the same places, but these people had access to western store food. Note not only the crooked, rotten teeth, but also the facial deformities. Their faces tend to be narrow and frail, especially the nose and nasal passages. Some show even more extreme deformity:

Here's a picture of a common deformity amongst Africans, "Monkey Face":

Here's a picture comparing two Irish brothers. The brother on the right was raised entirely on the native diet of the island they lived on, while the brother on the left was born and raised after a modern store was installed on the island:

Note how the left brother's face is thinner and looks emaciated, and his nose is pointier.

Here is a picture of two groups of children, top: native diet, bottom: westernized diet. Note how the faces of the latter group are different:

They don't look too happy, either.

Here's an interesting picture. This one is of skulls, the bottom one is a "modern" skull, and laying on top of it are two older skulls from the same region:

Notice how much thicker the old skulls are. Which would you rather have?

So what were the white people eating that was causing all these deformations and disease? Well, white flour, white rice, white sugar (and sweetened products), vegetable oils, jellies and canned foods. The change to the "Western" diet caused other deformities as well; children developed narrower chests and shoulders, and the incidence of more extreme deformities like club feet and flat feet increased as well. Additionally, women born under a "western" diet tend to have deformed pelvic bones, making childbirth difficult to impossible.

Here is a picture showing a deformed girl before and after she got pregnant and had a child. The pregnancy almost killed her and required a C-section. At right, note how her boyish grin has been replaced by a scoliosis party following the pregnancy:

Compare this to the Eskimos eating their native diet. Eskimo women will take a blanket out to the bush alone and pop out a kid in 10 minutes, then come back. It's such an insignificant occurrence to them that if it happens in the middle of the night, they won't even wake the husband, they wait till morning to introduce him to the new member of the family. Besides immunizations, they wouldn't need a doctor for any part of the pregnancy.

The problems that came along with the western diet also included an increase of all sorts of diseases. In his travel, tuberculosis was often associated with the western diet, and absent in native diets. Cancer, heart disease, osteoperosis, dementia all increased with the western diet. Worse still, facial deformations of the above type were also found to be associated with delinquency, mild or severe retardation, and hostility. In his visits of prisons in the US, Dr.Price noted that aside from a few drunkards you couldn't find a non-deformed face behind bars.

There is more to the story of course. Avoiding certain foods will not guarantee that you don't end up like one of the bad examples I've shown. In his travels, Dr. Price collected samples of food from every place he visited to analyze them for nutrient content. He also got many places to send him samples of local dairy once or twice a month for about two years following. It turns out the people on the native diets were getting at minimum 5 times the minerals and more than 10 times the fat soluble vitamins (Vit. A, D, E, K).

Importantly, not a single group he studied was vegetarian in their native diet. Every group consumed either copious fresh and processed (ie cheese, butter etc) dairy, or seafood, including fish, shellfish (clams, oysters), crabs, roe and milt, along with whole grains. Further testing revealed that their milk had much higher vitamin and mineral contents than the pale white grain-fed-caged milk that had become the most popular production method even back then. Dr. Price also noted that processing of grains to produce white flour removed all the oil, minerals, and Vitamins B and E.

When he returned to the states, he did some further research with areas in which farmland was becoming depleted of nutrients and losing productivity from intensive farming over a long time. In these areas too, he noted more extreme deformities and higher rates of disease and mortality. Here, Dr.Price's work overlaps that of Dr. Albrecht.

In Part 2 of this article, I'll talk more about Dr.Albrecht and his work. For now, here is a free pdf link to Dr. Price's book, "Nutrition vs Physical Degeneration".