More than 60 years ago, a Cleveland dentist named Weston A. Price decided to embark on a series of unique investigations. For 10 years, he traveled to various isolated parts of the earth where the inhabitants had no contact with “civilization” to study their health and physical development. He studied Swiss villagers, Irish fisherfolk, traditional Eskimos, Indian tribes in Canada and the Florida Everglades, South Sea islanders, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, Peruvian and Amazonian Indians, and tribesmen in Africa. 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.
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 diets of the healthy “primitives” Price studied were all very different: In the Swiss village where Price began his investigations, the inhabitants lived on rich dairy products – unpasteurized milk, butter, cream and cheese, dense rye bread, meat occasionally, bone-broth soups, and the few vegetables they could cultivate during the short summer months. The children never brushed their teeth – in fact, their teeth were covered in green slime – but Price found that only about one percent of the teeth had any decay at all. The children went barefoot in frigid streams during weather that forced Dr. Price and his wife to wear heavy wool coats. Nevertheless, childhood illnesses were virtually nonexistent, and there had never been a single case of tuberculosis in the village.
On the other hand, hearty Gallic fishermen living off the coast of Scotland consumed no dairy products. Fish formed the mainstay of the diet, along with oats made into porridge and oatcakes. Fish heads stuffed with oats and chopped fish liver was a traditional dish, and one considered very important for children. The Eskimo diet, composed largely of fish, fish roe, and marine animals, including seal oil and blubber, allowed Eskimo mothers to produce one sturdy baby after another without suffering any health problems or tooth decay. Well-muscled hunter-gatherers in Canada, the Everglades, the Amazon, Australia, and Africa consumed game animals, particularly the parts that civilized folk tend to avoid – organ meats, glands, blood, marrow, and particularly the adrenal glands – and a variety of grains, tubers, vegetables, and fruits that were available. African cattle-keeping tribes like the Masai consumed no plant foods at all – just meat, blood, and milk. South Sea islanders and the Maori of New Zealand ate seafood of every sort – fish, shark, octopus, shellfish, sea worms – along with pork meat and fat, and a variety of plant foods including coconut, manioc, and fruit. Whenever these isolated peoples could obtain sea foods they did so – even Indian tribes living high in the Andes. These groups put a high value on fish roe, which was available in dried form in the most remote Andean villages. Insects were another common food, in all regions except the Arctic. The foods that allow people of every race and every climate to be healthy are whole natural foods – meat with its fat, organ meats, whole milk products, fish, insects, whole grains, tubers, vegetables, and fruit – not newfangled concoctions made with white sugar, refined flour, and rancid and chemically altered vegetable oils.
Price took samples of native foods home with him to Cleveland and studied them in his laboratory. He found that these diets contained at least four times the minerals and water soluble vitamins – vitamin C and B complex – as the American diet of his day. Price would undoubtedly find a greater discrepancy in the 21st century due to continual depletion of our soils through industrial farming practices. What’s more, among traditional populations, grains and tubers were prepared in ways that increased vitamin content and made minerals more available – soaking, fermenting, sprouting, and sour leavening.
It was when Price analyzed the fat-soluble vitamins that he got a real surprise. The diets of healthy native groups contained at least 10 times more vitamin A and vitamin D than the American diet of his day! These vitamins are found only in animal fats – butter, lard, egg yolks, fish oils, and foods with fat-rich cellular membranes like liver and other organ meats, fish eggs, and shellfish. Price referred to the fat-soluble vitamins as “catalysts” or “activators” upon which the assimilation of all the other nutrients depended – protein, minerals, and vitamins. In other words, without the dietary factors found in animal fats, all the other nutrients largely go to waste.
Today the research of Weston Price is largely unknown. In a country where the entire orthodox health establishment condemns saturated fat and cholesterol from animal sources, and where vending machines have become a fixture in our schools, who wants to hear about a peripatetic dentist who warned about the dangers of sugar and white flour, who thought kids should take cod liver oil, and who believed that butter was the number one health food?
The irony is that as Price becomes more and more forgotten, more and more research appears in the scientific literature proving he was right. We now know that vitamin A is essential for the prevention of birth defects, for growth and development, for the health of the immune system, and the proper functioning of all the glands. Scientists have discovered that the precursors to vitamin A – the carotenes found in plant foods – cannot be converted to true vitamin A by infants and children. They must get their vital supply of this nutrient from animal fats. Yet orthodox nutritional pundits are now pushing low-fat diets for children. Neither can diabetics and people with thyroid conditions convert carotenes to the fat-soluble form of vitamin A – yet diabetics and people with low energy are told to avoid animal fats.
The scientific literature tells us that vitamin D is needed not only for healthy bones and optimal growth and development, but also to prevent colon cancer, multiple sclerosis, and reproductive problems.
Cod liver oil is an excellent source of vitamin D. Cod liver oil also contains special fats called EPA and DHA The body uses EPA to make substances that help prevent blood clots, and that regulate a myriad of biochemical processes. Recent research shows that DHA is essential to the development of the brain and nervous system. Adequate DHA in the mother’s diet is necessary for the proper development of the retina in the infant she carries. DHA in mother’s milk helps prevent learning disabilities. Cod liver oil and foods like liver and egg yolk supply this essential nutrient to the developing fetus, to nursing infants, and to growing children.
Butter contains both vitamin A and D, as well as other beneficial substances, including trace minerals. Conjugated linoleic acid in butterfat is a powerful protection against cancer. Certain fats called glycospingolipids aid digestion.
Saturated fats from animal sources, portrayed as the enemy, form an important part of the cell membrane; they protect the immune system and enhance the utilization of essential fatty acids. They are needed for the proper development of the brain and nervous system. Certain types of saturated fats provide quick energy and protect against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract; other types provide energy to the heart.
Cholesterol is essential to the development of the brain and nervous system of the infant, so much so that mother’s milk is not only extremely rich in the substance, but also contains special enzymes that aid in the absorption of cholesterol from the intestinal tract. Cholesterol is the body’s repair substance; when the arteries are damaged because of weakness or irritation, cholesterol steps in to patch things up and prevent aneurysms. Cholesterol is a powerful antioxidant, protecting the body from cancer; it is the precursor to the bile salts, needed for fat digestion; from it the adrenal hormones are formed, those that help us deal with stress and those that regulate sexual function.
The scientific literature is clear about the dangers of polyunsaturated vegetable oils – the kind that are supposed to be good for us. Because polyunsaturates are highly subject to rancidity, they increase the body’s need for vitamin E and other antioxidants. Canola oil, in particular, can create severe vitamin E deficiency. Excess consumption of vegetable oils is especially damaging to the reproductive organs and the lungs, both of which are sites for huge increases in cancer in the US.
In test animals, diets high in polyunsaturates from vegetable oils inhibit the ability to learn, especially under conditions of stress; are toxic to the liver; compromise the integrity of the immune system; depress the mental and physical growth of infants; increase levels of uric acid in the blood; cause abnormal fatty acid profiles in the adipose tissues; have been linked to mental decline and chromosomal damage; and accelerate aging. Excess consumption of polyunsaturates is associated with increasing rates of cancer, heart disease, and weight gain. Excess use of commercial vegetable oils interferes with the production of prostaglandins – localized tissue hormones – leading to an array of complaints such as autoimmune diseases, sterility, and PMS. Polyunsaturated oils, hardened to make margarine and shortening by a process called hydrogenation, deliver a double whammy of increased cancer, reproductive problems, learning disabilities, and growth problems in children.
The vital research of Weston Price remains largely forgotten, because the importance of his findings, if recognized by the general populace, would bring down America’s largest industry – food processing and its three supporting pillars: refined sweeteners, white flour, and vegetable oils. Representatives of this industry have worked behind the scenes to erect the huge edifice of the “lipid hypothesis” – the untenable theory that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease and cancer. All one has to do is look at the statistics to know that it isn’t true. Butter consumption at the turn of the century was 18 pounds per person per year, and the use of vegetable oils almost nonexistent. Yet cancer and heart disease were rare. Today butter consumption hovers just above four pounds per person per year while vegetable oil consumption has soared – and cancer and heart disease are endemic.
What the research really shows is that both refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils cause imbalances in the blood and at the cellular level that lead to an increased tendency to form blood clots, leading to myocardial infarction. This kind of heart disease was virtually unknown in America in 1900. Today it has reached epidemic levels. Atherosclerosis, or the buildup of hardened plague in the artery walls, cannot be blamed on saturated fats or cholesterol. Very little of the material in this plaque is cholesterol. A 1994 study appearing in the international medical journal The Lancet showed that almost three quarters of the fat in artery clogs is unsaturated. The “artery clogging” fats are not animal fats but vegetable oils.
Built into the whole cloth of the lipid hypothesis is the postulate that the traditional foods of our ancestors – the butter, cream, eggs, liver, meat and fish eggs that Dr. Price recognized were necessary to produce “splendid physical development” in “primitives” – are bad for us. A number of stratagems have served to imbed this notion in the consciousness of the people, not the least of which was the National Cholesterol Education Program, during which your tax dollars paid for a packet of “information” on cholesterol and heart disease to be sent to every physician in America. In 1990, two generations after Weston Price conceived of studying isolated nonindustrialized people as a way of learning how to confer good health on our children, the National Cholesterol Education Program recommended a low-fat diet for all Americans above the age of two. The advantage of such a diet is supposed to be reduced risk of heart disease in later life – even though not a single study has shown such an hypothesis to be tenable. What the scientific literature does tell us is that low-fat diets for children, or diets in which vegetable oils have been substituted for animal fats, result in failure to thrive – failure to grow tall and strong – as well as learning disabilities, susceptibility to infection, and behavioral problems. Teenage girls who adhere to such a diet risk reproductive problems. If they do manage to conceive, their chances of giving birth to a low-birth-weight baby, or a baby with birth defects, are high.
Compared to this folly, the wisdom of the so-called primitive in regards to ensuring the health of his children has inspired the awe of Weston Price and all who have read his book. Again and again he found that tribal groups – especially those in Africa and the South Pacific – fed special foods to young men and women before conception, to women during pregnancy and lactation, and to children during their growing years. When he tested these foods – things like liver, shellfish, organ meats, and bright yellow butter – he found them to be extremely rich in the “fat-soluble activators,” vitamins A and D.
For a future of healthy children – for any future at all – we must turn our backs on the dietary advice of sophisticated medical orthodoxy. We must return to the food wisdom of our so-called primitive ancestors, choosing traditional whole foods that are organically grown, humanely raised, minimally processed, and above all, not shorn of their vital lipid component.
Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions, The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (NewTrends Publishing). She is president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit nutrition education foundation located in Washington, DC. (202) 333-4325, www.westonaprice.org. This article first appeared in New Life Journal, May/June 2003 issue.
This article appears in January 2004.
