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A Review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
Published in Natural Living, Vol. 3, No. 6, December 1953, pp. 1-6. Author: John C. Kennedy.
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This book might be brushed aside as unworthy, being too poorly organized, too wordy, and much too long. It would seem to have been written by a kindly, grandfatherly, persistent sort of gentleman, who had some grounding in scientific method, who had an abundance of love for humankind, but who didn’t know how to write a book.
Dr. Price’s faults of reiteration, of orthography, of quoting whole passages twice and even thrice–and of time-consuming disorganization might easily have been corrected, and one wonders why he did not delegate the putting together and proof-reading. He might thus have secured many more readers of this critically valuable work, and might himself have spent more time at the creative end of the job, the digging out of more data though his book already abounds in data, the interpreting of more pictures, of which he must have taken thousands. The dull fashion in which these data are put together and the abominable proof-reading are faults, but they cannot hide the artist at work on nutrition and its importance in the physical degeneration all about us.
Wanting to find out why his patients were so chalk-faced, why their teeth so carious, why their lives so unhealthy, Dr. Price went after the answers, and Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is the result. Most readers will echo what Ernest Hooton says in the foreword: “I salute Dr. Price with the sincerest admiration (the kind that is tinged with envy) because he has found out something which I should like to have discovered for myself.”
At what must have been tremendous exertion Dr. Price visited more than a dozen communities around the world, photographed hundreds of faces, obtained precise data on foods eaten, and then went through the same procedure with other members of the same group who with their descendants had been in contact with modern civilization. He thus saw what native nutritional wisdom did for various peoples, and what “civilized” wisdom did for the same groups.
Isolated and modernized Swiss were visited, and Gaelics, and Eskimos, North American Indians, Melanesians, Polynesians, African tribes, Australian aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, New Zealand Maori, Peruvian Indians. And a good deal of study was put into the ancient civilizations of Peru and what the beautifully preserved skulls of those groups tell him who can read them.
He began his observations in the Loetschental Valley of Switzerland, where the fine physiques and spirits of the isolated peoples stirred him to write: “One immediately wonders if there is not something in the life-giving vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not only great physical structures within which their souls reside, but builds minds and hearts capable of a higher type of manhood in which the material values of life are made secondary to individual character.”
While on native foods, such as animals, bananas, roots, nuts and honey, these Africans have superb physical development, including regular dental arches without cavities.
Shocking, isn’t it? This is white man’s contribution to the African native, for modernized Africans using white man’s food have rampant dental caries and have often lost the ability to masticate their food.
Superb Physical Specimens
One does not have to wonder long, for Dr. Price finds time after time that insulation from civilized influences, if it is coupled with the age-old wisdom of the natives, produces superb physical specimens. Isolated “primitives” have little or no disease, and very seldom do they have a carious tooth. They do not give birth to mental defectives, they need no prisons, they do not work for money, yet their days are happily spent in satisfying, creative work and leisure. Their children are born easily, seldom cry during their babyhood, and they never have defective dental arches, all their teeth coming into proper place as Nature intended.
The significant finding of Dr. Price is that as soon as these people begin to use white man’s bread–as they always do in fringe settlements–white flour, white sugar, canned goods, their physical degeneration begins. The children in the first generation following the beginning of eating devitalized food show structural defects like pinched nostrils, narrowed dental arches and faces. They are apt to be mouth breathers, they are disease ridden, they never know the robust health of the isolated relatives. And successive children born in these same circumstances show progressively worse defects. Each one of us can see the very same forces operating in our communities; the younger children have narrower faces, narrower dental arches and narrower hips, are taller and show more evidence of the castration that denatured foods accomplish so effectively. The above formula shows few variations.
Dietary Observations
We moderns of course want to know why these backward people can have such good teeth, for instance, when most of us must endure the dental drill and have our mouths loaded down with plugs and bridges of various kinds, if not stuffed with “store teeth”. Ernest Hooton tersely remarks somewhere that store food will be eaten with store teeth. Dr. Price, using all his scientific training and keen faculties for perception, finds the reason for their excellent skeletal development in their diets. Here are a few dietary hints picked at random from around the world: the cattle tribes of Africa and the Swiss in isolated portions of the Alps eat high quality dairy products, and the Swiss supplement these with whole rye bread. It is interesting that girls of the Masai tribe in Africa wait for marriage until some time after the tribes’ cows are pastured on rapidly growing young grass; the milk and cheese from these animals is then highest in nutritive quality, and contains good portions of what Dr. Price has called “Activator X.” (This is not the time for an extended report of Dr. Price’s findings with regard to butter’s nutritive values, but the writer hopes there may be such a report in the future.) Africans also burn the water hyacinth and use the ashes in the food of mothers and growing children, knowing Iittle of the iodine and other trace minerals which thus get into their food, but being sure of the effectiveness of the technique. They also eat two cereals, red millet, high in carotin and calcium, and linga-linga, which is quinoa, a stimulant for the flow of milk in nursing mothers.
Fiji Islanders will travel long distances when they must to secure crabs, very rich sources of vitamins and minerals, as part of the diet for pregnant women, and the Indians of the Arctic Circle find glands, particularly the thyroid, of moose effective in their diet. Eskimo mothers-to-be eat fish eggs, both fresh and dried, which are high in body-building minerals and vitamins; and fathers-to-be eat the milk of male salmon. Eskimos also eat the organs and other special tissues of large and small fish, seal oil and seal meat, caribou meat, limited fruits and berries and ground nuts. Mothers-to-be among the coastal Indians of Peru also eat fish eggs, and men, wishing to transmit only the best of germ plasm to their young, eat the angelote egg, an organ of the male fish of an ovoviviparous species.
Outer Hebrides people have a good plain diet of oats and sea foods, some vegetables, but no dairy products to mention, pasturage not being available. “Baked Cod’s head stuffed with oatmeal and chopped cods’ livers” is one of their indigenous dishes, “an important and highly relished article of diet.”
The temptation in reviewing Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is to list all the foods found by Dr. Price to be effective in developing fine physiques and mental and moral qualities. Such a list would be a directory of natural foods, there being in all of these diets little preparation, though often a good deal of travel goes into the securing of special foods for special purposes. Here it might be well to underscore the need for a readable condensation of this superb book. It is so poorly written and organized that only devoted souls will ever read it through. It rates a better fate than this. People need this message! A paper-backed pocket-size edition would be a great boost to a nation sadly degenerate physically and mentally. (If you want to see one or two sad items in our degeneracy, take a look at the figures Dr. Price quotes on male infant mortality–because of the narrowness of the prospective mother’s birth canal–and on mental and criminal degenerates, all due to prenatal injury.) Perhaps even more effective in our present situation would be a well-ballyhooed Simon & Schuster picture-book with a minimum of words to read and a maximum of pictures to heed. In the LIFE style, such a book might be a stimulant that would help us out of the mire of our fear-psychosis and into the sunlight of a constructive health program for ourselves and our neighbors.
Caries Only One Expression
lt is of utmost importance that the reader of N&PD realize that Dr. Price’s views are not confined to teeth, dental arches, and facial forms. In these areas he is an expert, and he has used the expert’s approach to prove his thesis, but one expects it when he learns that “dental caries is only one of the many expressions of our modern deficient nutrition.” He quotes the psychologist Thorndike as believing that “thinking is as biological as digestion.” Persons with poor food thus cannot think as effectively as they would with good food.
If your dental arches are bad, your facial features are probably narrowed, as is your pelvis and your skeleton in general. The chances are that your brain has not got as much room in your cranium as it might have had if your mother had been in a better nutritional state previous to, and after, your birth. With so complicated a process as this is, it is dangerous to generalize much. Here the scientific approach is critically needed for a more thorough handling than Dr. Price could give of this supremely important subject. He found that defects in the germ plasm of parents–yes, men, that’s plural!–were transmitted to offspring; and he was pretty sure that correction of the nutrition of parents would correct in large measure crippling deformities in children. All around us, unfortunately, we see samples of families in which lowered rather than raised capacity for reproduction is evident.
Your reviewer has no competence whatever in criminal or in medical literature, but he does have eyes to see, and when in his own little neighborhood he can walk a few blocks and see 4 mongoloid children under 5 years old, he is bound to wonder why? Does the following answer this question: “In mongolism definite failure of the pituitary development is to be found says Dr. Clemens E. Benda.” Vitamin E, which our people do not get in bread because they don’t care to go to the trouble of grinding their own whole-grain flour, plays an “important role in the nutrition of the pituitary body.” That the majority of mongoloids are born to women over forty years of age is of interest but not of primary importance–among primitive women on good natural diets mongolism is unknown.
Even as this review is written the American College of Surgeons is meeting in convention. An extended newspaper report has this to say concerning “a scientific meeting of the college”: “…Dr. C. Paul Hodgkinson, Derroir, and Dr. John B. Montgomery, Philadelphia, attributed prolonged labor to three main causes, failure of the uterus to contract effectively, disproportion between the size of the baby and the mother’s pelvis, and malposition of the baby.” We may bemoan the fact that these gentlemen do not tell us the why? of the failure in contraction, the why? of the small pelvis, the why? of the malposition; but we do not need to doubt that there is a good deal of prolonged labor in the United States. Unfortunately the World Almanac is of no value in furnishing figures on the number and sex of our infants who die in the birth process or soon after though the Public Health Service of the Federal Security Agency should have such data. Dr. Kathleen Vaughan (Safe Childbirth, 1937) finds the situation bad in England, where more than 10,000 boys died in one year in the 1930’s. She finds a similar situation in the Netherlands, and closes a report to the Minister of Health thus: “…This destruction of male infants which goes on day by day and year by year, puts the consequences of the Great War into the shade. Our surplus female population is directly due to it. We have no need of Pharaoh’s midwives to kill our boys off at birth. Civilization does it unaided, for all civilized races as they pass their zenith and are on the downgrade have eventually had to face the same problem, the outnumbering of men by women, and most of them have met it as the East does today by female infanticide. A more intelligent policy would be to prevent the males dying at birth. We see that difficult childbirth leads to a high maternal mortality, but it is also the cause of a high infant mortality falling most heavily upon the male infants, and it is also responsible for the production of mental defectives in ever-increasing numbers.” Sir Arbuthnot Lane, a great figure in England’s surgical history put his finger on the sensitive spot when he wrote: “unless the present dietetic and health customs of the White Nations are reorganized, social decay and race deterioration are inevitable.”
The average college graduate of today faces living after his schooling with no knowledge whatever of good food as opposed to bad food. He has, in fact, a kind of cavalier disdain of giving his food any thoughtful consideration. Having no idea of the connection between food and health, he cannot approach this everyday problem with the intelligence he should bring to it. Educators, with student illness all about them all the time, may well ponder this state of things. There is a well-proved relationship between food and health, both of body and mind. What man with vision wants to endow an experiment in which student disease would be eliminated? I’ll give him a plan.
When my children apologize to their friends for the queernesses of their father, they begin. “You see, Pop read a book…” Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is that book. It made a natural farmer, spare-time, out of me, and I’m having the time of my life. I, too, salute Dr. Price. I’d like to have been able to shake hands and thank him personally. Let me close this review with these words of his: “Probably the most indelible impression that is left by my investigations among primitive races, is that which came from examining 1276 skulls of the people who had been buried hundreds of years ago along the Pacific Coast of Peru and in the high Andean Plateau, without finding a single skull with the typical marked narrowing of the face and dental arches, that afflicts a considerable proportion not only of the residents in modernized districts in Peru, but in most of the United States and many communities of Europe today. I know of no problem so important to our modern civilization as the finding of the reason for this, and the elimination of the cause of error. Perhaps few will recognize the significance of this important point. This may be the reason why the prospect is not encouraging.”
Scratchy Photos
You may have wondered why we used two “scratchy” photos to illustrate the article on Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The Academy was kind enoúgh to lend us a projection strip film containing many frames, but these had unfortunately been scratched by passage through various projectors. However, we felt that the photos were so important for what they revealed that we printed them anyway and believe they are none the less emphatic for it.
Biographical Notes on Dr. Weston Price
Weston A. Price was born in a farming community near Newburgh, Ontario, September 6, 1870. There he grew to manhood and received his preliminary education, completed at the Collegiate Institute of Napanee, Ontario. He had earned the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery at the University of Michigan by the time he was 23.
Dr. Price opened his first office in Grand Forks, North Dakota, but an attack of typhoid fever in that first winter was nearly fatal and after a long illness, he returned to his native Canada. There he lived on wild berries, fish, cream and milk. During his illness, his teeth had decayed alarmingly but in the new regime the destruction seemed to halt. This led Dr. Price to consider diet as a prime factor in the cause of tooth decay.
Calcium metabolism drew Dr. Price’s attention in 1925 and he became a student of nutrition. Convinced that it was better to study why healthy people were healthy than to study disease, he travelled to remote areas of the earth searching out primitive peoples untouched by civilization. On these journeys he was accompanied by his first wife, Florence Anthony Price, of whom he writes:
“She was a very devoted participant in practically all my expeditions amongst primitive races. She was keenly interested in the same problems and gave many lectures, illustrated, to lay audiences, interpreting the wisdom of the primitives as portrayed by many photographs and slides, of their home life and physical characteristics. She was an artist of great ability and colored practically all of my transparencies and slides. She was untiring in her devotion to this cause. Her intense interest in this research program was largely motivated by the death of our only child, Donald, at the age of sixteen, after a four year fight against endocarditis. Florence Anthony Price was responsible for the harboring of special funds, contributed to the endowment fund of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, in memory of our son Donald. The world is forever indebted to her for her invaluable contributions.”
His expeditions ranged through the Swiss of the High Alps, the Gaelics of the Outer Hebrides, the Eskimos, the North American Indians, both plains and coastal, the South American Indians, including the coastal in Peru, those of the High Andes and the Amazon Indians, the Melanesians, the Polynesians, the Malaysians, the Australian Aborigines, the New Zealand Maori, the African Negroes, and African Arabs. In the course of these expeditions Dr. Price made between 19 and 20 thousand original negatives and, incidentally, developed most of his photographs on the site. In evaluating this material, one is impressed by the fact that never again will such isolated primitives be found. The global war has brought civilized influences into the most remote corners of the world, and without question has disturbed that primitive food pattern which Dr. Price was investigating.
The material acquired on these trips which took him over one hundred thousand miles, he compiled in a book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Now in its fourth edition, the volume has been an inspiration to many thousands of persons working in the field of nutrition.
During this period his first wife died and her friend, Monica Scott Salter, also a Canadian, became the second Mrs. Price. It was she who helped with the task of republishing his book at a time when republication had become almost impossible. Through her efforts the tremendous accumulation of research material Dr. Price possessed was made available to the Academy of Applied Nutrition.
In May 1947, Dr. Price presented the Academy with his entire scientific collection. This included over 15,000 original photographs, 4,000 bound 4¼” x 4″ lantern slides (half of them hand colored), a library of film strip lectures, portions of which illustrate these pages, cameras, enlarging equipment and a number of slide projectors.
Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups, and physical/developmental disabilities has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people, “mongoloids” and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use the author’s exact words in the interest of authenticity. No disrespect to any individuals or groups is intended.