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Impaired Inheritance
Published in Modern Nutrition. Excerpted from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
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Dramatic evidence of disturbed development in various primitive stocks which begins even in the first generation after parents adopt a diet of modern refined foods–white flour, white sugar, canned foods–and rapidly increases in severity. The same changes have taken place in the modern civilization in America and Europe, and can be observed in children and adults all about us.
Since our quest was to gather data that will throw light upon the cause of modern physical degeneration among human racial stocks in various parts of the world, it became necessary to include for study various groups living in the hot sultry climates of the tropics. Again it was desirable to obtain contact with both highly isolated and, therefore, relatively primitive stocks for comparison with modernized groups of the same stock. In order to accomplish this, an expedition was made in 1934 to eight archipelagos of the Southern Pacific to study groups of Melanesians and Polynesians.
If the causative factors for the physical degeneration of mankind are practically the same everywhere, it should be possible to find a common cause operating, regardless of climate, race, or environment.
Reaching Remote Groups
The program in each group consisted in making contact with local guides and interpreters. They had generally been arranged far in advance by correspondence with government officials. By these means we were able to reach isolated groups in locations quite distant from contact with trade or merchant ships. To reach these isolated groups often required going over rough and difficult trails since most of the islands being of volcanic formation are mountainous.
Analytical Studies
On reaching the isolated groups our greetings and the purpose of the mission were conveyed by our interpreters to the chiefs. When these formalities were once over and our wishes made known, the chiefs instructed the members of their tribes to carry out our program for making examinations, recording personal data, making photographs, and collecting samples of foods for chemical analysis. The food samples were dried or preserved in formalin.
Faulty Advice of Missionaries
While the missionaries have encouraged the people to adopt habits of modern civilization, in the isolated districts the tribes were not able to depart much from their native foods because of the infrequency of the call of the trader ship. Effort had been made in almost all of the islands to induce the natives to cover their bodies, especially when in sight of strangers. In several islands regulatory measures had been adopted requiring the covering of the body. This regulation had greatly reduced the primitive practice of coating the surface of the body with coconut oil, which had the effect of absorbing the ultra-violet rays, thus preventing injury from the tropical sun. This coating of oil enabled them to shed the rain which was frequently torrential though of short duration. The irradiation of the coconut oil was considered by the natives to provide, in addition, an important source of nutrition. Their newly acquired wet garments became a serious menace to the comfort and health of the wearers.
Previous Total Health
The early navigators who visited these South Sea Islands reported the people as being exceedingly strong, vigorously built, beautiful in body and kindly disposed. There were formerly dense populations on most of the inhabitable islands. In contrast with this, one now finds that on many of the islands the death rate has come to so far exceed the birth rate that the very existence of these racial groups is often seriously threatened.
Blighted by Civilization
Many of the island groups recognize that their races are doomed since they are melting away with degenerative diseases, chiefly tuberculosis. Their one overwhelming desire is that their race shall not die out. They know that something serious has happened since they have been touched by civilization. Surely our civilization is on trial both at home and abroad.
Comparison of Health
The nutrition of the primitive Polynesians is continually reinforced with animal life from the sea which includes both soft and hard-shell forms. The incidence of tooth decay varied from 0.6 per cent for the most isolated groups to 33.4 per cent for the modernized groups (an increase of 55 times).
No dentists or physicians are available on most of these islands, because there had been no need for them.
Disturbed heredity. These children are Australian Aborigines. Note the marked change in facial and dental arch form in the younger child at the right. This is depressed reproductive capacity of the parents after they have adopted the imported foods-white flour and white sugar products, in place of their traditional highly nourishing foods.
Since trading ships made calls at the port cities, bringing in foods of civilization, dental decay has become rampant, and suffering from it is great.
Toothache is the only cause of suicide.
Those individuals living in their native environment on their native foods have universally normal facial and dental arch form reproducing the characteristics of the race. Those living on the normal environment except for using the imported foods of white flour, sugar, sugar products, syrup, polished rice, and the like, have in the succeeding generations marked changes in facial and dental arch forms.
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 has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Price’s exact words in the interest of authenticity. No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic group is intended.