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Travelogues in Health, Episode 5
Radio interview aired on WTAM, in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 28, 1940
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A historic series of 13 radio interviews with Dr. Weston A. Price was conducted shortly after the publication of his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The series, titled Travelogues in Health, aired on WTAM, in Cleveland, Ohio, during the spring and summer of 1940.
The following episode, number 5 in the series, aired on April 28, 1940, and focused on a comparison of “primitive” and modern diets and their effects. Please see our editor’s note on terminology at the end of this interview.
An audio re-enactment of the episode done some years back by two of our board members, Ed Bennett and the late David Getoff, from the written transcript preserved by Price-Pottenger, can be heard here:
Interviewer: Dr. Price, what is causing the breakdown of the primitive races when modernized?
Dr. Price: The most important result of my investigations among fourteen primitive races living in different parts of the world has been the discovery that wherever they are in the process of modernization by contact with our modern white race, they were found to be breaking down physically with the same general expressions of degeneration that characterize our modern civilization in Europe and America. However, this has occurred only when and where the native foods were being displaced by the white man’s foods of modern commerce. Since the purpose of these field investigations was to throw light on the contributing factors to the progressive and rapid increase of our modern degenerative diseases in the white race, the answer to this problem has been revealed largely by these explorations. It is my purpose in this broadcast to discuss some of the outstanding shortcomings of our foods of modern commerce. By obtaining samples of both the native foods and the displacing foods for chemical analysis, it has been possible to reduce the problem to a quite definite chemical basis.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, how do the foods selected by the primitive races compare with the displacing foods of modern commerce?
Dr. Price: Our bodies are chemical engines and require a definite amount of various chemicals every day for their growth and repair. When reduced to their mineral and vitamin content, the foods as selected by the primitive races were from two to four times as high in body building and body repairing materials as the displacing foods provided by our modern commerce. There are several stress periods in all of our lives. During growth, we all require an extra amount of body building material which must be provided in the daily food intake. If the factor of safety is adequately high—that is, if there is a sufficient excess for growth above daily needs for repair—those deficiency diseases which develop so readily at that period do not occur; as for example, tooth decay. Similarly, during the process of reproduction, the mothers require a greatly increased quantity of body building material. When the factor of safety in the nutrition is adequate in this period, mothers are not subject to tooth decay and associated nutritional disturbances.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, what were the principal displacing foods of commerce furnished to the primitive races where they were being modernized?
Dr. Price: In the various parts of the world where I have made studies, the displacing foods of commerce consisted chiefly of refined cereals such as white flour, polished rice, and refined sweets, chiefly sugar. These materials constituted a principal part of the displacing foods. To these were added sometimes canned goods, vegetable fats and processed foods.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, have we not been taught that bread is the staff of life? How can it be that white bread, which is supposed to be the best, can do harm?
Dr. Price: In the processing of wheat to make refined flour, approximately four-fifths of the minerals usually are removed and nearly all the vitamins, which are chiefly in the germ or embryo and outer coating. For example, it is estimated that 90% of vitamin B1 is removed in the milling process. Practically all of the vitamin E is removed or destroyed in refined white flour. Refined sugar has practically all body building and body repairing chemicals removed from the plant juice. In order that an individual would get a similar quantity of phosphorus from a white flour food to that obtained from eating entire wheat, we would have to eat about four and a half times as much by weight. In other words, while two grams of phosphorus, an estimated day’s sole requirement, would be provided by one pound of wheat used as a cereal, an individual would have to eat in order to get a similar quantity from white bread, six single loaves or three double loaves every day.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, can you give us some illustrations of the serious effect of dependence on white bread?
Dr. Price: The Homestead Bulletin, Number 6, of the School of Living, Suffern, NY, states:
“Careful scientific experiments have proved beyond doubt that white bread is not suitable for human or animal consumption. When monkeys, chickens, Guinea pigs, or mice have been fed on an exclusive diet of white bread, they have lost weight, become diseased, and died. Numerous instances are recorded of human beings literally starving to death on white bread—the most conspicuous example being the loss of 4,000 men forced to live on a white flour diet while constructing 222 miles of track connecting Bolivia and Brazil.”
In my own animal experimentations, I have placed litter mates of rats in three pens and fed them on similar diets, except the kind of bread they received. Those that received the entire wheat product, freshly ground, grew normally and were apparently very healthy and reproduced normally at three months of age. Those receiving the white flour products were much undersized, had very bad dispositions such that they would jump against the side of the cage and try to bite us when we would put the foods in their cage, making it necessary for us to use heavy leather gloves. Their hair fell out in patches and they had tooth decay. The animals in the third cage received the bran and middlings mixture. They too were undersized and very abnormal in their disposition and development. Those on the white flour product were never able to reproduce. A chemical analysis of the bloods showed distinct differences in the three groups. Similarly, McCarrison in India has demonstrated that various groups of rats when fed on the diets of the people of different districts of India tended to develop the physical and temperament characteristics of the people living in those days.
An important observation regarding the history of the increase in the degenerative diseases in the white races of the United States and Europe has been emphasized by J. C. Drummond, a distinguished biochemist of England. In discussing the question of the modern decline in fertility before the Royal Society of Medicine, he suggested that the decline in the birth rate in European countries during the last 50 years was due largely to the change in national diets which results from the removal of vitamins B and E from grains when the embryo or germ was removed in the milling process. He called attention to the fact that the decline in the birth rate corresponded directly with the time when the change was made in the milling process so that refined flour was made available instead of the entire grain product.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, what seems to have guided the primitive races in the selection of their foods?
Dr. Price: The amount of food that any human or animal will eat is largely controlled by the appetite or sense of hunger. There are two distinct factors involved in nutrition; one, the heat and energy necessary to keep the machine going from day to day, and the chemicals that are needed for growth and repair. If we will compare our bodies to an automobile, we will find that we differ primarily in that the automobile needs only the fuel that will provide heat and energy, whereas our bodies require, in addition, materials for growth and repair. If the requirements of the automobile were similar to our own, we would have to provide a fuel that while producing heat and power would supply the chemicals for building new tires, repair bearings, replace the paint, and automatically repair damaged fenders, etc. One of the greatest troubles with our modern foods is that they provide chiefly or only heat and energy and nothing for repair.
Unfortunately, the sense of hunger, as it seems to be expressed in our modernized humans, is entirely satisfied when we have provided for the heat and energy. Consequently, we like best those foods that supply these factors most liberally. Refined sugar is comparable, so far as our bodies are concerned, to the gasoline we give our automobiles since it provides only heat and energy. Refined flour is the whole wheat reduced so that it provides very little body building and repairing material compared with the entire wheat product.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, how has nature protected the primitive?
Dr. Price: Nature has built balanced foods for humans and animals. These are limited to plants or to animals that have eaten plants, including their products. Few, if any, of the foods available for primitive races were as low in body building and repairing material as the great bulk of our refined sugar and refined flour products of commerce. In order that the primitives would obtain sufficient food to satisfy their hunger, which is chiefly an appeal for heat and energy, they were required to eat a sufficient quantity to furnish also a liberal supply of body building and repairing chemicals. Still another factor seems to have entered into it. Evidence has been disclosed in my studies of many primitive races that they have had a sense of body need as a special hunger for certain chemical factors, which special sense or instinct our modernized groups seem to have largely lost. This is splendidly illustrated by the distances that many primitives would travel for special foods. For example, in Central Africa, I found many tribes burning water plants at the 5000 and 6000 foot level to obtain the ashes to carry to other districts for adding to the foods of their children. These ashes contained iodine, an essential for normal function of the thyroid gland. On questioning why they used it, they gave me the answer through the interpreters that it was to prevent “big neck” or goiter.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, is this what we call instinct in animals?
Dr. Price: Yes, this quality of having a sense of special need for certain substances has been splendidly illustrated in some of my animal experiments. When I placed young chickens in three different pens and fed them all on the same ration except the kind of butter that was available for them, their health and growth varied in proportion to the vitamin level of the butters provided in the different pens. The butters were selected on the basis of their vitamin and activator content; namely, high, medium, and low content. When half the chickens were dead in the pen with the low vitamin butter and about one-fourth were dead in the pen with the medium level of vitamin content, not one had died in the pen with the high vitamin butter. Still more significant was the following observation: When these same three types of butter were all placed in the same large pen of chickens and changed every day to fresh and the quantity used determined by weighing in and out, it was found that the chickens would select the dish with the high vitamin butter and use twice as much of the high vitamin butter as of the low vitamin butter, even though positions of the dishes were systematically changed every day. These chickens evidently knew more than I did for I could not tell any difference in the three butters without testing nor could any member of my staff. We moderns seem to have lost something that wild animals, birds, and the more primitive humans seemed to have retained. We apparently are losing this vital contact with mother Nature as an inherent sense or instinct.
Interviewer: Dr. Price, this is most interesting. We are concerned to know how we can get back into harmony with nature. What will be the subject of your next broadcast?
The relation of soil depletion to plant and animal deterioration.
*Editor’s note: Since the era in which this interview was conducted, social mores and attitudes have changed greatly, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, in the interest of authenticity, we have chosen to use Price’s exact words. No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic groups is intended.