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Tribute to Weston A. Price DDS
Published in Journal of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1947.
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The American people have come to the place where 15 persons working on the land can produce the food and fiber for themselves and 85 other individuals living in town. In making this migration from the farm to the city, the problems of harvesting, processing, transporting, and storing have been solved without regard to the retention of the essential elements. Knowledge of vitamins, vitagens, enzymes, and minerals came long after our methods of preserving and distributing foodstuffs were well established customs.
Associated with this change there developed many signs of physical deterioration of our people. These were embarrassing in the light of the brilliant discoveries about infectious diseases. Among the most important of these signs of physical degeneration was the decay of our teeth. To the study of this problem came Weston A. Price D.D.S. who had what too many of our highly trained specialists lack today, an appreciation of that which seemed reasonable and natural. He was blessed with a large amount of common sense. He was not one who ”knew too much about too little” to have any concept of the social implication of his discoveries. On the contrary he asked Nature and Nature told him. He went among the primitive peoples of the earth to find why they had little or no tooth decay. Coming back to the United States he saw that not only were our food habits bad but that our land was depleted and that the destruction of the fertility of our soil was our greatest health hazard for the future just as destructive methods of food processing were our most immediate ones. He opened for all of us the whole question of soil-health relationships.
He discovered that there was a geographical relationship between the degree of depletion of our land and the occurrence of the evidence of physical degeneration among the people.
We all recognize that there are two schools of thought about these soil-health relations. The one warns that at present no one can say that any alteration of the ration, much less of the soil, can influence in any significant way the amount of calcium that an animal puts into its milk or its muscles. These men warn that we need much more research in this field before we use man for a laboratory animal. All seem agreed, however, that more research is desirable to document the obvious.
On the other hand, no one can object to the statements contained in the original Manifesto of ‘Friends of the Land’:
“Soil debility, soon repeated in nutritive deficiencies, spreads undernourishment. Evidence on this point is far from complete, but the trend of the accumulated findings is unmistakable. If the soil does not have it in it, plants that grow there do not nor do animals that eat those plants; nor do the people throughout the country who eat these plants and animals.”
Outstanding among the pioneers in this study of health as it relates to diet and through the client to the soil is Weston A. Price. He discovered what we physicians shall, in turn, discover about other diseases if we too take a positive attitude and turn our attention to health instead of sickness. We shall find no doubt that health depends upon reaching an equilibrium with our surroundings, in striking a balance with nature. Certainly good health will not be found in the use of any of the new gadgets of civilization.
Dr. Price found that primitive peoples had good teeth although they had never seen a toothbrush or heard about dental hygiene. It was their diets that made the difference. While no two tribes had the same menu, yet there was a common principle running through all of their diets. These were unspoiled grains and fruits, the internal organs of animals, and food from the sea whenever it could possibly be obtained. As the white man’s flour and sugar made their appearance, tooth decay, facial deformities, and other signs of degeneration appear.
Dr. Price saw more clearly than most men that tooth decay was but an external sign of a systemic disorder. He believes that while painting fluorides on the endangered tooth may protect the tooth itself, such a symptomatic treatment will do no more to prevent the disintegration of the rest of the body than will the “enrichment” of white bread bring back the staff of life.
I like to think of Dr. Price as the leader of an Advanced Guard that is responsible for a growing popular interest in Health as a positive thing opposed to sickness, and to an increasing understanding of the relation between soil and health. To this Advance Guard have come men with a background of scientific discipline. Among them are Sir Robert McCarrison, of India, Dr. William Albrecht of the Missouri Experiment Station, and Dr. Frances Pottenger Jr., as well as the many physicians and dentists that have founded The Academy of Applied Nutrition.
It also includes many publicists with a considerable measure of practical experience, such men as Sir Albert Howard, Louis Broomfield, and J. E. Faulkner. But as Paul Sears has remarked: “It is not surprising that active soil and health cults have grown up around the fringe of this Advance Guard. The main tenet of such groups is that, by promoting normal biological processes in the soil and returning all possible organic matter to the soil, healthy plants, livestock, and human beings will be produced. At times some of the more enthusiastic overdo things. One example of this sort of thing is the denunciation of all artificial fertilizers. But they are, in general, on the trail of very important truths.”
Those who insist on the importance of soil and its relation to health are not working blindly. They are drawing upon a respectable body of knowledge which deals with the large relationships in Nature. I refer to the science known as Ecology whose principles they are attempting to apply.
Nature is forever trying to balance things. We of ‘Friends of the Land’ are trying to get our people to help through a balanced system of agriculture and we of The Academy of Applied Nutrition are trying to bring them health through a balanced diet.
Man was a part of a biodynamic balance until he developed tools and then he began to try to outwit Nature. What modern man cannot seem to realize is that it is a losing game. What he does need to realize is that only through cooperation with Nature can he gain health and happiness. Dr. Weston A. Price, as one of those rare scientists who appreciates the obvious, has pointed the way. May we march forward to consolidate the objectives he has staked out for us.
Path of a Pioneer
Most of us leave no discernible footprints on the pages of history and our initials last longer carved in the bark of a tree than our memory Iives in the minds of men. The timorous toe-prints of the brilliant but hesitant souls are apt to vanish, But the firmly planted foot of the pioneer marks new trails and while his survey of the newly opened territories may not be detailed or complete his trail becomes the highway of the future. His observations form a preamble to the more detailed and documented scientific conclusions of later generations, Such a man was Weston A. Price, M.S., D.D.S., of Cleveland, Ohio, and more recently of Redlands, California.
Dr. Price has led us away from studying leaves under microscopes to seeing the forest, from examining grains of sand to visualizing desserts, from the analysis of disease to the synthesis of health. He may have opened a new path or have cleared the underbrush from an old path but most certainly he brought us closer to our goal, the optimum health of our people.
– – – J.C.A.H
Weston Andrew Valleau Price
D.D.S, University of Michigan, 1893, M.S., University of Michigan, 1913.
Certificate of Honor, A.M.A., 1914.
Fellow, American College of Dentists.
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Past President Cleveland Dental Society, Northern Ohio Dental Association and Ohio State Dental Society.
Honorary Member, American Academy of Applied Nutrition.
Honorary Member, Eugene Field Society.
Honorary Member, International College of Dentists.
Honorary Member, Mark Twain Society, and a member of:
American Dental Association.
American Association of Applied Science.
American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Biological Society of Great Britain. International Association for Dental Research.
From the above tabulation of degrees, honors and affiliations it is apparent that the life of Dr. Weston A. Price has been devoted to the sciences which consider the many aspects of health and apply the principles thus learned to the problems of race regeneration. His biography, adding further details, substantiates the conclusion.
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 on 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.
Selecting Cleveland, Ohio, as the location of his next office, Dr. Price commenced to build the practice from which he retired in 1943 at the completion of 50 years of service. From the first he showed an interest in research as well as in the techniques of his profession. His early contributions to the literature included papers on cataphoresis, tooth desensitization, skiagraphs made with radioactive salts, and a pyrometer controlled furnace for fusing porcelain. His studies of the physical characteristics of inlay materials, particularly gold alloys and pattern waxes, were important steps in the development of the techniques of today.
The Research Institute of the National Dental Association was largely the result of his struggle to bring the light of science to bear on the problems of dental health.
On the subject of focal infection alone, Dr. Price published twenty-five reports including two printed volumes which totaled 1170 pages.
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 18 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 3-1/4″ 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.
In addition, seven display cabinets, each of which illuminates 25 colored slides 8″ x 10″, now line the walls of the office of the Academy. These may be exhibited at the Del Mar meeting in October. Several large packing cases still unopened hold promise of further treasure. Dr. Price also made a substantial endowment to further the work of the Academy.