Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

 by Weston A. Price, D.D.S.

(First of all, the publisher's note at the beginning of the book, just for Politically Correct balance:)

                                           NOTE

Since this invaluable book was published 60 years ago, mores and social attitudes have changed to such an extent that some readers may be offended by references to "savages" and other out-of-date nomenclatures, as well as by some of the research studies that are no longer timely.  However, in the interest of authenticity and completeness, the publisher feels an obligation to reprint the book exactly as Dr. Price wrote it in 1939.

*

This book is so valuable for its nutrition information that it is still in print, and still sells briskly.  If there ever was a book that condemned the modern engineered diet, this is that book.

In the Thirties, a dentist named Weston Price realized that many of his patients were coming in with crooked, rotten, or missing teeth, misshapen jaws and odd facial anatomy.  After doing a little research, he discovered that all these patients ate diets that were heavily weighted toward what might be called, "The White Diet."  It consisted mostly of bleached white flour, processed milk, processed vegetable oil, polished rice, and processed white sugar. 

In contrast, his patients who lived on family farms or came from more traditional backgrounds lacked all these afflictions, and were sturdy, healthy, handsome, with strong, perfect teeth in wide, well-formed faces.  They were able to resist many opportunistic diseases, and were fertile generation after generation.

Dr. Price eventually took his patient wife with him on a worldwide expedition to find the most traditional and/or "primitive" populations of the places where he visited.  At each stop, he would examine, notate, and take photos of teeth, facial characteristics, and diets.  Time after time, it became obvious that the small (and shrinking) populations who continued to eat their traditional foods had broad, racially-characteristic faces, strong bones, well-shaped muscles, and normal reproductive abilities. 

On the other hand, those people who exhibited the sharp features, narrow faces, crooked jaws and teeth, chronic illnesses and wasting diseases were all individuals who ate the "White" diet exclusively.  There were, obviously, gradations of health and constitution among different populations, but as their reliance on the traditional diets gave way to the convenience of the White diet, the subjects'  health began to deteriorate, their offspring often showed problems soon after birth, and soon, he learned that not only were the ill individuals not only not getting well, they were not fertile, and did not produce children after about the fourth generation.

Today, it's fashionable to fault Dr. Price's research on the basis of his "only" being a dentist.  But he was a dentist who knew what he should see in people's mouths, and the reality he found in the mouths of patients who tried to exist on a inferior, refined diet.  Unfortunately, today's modern SAD (Standard American Diet) has moved so far to the "White" side of the nutritional spectrum that Dr. Price would be stunned and dismayed if he were alive today. 

The word "modern" in front of the diet you eat does not guarantee that it is an optimal, nutritious, and healthful diet, any more than "primitive" diets are to be discarded in the space age , simply because of their lack of refinement. 

We have all become so addicted to convenience in our diet that we have allowed the powers that be to literally poison us. We are losing our beauty, so we have to resort to all kinds of surgical sleight-of-hand to make us look presentable.  Time was when the ideal of beauty we seek today was common in the wholesome, healthy faces of young people who ate a diet of nutritional richness and wholesomeness.  We are losing our health, and dropping like flies from diets our doctors INSIST are good for us, when in reality, it's the same White diet that crippled one culture after another in the early part of the century.  We are losing our fertility.  We resort to repeated Caesarean-section births, fertility clinics to help us achieve pregnancies that should happen easily and naturally, and there is almost no such thing as a "natural" birth any more, except in women who have refused to fall for the dietary lies of the government agencies and medical magicians who insist we eat the inferior diet they foist on us every day.

This book should cause you to really, really THINK about the things you put into your mouth, from now on.  If you don't want to buy it, check it out at the library.  Even if you don't read anything but the captions under the hundreds of comparative photographs, you are going to be wiser when you turn the last page. 

Dr. Price was a man far, far ahead of his time.  But, today, they'd probably yank his license and force him not to practice any more.  A real nutritional maverick, and a man of such integrity that he was unafraid to do his own research, to go to the places that the answers would be found, and to properly place the blame where it belonged--on the artificial, ersatz and nutritionally-deficient modern White diet. No wonder there are still people who dismiss his work out-of-hand simply because he was "only" a dentist.  My, how times have changed...