Nutrition and Physical Degeneration A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects

Nutrition and

Physical Degeneration

A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets

and Their Effects

In the early 1900's, before the five-a-day craze, Dr. Weston Price, a dentist and anthropologist, travelled round the world, comparing the health of primitive people eating their traditional diet, with the same people eating a modern diet. Surprise, surprise -- those on the traditional diet had far fewer dental cavities, illnesses, and even birth defects.

Why is this pioneer not better known today? He pointed the finger at refined foods -- white sugar and white flour -- but he also recommended animal fats, organ meats, saturated oils.

This is an alternative book on alternative nutrition. It makes fascinating reading, free from social and dietary political correctness, and filled with original photographs -- over 100 of them.

CONTENTS:

I.--Why Seek Wisdom from Primitive Races
II.-The Progressive Decline of Modern Civilization
III.-Isolated and Modernized Swiss
IV.-Isolated and Modernized Gaelics
V.-Isolated and Modernized Eskimos
VI.-Primitive and Modernized North American Indians
VII.-Isolated and Modernized Melanesians
VIII.-Isolated and Modernized Polynesians
IX.-Isolated and Modernized African Tribes
X.-Isolated and Modernized Australian Aborigines
XI.-Isolated and Modernized Torres Strait Islanders
XII.-Isolated and Modernized New Zealand Maori
XIII.-Ancient Civilizations of Peru
XIV.-Isolated and Modernized Peruvian Indians
XV.-Characteristics of Primitive and Modernized Dietaries
XVI.-Primitive Control of Dental Caries
XVII.-One Origin of Physical Deformities
XVIII.-Prenatal Nutritional Deformities and Disease Types
XIX.-Physical, Mental and Moral Deterioration
XX.-Soil Depletion and Plant and Animal Deterioration
XXI.-Practical Applications of Primitive Wisdom

a selection from the INTRODUCTION:

After spending several years approaching this problem by both clinical and laboratory research methods, I interpreted the accumulating evidence as strongly indicating the absence of some essential factors from our modern program, rather than the presence of injurious factors. This immediately indicated the need for obtaining controls. To accomplish this it became necessary to locate immune groups which were found readily as isolated remnants of primitive racial stocks in different parts of the world. A critical examination of these groups revealed a high immunity to many of our serious affections so long as they were sufficiently isolated from our modern civilization and living in accordance with the nutritional programs which were directed by the accumulated wisdom of the group. In every instance where individuals of the same racial stocks who had lost this isolation and who had adopted the foods and food habits of our modern civilization were examined, there was an early loss of the high immunity characteristics of the isolated group. These studies have included a chemical analysis of foods of the isolated groups and also of the displacing foods of our modern civilization.

--- These investigations have been made among the following primitive racial stocks including both isolated and modernized groups: the Swiss of Switzerland, the Gaelics in the Outer and Inner Hebrides, the Eskimos of Alaska, the Indians in the far North, West and Central Canada, Western United States and Florida, the Melanesians and Polynesians on eight archipelagos of the Southern Pacific, tribes in eastern and central Africa, the Aborigines of Australia, Malay tribes on islands north of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand and the ancient civilizations and their descendants in Peru both along the coast and in the Sierras, also in the Amazon Basin. Where available the modernized whites in these communities also were studied....