Book Review: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
My friend Peter lent me an old 1970 reprint of Weston Price's classic "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration." Dry as the title sounds, I have been captivated and cannot put it down. This book documents the findings of a dentist who went in search of the cause of caries, or tooth decay, as well as other degenerative diseases that afflict Western Civilization. His life work constitutes one of the most important scientific experiments in the last century. Since most of the traditional cultures that he documented have either disappeared or radically altered their lifestyle, his brilliant experiment can never be repeated. His exploration of the massive control that traditional cultures are to the out-of-control experiment of modern life is the foundation of most of the latest wisdom on human diet.
I have written about Price indirectly, mostly through other scientists and dieticians who based their work on him, on this blog several times before. For example, I reviewed Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto at:
http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/right-to-look.html,
and Fast Food Nation in an essay of 10 September, 2006 called, "The Comforting Tale of Mad Max." Unlike such later books about the wrongs of modern food production, Price took a world perspective and put aboriginal peoples first in his analysis. Now that I think of it, I think that it was my need to respond to such findings about our universal need for good food that started me thinking how to change our lifestyle and acted as the stimulus for my "mound architecture" proposals.
You can read more about Price at several sites on the web, such as:
http://www.healingourchildren.net/food_nutrition_health.htm
And at the website for the Weston A. Price Foundation, a lobby group inspired by his findings,
http://www.westonaprice.org/tour/index.html
Just flipping through the monochrome photographs in the book has been a revelation to me. Some pictures from the beginning of the book are posted on these websites. There are pictures of skeletons of aboriginals and peasants who had eaten their traditional foods all their lives alongside those who did not. Not only are the teeth perfect but the skull is actually thicker. This does not mean that they were "thick-headed" in life; in fact, Price shows evidence that the poor Western diet decreases intelligence, shortens attention span and even contributes to crime. But it does mean that they were protected from any number of shocks and illnesses that kill us thin skinned victims of the Western diet.
It is one thing to read about how we need to get onto a traditional diet and get rid of sugar and re-used fats, and quite another to see how it actually degrades the human face. A well nourished face has a broad nose and rounded arches. A malnourished face, which means just about everybody in the so-called "developed nations" has a pinched nose, narrow arches and overcrowded, rotting teeth. Proper diet makes you more beautiful!
Such is the cult of beauty in this society that I am sure that if an advertising campaign featured price's side-by-side portraits there would be no further need to argue the point. Sugar would be either banned or heavily taxed and industrial food processors and the entire junk food industry would go out of business within six months. Just as there is no such thing as an environmentalist vs. non-environmentalist anymore, all see the urgent need to live naturally, there would be no question of food faddists versus "normal" eaters, there would only sensible, locally grown, traditional eating.
That is not to say that this is not an old fashioned book. The word "primitive" had not yet been expelled from polite speech. Race, and the consciousness of race, was central to science back in the 1940's when this was written, even though the thrust of Price's findings goes directly against race being a factor in diet. He describes in detail how all races respond quickly, in less than a generation, to the same changes in diet. One of his most unforgettable photographs shows a white boy raised on imported food in Alaska with the same contorted, ugly facial degradation, narrow nose and crooked, rotting teeth that afflict aboriginal who have left aside their traditional, locally produced foods.
The introduction and prefaces to "Degeneration" offer some advice, most of which would be familiar to readers of this blog. One new thing for me was the need to mill flour fresh, and consumed very soon and close by where it was made. Russian peasants ate little more than black bread their whole lives and they were not malnourished or unhealthy because the bread they ate was whole, fresh and milled locally. Especially important is the necessity not to re-use fats and cooking oils. I once met a fellow who working his way through school spent a summer working in a doughnut store. He never touched a donut again. He had witnessed first hand how they make them. They do just that, they recover the cooking oils and fats and collect them into a great sticky mass that keeps getting reused for months and years at a time.
One of the writers of a preface to this book points to the long-term cause of the poor Western diet. As masses move into cities there is a need to transport food ever longer distances, and foods are selected that can make that long trip, rather than foods that nourish us and make us healthy. In other words, it is a failure to grasp the holistic lessons of history and geography as much as medicine. I tend to accuse philosophers as well. If we love wisdom, we can hardly allow our diets and even our faces to rot before our eyes the way they are. Philosophy has become the exclusive concern of a few specialists, rather than everybody's passionate hobby. As Comenius points out, if we maintained a universal philosophy we would see the whole picture and appreciate what leads to progress and degeneration.
"It will be easy to write such a Philosophy provided that we regard every Thing (natural or artificial) as self-centred in its essence, observing its structure, shape, and parallelism well and truly and as a unit, then all the additions making for perfection and all the deficiencies making for degeneration, and how to produce or prevent them respectively, and then dealing with things in combinations and groups." (Panorthosia, Ch. 13, para 12, p. 203)
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John Taylor
email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
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