Author: Amy Wing
Date: March 2, 2021
NOURISHING TRADITIONAL FOODS:
A LASTING FOUNDATION FOR OUR HEALTH
The Journey & Findings of Dr. Weston A. Price
I. INTRODUCTION
During a pivotal time in the 1930’s, Weston A. Price, D.D.S. (1870-1948) conducted an intercontinental study that revealed the sources of food needed to build human health. For over a decade, he traveled with his kindred soul and wife, Florence, to some of the most remote places on earth where they learned from the indigenous people about the traditional diets that sustained them for thousands of years. In 1939, Dr. Price published his landmark book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.” Eighty years later in the 2019, 8th edition, of Dr. Price’s book, David J. Getoff, Traditional Naturopath, Board Certified Clinical Nutritionist, and Fellow of the American Association of Integrative Medicine, stated, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” remains the single most important treatise on human nutrition and dietary health ever written.” (Price, 2019, p. xxxv).
The story begins in the backwoods of southern Ontario, Canada, where Dr. Price and his eleven siblings grew up on their 200-acre family farm, homesteaded in the wilderness by their great grandparents. In 1893, he received his degree in dentistry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While practicing at his clinic in Grand Forks, North Dakota, he became very ill with typhoid fever and nearly died. His eldest brother brought him back to the family farm and helped him rebuild his health. While there, his uncle took him camping, fishing, and gathering wild berries. As Dr. Price recovered, the benefits of eating wild foods and living close to nature were deeply instilled in him (Price, 2019).
II. THE PRICES’ JOURNEY
Fully recuperated, Dr. Price opened a dental practice in Cleveland, Ohio. It was here that he began to see a decline in his patients’ health, and not long before he realized the decline in their health coincided with the advent of modernization and the mass production of processed food. At the time, agribusinesses were outcompeting and taking over small farms across the country. They replaced the farms with vast fields of monocrops, that included mainly wheat, soybeans, and corn, and sprayed the fields heavily with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Factories made processed food products and distributed them in chain grocery stores. This included white flour, sugar, and salt and industrialized vegetables oils (e.g., cottonseed, canola, safflower, soybean, and corn) extracted at high temperatures with hexane gas (WAPF, 2017).
In investigating the cause of the degeneration of his patients, Dr. Price noted that the results strongly indicated there was an “absence of some essential factors . . .” He elected to take a positive approach and study first-hand the traditional diets of indigenous people who had high immunity to disease and degeneration (Price, 2019, p. 1). In 1931, Dr. Price and his wife Florence dedicated themselves to this quest and made their way by airplane, steamship, railway, small river boat, truck, and on foot to meet with nomadic tribes and villagers who inhabited wilderness, untouched by modern society.
Often traveling with interpreters, Dr. Price and Florence earned the trust of the indigenous people everywhere they went. Dr. Price conducted dental examinations of each individual and was advised on what they ate and how they prepared their food. He shared the results of his studies and relayed to them the wisdom he discovered in their selection of foods for their health. Concerned for their well-being, he cautioned them of the degenerative consequences of the modern diet, evident in his research. Dr. Price’s investigations were detailed and comprehensive. His research materials included narrative reports and “some fifteen thousand photographs, four thousand slides, and many filmstrips” (PPNF, 1948).
III. ECOREGIONS & INDIGENOUS TRADITIONAL DIETS
Dr. Price provided a summary of the traditional diets he studied, outlined here:
Switzerland alpine valleys – exceptionally high-vitamin dairy products and sourdough rye bread; meat about once a week; vegetables as available, chiefly in the summer.
Outer Hebrides on the coast of Scotland – sea foods; oat cake and oat porridge with limited vegetables in season; marine plants.
Alaskan and the Far North Eskimos and Indians – sea and land animals, including organs; limited vegetables; very limited seeds; green foods.
Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian South Sea islanders – sea animal foods, marine and land plants, limited seeds, lily roots or taro.
African cattle tribes – milk, blood and meat supplemented by plant foods.
African agricultural tribes – domestic animals, including their organs, fresh water animal life, insects and a variety of plants.
Australian aborigines – large and small wild animal lie, wild plants, and where available, fresh water or marine sea life, large and small.
New Zealand Maori – sea animal life, marine plants, marine birds, and their eggs, land birds, seeds of trees and plants and vegetables, particularly fern root.
North and South America plains Indians – organs and tissues of wild animal life, a large variety of plant foods and fresh and salt water animal life.
North and South American coastal tribes – sea animal and plant life.
Amazon Jungle tribes – fresh water animal life, small land animals and birds, and wild plants (Price, 2019, p. 433).
One of the Prices’ expeditions was to Northern British Columbia and Yukon Territory, beyond the Rocky Mountain Divide where the rivers flowed north to the Arctic. Once he and Florence arrived, they met with some of the nomadic tribes that follow the seasonal migrations of the moose and caribou herds. Dr. Price noticed that no animal life was accessible from the sea and farming was infeasible because of the extreme cold. The tribes’ diets consisted almost entirely of wild animals, including the organs and tissues and particularly the walls of the second stomach and adrenal glands. Dr. Price learned the adrenal glands in their diet contained more vitamin C than any other known plant or animal source. In examining all the individuals of these northern tribes, Dr. Price found that each person was in superb health. He wrote that in several tribes “not a single tooth had ever been attacked by tooth decay” and found only 0.16 percent dental caries total. In contrast, Dr. Price described their return stating, “As we came back to civilization and studied, successively, different groups with increasing amounts of contact with modern civilization, we found dental caries increased progressively, . . . As we came down the Stikine River to the Alaskan frontier towns, the dental caries problem increased to 40 percent of all of the teeth” (Price, 2019, p. 67 – 69).
The Amazon Jungle at the foothills of the Peruvian Andes was another destination for Dr. Price and Florence. Upon arriving, he described the area, “The abundance of rain, the fertility of the soil, and the warm climate make plant growth most luxuriant on the eastern slopes of the Andes.” Initially, they met with a tribe of thirty members from an isolated area of the jungle. Their diet consisted of abundant fish from the Amazon River and its branches; animal life from the forest and thickets; bird life, including many water fowl and their eggs; plants and fruits. Andean yucca was commonly eaten. In this tribe, Dr. Price did not find a single tooth that had been attached by dental caries. However, in another related tribe whose members had converted to a modern diet, Dr. Price found rampant tooth decay and extensive loss of teeth (Price, 2019, p. 223 – 228).
Almost completely enclosed by three high snow-capped mountain ranges, the alpine Loetschental Valley in Switzerland was isolated for centuries. Shortly before the Prices’ arrival, an eleven-mile tunnel had been built which gave them access; and, a footpath took them the rest of the way. The villagers’ foods were still produced locally except for sea salt. Their traditional diet consisted of raw cow and goat milk, butter, cheese, and cream; rye sourdough bread; greens in the brief summer months; and meat once per week. In the summer, the cows followed the retreating glacial snowmelt, leaving the lower valley to be harvested for hay and rye. Cultured rye sourdough bread was a staple, eaten with raw with cheese and milk. The superior quality of the first butter that was made after the cows reached their glacial pastures in June was a celebrated occasion every year in the Village of Loetschental Valley.
IV. TRADITIONAL DIETS CONFERRED HIGH IMMUNITY
Dr. Price found that the indigenous people he studied who exclusively ate their traditional foods had high immunity to disease and degeneration. Their immunity not only protected their teeth but their health overall. Similar to the Northern British Columbia and Yukon Territory and Amazon Jungle tribes, the Loetschential Valley Swiss villagers had nearly complete immunity to dental caries. Dr. Price found that tuberculosis was absent from the Loetschential Valley Village while it was the most prevalent disease in the rest of Switzerland. (Price, 2019, p. 36 – 40).
Analyzing the nutritional content of the traditional diets, Dr. Price determined the nutrients needed to achieve high immunity from disease and degeneration throughout the stages of life and from generation to generation. Overall, his research demonstrated that while the foods differed greatly among the indigenous groups, their diets were very similar when reduced to the mineral and vitamin content (Price, 2019, p. 432). In the broader biological context, he stated, “We humans have the same rigid restrictions regarding food selection as the simpler forms of life when foods are evaluated from their chemical basis” (Price, 2019, p. 424).
Through his research, Dr. Price determined that malnutrition was the cause of the degeneration in his patients and those he studied elsewhere who had adopted the modern diet. He stated, “Modern commerce has deliberately robbed some of nature’s foods of much of their body-building material. . . For example, in the production of refined white flour approximately eighty percent or four-fifths of the phosphorus and calcium content are usually removed, together with the vitamins and minerals provided in the embryo or germ” (p. 255). Comparing the traditional Swiss diet to the modern diet, for instance, Dr. Price found the Swiss diet was higher in calcium (3.7x), phosphorus (2.2x), iron (3.1x), and magnesium (2.5x), as well as ten times the amount of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K2) and much higher in water soluble vitamins (B, C) (Forristal, 2004).
V. NUTRITIONAL PROGRAM TO RESTORE HEALTH
Dr. Price developed a nutritional program to restore teeth with incipient dental decay, concentrating on improving the chemistry of the saliva so that harmful acids and pathogenic bacteria no longer dissolved the tooth enamel. Eliminating the food products of the modern diet was imperative to improving the saliva chemistry. Once corrected, the saliva nourished the teeth rather than damaged them. Dr. Price’s restorative diet encompassed very high-vitamin butter from cows that pastured on early summer grasses and very high-vitamin cod liver oil, seafood, the organs and bone marrow of animal foods, vegetables, and raw milk (Price, 2019, p. 265).
Based on all the traditional diets he studied, Dr. Price placed particular emphasis on the importance of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E. and K which he discovered and called “vitamin-like activator” or “factor X,” later named vitamin K2.
In 1999, Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. created the Weston A. Price Foundation to carry on the work of Dr. Price, with an emphasize on research and education. They have local chapters around the world and advocate for small traditional farms. Drawing on Dr. Price’s research, they summarized the characteristics of traditional diets as a fundamental reference, excerpt below (Nienhiser, 2000):
Animal protein and fat from fish and other seafood; water and land fowl; land animals; eggs; milk and milk products; reptiles; and insects
At least four times the calcium and other minerals and ten times the fat soluble vitamins from animal fats (vitamin A, vitamin D and the Price Factor–now believed to be vitamin K2) as compared to the average American diet
Animal products that were eaten raw
High food-enzyme content from raw dairy products; raw meat and fish; cold-pressed oils; naturally preserved, lacto-fermented vegetables, fruits, beverages, meats and condiments
Seeds, grains, and nuts soaked, sprouted, fermented, or naturally leavened in order to neutralize naturally occurring antinutrients in these foods, such as phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, tannins and complex carbohydrates
Total fat content varied from 30% to 80% but only about 4% of calories from polyunsaturated oils naturally occurring in grains, pulses, nuts, fish, animal fats, and vegetables. The balance in the form of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids
Nearly equal amounts of omega-6 and omega-3 essential fatty acids
Natural sea salt
Animal bones, usually in the form of gelatin-rich bone broths
Special nutrient-rich foods for parents-to-be, pregnant women, and growing children; proper spacing of children; and teaching the principles of the traditional diet to the young
Dr. Price’s findings eighty years ago are profoundly relevant today. Through his research, he identified the common characteristics of the traditional diets that conferred high immunity to the indigenous people he studied, described above by the Weston A. Price Foundation. The many facets of traditional diets are the bedrock of Nature’s Hearth nutrition education program.
References
Forristal, J. L. (2004, 12, 22). A visit to Switzerland’s Loetschental in the Footsteps of Weston A. Price. Washington, D.C.: The Weston A. Price Foundation.
Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. (1948). The classic studies of Weston A. Price, D.D.S. devitalized foods and physical degeneration, Dental Items of Interest, 70, 426.
Price, W.A. (2019). Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. (8th edition). Lemon Grove, CA: Price Pottenger.
Nienhiser, J. (2000). Characteristics of Traditional Diets. Washington, D.C.: The Weston A. Price Foundation.
WAPF. (2017). The dangers of industrial fats & oils. Washington, D.C.: The Weston A. Price Foundation.