Dentist Gone Native

The prophetic nutritional research of Dr. Weston Price, DDS

by Dr. Stephen Byrnes

part 2 (conclusion) The effects of modern diet on native peoples

For part 1 of this article, see the Sept/Oct 2005 issue or www.wafreepress.org/77/dentistGoneNative.shtml

The roots of disease

When dentist Weston Price visited the various primitive groups in the 1930s, he noted that white European civilization had begun making inroads into the areas where they lived. Some of the native peoples had also opted to leave and move into more modernized areas. Dr. Price also had the opportunity to compare white colonials who were living alongside, or close to, the native peoples he was studying. What he found was what he thought he would find: disease and dental decay.

When people read Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it often changes their lives because not only does it describe how healthy native people look, feel, and eat, it also shows in painful detail what happens to those people when they abandon their native eating patterns and adopt modern foodstuffs.

The pictures Price took of people eating a modern diet are horrifying and stand in stark contrast to the pictures next to them of healthy, smiling natives. The photographs capture the suffering caused by modern foodstuffs--chiefly rampant tooth decay. Even more startling, they show the change in facial development that occurs with modernization."

Price found that parents who had modernized their diets gave birth to children who no longer exhibited the tribal patterns. The children's faces were more narrow, their teeth crowded, their nostrils pinched. These faces did not beam with optimism like those of their healthy ancestors.

The photographs of Dr. Weston Price demonstrate with great clarity that the foods of modern commerce do not provide sufficient nutrients to allow the body to reach its full genetic potential--neither the complete development of the bones in the body and the head, nor the fullest expressions of the various systems that allow humankind to function at optimal levels: the immune system, the nervous system, digestion, and reproduction.

And what were the offending foods that these unfortunate people consumed? Why, everything we find on our grocer's shelves: sugar, white flour, jams, jellies, cookies, condensed milk, canned vegetables, pastries, refined grain products, margarine, and vegetable oils.

Price noted in several places that where modern foods had displaced traditional ones, there was suicide from the pain from tooth decay. As most of us know, dental pain can be excruciating. With no drugs to ease their pain, and no dentist around to pull the dying tooth, people took their own lives to escape the torture.

White Europeans who lived in Africa had to leave periodically for health reasons. Children born there had to be sent away several times during their youth in order to survive. Such was the hardy effect of modern foods on these people. Native Africans, of course, had no such problems as long as they stayed on their native diets.

As noted earlier, the major infectious disease at Price's time was tuberculosis, the White Scourge. Price took several photographs of children, usually the children of either Europeans or natives who had adopted the modern foods before their children were born. They are disturbing in their depictions of suffering. Some of the children were too sick to be moved to better lighting for photographing. Others had pus visibly draining from their lymph glands and abscessed teeth.

Invariably, parents and children who had adopted modern foods were highly susceptible to tuberculosis and other degenerative diseases.

The native Hawaiians are a tragic example of this shift. Price, of course, noted that Hawaiians who ate their traditional diet of coconut, fish, shellfish, taro, sweet potatoes, and fresh fruits were healthy and strong. Today, however, the health of native Hawaiians is frightening. Obesity and diabetes are rampant. Because canned meats with nitrates in them are popular there, rates of stomach cancer are high (nitrates convert into carcinogens in the stomach--vitamin C halts the conversion).

Hawaiians today eat plenty of sugar, soft drinks, vegetable oils, macaroni salad, white flour, and white rice. Coconut is sometimes eaten, but usually as part of a sugary snack. High blood pressure and heart attacks are common. Rates of Alzheimer's are elevated as well. Such is the effect of processed foods on a beautiful race of people.

In the last decade or so, however, a diet was proposed called the Hawaii Diet. Though it is a little low in fat for my tastes, it advocates a full return to traditional eating patterns: fish, taro, sweet potatoes, fresh fruit and vegetables, and occasionally pork (wild boar and feral pig are native to the islands). Specifically avoided are white rice, sugar, Spam, and processed foods in general.

The change is dramatic: people lose weight, they have more energy, their health problems dissipate or become more manageable, and their teeth invariably improve as well.

Price noticed this pattern also. If a native abandoned his ancestral eating habits in favor of modern foods, ill health and dental caries followed. If that same person switched back to the original eating pattern, however, health returned and the progression of dental decay stopped and reversed itself. This is perhaps the most uplifting aspect of Price's work: one can always reverse the trend; there is always hope.

Price accurately and ominously predicted that as Western man consumed more refined sugar and substituted vegetable oils for animal fats, disease would increase and reproduction would be more difficult. Today, some 25% of Western couples are infertile, and rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease have skyrocketed. Price was truly a modern Cassandra of Troy--prophesying the truth, but with no one listening.

From Price's book: "We found a family on the opposite coast of the island [in the Scottish Outer Hebrides] where the two boys shown... resided. One had excellent teeth and the other had rampant caries. These boys were brothers eating at the same table. The older boy, with excellent teeth, was still enjoying primitive food of oatmeal and oatcake and sea foods with some limited dairy products. The younger boy, seen to the left, had extensive tooth decay. Many teeth were missing including two in the front. He insisted on having white bread, jam, highly sweetened coffee and also sweet chocolates. His father told me with deep concern how difficult it was for this boy to get up in the morning and go to work.... Note narrow face and [dental] arch of younger brother." Photo (c)Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, reprinted with permission. Photo was taken during Price's travels c.1930.

A Return to Sanity, Please?

For many decades, Price's work has been buried and forgotten. Due to the efforts of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, however, and the republication of Price's book for the public, that is fortunately starting to change.

Price's conclusions and recommendations were shocking for his time. He advocated a return to breast feeding when such a practice was discouraged by Western medicine. He urged parents to give their children cod liver oil every day. He considered fresh butter to be the supreme health food.

He warned against pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, colorings, refined sugars, and vegetable oils; in short, all the things that modern nutrition and agriculture have embraced and promoted the last few decades. Price believed that margarine was a demonic creation. Let me tell you, with recommendations like these, he was really unpopular! But the result of his research speaks for itself.

Because his data flatly contradict virtually everything that politically correct nutrition holds, it is common to find his work belittled. If Price's studies are accurate, then the low-fat school must go the way of all flesh: into the graveyard. It is typical, therefore, for critics to claim that Price only superficially examined the peoples he encountered and made simplistic conclusions about their health.

Price is also accused of ignoring the nutritional deficiencies of the peoples he studied, as well as high rates of infant mortality (it is true that high infant mortality rates existed, but only after exposure to and adoption of the white European way of life). It's also sometimes asserted that the modern foods--which Price argued were native peoples' downfall--were actually wholesome, but that native peoples began to over-consume them and didn't balance their diets correctly, hence their high rates of disease after adopting modern foodstuffs.

It is truly amazing how far some experts will go to defend the processed food industry and shaky nutritional hypotheses! Even a cursory look at Price's book will tell any rational person that Price did not superficially examine the people he studied. The detail about native customs, eating habits, and history of the various areas argues against any accusations of superficiality, as does the fact that Price was a physician with many years of distinguished experience.

If there were nutritional deficiencies, Price would have noted them down, but no such descriptions exist for the simple reason that no such deficiencies existed. We know this to be true, for if we examine the modern descendants of Price's subjects, we find that they enjoy robust health and freedom from both dental caries and more chronic diseases as long as they have not abandoned their native diets.

Critics also claim that malnourished people usually don't have dental problems, so it is immaterial that the natives Price photographed had perfect teeth, or that the modernized ones had poor ones. This claim is simply false. Numerous researchers have noted the clear and obvious connection between dental and bodily health. They all assert without hesitation that the health of the body is reflected quite accurately in the health of the teeth.

Dr. Price's Message

The obvious conclusion of Price's research is that for humanity to survive, it must eat better. And the foods it must eat must be whole, fresh, and unprocessed. More and more, people are beginning to see this and have been changing their eating patterns. For the majority, however, the continuation of negative dietary habits will inevitably lead to decreased vitality and unhealthy children; in short, the degeneration of the human race.

Besides, eating whole foods tastes good! The first happy lesson to be gleaned from traditional diets and Price's work is that good food can and should taste good. It's OK to saute vegetables and meats with butter. It's OK to consume whole (unpasteurized, non-homogenized) milk, meat with its fat, eggs, shrimp, lobster, liver with onions, and bacon. It's OK and healthy to eat home made soups made from gelatin-rich bone broths and sauces made from drippings and cream.

Eating whole foods is good for the environment. The building blocks of a whole foods diet are pesticide-free plant foods raised on naturally enriched soils, and healthy animals that live free to graze and manure the paddocks of their farms, as opposed to standing in a cramped stall, never seeing sunlight, being fed soybeans and corn meal, and being shot up with steroids and antibiotics.

Eating whole foods is better for the economy as well. Organic foods are usually raised by small farms. Each time you buy an organically raised plant or animal product, you are helping someone to earn a living. Isn't that preferable to giving your money to a multi-national food company that mass-produces its product, not caring about the health of the soil, the planet, the animals, or ourselves?

Finally, eating whole foods is healthier. We humans evolved eating food stuffs in whole ways. You did not see a caveman trimming the fat off of his meat--he ate the whole thing. You did not see a Swiss Alps villager eating low fat cheese--she ate the whole thing. You did not see Maori fishermen avoiding shellfish for fear of cholesterol--they ate the whole thing.

Foods are packaged in ways that Nature intended: they contain all the nutrients within themselves for optimal assimilation by our bodies. Eating whole foods insures us the highest amount of nutrients food has to offer. Tampering with them is ill advised.

Our Opportunity

Westerners live in countries where food is readily available, unlike some other parts of the world where people sometimes starve or are malnourished. Further, we live with a choice between two ways of eating: the way of whole foods, and the way of processed, new fangled junk. With such a privilege, we owe it to ourselves and our children to choose the way of life: the way of whole foods. By making this decision, we can stem the tide of chronic disease that threatens to consume our bodies and minds. Let us make that decision and embrace the ways of our ancestors. It is only by turning to the wisdom of traditional diets that we can find our biological salvation.