A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects by Dr Weston Price DDS, Benediction Classics (May 2010)
In all honesty, I hadn’t actually got around to reading this book because I thought I knew what it said having seen and heard it referred to so often in other articles, books, podcasts and videos. However, I have to say that the effort taken to read the 400 plus pages of this heavily illustrated book is well rewarded.
In fact, if you were only ever to read one book on nutrition – this would be the one I would chose. Taking things one step further, if you were only ever going to read one non-fiction book this one would have the power to alter not only your life, but the life of your children and grandchildren.
A large claim?
It’s truly paradigm busting stuff and the implications of Price’s work are immense if they were to be taken onboard by the medical profession or the populace at large.
At the same time, at the (cynical) prompting of a respondent to an article I had written I read Bad Science by Dr Ben Goldacre. This is a theme to which I may return, but as an allopathic doctor, the author appears to reserve a special level of vitriol for nutritionists spending a chapter each rubbishing the UK’s two best known advocates of the importance of diet. And a word search on my Kindle edition reveals that he mentions nutritionists in a derogatory way a total of 64 times.
It is obvious that he simply thinks the whole notion that food might have anything important to do with health completely ridiculous. As do most doctors because they are taught practically nothing about the subject and therefore see it as being of no significance.
On a slightly different note, I was in the supermarket recently and was speculating over the age of an infirm, morbidly obese lady with massively swollen legs and also taking the opportunity to see what she had in her shopping trolley. It was the usual processed fare.
Ben Goldacre argues (not without humour) in his book for at least the accurate presentation of facts to the various professions and population so that they can make their own mind up about the data. And it occurred to me that the lady in question probably had no idea that the choices she had been making every meal time and every week as she did her food shopping were the cause of her maladies. And she would have believed this because of the entrenched attitudes of the medical profession.
So, first a little about the good man himself.
About Dr Weston Price
Dr Weston Price was born in Canada in 1870 and qualified as a dentist from the University of Michigan in 1893.
He went into general practice, married and had a son, Donald, for whom he did a root-canal filling. Sadly, Donald died as a consequence of an infection relating to this root filling. This led Price to front a 60 man team of researchers on a 25 year long investigation into root canal treatments in what was then the research arm of the National Dental Association which later become the American Dental Association.
He produced meticulous research into root canal fillings publishing them in a two volume, 9 lb book. For more on this subject please refer to the article and video Problems with Root Canal Fillings.
He then turned his attentions to the fundamental causes of dental disease.
His search led him to travel to the most remote parts of the planet to research the health of native peoples and the effect of the advance of the ‘modern’ diet. He conducted this exhaustive research with his wife over a period of 9 years clocking up over 100,000 miles when global travel to remote areas was far from easy.
Potted versions of his story are available to watch on the videos The Price-Pottenger Story (7 mins) and Introduction to the Work of Weston Price (10 mins) and footage of the man himself at Dr Weston Price (2 mins).
One of his motivations in doing this work related to why there had been 21 civilisations that had risen and fallen without explanation over the last 6,000 years and he feared that we were destined to repeat the pattern unless we understood the possible cause(s).
“Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.”
George Santayana
Continued in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration 2.
