Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939)

Dr. Weston A. Price, DDS - 30 Q&As - Book Summary

Across fourteen isolated populations on five continents — the Loetschental Swiss, the Hebridean Gaels, the Alaskan Eskimos, the Northern Canadian Indians, Pacific Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, the Maori, the Andean Quichua, and others — the same pattern held: the people eating their ancestral foods produced children with broad faces, full dental arches, and caries rates between 0.16 and 5.2 per cent, while the same racial stock living near a trading post that supplied white flour, sugar, and canned goods produced children with narrowed faces, crowded teeth, and caries rates of 25 to 40 per cent. The change appeared in the first generation born after the dietary shift. The parents, raised on the ancestral diet, remained intact. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, published in 1939, documents this finding across more than fifteen thousand photographic negatives, over twenty-eight hundred saliva analyses, and chemical analyses of native foods gathered from each of the populations studied.

Weston A. Price was a dentist — Member of the Research Commission of the American Dental Association, Member of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, author of the earlier two-volume Dental Infections, Oral and Systemic. His expeditions ran from 1931 through 1936. The method was direct: locate populations still eating ancestrally, locate their modernised counterparts, examine every tooth in every dental arch, photograph the faces, collect food samples for chemical analysis, collect saliva. The work was funded privately and conducted with his wife as travelling companion across territories that often had no road, no airstrip, and no medical facility within hundreds of miles. The conclusions he drew were not the conclusions the dental and medical establishment of the period was drawing.

The 1930s establishment position on rising rates of dental caries, the wasting condition it called tuberculosis, heart disease, and what it then called Mongolism rested on two pillars: germ theory, which attributed degenerative conditions to organisms entering from outside, and eugenics, which attributed physical and mental defects to fixed hereditary inferiority. Alexis Carrel had already noted in Man, the Unknown that what the establishment called degenerative disease was replacing what it called infectious disease as the dominant burden of modern populations, even as the conditions it had attributed to bacteria were declining in the official statistics. Surgeon General Parran’s survey reported one in twenty Americans too sick to work or attend school on any given day. Earnest Hooton at Harvard was warning that dental degeneration would lead to extinction of the species. The eugenicists were proposing sterilisation programmes for the populations producing the highest rates of “defectives.” Price’s data contradicted both pillars at once. The wasting and the decay appeared in populations whose oral hygiene was non-existent and whose teeth were sound, and were absent in populations whose teeth were continuously coated with food residues — a pattern germ theory could not account for. The degeneration was not hereditary in the fixed sense — it appeared in the first generation born after a dietary change, in family lines whose grandparents had been intact, and it could be reversed in subsequent generations by restoring the supply.

Price’s framework operates as terrain medicine in its specifically nutritional register: the body builds itself from what the food supplies, and what the food supplies depends on what the soil supplies and how the food is processed before it reaches the table. The work sits alongside Béchamp’s milieu and Shelton’s later integration of nutrition with the body’s restorative processes, and it anticipates the soil-depletion arguments that Albrecht and Howard would develop in the decades that followed. The full summary documents the specific cross-cultural convergence on a class of “sacred foods” — fish eggs, organ meats, butter from cows on rapidly growing spring grass — independently identified by Eskimos, Andean Indians, Hebridean Gaels, and African tribes as critical for prospective parents; the case of the sixteen-year-old whose facial bones were widened by half an inch over thirty days, triggering rapid passage through adolescence and three inches of growth in four months; and the Cleveland feeding programme in which one reinforced meal a day, six days a week, arrested active dental decay in poor children whose home meals and oral hygiene were unchanged. The Loetschental Valley, with two thousand inhabitants on whole rye, dairy from cows on alpine pasture, and weekly meat, had no prison.

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