Weston Price

In the 1930s, there was an American dentist named Weston Price who started noticing a serious decline in dental health. He was perplexed and soon realized that not only were people’s mouths unhealthy, but there was a drastic spike in many chronic diseases that hadn’t previously presented much of a public health problem. These were diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, and cancer, for example. (All of the diseases that nowadays we expect to get as part of the natural aging process, for which there is no real cure, right?) He couldn’t understand what the problem was, why people’s teeth and bodies were breaking down at accelerated rates.

Dr. Price also noticed that a patient’s dental health correlated to his or her physical health. In other words, if someone had healthy teeth with few cavities, he or she was also generally healthy. If the mouth was filled with cavities, decaying gums and diseased roots, chances were that the patient was suffering from chronic or degenerative health problems.

Since he was already a gazillionaire from having a successful dental practice, Dr. Price and his wife set out for a tour that would last several years in which they would travel the world to observe and examine the eating and lifestyle habits of other populations. Were other populations experiencing the same decline in overall health?

Negative. In fact, the cultures that maintained their traditional eating habits had the fewest occurrences of chronic degenerative disease. They went everywhere – Europe, Africa, Alaska, the Pacific Islands – and it seemed as though the groups’ specific diet was less important than the fact that they consumed absolutely no processed foods. (It was during the early 1900s that processed food started making its way into everyday diets in the U.S.). For example, Swiss mountain people ate mostly full fat dairy products* like cheese and rye bread. Eskimos ate meat and fat, that’s pretty much it. A Gaelic group never had any dairy products but did eat a lot of fish, fish organs, and oats. Chronic disease was not an issue in any of these places and people’s teeth were immaculate even though brushing and flossing was not usually a part of their daily routines.

Despite the differences between diets, there were some similarities: Everyone ate meat to some extent, everyone had a fermented food as a staple, and nothing NOTHING was processed or treated with chemicals. Dr. Price’s point was that the health of Americans was in a downward spiral because these crazy new processed foods were replacing the natural healthy foods that have been eaten for centuries. By "crazy new processed foods" I mean refined grains, sugar, caffeine, pasteurized dairy and artificial preservatives and sweeteners, for example.

This research really hasn’t been given much attention because Dr. Price wasn’t a medical doctor or research scientist. His work just really consisted of reports, possibly biased, on his observations and the 18,000 photographs he took (really!). It is considered a politically incorrect topic, I guess because generalizations are made about populations of people.

Deciding what to make of this theory as a present day American is difficult. I suppose you can look at your ethnic roots and figure out what your ancestors ate and try to emulate that. But what if, for example, your mom is Japanese and your dad is Swiss? Most people have a complicated blend of ancestry. Besides, it’s hard to find time to hunt caribou these days, especially since the whole season of Gossip Girl is going to be replayed this summer (thanks for the tip, Alexis!). I don’t have the answer here but the obvious starting point is to make sure your food is not processed, chemically treated or refined.

Here is the website for the Weston A. Price Foundation – http://www.westonaprice.org/. I HIGHLY recommend it, it talks about so many important topics. I basically paraphrased an article from Dr. Stephen Byrnes for this post so I’m sure you could do an internet search on him and find some other good stuff.

*Unpasteurized. A topic for another day.