Weston A. Price was a prominent dentist known primarily for his theories on the relationship between nutrition, dental health, and physical health. He founded the Research Institute of the National Dental Association, which later became the Research Section of the American Dental Association, and served as its chair from 1914-1928.
In the early 1930s Price travelled more than 100,000 miles to study the diets and health of isolated primitive peoples all over the world, at a time when such communities still existed — people “who were living in accordance with the tradition of their race and as little affected as might be possible by the influence of the white man”. What he found makes fascinating reading, turning many of our modern ideas on their heads — far from living lives that were “nasty, brutish and short”, these people were healthy, vigorous and happy, with few or none of the modern diseases of degeneration. Then Price compared these communities to other, less isolated groups of the same peoples, exposed to the “trade foods” produced by industrial society (processed foods grown by synthetic farming methods), in the shape of the “white man’s store”. He found it takes only one generation of eating industrialized food to destroy health and immunity.
Want to understand why hundreds of thousands of people in the “developed world” die each year from cancer and heart disease? Dr. Price’s book spells it out, Nutrition -> causes -> physical degeneration. With the coming of the modern man with his foods of commerce, comes disease and even death. The book was written in the 1930′s therefore has some odd ways of viewing society, but the technical and social information is extensive. The photographs in the book are priceless. Hundreds of faces tell the story better than words ever could. As the text is now available online complete with pictures, there is no reason not to avail yourself of this groundbreaking resource. It will revolutionize the way you think about food. This is the book that showed me why I needed to change my dietry habits. If you never read another book in your life, you owe it to yourself, your children and your grand children to read this book. I highly recommend it. The book is available to read online here.
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