When Dr Weston Price, the famous dentist travelled the world in the 1930s visiting many of the last groups of people whom the roads had not reached he found people who were happy and optimistic, physically well-formed and free of degenerative disease. He catalogued what he found in his book ‘Nutrition and Physical Degeneration’. Of course, life was not perfect, if it was we would not have degenerated into the state of things now and of course there were many problems in the world in the 1930s. The point is that these people in these studies were so well-formed. Weston Price found that natural beauty was shared by all the people, putting to rest the idea that beauty is something elitist. He also noticed that people living in the same tribes often looked like brothers and sisters, suggesting that the differences between us may be exaggerated from epigenetic and nutritional factors. The Weston Price studies are exceptionally valuable in what they reveal about human nutritional needs. The story of Weston Price is, in short, that he was an American dentist, so shocked by the state of his patient’s teeth in terms of both decay and their crookedness that he decided to carry out this research project. Visiting the remaining preindustrial cultures in the 1930s which the roads and therefore processed foods had not reached. He found people with little or no tooth decay and well-formed jaws and cheekbones, with plenty of room for the teeth to grow straight and uncrowded. The state of the teeth corresponded with similarly good overall bone structure and also lack of degenerative disease. In the groups he visited it would seem at first glance that what people ate varied enormously from place to place, based on what was locally available, but on close study it became clear that there were some distinct commonalities.
So what are these commonalities? All the people studied ate a large percentage of their food raw i.e. undamaged by heat. This included raw animal fats. Nearer the equator, in the tropical regions this would be mainly plant foods, for example, tropical fruits, including for example coconut with its beneficial fats and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum in the far northern latitudes, the Inuit relied heavily on animal fats. This way of eating is and living is no doubt more challenging than living in warmer climes, and the life expectancies weren’t as long, but this is ay of eating got people through generation after generation with health that would be enviable to many today. Of course, there were no refined or denatured foods such as refined sugar or flour; canned foods; pasteurized, homogenized, or low-fat milk; artificial vitamins or artificial additives and colourings in any of these diets. They also ate seasonally and locally. In traditional diets, seeds, grains and nuts are soaked, sprouted, fermented or naturally leavened in order to neutralize naturally occurring anti-nutrients in these foods, such as phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, tannins and complex carbohydrates. The total fat content of traditional diets varies from 30% to 80%
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