Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

"Weston Price was a great dental scientist and did some really important work. What I didn’t know when I read this for the first time is that Weston Price’s book was the culmination of a long line of dental research in the first half of the 20th century, demonstrating that high fat diets are required in childhood when teeth are developing, to protect against cavities. Weston Price travelled around the world with his wife – whom he refers to as Mrs Price – and did his 1930s equivalent of controlled dietary experiments. He visited populations that were so isolated that they didn’t have access to modern Western foods (ie refined flour and sugar or refined white rice) and he compared their teeth, gums and jaws to people of similar genetic stock that did eat Western food. He began high in the Swiss Alps, in a village that is a mile above the nearest road, and he compared their teeth and jaws to the Swiss living in one of the major Swiss cities. He visited pygmies in Central Africa, and a variety of African tribes, Native American populations, Inuits and South Pacific islanders. Everywhere he went he took photos of their teeth and jaws. So you’ve got these populations that eat no sugar and refined flour with beautiful white teeth and perfect jaws, and other populations with the same genetic background, but living near Westerns outposts or cities or trading with the West. Not only were the kids’ mouths riddled with cavities, but their jaws were a mess. After reading Weston Price, half the reason I try to keep my kids off sugar is hoping I’ll save money on orthodontics. That’s the thing. You just look at the pictures. People who were eating refined flour and sugar were a mess, and people who weren’t seem to have been very healthy. It’s hard to tell with this kind of research, but as far as what was done in the era, Price did a pretty good job of convincing readers – he certainly convinced me – that there is something going on when you add Western food to any baseline diet. This is not modern science, it’s not something you can base public health recommendations on, but it is a book that can change your paradigm about what’s healthy and what’s not. And it’s a good read. No, it’s also a great travelogue. He’s a great storyteller. There are parts that I didn’t even believe could be true – how pygmies in Africa kill elephants by sneaking up behind them and sawing through their hamstrings over the course of a couple of days. Then they can kill the elephant because it can no longer move. I guess the elephant doesn’t feel this happening. You think this is crazy, and then you turn the page and there’s a photo of Mrs Price, a dowdy-looking middle-aged woman in a pith helmet and a long skirt, standing next to two pygmies with two enormous elephant tusks towering above them. One of the fundamental observations that I discuss in Good Calories, Bad Calories is the absence of cancer in populations that do not eat Western diets. We think of cancer as inevitable. But the chief statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company, who later became one of the founders of the American Cancer Society, compiled the observations that populations that don’t eat Western diets don’t get cancer nearly as much. One of the explanations put forward in the early 20th century was that the meat in Western diets was the cause of cancer. But people at the time pointed out that the same absence of cancer is true of the Inuit, the Native Americans of the Great Plains and pastoral populations like the Masai. These are people who live exclusively on animal products – so whatever is causing the cancer, it’s unlikely to be that. There is now a growing body of research showing that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are cancer promoters. I actually have a five page article about this research in the journal Science today. The idea is that you avoid cancer by keeping insulin levels as low as possible, which means avoiding these same fattening carbohydrates we’ve been talking about, and arguably eating an animal product, fat-rich diet. It’s the same type of diet we’ve been eating for two million years, prior to agriculture, and the same diet that many of these indigenous populations were still eating through the early 20th century. Actually, while I was doing research for this story I interviewed the head of the cancer research centre at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School, as well as Craig Thompson, the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in Manhattan. Both of them told me they were effectively on the Atkins diet – very low carb, high fat, mostly animal products – not because they wanted to lose weight, but because they didn’t want to get cancer."