Weston Price: In Tireless Pursuit of the Principles of Human Health

How many people do you know who traversed over land and sea at their own expense to study isolated people groups for the sole purpose of furthering nutrition research? Gold star to Weston Price. 🌟

“No era in the long journey of mankind reveals in the skeletal remains such a terrible degeneration of teeth and bones as this brief modern period records.”

—Weston Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration pg 7

Note: this post is part 2 of a four-part series on Weston Price. Here is:

Part 1: All My Life I've Wondered What's Wrong with My Immune System

Part 3: How to Incorporate Weston Price's Nutritional Principles into Modern Life

Part 4: Anecdotes from Weston Price's Book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Last week, in my post All My Life I've Wondered What's Wrong with My Immune System, I talked about how putting Weston Price’s principles into action has made me much less susceptible to illnesses. Now it’s time to cover the legend himself in more detail.

(Note: if you’re interested in how to get started with intermittent fasting, click here.)

As a lifelong lover of science myself, it’s easy for me to spot others who have the same passions I have. I particularly have respect for someone who was so serious about his interest in human health that he trudged across the world at his own expense at a time when travel was more difficult than it is today in search of lasting nutrition principles. There’s someone else who loves science that much? What a hero! (And a nerd. I love nerds. 🤓)

Meet Weston Price, The Curious and Meticulous Researcher

Weston Price heard from other researchers and anthropologists that there were isolated people groups living in remote parts of the world who had phenomenal health. He also heard that they ate ancestral diets that were carefully curated from hundreds of generations of accumulated wisdom about what nutrients the human body needed to function optimally. This appealed to him because he recognized these people as a nutrition experiment already in existence. The difficulty in nutrition research is getting people to adhere to an intervention. But these people had been living this way for generations. He simply had to find them, see what they ate, and what the effects on there health were.

What Weston Price Did

For ten years, he and his wife trekked around the wide world to visit fourteen remote people groups who were renowned for their impeccable physiques. What a guy! Is that not the most romantic date ever? 🤣

Weston on his 10-year date with his wife:

Among those visited were the Lötschental Valley in Switzerland, Native Americans in remote parts of northern Canada, the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos in northern Canada, Malaysians, Polynesians, Maori in New Zealand, Pygmies in Africa, and Aborigines in Australia. As part of his meticulous research, he took over 15,000 photographs, 4,000 slides, many filmstrips, and hundreds of pages of careful notes.

A Summary of Price’s Research

Price always examined and noted the people's teeth first. He did this because he believed that when someone’s teeth are resistant to decay, this is an indication of sound health in the rest of the body. After all, he reasoned, teeth are simply bones. They just happen to be the easiest bones to examine.

Furthermore, he believed that one obtained decay-resistant teeth not necessarily by avoiding starches and sugars (although that plays a very small role) but by receiving proper nutrition. When he saw a mouth full of cavities, he theorized that the person didn’t have enough minerals or enough of the vitamins that activate minerals in the diet to produce strong teeth that resisted decay. Decaying teeth were merely indicative of a nutrient-depleted body.

His first stop was the Lötschental Valley in Switzerland, a remote valley where the people ate only the food they produced locally. He found that for every 100 teeth he examined of these residents, there were on average two cavities. Because he was a careful scientist, he also examined the teeth of genetically similar people living in larger towns and eating a modern diet. He found ten or twenty times the cavities depending on the region. Some had 20% of their teeth infected with cavities and others had 40%.

When possible, he examined the skulls of previous generations. Some of the people groups had the bones of their ancestors on display in their churches or temples.

Price writes in the introduction on page 7 of his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration:

He was fascinated to see skulls of people who had died of old age but who had their teeth completely intact! He could tell from examining the teeth in the skulls that they had almost no cavities. This was despite having no access to fluoridated water or toothpaste with fluoride.

Furthermore, most of the people groups did have some starch in their diet that could have caused decay in their teeth had they been susceptible. They certainly didn’t have access to the same amount of white flour and white sugar that we have but they did eat things such as freshly ground rye which had sufficient starch to break down weakened teeth.

Price also meticulously documented the bone structure of people’s faces. Once again, this was interesting to him in that he saw it as an indication of proper nutrition. When a child doesn’t have access to the proper nutrients, the jaw and upper palette don’t form properly causing the teeth to crowd later in life. To rule out genetic factors, he tracked down members of extended family groups to compare those eating the ancestral diet with those who had moved away and were eating a modern diet.

He noticed that parents who grew up in remote places had perfectly formed jaws and strong teeth. But when those same people moved away and raised children on a modern diet, often their children had narrow palates and crowded, rotting teeth.

For each people group he visited, he sent back samples of their food to his lab and studied their food to analyze what substances they had that modern diets were lacking.

Here are some interesting snippets. Compared to those on a modern diet:

• New Zealand Maori got 23.4 times the magnesium, Malaysians got 26 times, and Polynesians got 28.5 times magnesium as the average person eating a modern diet. (This is one of numerous reasons I recommend that all my coaching clients take magnesium glycinate.)

• Eskimos were getting 49 times the iodine as the average person on a modern diet.

• All fourteen of the isolated people groups received a minimum of ten times the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K as those on modern diets.

How Did The Isolated Groups Get Their Fat Soluble Vitamins A, D, and K?