Why am I looking to our ancestors and nature for guidance?

Weston Price

Weston Price, head of the American Dental Association, traveled the world in the 1930’s to gather data on traditional indigenous peoples. He wondered why the majority of people in the United States have cavities and crowded teeth. He discovered, much to his shock, that these traditional populations, when eating their traditional diets, had nearly zero cavities and fully developed jaws and skulls, meaning they had no crowding of their teeth. When these same populations established contact with civilization and began eating modern foods, their health deteriorated considerably, giving them cavities and poor development.

On the left image above are traditional people still eating their traditional diet. Note the “magnificent teeth and dental arches” which are typical of all traditional peoples. On the right image are people of the same genetic population, but eating a modern diet. Note the cavities and “lack of development of the facial bones with a narrowing of the nostrils and dental arches with crowding of the teeth”.

For more information, check out Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A Price.

What were these people eating, and avoiding, to put them in a state of such excellent health?

Pottenger’s Cats

Dr. Francis Pottenger also performed nutrition research in the 1930’s. His experiments involved feeding groups of cats either raw animal products (meat, organs, bones, milk) or cooked animal products. After 10 years, several generations on the raw food diet were in excellent health by every measurable marker.

The cats fed the cooked food diet did not fare so well. By the end of the first generation, they already began developing degenerative disease and lacked energy. The second generation had poorly developed skeletons, especially in the skull, and more degenerative disease. The third generation had significantly degenerated to the point that very few were fertile, and none of the much smaller (in size, mass, and population) fourth generation lived past 6 months.

The good news is that this degeneration is reversible. Cats in the third generation cooked food group were switched over to a raw food diet and became more healthy quite quickly. They then produced a new generation which was properly developed and had far less degenerative disease.

This study shows that simply eating the “wrong” foods for our body is enough to produce terrible results. Cooked animal products are not nutritious enough to supply cats with all they need to properly develop, but raw animal products are. What are the “right” and “wrong” foods for humans?

Compare

Consider the state of our health in the modern United States:

• At least half of adults have prediabetes.
• Almost 40% will get cancer in their lifetime.
• 650,000 people die every year from heart disease.
• Half of people are obese.
• The average person needs several cups of coffee just to make it through the day.
• Depression and anxiety are “normal” now.

Contrast that with, for example, the health of the Innuit or Eskimo peoples on their native diet of almost exclusively whole seafood (whale, fish, seal) and whole caribou. They have perfectly formed skeletons, perfect teeth, and more than twice the thickness of the skull as us. They aren’t plagued by modern degenerative diseases, such as those listed above, and have incredibly good blood panels. Hearty, strong, full of energy, happy. These are all words regularly used to describe these people. Note: Learn more about these impressive people by reading The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

The picture above compares a modern whole skull to the skulls of two traditional people. Note how thin the modern skull is compared to the thickness of the two traditional skulls.

Something is clearly wrong with our way of life. We are paying the price for abandoning our nature. The modern person is only a shell, not coming close to their potential. For this reason, and many more, we must study the wisdom of traditional knowledge, proven successful for thousands of years, to teach us how to live.

In the posts that follow, we’ll elaborate more on the differences between a traditional healthy diet and the modern toxic diet. Diet is the first area of health covered because I believe it’s the most important.