Every so often there is a bit of research that can never be re-enacted. This was the case with the work done by Dr. Weston A. Price. Like a comet that passes only once through our solar system Price had a singular opportunity to observe what really transpired as our recent ancestors became ‘civilized’. Dr. Price would forgo the convenience of working in a clinical laboratory. Instead he spent 20 years traveling and living under the most primitive of conditions to make simple, firsthand observations.

Dr. Price was a practicing dentist during the early 1900’s. He was perplexed by an obvious question that so many other of his associates took for granted. Why did people living under primitive conditions have excellent teeth?

At the time missionaries and traders were pushing into the last few isolated parts of the world. These places had no dentists and Price would find that there was little need. Some of the groups that he studied had an incidence of dental caries as low as 0.16% or one-sixth of one percent. In one area 2,464 teeth were examined. The people were of all ages. Only 4 cavities were found. This sounds impossible considering the fact that there was no fluorine in the water, no tartar control toothpaste’s. What gave these people immunity from tooth decay?

Even more compelling was the fact that time and time again Price found natives from the same racial stock only miles away that had rampant dental disease. He looked at different people living in a wide array of regions and climates. He analyzed Swiss isolated by mountainous alpine terrain as well Gaelics living near the almost unnavigable seas of the Outer Hebrides.

He observed the Indians of the Americas including those in the far north and great northern plains. Further south he lived with Florida Seminoles as well as the Columbian and Peruvian Indians in the jungles and mountains of South America. Inhabitants of Fiji, Hawaii and the Maori’s of New Zealand in addition to the Aborigines of Australia were included in his work.

On average the rate of cavities jumped from nil to over 25% very soon after the natives began changing what they ate. Price documented a specific case where natives labored on an English plantation. All of the workers were essentially free of cavities except for one, the cook. He routinely sampled the foods he prepared while the other workers continued with the same unchanged diet they had eaten for hundreds of years.

Tuberculosis, which at the time was uncontrolled among civilized populations, began manifesting itself in the same native groups shortly after dietary changes were made. Tuberculosis is infectious in nature and can be transmitted by human contact. However there must also be a susceptible host. Isolated groups had never seen this malady until civilization arrived, so much so it was referred to as the ‘white plague’ by natives. Once again some natives would develop the disease while others seemed immune.

Physicians thought that primary cause for these outbreaks were due to the living conditions of the natives. They thought that the smut from peat fire smoke that hung over the thatched topped homes is what contributed to disease in these Gaelic towns. The remedy of building new homes with more sanitary conditions had no impact. Natives that had changed their diets to new imported foods were not only developing cavities, they were now succumbing to tuberculosis.

Dr. Price noticed arthritis and other degenerative rheumatoid conditions developing in newly ‘civilized’ groups. In one instance he observed 10 native Indians in a reservation home that were laying side by side, completely bedridden with crippling arthritis. Only miles away there were Indians that chose not to alter their lifestyle or diet. They considered the white man as dirty and so was anything that he came in contact with, even food. They did have regular contact with whites, but it was limited to trading; usually furs in exchange for hunting ammunition. Arthritis of any kind was unheard of in these groups.

Dr. Price supplemented his research on living subjects by examining the teeth and bones of deceased natives. Twenty thousand skeletons were examined.

It was a relatively simple task to discriminate the remains. Christian missionaries that converted natives demanded that the corpse be buried in a prone or flat position. Prior to that natives would bury the bodies in a sitting or flexed position. Some would use mounds above the ground while others would bury the bodies on top of each other only to exhume them after a couple of years. The bones were then stored in a sacred building so the burial ground could be reused. None of the bones that Dr. Price examined had visible signs of degenerative arthritis. He observed this phenomenon among white European as well as Indian groups.

Even more troubling was what Price observed next. Up until then he only noticed the rather immediate effect of cavity formation and onset of new chronic and infectious diseases from these dietary changes. Prior to this time he was struck with the perfection of the structure of their oral cavities. The teeth were not only free of caries but the arch formed by them were perfectly spaced an aligned. Price called them "two rows of pearls". The next generation would not be so fortunate.

The offspring of parents who had changed their diets were plagued by an onset of structural problems. The first and most obvious were that the rows of teeth were now crooked and crowded. Up until this time Price never observed an impacted molar, now they were commonplace. Those crooked teeth now held more cavities. The rate went from nil to 25% in the first generation. The second generation was now seeing decay in an average of 45% of their teeth. Other groups were more severely effected. In some tribes the rate would jump as high as 78%.

There were structural changes. The new offspring showed more deformities, cleft palates, club feet, etc. A subtle structural change was the narrowing and deviation of nasal cavities. These children could no longer get adequate air through their nose. They became perpetual mouth breathers. Meanwhile the incidence of infectious disease and chronic rheumatoid conditions amongst the young increased. Children were now routinely afflicted with dental disease, tuberculosis and arthritis.

Even more subtle was the reproductive efficiency of these children as they reached puberty. Speaking simply, it became increasingly difficult for them to conceive and successfully carry the pregnancy to term.

While Dr. Price was making anecdotal observations of dietary changes on humans another researcher was conducting controlled experiments on animals. Between the years of 1932 and 1942, Dr. Francis Marion Pottenger, Jr., conducted a feeding experiment to determine the effects of subtle dietary changes on cats. His cat study was completely independent of Dr. Price's work.

The research was prompted when Pottenger noticed that his laboratory cats seemed divided in their ability to survive adrenalectomies (surgery to remove the adrenal glands). At the time there were no chemical procedures available for standardizing biological extracts (in this case, adrenal hormones). Manufacturers used animals to determine their potency. Cats cannot survive without their adrenal glands so a properly calibrated dose of extract was needed daily to support their lives. This in turn would indicate the potency of that batch of hormonal extract.

If a cat didn't survive the initial surgery it couldn't be used later in standardizing the potency of hormone extracts. Dr. Pottenger sought to maximize the pre-operative health of his laboratory animals by feeding them a diet of market grade raw milk, cod liver oil and cooked meat scraps (gathered from a local sanitarium).

These scraps included the liver, tripe, sweetbreads, brains, heart and muscle. This diet was considered to be rich in all the important nutritive substances by the experts of the day, and the surgical technique used for the adrenalectomies was the most exacting known. Even with all these precautions many of the cats still did not survive surgery. He then began noticing that these cats showed a decrease in their reproductive capacity. Many of the kittens born in the laboratory exhibited skeletal deformities and organ malfunctions.

As his neighbors in Monrovia donated an increasing number of cats to his laboratory, the demand for cooked meat scraps exceeded supply from the sanitarium. Pottenger placed an order at the local meat packing plant for raw meat scraps, again including the viscera, muscle and bone. These raw meat scraps were fed to a segregated group of cats each day and within a few months they appeared in better health than the animals being fed cooked meat scraps. Their kittens were more vigorous, and most interestingly, their operative mortality decreased markedly.

The contrast in the apparent health of the cats fed raw meat and those fed cooked meat was so startling, it compelled Dr. Pottenger to undertake a controlled experiment. What he had observed by chance, he wanted to repeat by design. He wanted to find answers to such questions as: Why did the cats eating raw meat survive their operations more readily than those eating cooked meat? Why did the kittens of the raw meat fed cats appear more vigorous? Why did a diet based on cooked meat scraps apparently fail to provide the necessary nutritional elements for good health? He felt the findings of a controlled feeding experiment might yield new insights into optimal human nutrition.

Dr. Pottenger devised a series of experiments where one group of cats were fed a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third milk and cod-liver oil. The second group was fed a diet of two-thirds cooked meat, one-third milk and cod-liver oil. Nine hundred cats were studied over a ten year period.

The cats receiving raw meat reproduced normally, had few abortions, nursed their young well, had very good behavior patterns and exhibited a high resistance to infections and parasites. The cats receiving the cooked meat reproduced poorly. There was an abortion rate of 25 per cent in the first generation, increasing to 70 per cent in the second generation. Many of the pregnant cats died in labor and the mortality rate of the kittens was high. The cats that survived long enough to mature were irritable and difficult to handle.

Skin lesions and allergies were frequent and became progressively worse from generation to generation in the cats eating cooked meat. Structural changes became evident. The oral arches narrowed, and bone deformities (osteomyelitis), cardiac lesions, thyroid disease, nephritis, hepatitis, arthritis, and many other conditions familiar to human beings all became common. The kittens of the third generation were so degenerated that none of them survived the first six months of life, thereby terminating the strain.

Pottenger wanted to see if there was a way to reverse this trend. He returned the cats in the first and second generation cooked meat group to a raw meat diet. There was immediate improvement but it still took three to four generations before the offspring regained the good health of their counterparts nourished with raw meat throughout.

The implications from the work done by these early researchers is daunting. The indication is that simple dietary changes would result in an inevitable increase in all types of chronic conditions. In fact these ‘maladaptive’ problems would tend to increase with every generation.

More and more couples would experience problems simply conceiving. Adequate sperm and eggs might be available but normal fertilization still would not take place. Males might show inexplicable drops in sperm count. Weight gain, sleeping disorders, chronic fatigue, skin problems, and allergies of all types would be on the increase. There would also be an increase in osteo-arthritis and rheumatoid conditions as well as other so called auto-immune diseases. Unfortunately these are the same trends that we have witnessed in increasing number in humanity’s recent generations. The incidence and prevalence of these trends are accelerating as we approach the next millennium.

Chapter 12