Does Modern Society Perpetuate Poor Health and Bad Teeth?
I wish I could say that I had perfect teeth like this picture taken years ago of a beautiful Seminole princess living in the Florida Everglades. Quite the opposite. I have spent lots of money on dental work through the years. I came across a very interesting study by Dr. Weston A. Price who discovered that people who ate non processed foods including healthy proteins ( with at least 50% raw foods) had beautiful teeth. And interestingly enough he found that vegetarians were not as healthy as those who had a variety of foods including meats. Do I hear some of the guys yelling Yes. Before you get too excited about the protein part. Hold on…that might include a high quality protein from dried caterpillars and dried fish as they eat in Africa. They add these tasty morsels to soups and stews. It is found when protein sources are adequate even from humble caterpillars that it is adequate enough to produce beautiful bone structure in their African off-spring. These sources have enough Vitamin A and D therefore some cultures don’t have to consume lots of high fat animal protein.
Okay let me get back to the other part of the healthy diet….I got side tracked with caterpillars. Anyway the other part of this healthy diet includes whole grains,meats, plenty of pure water and also fermented foods as well. You will find fermented foods in many cultures from sour dough breads,yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut (and store brand pasteurized doesn’t work because it destroys the healthful enzymes) , to Korean Kimchi. Fermented foods add friendly bacteria. Other benefits are reducing cholesterol, inhibiting parasites, regulating bowels and balancing intestinal pH.
Now back to Dr. Price. He is sometimes called the Charles Darwin of nutrition. I like to call him the Isaac Newton of nutrition because he figured out the fundamental laws of human diets, which, like the laws of physics, identify certain dietary components the body needs to be built properly and to stay healthy. It was Weston Price who put us on the path with his discovery of these basic fundamental laws.
Weston Price was a dentist who practiced back in the 20s, 30s, and 40s in Cleveland, Ohio. He was well known and well respected in his day, widely published in peer review journals. He was the author of a textbook on dentistry used by the US Navy. He served as head of research for the National Dental Association. He had a laboratory in his dental office where he evaluated different foods for nutrient content. He wrote prolifically and did a lot of research on root canals. (by the way research root canals and see if this is a healthy practice-I personally pass on root canals)
Dr. Price became more and more concerned about the increasing amount of dental problems he was seeing in his patients. He noted that tooth decay not only caused a lot of suffering but also that people who suffered from tooth decay invariably had other health problems. He also was concerned about the children coming into his practice. More and more frequently he saw what he called “dental deformities.” We have a euphemism for this condition; we say “crooked teeth.” More and more young people were coming in with narrow jaws, narrow palates, not enough room for their teeth to come in and hence crowding, overbites, under bites, the under-development of certain areas of the face. He noted that the young people who had these problems invariably had other health problems. He concluded that the teeth were a visual indicator of what’s going on in the rest of the body.
When Dr. Price began he research it was a time when the world was opening up; adventurers were going to areas where there had never been any contact with civilization before. Their observations and photographs appeared in magazines like the National Geographic. A frequent observation was that isolated peoples had beautiful teeth. In fact, the first settlers in American described the teeth of the Native Americans as “white and as straight as piano keys.”These reports, of course, intrigued Dr. Price very much and he decided to start out on a series of travels to find these people with beautiful teeth. His investigations lasted ten years and were described in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. In his travels, Dr Price sought the answers to two questions.
- The first question was, was it true? Were these reports of populations that did not suffer from dental carries and dental deformities actually true? And if the answer to the first question was yes, then he sought the answer to the second question:
- What were the people eating? He was not interested in what unhealthy people were eating. He knew what unhealthy people were eating. He wanted to know what the diets of healthy people contained.
That was the genius of Dr. Price–he asked the right questions and had the fortitude and persistence to determine the answers. It was the perfect time in the history of the world to seek the answers to these questions because groups of isolated peoples still existed, and he had at his disposal a new invention to record his findings—the camera.
You might find this slide presentation interesting with pictures from Dr. Price’s book. Look at slide # 50 shown below. If you would like to view the entire presentation in power point TradDietsPartI-1 The presenter says of the picture:
This is a photograph of Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, taken in 1910. Both Native Americans and whites have excellent bone structure—notice how handsome everyone is. There is only one exception, the man whose face is circled. Today the individual with good bone structure is the exception and the narrow face is the norm The Native Americans got their good bone structure by eating things like buffalo guts but the Americans almost certainly got theirs from eating raw dairy products along with eggs, liver, bacon and other familiar foods.
The short video below includes the work of Dr. Price and a man by the name of Dr. Pottinger who did a study of the health of generations of cats when fed various diets either cooked or raw. He found like Dr. Price that each generation of cats became more disease prone when much of the diet was cooked or denatured. After viewing this we may all consider using a diet with 50% raw. This is the percentage of raw food that Dr. Price said was the minimum percentage of raw food to maintain health. I will have to admit this is challenge but even at age 60 it should reap great rewards. The body has an amazing ability to repair itself if we don’t wait too long and because prevention is the best and easiest choice.
I know that it is more difficult to stay healthy than those in previous generations. We deal with GMO (Genetically Modified Foods) which is another topic for another post. GMO foods do not promote health but disease. We have hormones added to our meat and our milk. Dr. Price found that Primitive Diets contain 4 times the calcium and other minerals, and 10 times the fat-soluble vitamins as the modern American diet. And of course when Dr. Price made this statement that was in the 40’s. Imagine what it is today with the introduction of so many Franken foods (like in Frankenstien) or what we call foods and are really not foods at all.
We have a blueprint for our bodies. Our bodies are like a house or a temple and the blueprint for building those bodies is our genetics. The Creator would not give us any less than a perfect blueprint for our bodies. Whether or not this house is built according to the blueprint depends on the building materials that we use. If we don’t know enough to choose good building materials, or if we are trying to save money and use sub-standard materials, the body does the best it can but it cannot build exactly according to the blueprint.
The video below is about Dr. Prices’ and Dr. Pottinger’s research. I think you will find this interesting.
