746 of 759 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
rare and important research, January 20, 2004
This book distills the research of Weston A. Price, a dentist and independent nutrition researcher. In a decade of travel around the world, Price and his wife studied the health, dietary habits, and chemical composition of food of dozens of traditional peoples of various racial backgrounds. His research was done at a time when many such groups still lived free of the influence of Western civilization and what he called "foods of commerce," i.e. heavily refined and denatured foods.
One could question whether 60 plus year old research is relevant today, but I found his work powerful and persuasive for a very simple reason.
Health problems sent me on a quest to find the best dietary information, but I soon found myself mired in contradictory claims, opposing research and special interest groups, as well as outright deceit. First I would read about how one vitamin or mineral was good for this. Then I would read that the very same item was bad for that. You shouldn't combine X with Y, or needed to add tons of Z or W, except on Sundays when the moon was almost 3/4 full. I became very disillusioned with the incredible complexity of nutrition. As I read more and more deeply, I also became annoyed at all the disinformation and profiteering behind much of the so-called research.
I reached this bottom line: While we understand proteins, carbs, and fats reasonably well, and have a pretty good handle on most vitamins and about a dozen minerals, there is simply an immense amount we just don't know. We are researching minerals at about 5 per decade (around 50 to go - a hundred more years at our current rate). There are around 5000 enzymes in bee pollen alone, and few of them have been researched. There are an unknown number of phytochemicals and other things we have yet to discover that have been constituents of our food for perhaps millions of years. Science moves very slowly, and it could easily be several hundred or 1000 years before we get it all sorted out. And that doesn't take into consideration the power groups who insist on muddying the waters for profit's sake. Modern science is quite obviously incapable of giving us complete answers to our nutritional questions. It just plain doesn't have them to give, nor will it for a long, long time.
Then I found Price's work. Basically, he was the Tony Robbins of diet - he sought out the healthiest people on Earth and studied what they had done for hundreds and thousands of years to stay healthy. He looked at their Traditional diets as well as what happened when they adopted Western diets. The results are in this book, and it is well worth your taking the time to read. While others have followed his work, the changing nature of the world now make it impossible to duplicate his research today. His work stands as a pivotal piece in science and health as well as in history. This represents the cumulative knowledge of millions of people over thousands of years in a laboratory that includes the entire world. Definitely non-trivial.
There are also books by Ronald Schmid and Sally Fallon that introduce and give overviews of Price's work. I recommend them also. Today, when we must all become advocates for our own health, arming yourself with the best information is vital.
update December 2008
A recent article published by the Weston A. Price Organization not only validates Price's X-Factor research, it also clearly illustrates the point I make above about modern scientific method and nutritional research failing to provide adequate information.
Vitamin K2 has been identified as the X-Factor, and recent research into K2 shows that it is an extremely essential nutrient, not the throw-away that it has long been considered. It is a vital factor in bone and tooth health, heart health, nerve health, and so on. It turns out to be a critical part of so many body processes that physiology texts will have to be rewritten in major ways.
Here is a vitamin discovered nearly 100 years ago, and yet science is just beginning to understand how terribly important it is. The main reasons for this serious error are; a lack of understanding of the chemical tests involved, lack of reading research in other countries, and a lack of interest on the part of researchers. (No money in vitamin research, you can't patent vitamins.)
The article is available from the Weston A. Price Organization and is a very interesting read.
UPDATE August 2009:
The figure of 5000 enzymes has been bothering me, as the source of that info was not well cited. I have been looking around for a hard figure on the number of enzymes, and guess what? There is no such hard number. All the sources I have found vary widely (1,000 to 80,000), and do not cite references. Some sources say that there are 5,000 named enzymes, and up to 20,000 possible.
This is yet another reason why current nutritional research is such a poor source of decision making data - they just don't have enough hard data to trust.
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154 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must-Have for anyone who doubts the Diet-Disease link, May 25, 2005
I owe a great debt to this book. Back in 1977, I ran across an old battered copy of Nutrition & Physical Degeneration, and it became the second book I ever read on the diet-disease connection. I had just finished my first major change in diet, a 5-week cleansing program, and the results (loss of acne and a growing sinus problem) so stunned me that I was looking around for anything that further explained this diet-symptom connection. Price's book hit me like a ton of bricks, but it wasn't his words that I remember reading; it was the shocking photographs- traditional people's faces juxtaposed with those that had moved to the cities and modern diets-that spoke volumes.
Two years later, in 1979, I left home for what would be a 3-year hitchhiking trip around the globe. A year was spent traveling through Africa, and not a day would go by went I didn't see examples of what Weston Price was pointing out. Deep in Mali or Senegal or the Ivory Coast, you would see a vibrant health in people. Then go into the cities like Dakar or Bamako, and the bone structures and teeth and skin would have deteriorated. Just like Price's photographs. I remember thinking that this doesn't take a scientist or nutritionist to see this. Anyone, even a traveling hippie, could spot what was happening when humans moved from a whole foods diet, to a one filled with fake foods.
If you have any doubt that virtually every skin and digestive problem is related directly to the sludge-producing, historically new diet that we have been consuming since about the 1930s, read Weston Price's book. Heck, just look at the pictures. Because until our medical profession stops its unholy relationship to the pharmaceutical industry, it is up to each of us to uncover and remember this diet-disease/diet-health relationship.
Scott Ohlgren
author, Cellular Cleansing Made Easy
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342 of 350 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ten Stars for This One, August 26, 2001
By A Customer
Dr. Price hoped to influence the world to change their dietary habits. With just his wife and whatever bearers, guides, and drivers he could find, he single-handedly proved the diet-health link and backed it up with meticulous records and photographic evidence. He traveled to the far corners of the world to find the most primitive cultures on each continent, and compared their traditional diets to the standard Western diet. Photo after photo in his book points up the glaring difference between the health and APPEARANCE of the natives of whatever culture nourished on their traditional diet and those whose diets had been disrupted and "displaced" by the "white diet"...a diet high in refined foods like white sugar, bleached white flour, polished rice, and synthetic fats. He also carefully laid out the guidelines for a natural unrefined diet that would be suitable for modern Americans. Too bad all that careful research and excellent advice has been ignored. Today's SAD (standard American diet) is a god-awful, unbalanced grain-heavy (65% "complex carbohydrates") piece of tomfoolery that bears no resemblance to the diet that nourished and nurtured our ancestors. If you never buy another book about nutrition, you owe it to your children and your grandchildren to buy THIS book, READ AND REREAD IT, and pass it down to your posterity.
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