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Price was a dentist who embarked on a decade long research project in the late 1930s to find the healthiest people on Earth and study what they ate and how they ate it. His studies ranged all over the world, covering all different races. Schmid has done a good job of giving an overview of Price's findings.
The only issues I have with this book are that Schmid falls for the cholesterol scam in discussing heart disease, and that he also falls for the idea that the term "life expectancy" as used in statistics means the average age of death. (page 66) It doesn't. Life Expectancy as an arithmetic average would be reasonably close to the median age of death in a perfect Bell curve population sample, but such perfect samples only exist on paper, not in reality. The median age of death, that is the age by which half of the population died, was 57 in 1900. This means that half the population lived to be 57 or older. Kind of different than saying the average age of death was 45-50. In 2000, the median age of death was only 78, so there hasn't been as much gain as we are led to believe. Neither figure addresses the health or quality of life of people at those ages, either. A minor point in the grand scheme of this book. His discussion of life expectancy differences for those 40 and over on the rest of the page is still very much true and sets the record straight on the PR hype we are given about our current state of health.
... Read more ›The book goes wrong, like so many others, in its demonization of saturated fat. Schmid is simply wrong about saturated fats causing heart disease, cancer, and ill health in general. He is also wrong in asserting that our ancestors did not eat a lot of saturated fat. This is strange coming from someone who is so obviously familiar with Price's research which showed every population group to be eating diets rich in saturated fats and these people, as Schmid knows, were supremely healthy.
I think a better book to get would be Lutz and Allan's LIFE WITHOUT BREAD or Fallon and Enig's NOURISHING TRADITIONS.
There is a lot information that I found useful, such as the grading of salmon (which I never knew about), or getting calcium from eggshells to name just a few. However, he does not tell you how much calcium you are getting by eating eggshells. Also, I could never grind it to a powder in a blender as he said. I had better results with just a mortar and pestle.
On saturated fats, try as I might, I cannot find anything he has to say against the use of saturated fats as criticized by Fallon or Brynes. (Perhaps they have become somewhat fanatical about Price's diet). He is, however, against the modern way of raising animals which he believes is not the same as our ancestors. He points out that a lot of animal's mouths are being used as convenient garbage dumps, and proceeds to name all the types of garbage being eaten, that's right, garbage! This may alter the fat content, metabolism, ratios, etc., to a state that may not be healthy for you or the animals fed on such a diet. I agree on this point wholeheartedly! But, in no way do I see him telling us in the meantime to eat vegetables only and avoid all animal products! Properly raised animals that is.
There is also an explanation of the death rate of earliers years of how long Americans live are skewed. I never quite understood this, as I read about it in other books but there is no explanation how they concluded this, but he gives it here and it's so simple to understand!
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