I became aware of Dr. Weston A. Price while doing research for a class on anatomy and physiology I was preparing for homeschoolers. I spent hours on www.westonaprice.org. I learned that Dr. Price was an American dentist in the early part of the twentieth century that noticed more and more of his patients coming to him with many cavities and crowded teeth. He had a hunch these troubles were due to consuming foods of little nutrition. To test his hypothesis he came up with a brilliant scheme: Instead of only looking “in his own backyard” to see whether or not a poor diet was responsible for these problems, he traveled the world looking for cultures that had few cavities and wide dental arches. He then studied what these cultures were eating and recorded what he found. He traveled from isolated Swiss valleys to islands off the Scottish coast, to Eskimos in Canada, to South Sea Islanders, to African natives to Peruvian Indians documenting their faces with photographs. He found that those peoples who ate their densely nutritious native foods properly prepared had near-perfect teeth and wide dental arches with room for all their teeth, while those cultures that partook of the foods of modern commerce such as white flour, sugar and jams demonstrated dental deformities and degenerative diseases. The book that he wrote and illustrated with the photographs he took while on his trips is a classic: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Once you have seen the book you will never forget those pictures.
A friend and I have begun to teach seminars on the basic work of Dr. Price and demonstrate the food preparation techniques that he observed while he traveled. It has been personally very rewarding.
Most people intuitively know that there is something wrong with a system that does not restore health but manages disease. Doctors continue to prescribe more and more medications for symptoms but very few are motivated to help the patient get down to the underlying cause, which is poor diet. So many health industries are flourishing in the wake of so much illness, especially the pharmaceutical companies. I personally do not think our health care system will continue to support itself when there are not enough healthy people left to pay the health costs of those who are sick.
Even worse, we hear of efforts to make it difficult for consumers to secure those traditional whole foods that can produce real health. Raw milk is a perfect example of a basic traditional food that was available to everyone in this country up through the first half of the last century but is now denied to the majority of our population today.
There are many testimonies of asthma and other health conditions being improved when unpasteurized milk is consumed. Many heat sensitive vitamins and minerals are available in raw milk that are destroyed or made inaccessible when heat processed. And today, the push in the food industry is to ultra-pasteurize milk so that is can sit on a shelf for years, but cannot support life and health. See www.realmilk.com to see the research and ongoing efforts to make unpasteurized milk freely available again.