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The Price of Nutrition Rachel Conroy Dr. Price was born in 1870 in Canada. He became a dentist and began practicing in 1893. Dr. Price has been coined by many as the “Charles Darwin of nutrition. ” He became concerned with the causes of tooth decay and physical degeneration and started looking at what was the root of the problem. At the time and still today these issues were contributed to genetics. Dr. Price asked why these patients’ parents were not exhibiting similar problems. This led Dr. Price to believe that there was a deeper issue that had not been studied yet.
According to the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research – 31% of children between the ages of 9 to 11 have tooth decay in their permanent teeth and according to parents. com 45% of population research that much of the dental diseases that we experience today can be attributed to poor health that came from the introduction of modern civilizations and nutrition. My family and I have benefited from Dr. Prices nutritional studies and I hope to explain some of his ideas. I will do this be first looking at why he decided to do this research.
Second look at how he established who should be included in his research and where they were located, and last look at what his research concluded. Weston A. Price was a dentist in Cleveland during the turn of the century. He served as the chair of the Dental Association from 1914-1928. He was a highly respectable dentist who had major concerns for the health of his patients. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, Price began seeing increases in tooth decay and dental deformities among his patients, not limited to but including: narrowed dental arches, vercrowding of teeth, and severe cavities.
He began to wonder why had not been seeing these issues a mere 10-15 years ago. The dentists of the era were saying that these issues were caused by genetics. If it was genetics then why were the parent’s teeth all straight? Another aspect Price noticed was a strong relationship between physical and dental health. He began to see a connection between children with crooked teeth contracting Tuberculosis. This was more than interesting to him. Why would children with crooked teeth have a higher chance of contracting Tuberculosis?
Dr. Price had heard that there were primitive people living healthy disease free lives and struck on idea. Maybe they knew something that he didn’t. So his wife and he decided to explore theses tribes more carefully. So over the next nine years they traveled around the world where these isolated groups were untouched by modern civilization and see if they could come to conclusions. Let’s now take a look at where Dr. Price traveled and what he found. Dr. Price and his wife travelled extensively over the course nine years.
Finding groups that were not affected by modern civilization and that were healthy. According to Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, Dr. Price visited different groups in an assortment of areas: Swiss Alps, Africa, Polynesian Island, Andes Mountains in Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Canada, and all the way to the Arctic Circle. What he found amazed him the peoples of these tribes had perfectly straight teeth with only about 1 % of the population with dental decay. Furthermore their facial features were well proportioned and they had high dental arches.
Although most of these tribes had little or no dental hygiene, they had no decay. They were on the most part healthy and strong, with none of the diseases as back in U. S. Not one single case of Tuberculosis even when they had had been exposed to it. Aside from being completely disease free and healthy they also were very happy people. The greatest part was that Price was able to capture all this with a camera to prove its validity. Civilization had often been stretching its legs throughout the region where Dr. Price would come to visit and it became apparent that Dr.
Price would have the opportunity to evaluate the effects of Western food on groups that had started eating the food with in their lifetime and also look at children and young adults who had been born into western commerce. I will now take a moment to explain Dr. Price’s findings among these populations. Western food caused much damage among the group who added the diet to their current diet. It is startling to find out how quickly certain foods affected the body. Within the initial population depression and even suicide.
Their children saw lives filled with malformations: arrowing faces, crowded teeth, and reduction to immunity, decrease in fertility, and degenerative diseases. This was in one generation. The obvious next step was to analyze his findings by taking a look at what was difference between the native nutrition and modern nutrition. He took samples of food from these groups to take back with him and studied how their diets were different than that of U. S. citizens. A curious finding was that all the diets were widely different. Some groups existed on almost all meat others almost all vegetarian.
There are 5 similarities of all these diets. First, except the Innu, all groups ate insects and their larvae. Second, all tribes ate fermented food, which aided in their digestion of cooked foods. Third the groups all made an effort to obtain seafood, traveling very far for food that was dense in vitamin D and considered sacred. Fourth was that all groups consumed diets rich in fat, especially animal fat, they held to the belief that they would not get sick if they ate these fats. Last and the most obvious was that these groups of people ate only natural unprocessed foods.
Milk was whole and unpasteurized, sweets were honey or aple syrup and were used sparingly, there were no canned foods or white flour, and animal and plants were raised and grown in organic soil. According to the article, “Politically Incorrect: The Neglected Nutritional Research of Dr. Weston Price, DDS,” written by Stephen Byrnes a nutritionist and naturopathic doctor, these diets contained “10 times the amount of fat-soluble vitamins, and at least 4 times the amount of calcium, other minerals, and water soluble vitamins than Western diets at that time. ” Dr.
Price established a connection between nutrition and dental health, ut more than that he was able to show a link between modern foods and the decline of physical health. He did this by systematically showing that primitive groups were living healthy, disease free lives without any dental issues at all. Then showing how when modern food entered their diets physical, dental and mental health was in quick decline. While there was a lot the Dr. Price discovered within these studies I feel that this is the most comprehensive way to approach his research and show how he most deserves the title of the “Darwin of Nutrition. This is ppropriate because he proved that humans transform and change due to their surrounding and what they eat. Annotated Bibliography: Byrnes, Stephen. “Politically Incorrect: The Neglected Nutritional Research of Dr. Weston Price, DDS. ” Date unknown. Soilandhealth. Web. 22 October, 2013 Fallon, Sally. “Weston A. Price, DDS. ” The Weston A. Price Foundation. 01 Jan, 2000. http:// www. westonaprice. org/nutrition-greats/weston-price. web. 20 October, 2013 Mascarelli, Amanda. “You Have to Get Braces? Cool. ” Los Angeles Times. July 1, 2011. articles. latimes. m/2011 /Jul/01 [health/hk-he-orthodontics-20110701 . Web. 24 October 2013 Parents. "Will Your Child Need Braces? "Parent. com. July 2007 http:// www. amley-amley. com/files/parents. pdf. web. 22 October, 2013. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. "Dr. Price. ” Copyright 2013. http://ppnf. org/about/about- price-and-pottenger/dr-price/. web. 20 October, 2013 United States. Dept. of Health & Human Services. National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. "Dental Caries (Tooth Decay) in Children (Age 2 to 11). ” 18 July. 2013. National Institute of