Authors: John Robbins
To Price, the conclusion was obvious: The consumption of sugar, refined flour products, sweetened foods, canned foods, polished (white) rice, and other processed foods brought the white man’s diseases to native populations. If people were to remain healthy, it was
imperative that they resist dietary colonization and return to their ancestral wisdom and native diets.
Remarkably, Price saw that these native diets upon which indigenous people had long thrived differed greatly from one another. They were, in fact, as varied as the environments in which the people lived. Tribes who made their homes near rivers, lakes, or the ocean typically based their diets on fish and other marine life. Those who lived in cold northern climates where plant life was sparse tended to base theirs on wild game. Yet others, living in more temperate areas, were mostly vegetarian, eating primarily whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, much like the Abkhasians, Vilcabambans, Hunzans, and Oki-nawans (none of whom Price ever met or studied). Some were essentially lacto-vegetarian in that their diet consisted mostly of plant foods such as seeds, nuts, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, but also included dairy products. A number of others ate a diet that could best be called “pesco-vegan,” in that it did not include significant amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs, but was rich in a wide variety of plant foods and in fish. Some, like the African Masai, ate primarily the blood, milk, and meat of their cattle. Others, like the Kikuyu tribe just to the northwest of the Masai, ate mainly sweet potatoes, corn, millet, beans, and bananas.
The diversity was endless. In some cultures, most of the food was cooked. In others, much of it was eaten raw. Some cultures ate liberally of dairy products from pastured cows, goats, or camels, while others lived “in isolation so great that [they] had never seen milk in any larger quantity than drops.”
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Some of these native peoples lived in ecosystems so inhospitable that they were forced to depend on only a few varieties of plant foods, while others enjoyed a great multitude of fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes. In some tribes, whole grains were the staples of the diet, and were considered sacred. In others, grains played little or no role, and other foods, including sometimes the livers of certain wild animals, were the ones held sacred.
As diverse as these diets were, they did, to Price’s eyes, have certain things in common. Most notably, none contained any refined or devitalized foods such as white flour, sugar, canned foods, pasteurized or skimmed milk, or refined and hydrogenated vegetable oils. And they all tended to be low (compared to modern diets) in calories. Price also noticed that all contained at least a small measure of animal food, even if only insects, fish, or milk. How interesting that the common features he found among the diets of all the healthy native peoples he studied are found also in the diets of the elder Okinawans, Abkhasians, Vilcabambans, and Hunzans.
At a time when many in the West looked upon native people as savages in need of the civilizing influence of Western culture, Weston Price saw the ignorance, the arrogance, and the destructiveness of this attitude. At a time when indigenous cultures were everywhere being destroyed by westernization, he wrote with immense respect for the ancestral wisdom of native tribes. I am sure that if his voice had been heeded, the cultures and the health of more indigenous peoples would have survived.
Moreover, Price was one of the earliest and most outspoken voices against the increasing tide of refined and processed foods. In this, he was something of a grandfather to the natural-foods movement of today. There is no telling how much suffering and disease would have been avoided if his message had been heard, and the shift to ever more processed and refined foods had been averted.
Though writing in the 1930s, much of what Weston Price said has withstood the test of time and has been corroborated by subsequent research. He was one of the first to observe that many of the common diseases in our culture—including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, tooth decay, and obesity—were rare among indigenous peoples throughout the world whose diet was made of natural, fresh, unprocessed foods, grown in their environment. And he saw that when these peoples began to eat denatured and devitalized food, when sugar and white flour and canned foods made their way into their mouths and stomachs, the incidence of these diseases began to
skyrocket. He was not exaggerating when he reported that many traditional peoples, often living a hand-to-mouth existence, maintained vibrant health, lived long, and enjoyed youthful vitality. It is a fact that in some cultures, most modern diseases were unknown, women had fast and comparatively painless childbirths, and men could run all day without fatigue. All this we know not only from Price, but also from many other researchers who have corroborated these views.
Author and cancer expert Ralph Moss has described what took place in the mid-nineteenth century, when well-trained medical personnel began to travel and even to live among indigenous peoples.
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The news they brought back was startling. These diverse populations, many of whom had little in the way of material possessions, were generally much healthier than their Western counterparts. True, some had high infant mortality rates, and they easily succumbed to infectious diseases they had never before encountered, such as measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis. But they had far less asthma, allergies, indigestion, heart disease, and cancer.
The almost total nonexistence of cancer was particularly striking, because it was at this very time that cancer rates in the West were beginning to skyrocket. This led the French surgeon Stanislas Tanchou, M.D., to formulate what became known as “Tanchou’s Doctrine”—the theory that the incidence of cancer increases in direct proportion to the “civilization” of a people.
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This doctrine came to be embraced by John Le Conte, M.D., an influential physician who became the first president of the University of California.
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Le Conte’s enthusiasm led to a host of medical missionaries, anthropologists, and others searching avidly for cancer among the native peoples of the world. But the result was always the same. For seventy-five years, not a single case of cancer was documented among the tens of thousands of native people studied by competent medical examiners. A Harvard-trained anthropologist named Vilhjalmur Steffansson, for example, lived for eleven years among the Eskimo and never saw a case. In later life, he wrote a book titled
Cancer: A Disease of Civilization?
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Unfortunately, whatever protection these native populations had against cancer began to be lost when many began to adopt Western ways in the 1920s. From then on, the rates of cancer among native
peoples began a steady rise, eventually nearly reaching those of white populations.
Clearly, Weston Price was on to something profoundly important. There is no doubt that there are aspects of modern Western civilization that are toxic, disease-causing, and carcinogenic. Overall, he did a remarkable job, particularly given that he lived and wrote when nutritional science was in its infancy. His work began long before Casimir Funk coined the word “vitamin.”
However, it is also important to recognize the limitations of his views. In most cases, Price spent only a brief amount of time with each of the cultures he photographed and wrote about. He traveled primarily in the summertime, which gave him a partial picture of the peoples and the lands he visited. In most cases, he never saw the hardships of winter, nor the diseases and other difficulties that would come with the cold. Considering his intense interest in the health of the people he visited, it is regrettable that there are in his writings hardly any comments about infant mortality.
He did not speak the languages of his hosts, and typically lived with them for only a matter of days, or at most a few weeks—hardly enough time to gain a deep understanding of a culture that is different from one’s own. If the peoples he visited wanted to keep anything hidden from his Western eyes, they would have had little difficulty doing so.
Further, Price was not trained in cultural anthropology and had not undertaken the discipline of learning to identify and detach from his own cultural biases. The fact that everywhere Price went he saw the same pattern could be interpreted as evidence that he discovered a law of great significance. But it could as easily be taken as an indication that he had certain predilections that he took with him wherever he went and which influenced what he saw and did not see. If everywhere you go you see the same thing, perhaps that says as much about the eyes with which you are looking as it does about the places you are visiting.
Price wrote extensively and movingly about the demise of indigenous
people’s health. As he describes it, the cause was always the white flour, sugar, jams, jellies, cookies, condensed milk, canned vegetables, margarine, vegetable oils, confections, and other refined foods they began to eat once they were exposed to Western ways. While I am certain that eating large quantities of such foods caused these people immense harm, and I applaud Price for illuminating this truth, it is important to remember that other developments were occurring at the same time that also contributed to the degeneration of native health that he so vividly catalogued and photographed. He barely mentions, for example, the role of unfamiliar germs for which indigenous peoples had no resistance, the health consequences stemming from the breakdown of social networks and kinship groups, the health implications of shifting to a more sedentary life, and the abuse of alcohol, which often became available to indigenous people through the same channels as processed food.
Unfortunately, in Weston Price’s zeal to show the damage done by processed foods, he portrayed all indigenous peoples prior to their exposure to such foods as essentially exemplary. In the more than five hundred pages of his book, for example, there is not a single negative reference to any feature of the lifestyles or the health statuses of any of the peoples he visited who were still eating their native food.
Indigenous peoples, like people everywhere, come in all shapes, sizes, and kinds. Some cultures have embodied great wisdom and compassion, while others have not. Most have found ways of living that have endured over time, though not all have developed lifestyles and customs that are worthy of emulation. There have been some indigenous peoples, for example, who have engaged in ritual human sacrifice, slavery, and the brutal oppression of women.
While some present-day hunter-gatherer communities such as the Pygmies and Bushmen in Africa are exquisitely cooperative and nonviolent peoples who embody a marvelous respect for life, other tribes have developed habits that are not so life-affirming. The Ache people, for example, are a small indigenous population who live in the rain
forest of eastern Paraguay. They were studied between 1978 and 1995 by anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado from the University of New Mexico and their colleagues.
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The Ache are indigenous hunter-gatherers who were relatively uninfluenced by the outside world until the 1970s. They are a strong and vigorous people who until very recently ate only their native foods. Price never visited them, but he would have found them splendid and impressive.
However, 40 percent of newborn Ache females do not live to see their first birthday. And it is the Ache custom to kill children whose parents die so that the tribe will have no orphans. Hill and Hurtado tell of interviewing an Ache man who had killed a thirteen-year-old girl who had been beautiful, healthy, and happy, simply because her mother had died in an epidemic.
To give another example of the heights (or depths) of decadence reached in some peoples long before the coming of refined and processed foods: When the Spaniard Hernán Cortés first entered the Aztec capital in Mexico in 1519, he found a thriving society in which twenty thousand people per year were being sacrificed by the Aztec royalty. Captives were taken to the top of pyramids where, upon a flat stone ritual table, they had their hearts ripped out. Then the limbs were removed, cooked, and eaten by the royalty.
Though we can learn wonderful things about health and the positive possibilities of human culture from many traditional ways of life, there are very real dangers in romanticizing indigenous people. We need to be discerning.
Today, many of Weston Price’s followers consume a great deal of meat and milk and zealously push others to do the same, citing his admiration for the health of the Masai, whose diet consisted primarily of the blood, milk, and meat of their cattle.
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In Price’s eyes, the ability of the Masai to dominate their neighbors proved the superiority of their diet. He wrote,
In every instance these cattle people dominated the surrounding tribes. They were characterized by superb physical development, great bravery, and a mental acumen that made it possible for them to dominate.…The Masai until checked carried on a relentless
warfare, consisting largely of raids, in which they slaughtered the men and carried off the women and children and drove away the cattle or goats.
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Although Price saw such warlike and aggressive behavior as evidence of strength and health, another view would see it as bloodthirsty and cruel. Our needs today, in an ever more connected world, are not for a diet that enables us to raid and dominate our neighbors, but for one that enables us to live healthy lives in harmony with one another and the rest of creation. Our needs are not for a diet that makes us more aggressive and warlike, but for a diet that enables us to live fruitful lives, strong in well-being within ourselves and the ability to live in peace with others.