Our Story Starts with a Canadian-Born Dentist of the name Weston A. Price. As he ran his practice in Cleveland, Ohio in the beginnings of the 1900’s he saw first hand the rapid increase in dental problems as people adopted a modern diet. He wasn’t the only one, in the 1930’s there was a huge debate in medical circles over nutrition. But Price is the one that matters, and that’s because Price was a fucking boss. While all the other doctors were laying about in their Red Leather Arm Chairs in front of a open fire and discussing the degeneration of modern health price shut down his dental practice, packed up his wife and started traveling the world looking for answers.

He went to the mountains of Switzerland and Peru, the lowlands of Africa, the bush of Australia, the outer islands of the Hebrides, the everglades of Florida, the coast of Alaska, the islands of Melanesia, and the jungles of new guinea and new Zealand.

He tracked down isolated populations that had not yet been exposed to modern foods and his discovery’s earned him the title: The Charles Darwin of Nutrition.

What makes his work so valuable, almost a hundred years later is that the people he studied are gone. The few hunter gather tribes that still exist live in extreme parts of the world where farming is impossible.

So what did he learn? What did Price find after a lifetime studying the last of the hunter gatherers?

For one he found that those eating a wide variety of traditional diets had had no dental problems, with a exception being the “sturdy mountaineers” of Switzerland who had teeth covered in a greenish slime, but underneath that Price found perfectly formed teeth virtually free from decay.

Wherever he went Price took pictures of teeth and collected samples of food, which he sent home to be analyzed for macronutrient and vitamin content. He found that The native populations were eating a diet substantially higher in Vitamins A and D, on average ten times as much! It was already understood at this time that the processing of foods robs them of nutrients, and store food is designed to be stored and last a long time, the best way to make it more stable and remove pests was to remove the nutrients from it.

Price concluded that modern Civilization sacrificed  the quality of its food for quantity and shelf life.

Price found a extensive Varity of diets , he found seafood diets, dairy diets, meat diets, and diets in which fruits vegetables and grains predominated.

The Masai of  Africa consumed virtually no plant foods at all, subsisting on meat, blood and milk. Seafaring groups in the Hebrides consumed no dairy at all, subsisting on a diet largely of seafood and oats made into porridges and cakes. The Eskimos lived on raw fish, game meat, fish roe and blubber, seldom eating anything green.

Among the Nile near Ethiopia price encountered what he judged to be the healthiest populations of all: tribes  that subsisted on milk, meat and blood from pastured cattle as well as animal food from the Nile river.

Price found groups that ate diets of wild animal flesh to be healthier than the agriculturalist that relied on cereals and other plant foods.  These agriculturalists also had a higher level of tooth decay but still low by our standards.

Price noticed that many of the people he visited particularly prized organ meats, which he found high levels of vitamins, and everywhere he went he found people placed a high value on seafood, which even mountain dwelling groups would go to great lengths to get, trading with coastal tribes.

The common denominator of good heath he concluded was to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh  foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.

He found the quality of animal based foods had a significant link to what those animals ate. The vitamin content of butter produced from cows grazing in spring grass compared to that of those grazing on winter forages had much higher levels of vitamin A and D as well as the health o the people subsisted of them.