SHOCKING !

The book the food manufacturers don't want you to see.

Published in 1939!

  
   It is a truth: "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king." Even more certainly--a one-eyed king is going to feel very alone. Different than everyone else. Like what happened to me twenty years ago after Weston Price's book had opened both my eyes.
   I discovered Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in when I began to reconsider and then to reject the conventional and unexamined answers I'd been given about health, and healing, and doctoring. Like most people who are glad to accept their smoothly-running body without question or concern, I only got curious about my health after I first noticed the onset of middle-aged degeneration. I visited the medical doctor in town who was generally regarded as the most progressive and least likely to prescribe drugs, to ask why I was feeling "off" such a large proportion of days during the week. His answer mainly it consisted of 'get used to it,' and 'it's middle age, everyone goes through it,' and 'take two aspirin when it gets bad and don't worry about it.'
   But I felt I was entitled to enjoy physical well-being and could not accept an increasingly hopeless, ever-worsening prognosis. So I then asked the advice of a very wise, and very old gardener in my neighborhood, who lent me his treasured first-edition copy of Price's book and referred me to a naturopath practicing nearby, Dr. Isabelle Moser. Isabelle became my doctor, taught me how to repair much of the degeneration that had already happened, and some years later, became my wife.
   Life has never been the same since I read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price started me observing the bone structure and state of constitutional degeneration of most of my neighbors. I found myself noticing peoples' teeth and jaws and faces and how many of them had crooked, crowded, irregular teeth, narrow jawbones, thin, pinched noses, and flat, nasal voices that derive from small, inadequately developed sinus cavities. Instead of admiring only the hefneresque charms of the young women, I began to observe and catalog the size of their pelvic girdles, to note if their "ovens" were adequate for the purpose of baking babies. Most were too small. I stopped thinking thin, aristocratic faces were beautiful and began considering that broad faces with flat noses were. I put new significance on the small number of children younger married couples were having, the difficulty their young parents had with the raising and management of even one child, the uncooperative and unfocused behavior of these kids, and how often the children around me were seeing the doctor, and how many of them seemed to suffer from a ever-ongoing series of physical complaints. And I contrasted this with how it had been for my parent's generation, where three children per family was normal. Or with my Grandparent's generation, where four or five kids per family was typical.
   And my increased understanding has created a wide gulf between me and most of my neighbors, who are lost in a confusion over why they and their loved ones get sick and who depend on medicine and medical doctors for their cures when they should be focused on their nutrition and life-styles.

   Most writers of books on health and alternative medicine mainly offer prescriptions and explanations to overcome degenerative complaints, of which most of us have no shortage. The Hygienists (my favorite of all the holistic approaches) at least have a systematic theory that explains how and why the body gets sick and offers a method of remedy that is the logical response to the cause of illness. But almost none, including some of the Hygienists, offer a standard of comparison which one can hold up and say, "This is an example of what true health would look like."
   Others in other fields have stressed that when studying some aspect of life how essential it is to have a standard of comparison--a control group--and that without a control group it is virtually impossible to grasp significant truths. For example, Abraham Maslow wisely tried to envision what a psychologically-healthy human would be like before figuring out what we might do to become better beings. He called this ideal a "self-actualizing" person. Maslow contested that if one knew what a person should try to become, then one could recognize a person who had grown to realize our potentials--and then could have a target to aim at for improving their own life. L. Ron Hubbard, another person who was deeply interested in achievement of the full human potential, created a dozen or more of these targets with his scales of various aspects of experience, from the most desirable state to most undesirable. G.T. Wrench did a similar thing when he stressed so strongly that if no one around you has had a good nutritional "start" in life, it is virtually impossible to recognize what a truely healthy person looks like. (You can read Wrench's book, The Wheel of Health, in this Longevity Library collection. Unfortunately there aren't many really healthy bodies around and they don't carry prominent labels. So we muddle in a morass of medical confusion.
   Weston A. Price did humanity a great and largely-unappreciated service by establishing an easily-understandble standard of human health, clearly demonstrated with photographs. A really good picture really is worth many thousands of words and Price offers the reader a narrated slide show of over a hundred photos, many of them of extremely healthy people contrasted with degenerated ones, photos taken all over the world, of people of different races living in climates eating totally different dietaries, accompanied by sensitive, compassionate narration. This coupling of the visual image with narration increases the power of Price's argument by a hundred-fold. Price's book is basically a photographic travelogue, the story of a world-wide search for a standard by which to judge human health. This makes Nutrition and Physical Degeneration the most convincing and powerful awakener of health-consciousness I have ever encountered.
   As I stated at the beginning of this essay, I was never the same after reading his book the first time. Only a handful of other books have so strongly influenced how I understood life. So I have gone back and re-read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration periodically--about once every five years it seems. I have lectured about Price's work, promoted the Foundation that tries to continue it, and have deeply wanted to make Price's book a central part of the Soil and Health Library. But have not been able to obtain permission from those who control the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. They have denied my requests because a reprint of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is still being sold by the Foundation and income from these sales are a major sustainer of that group. However, under the rules of "Fair Use" regarding copyright protections, one is allowed to quote from a book for the purposes of book reviewing or scholarly discussion. This is what follows below, a book review.
   Now, dear reader, comes a caution, and what I hope will be taken as a strong suggestion. Long ago before the university-trained, academic-minded English majors completely took over the editorial side of publishing business, writers were allowed to repeatedly restate their themes. If clever about how they go at this, an author can restate their restatements many times without seeming to be repetative or redundant. Restatement can be a useful technique and often necessary because most people do not really read carefully and don't fully grasp a concept the first time they are exposed to it. However, a book review must, by definition, be concise. If the reader wishes to achieve full understanding of what the book under discussion is about, they are almost required to go slow, to think the ideas over as they occur. I suppose what I am trying to communicate here here is a plea that you take your time, and think over the small portions of Price's book that I am able to excerpt here--