Unit 7 Lecture Notes

The most important and influential book to my understanding of nutrition is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. The best way I can describe Weston Price is that he is the Ludwig von Mises of Nutrition: a complete outcast from mainstream academia whose work is nonetheless far more important and valuable than the reams of scholarships produced by today's academic journal article bots that call themselves academics. His conclusions fly against the politically correct dogma taught in Nutrition schools in modern universities because his work provides a rigorous and clean exploration of the horrible damages caused by modern industrial foods whose producers are the main benefactors of nutrition schools everywhere today.

Price is mainly known today as both a dentist and a pioneer in the discovery and analysis of several vitamins, but his magnum opus, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is largely ignored by the mainstream of academia and nutrition science. On top of being methodologically thorough and well-documented, Price's research is unique, and will likely never be repeated. He spent many years traveling the world just as airplanes were invented and closely observed people from cultures across all continents, meticulously documenting their diets and their overall health, particularly their dental health. Since flight was so novel, he was able to visit many areas still largely isolated from world mar kets and thus reliant on their own local traditionally-prepared food items. Price took thousands of pictures of the people he studied as well as countless samples of their foods, which he then sent to his laboratories in Ohio for analysis. Such an experiment would be unrepeatable today, as modern industrial food has spread so far and wide across the planet that hardly any populations would be free from its effects.

Across the world, Price compared the diets of populations that were genetically similar but geographically separated, one of which would already be integrated into global trade markets with access to industrial food, while the other population would still be isolated and eating its traditionally-prepared foods. Price studied the Inuit in northern Canada and Alaska, Swiss villagers in isolated valleys, herdsmen in central Africa, Pacific Islanders, Scottish farmers, and many more populations. No matter where in the world you come from, Price visited your ancestors, or people very close to them. The results were as stark as they are edifying and Price arrived at several important conclusions. While it is really impossible to do justice to this momentous work in a few paragraphs, I will try my best to synthesize some of the findings here; I strongly urge you to read the book, which is available for free online, complete with the shocking pictures of jaw development. The end of this report also contains a guide to related modern readings that might be more palatable for the modern reader.

The first conclusion I take from Price's work is that the diseases of civilization that we've accepted as a normal part of life only began to appear with the introduction of modern processed foods, in particular, grains, flours, and sugars. The book is full of stories and analysis that make this an inescapable conclusion. Here is but one of many examples to illustrate the point, drawn from Chapter 21:

The second conclusion from Price's work concerns the quality of the soil in modern societies, which he found to be quickly degrading, causing severe nutrient deficiencies in food. Price published his book in the 1930's, and he had pinpointed the few decades prior as a time of particular decline in the nutrient content of land.

The third conclusion is that, despite embarking on his trip expecting to find vegetarian diets, Price found that all healthy traditional populations relied heavily on animal products. In fact, the healthiest and strongest populations he found were the Inuit and African herders who rely almost entirely on meat for their diet. The larger the amount of meat eaten by a population, the healthier and stronger it was. Price came to see the sacred importance of animal fats across all societies, and analyzed their nutrient content. Price found many nutrients that cannot be obtained from plants, and conclusively demonstrated that it is simply not possible to be healthy for any significant period of time without ingesting animal foods. To the extent that plant food was eaten, its role seemed primarily to be a vessel for ingesting precious fats.

The fourth broad category of Price's conclusions is the least interesting to me but unfortunately is the one that receives the most attention; Price closely studied how various cultures prepared their plant foods and extensively documented the methods needed to make most grains and plants palatable and non-toxic. These heavily complex traditional rituals of soaking, sprouting, fermenting and so on are clearly superior to modern mass-processing, and yet nonetheless they remain impractical for most modern people.

Price contributed massively to our understanding of nutrition and health, but like Menger and Mises in Economics, his teachings are largely ignored by the paper-pushing government-employed bureaucrats pretending to be modern scientists. Not coincidentally, listening to these government employees and ignoring Weston Price has come at a highly devastating cost to our modern health.

The modern world suffers from a crisis of obesity that's unprecedented in human history. Never before have so many people been so overweight. Modernity's tragically self-flattering misunderstanding of this crisis is to cast it as a crisis of abundance: it is a result of our affluence that our biggest problem is obesity rather than starvation. The flawed paradigm of nutrition - another field of academic inquiry thoroughly disfigured by government funding and direction - emphasizes the importance of obtaining a necessary quantity of calories, and that the best way to secure the needed calories is by eating a diverse and "balanced" diet that includes hefty portions of grains. Animal meat and fat are viewed as harmful and best consumed in moderation, if at all. From this perspective,obesity occurs when too many calories are consumed, and malnourishment occurs when too few calories are consumed. This view is as overly simplistic as ridiculous Keynesian textbooks' insistence that the state of the economy is primarily determined by the level of aggregate spending, with too much spending the cause for inflation, and too little spend the cause for unemployment which was discussed and debunked thoroughly in The Bitcoin Standard.

In reality, nutrition is about far more than caloric intake, it's about securing sufficient quantities of essential nutrients for the body, which come in four categories: proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. The fats are primarily used for providing energy for the body, the proteins for building and rebuilding the human body and its tissues, and the vitamins and minerals are necessary for various vital processes that take place in the body. The other major food group, carbohydrates, is not essential to the human body but can be utilized to provide energy. In the absence of essential nutrients, the human body begins to suffer from deterioration and negative consequences manifesting in diseases. In particular, the absence of animal proteins and fatty acids causes the body to enter into starvation mode: energy expenditure is reduced, manifesting in physical and mental lethargy and inactivity, and the body begins to convert its intake of carbohydrates into fatty acid deposits for storage for future use (in other words, causing obesity). Rather than a sign of affluence and overfeeding, obesity is actually a sign of malnutrition. The ability to digest plants and convert them into stores of fatty acids is an extremely useful evolutionary strategy for dealing with hunger in the short-run, but when the deprivation of essential nutrients becomes a lifestyle, the fat storage turns into the debilitating sickness of obesity. Rather than being a sign of affluence and overfeeding, obesity is an unmistakable sign of malnourishment and nutritional poverty.

These few conclusions have been instrumental in shaping my understanding of diet and nutrition, leading me to remove from my diet all processed foods, grains, and sugars, while increasing my intake of fatty meat; The improvements in my mental and physical health are spectacular. Not only have I lost around 30 pounds, I have also become objectively stronger at 38 years of age than I was at 18 or 28. But for our purposes today, the more significant impact is on my understanding of the relationship between money and health. What struck me most about Price's research is how the trends most responsible for malnutrition, obesity, and some diseases of modern civilization can be directly related to the economic realities of the twentieth century. The nutritional decline Price documented happened around the turn of the twentieth century, which, coincidentally, was when the modern world economy moved away from the hard money of the gold standard and toward the easy money of government.