Nutrition Article | Modern Diets Cause 'Diseases of Civilization'More Than Articles

Modern Diets Cause 'Diseases of Civilization'

Once upon a time, back in the 1930s and 40s, a famous dentist took his wife and a guide or two and traveled to remote areas of the world. This dentist was concerned about the changes he saw in each generation of his own patients.

In his practice in America he saw more and more children with badly decayed teeth, and each year more families had children with narrower faces and crowded, crowded teeth. Each generation, the children seemed less vigorous, less able to fight off common colds and flu than their parents and grandparents.

This dentist was named Weston A. Price, and he was convinced that our food had to be the only thing that could possibly cause the health of each generation to be worst than the generation before.

The only way he could find out if his theory was true was to find societies who were still eating the same foods his own healthy ancestors ate in the past, people who lived in such remote places that modern industrial foods had not yet reached them.

He traveled to isolated islands in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, to the Arctic and to high mountain valleys in Europe. He and his wife met people living in Africa and South America, and even found North American Indian tribes who were still holding on, barely, to the diets of their ancestors. His travels were well-documented and photographed, and the book he wrote about his discoveries became a standard textbook in American universities.

But the book was read by students studying anthropology, not medicine. In the medical community, his book was mostly ignored, in spite of his well-deserved fame for his previous research into the role of vitamins for human health.

What Price found were isolated communities who had no dental cavities, no crooked teeth, no diabetes, no obesity, and no heart disease. Contemporary missionary doctors like Albert Schweitzer were finding the same thing in traditional societies around the world.

Price and these other brave doctors discovered something else that should have been impossible to ignore.

When people stopped eating their culture's traditional foods, like whole-grain bread, fatty meat, whole milk, butter and cheese and locally grown vegetables, and began eating imported industrialized foods like refined sugar and flour and canned goods instead, their health almost immediately declined.

Diabetes, cancer and heart disease would appear for the first time when people began eating imported industrialized food. People would grow fat even though they may be eating fewer calories than their traditional neighbors, and their children were born with dietary deficiencies and crooked teeth.

The obvious conclusion, which has been known for 80 years or more, is that the 'diseases of civilization' are caused almost exclusively by refined, processed food.

These 'diseases of civilization' are now the leading causes of death in the United States - yet many people don't realize that heart disease, diabetes and obesity were almost completely unknown just a few generations ago, when our own ancestors still ate locally grown whole foods, prepared with love in our great-grandmothers' kitchens.

Price did his research before the recent explosion of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. These illnesses skyrocketed in the 1960s, and have been affecting more and more people ever since. Changes took place in our food supply that Price couldn't have predicted - the number of artificial, industrialized foods increased, and some of the healthiest foods lost many of their fat-fighting and nutritional value.

About the Author

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Tags: diets, Weston A. Price, nutrition