Thumbs up review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price, DDS

Nutritional and Physical Degeneration is one of the most ground-breaking books ever written on the link between nutrition and health. Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland, became very disturbed by what he saw in his patients. He started to see a link between the decay he found in the mouths of his patients and pathologies found elsewhere in the body like diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal complaints, and more. Dr. Price also found that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along with facial deformities like overbites, narrow faces, lack of well defined cheek bones, and underdevelopment of the nose. Dr. Price did not believe these problems to be in any way normal; He believed they were the result of poor nutrition. The worse a person?s diet was the more decay he found in their mouth. The more decay a person had in their mouth, the higher the rate of pathologies in other areas of the body.

More than 70 years ago Dr. Price decided to search the world for primitive people who lived entirely on indigenous foods. His travels took him from islands in the South Seas to Alaska to Africa and many places in between. He visited Australian Aborigines, Swiss villages, Eskimos, traditional American Indians, Amoazonian Indians, African tribes, and more. Dr. Price and his wife Florence traveled for ten years during the 1920’s and 30’s when groups of people completely isolated from civilization could be found.

Throughout his travels, Dr. Price kept a record of his findings with pictures and detailed assessments. What he found, to be called astounding, is an understatement. Dr, Price discovered that primitive people untouched by civilization, who subsided on a diet of indigenous food, had outstanding physical development with little to no dental problems, heart disease, diabetes, or any other diseases we know believe to be a normal consequence of life.

Dr. Price?s findings were not surprising to other investigators and explorers. However, the excepted explanation at the time was that primitive people were ?racially pure? and that the maladies we see in civilization were due to ?race mixing?. This theory was untenable to Dr. Price who found that the individuals in groups he studied who abandoned their traditional diets for foods provided by traders or missionaries, or who moved to a more civilized area were found to develop tooth decay and degenerative conditions.

The diets of these primitive groups of people were vastly different. Some were mostly cooked food while in others most of the food was consumed raw including animal sources. Some diets were based on sea food, others on domestic animals and others on wild game. Some diets were based on dairy while others consumed a variety of fruits and vegetables and grains.

The common thread between all the groups Dr. Price investigated was none of them contained any refined devitalized foods like white sugar, flour, pasteurized or skim milk, and refined or hydrogenated vegetable oils. All the diets contained animal foods of some type and some salt. Dr. Price analyzed the primitive diets and found they all contained four times the amount of water soluble vitamins and minerals, and ten times the amount of fat soluble vitamins compared to the modern American diet.

Unfortunately, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the permanent record of his travels, is nonexistent to today?s modern medical community. This book is more important to our health and welfare today than it was 60 years ago. Our food supply, if it could be classified as food, is devoid of almost all nutritive value. We need to incorporate the fundamentals of primitive nutrition and return to nutrient dense whole food. We need to get back to local farming and turn away from manmade supermarket garbage that is destroying our health.

Anyone interested in becoming truly healthy needs to read Nutrition and physical degeneration

  

The Eat Clean Diet for Men

Written by Robert Kennedy and Tosca Reno

Upon opening this book I was impressed; the foreword was written by Jack La Lanne a pioneer of health and fitness. I watched The Jack La Lanne Show as a kid; it was the first fitness show on TV; I’ve been involved in health and fitness since. This is a man who on his 70th birthday swam a mile while shackled to 70 boats carrying 70 people. He attributes his outstanding health, now at 95 years young, to clean living.

Jack La Lanne was the first well known advocate for deriving health and strength from ?eating clean?, which is the premise of The Eat Clean Diet for Men. This book is an easy to follow prescription to change your health for the better with no carb or calorie counting. It’s loaded with helpful tools like: creating a game plan for grocery shopping to ensure healthy choices, eating on the road, and eating right while dining out.

Some of The Eat-Clean principles
? Eat 5 or 6 small meals a day.
? Combine lean protein with complex carbohydrates at every meal.
? Never miss a meal, especially breakfast.
? Avoid all over-processed, refined foods especially flour and sugar.
? Avoid sugar-loaded colas and juices.
? Consume adequate good fats (EFA?s) each day.
? Stick to proper portion sizes ? give up the super sizing!

There are only two points made in the book that I firmly disagree with. The first is the recommendation to avoid all saturated fats. The fact is, these fats are very healthy and a necessary part of the human diet; saturated fats have nothing to do with obesity or cardiovascular disease as the media and medical community has lead us to believe. Second and probably most important, soy milk is on one of the grocery lists and included in a few recipes. Soy?s deleterious effects are indisputable and I?ve written about them several times. Among other problems with soy, twenty five grams of soy product per day is enough to disrupt your thyroid function, which is at odds with becoming leaner and healthier. Just use skim milk.

Outside of the above two concerns, I enjoyed reading The Eat Clean Diet for Men. Robert Kennedy and Tosca Reno make eating clean as fail proof as possible. I recommend this book not only to the average person just trying to lose that extra weight and improve their health, but to the experience fitness buff as well. I?m certain that anyone who reads The Eat Clean Diet for Men will take away something from this book to improve their lives.

  

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