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Weston A Price is really the go-to for the early research in nutrition and dentistry. His book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was making the rounds back wh

Weston A Price is really the go-to for the early research in nutrition and dentistry. His book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was making the rounds back when Nourishing Traditions became popular. Price, conclusively in my mind, showed that the moment the modern western was introduced into cultures who ate traditional foods, the next generation had terrible teeth, jaws that were too small for all their teeth, etc. Pretty great, if terrible findings, stuff. The typical western diet is a shit show, imo

gregwebs 4y ago
It’s a 100 year old book that is still required reading if you want to understand the subject of the article because Price visited existing healthy cultures around the world that had few cavities. He concluded that the shift from a nutrient dense diet to a nutrient poor diet (white flour and sugar) was the cause of cavities.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> The typical western diet is a shit show, imo On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han: > In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.
- tomerv 4y ago
  The cause for losing teeth is very different from cavities.
ComradePhil 4y ago
One doesn't have to ditch all "western food". Just being sensible with it is good enough: - ditch plant fat for animal fat - avoid excessive sugar - eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.) - stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing. You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all. Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.
- skrebbel 4y ago
  Stop eating vegetables? Tbf i can't figure out whether you're trolling or not.
  - ComradePhil 4y ago
    Definitely not trolling. If you don't know how to prepare vegetables in indegenous culture that you got it from, you are better off not eating it. Also, even if you did follow indegenous preparation methods, the food industry may have changed the plant by artificial selection or genetic modification such that the indegenous preparation is not as effective, so you're better off ditching them anyway. Vegetables have significant phytotoxin content without significant nutrient content, specially in forms bioavailable to us (eg. a lot of carotinoids in carrots, except we are terrible at converting that to Vitamin A... we need the retinol form, readily available in milk, eggs, fish, meat etc.). Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten. They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins. We have domesticated some of the plants and learnt how to remove those toxins over thousands of years... but if you don't know how to do that effectively, you're better off not eating them.
    - dharma1 4y ago
      Fruit definitely evolved to be eaten (this is how the seeds spread)
      - ComradePhil 4y ago
        True. Fruits and berries.
    - spaghetti1535 4y ago
      I have recently become interested in finding out more about this (and food/nutrition in general). I want to compile an overview of findings and reference studies. How did you learn about this? Do you recommend any scientific resources concerning the themes of your comment?
victorclf 4y ago
Weston A Price is an infamous quack. I'm disappointed to see he mentioned positively here. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling-legacy/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...
- manytree 4y ago
  Be careful throwing around the word quack. Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions: > [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness. > Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish. Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.
  - cheese_goddess 4y ago
    Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice. Raw milk and dairy is a common source of food-borne illnesses. Pasteurisation is the main reason why consuming milk and dairy products at the scale we do doesn't cause thousands of deaths every year. Here: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc. I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.

gregwebs 4y ago

It’s a 100 year old book that is still required reading if you want to understand the subject of the article because Price visited existing healthy cultures around the world that had few cavities. He concluded that the shift from a nutrient dense diet to a nutrient poor diet (white flour and sugar) was the cause of cavities.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> The typical western diet is a shit show, imo On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han: > In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.

tomerv 4y ago
The cause for losing teeth is very different from cavities.

ComradePhil 4y ago

One doesn't have to ditch all "western food". Just being sensible with it is good enough: - ditch plant fat for animal fat - avoid excessive sugar - eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.) - stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing. You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all. Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.

skrebbel 4y ago
Stop eating vegetables? Tbf i can't figure out whether you're trolling or not.
- ComradePhil 4y ago
  Definitely not trolling. If you don't know how to prepare vegetables in indegenous culture that you got it from, you are better off not eating it. Also, even if you did follow indegenous preparation methods, the food industry may have changed the plant by artificial selection or genetic modification such that the indegenous preparation is not as effective, so you're better off ditching them anyway. Vegetables have significant phytotoxin content without significant nutrient content, specially in forms bioavailable to us (eg. a lot of carotinoids in carrots, except we are terrible at converting that to Vitamin A... we need the retinol form, readily available in milk, eggs, fish, meat etc.). Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten. They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins. We have domesticated some of the plants and learnt how to remove those toxins over thousands of years... but if you don't know how to do that effectively, you're better off not eating them.
  - dharma1 4y ago
    Fruit definitely evolved to be eaten (this is how the seeds spread)
    - ComradePhil 4y ago
      True. Fruits and berries.
  - spaghetti1535 4y ago
    I have recently become interested in finding out more about this (and food/nutrition in general). I want to compile an overview of findings and reference studies. How did you learn about this? Do you recommend any scientific resources concerning the themes of your comment?

victorclf 4y ago

Weston A Price is an infamous quack. I'm disappointed to see he mentioned positively here. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling-legacy/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...

manytree 4y ago
Be careful throwing around the word quack. Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions: > [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness. > Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish. Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.
- cheese_goddess 4y ago
  Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice. Raw milk and dairy is a common source of food-borne illnesses. Pasteurisation is the main reason why consuming milk and dairy products at the scale we do doesn't cause thousands of deaths every year. Here: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc. I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.