To get the most from this article, please read Part 1 beforehand. Much of the information presented here relies on context and background knowledge from Part 1. I won’t be repeating much of that to keep things concise.
As a quick review, Price was a dentist who focused on dental decay and arch structure. While dental health was his gateway to health research, he discovered so much more.
Among isolated societies, he found almost complete immunity to the modern afflictions of dental decay, deformed arch structure, physical deformities, disease, crime, mental illness, and immorality. These groups rarely had dentists, doctors, or policemen.
However, when these groups switched to modern foods, catastrophe struck.
Price saw that this switch was linked with dental decay, which was linked with deformed facial and arch structure, which was linked with broader physical degeneration, which was linked with mental and moral degeneration. Outside of the human realm, he saw that nature was deteriorating due to soil depletion. This widespread degeneration is what we’ll be exploring.
Nutritional Deficiency and Dental Decay
This is the first link in the chain of degeneration. As seen in Part 1, when people switched from traditional foods to modernized foods, rates of dental decay exploded. The numbers in the table below show the percentage of teeth with cavities in traditional and modernized people.
It’s self-evident that the nutritional deficiency from modern foods brought dental decay.
Dental Decay and Facial and Arch Structure
The second link in the chain of degeneration is the correlation of dental decay with deformed facial and arch structure.
“Deformity” is not meant to offend, but rather to state the plain fact that we have not achieved our full physical potential.
The signs of a deformed facial structure are a long and narrowed face, pinched nostrils, an underdeveloped and receding chin, and facial proportion disturbances. The signs of a deformed arch structure are narrow dental arches, the crowding of the teeth, and an underbite (upper jaw underdevelopment) or overbite (lower jaw underdevelopment).
These deformities are so common nowadays that we don’t even consider them as such. In fact, calling such things “deformities” will get you in trouble.
If you look back at the photos from Part 1 with this deformity perspective, you’ll see how modernized people have all the common structural deformities. To make it easier, I’ve included photos below focused on the facial and arch structure instead of the teeth (which Part 1 focused on).
As illustrated, primitive people across all cultures had broad and complete nasal, facial, and dental arch development. No one needed tooth extractions or braces. The teeth all fit in naturally and perfectly, creating beautiful smiles. No wonder there was no need for dentists, much less orthodontists.
But these beautiful faces disappeared in as quickly as one generation when people modernized, as seen in the table below that shows the percentage of abnormal dental arches in modernized areas. The children were raised on modernized foods while the adults had a more primitive diet in their childhoods.
The modernized people had modern dental problems, but no modern dentists. For many, the joy of life was replaced by unbearable toothache, hopelessness, and a longing for death.
Facial and Arch Structure and Physical Degeneration
Accompanying the change in facial and arch structure was susceptibility to disease, difficult childbirth, and bodily complications.
Disease
When the book was published in 1938, the most prevalent disease besides cavities was tuberculosis. Consider the tuberculosis rate as a measure of overall disease among the groups.
Swiss: no tuberculosis deaths occurred in the dozen-century history of the Loetschental Valley. In a modernized area, a doctor supervised 3,500 patients and not one came from the isolated Swiss Alps. Several clinicians pointed out the association between cavities and tuberculosis.
Gaelics: the younger generations in modernized areas don’t show the same resistance to tuberculosis as did their ancestors. A special hospital was built for the increasing number of tuberculosis patients. The government repopulated an island that almost went extinct from tuberculosis, but the new settlers broke down just as rapidly.
Eskimos: they have existed for 5,000+ years, but in 1934, Dr. V. E. Levine and Professor C. W. Bauer say that “due to susceptibility to tuberculosis and other diseases the average life span of the Eskimo of Alaska is only 20 years and their race is doomed to extinction within a few generations unless modern medical science comes to their aid.”
Far North Native Americans: the modernized children die of tuberculosis rapidly. Case in point: despite the hygienic conditions and highly trained dietitians and nurses, 60% of the students who moved with the school from the primitive to the modernized area were dead from tuberculosis. An experienced doctor sent tuberculosis patients back to primitive conditions, under which the death rate was much lower than in modernized conditions.
Melanesians and Polynesians: in a group of 100 people, ten were coughing with tuberculosis. In Hawaiian hospitals, 100% of patients had disturbed dental arches. Many island groups recognize that they are doomed.
Africans: despite their resistance to the continent’s vast dangers, they have not been resistant to modern diseases. According to Marcel Savage, “in 1911 French Equatorial Africa had twenty million negro inhabitants; in 1921 there were seven and a half million; in 1931 there were two and a half million.”
Aboriginals: in several parts of Australia, which have supported a large primitive population for 75,000+ years, only a few dozen primitives are left in reservations. These remaining people are also quickly disappearing.
New Zealand Maori: approximately 100% of patients at a tuberculosis hospital had some sort of facial or arch deformity.
Difficult childbirth
With the narrowing of the face and dental arches comes the narrowing of the entire body, including the hips. This presents a serious problem for childbirth.
Among primitives, childbirth was a simple and rapid process. It was so easy that many groups regarded it as quite an insignificant experience. But in the just first and second modernized generations, serious trouble was experienced.
Price recounts a striking example of an Eskimo woman who had given birth to 26 children. Several of them had been born during the night and she had not bothered to wake her husband.
This woman insisted on preparing native foods for herself while she prepared her white husband’s imported foods for him. She didn’t have any tooth decay while her husband had rampant tooth decay and incomplete development of the face and dental arches, characteristics also shared by several of the children.
One of the girls who married had narrow dental arches, underdeveloped nostrils, and a narrow boyish type of body frame. Unlike her mother, this girl had a dangerous experience in the birth of her only child and never risked having another.
The photo below illustrates this increasingly common boyish frame.
Bodily complications
There are plenty more bodily complications associated with a narrowing of the head and body.
The narrowing of the chest predisposes an individual to tuberculosis. In 1937, Dr. Weisman observed that the normal chest was flat and wide while the average tuberculosis patient’s chest was deep and narrow, like that of an infant.
In the head, narrow nasal passages cause mouth breathing, sleep apnea, and gum disease. Constricted ear canals bring about ear infections and hearing problems. Constriction in the head creates problems with the hypothalamus, pituitary, and pineal glands.
In the body, the reduced surface area of the lungs increases the risk for asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, and other lung diseases. Digestive disorders like leaky gut are more common. Bone problems of osteoporosis, scoliosis, and hip and knee issues happen more frequently.
In more severe cases, deformities like malformed limbs and clubfoot occur.
It’s easy to look at this disease, difficult childbirth, and bodily complications as something that could never happen to us. But without modern hospitals, artificial vitamins and supplements, and advanced medical procedures, I doubt we would be much different.
Even with all our advancements, we still experience much of this physical degeneration. However, we’ve alleviated the most extreme cases. Science has advanced to a point where we can save degenerated children who would’ve otherwise perished. But saving them physically doesn’t mean saving them mentally or morally.
Physical Degeneration and Mental and Moral Degeneration
One of the deepest impressions Price had was the lack of prisons and mental institutes among primitives. In Uganda, the Ruanda tribes of two and a half million people had no prisons. This begs the question: could mental and moral degeneration also be linked to modernization?
In 1929, A. F. Tredgold found a correlation between physical deformity and mental deficiency: 19% of the general population had deformed palates compared with 82% of the mentally impaired, 76% of epileptics, and 80% of the insane.
Price found similar correlations. In a special education school, 97% of the children had abnormalities. In a juvenile correctional institute, 98.4% of the 189 children had abnormalities. In newspapers, there were rarely criminals with normal faces.
It was clear that processes creating physical abnormalities could also create brain abnormalities. In analyzing this relationship, we’ll look at children with Down syndrome, a severe mental injury.
Dr. Clemens E. Benda found that those with Down syndrome had an underdevelopment of the pituitary gland. This gland in the brain governs growth and reproduction.
The importance of this gland can be seen in Price’s operation on a 16-year-old boy with Down syndrome. He widened the child’s arch by moving the maxillary bones, which stimulated the under-functioning pituitary gland.
The boy grew three inches in four months. His genitals developed rapidly. He developed a fondness for calling people over the telephone. He invited a girl to go with him to a dance. Soon, he became a menace as a sex pervert, as the boy had the impulses of a man with the mind of a child. With no one to care for him, he was placed in a mental institute.
What could cause the under-functioning of this important gland? Dr. M. M. O. Barrie determined it was the lack of vitamin E. By feeding rats a diet deficient in vitamin E, he stopped the functioning of the gland entirely.
Indeed, the lack of nutrition that creates physical deformities also creates brain deformities, leading to mental and moral decline. Down syndrome is just one example. Modern research is linking the lack of nutrition to more and more mental disorders like depression and Alzheimer’s.
The Origins of Degeneration
What explains this pattern of degeneration? By now, you probably know it has something to do with nutrition. Let’s debunk the conventional explanations and pinpoint what exactly causes degeneration.
Myths
During Price’s time, the prevalent explanation for degeneration was the mixing of races. What constitutes race? For Price, it was the similarity of physical characteristics and appearances that suggests a group has a common ancestry.
When races blend, it produces characteristics of one or both races in accordance with the laws of inheritance and heredity. But when facial and arch deformities occur, this degeneration occurs in spite of heredity. A deformed child born to able-bodied parents, even of different races, is not what the laws of heredity would predict.
With plenty of examples of full-blooded, deformed children and mixed, well-developed children, it’s not the mixing of races that causes degeneration.
While the mixing of races explanation may have fallen out of favor, other theories have risen to take its place in the 21st century. Thumb sucking and faulty sleeping habits have been used to explain mouth breathing, and the lack of chewing hard foods has been used to explain the underdeveloped jaw. There are plenty of other hypotheses too.
At best, these hypotheses may slightly explain some of the degeneration we see, but what about the widespread disease, difficult childbirth, bone problems, and so much more? Is there a unique explanation for each of these modern problems, or is this degeneration more likely to stem from an overall lack of physical development?
Reproductive exhaustion
While analyzing Down syndrome in the United States, Price found that the average age of the mothers of these individuals was 41 years, the average number of children per family was five, and 60% of them are the last born. Price came across a similar pattern in modernized tribes: the later-born children exhibited more physical degeneration.
It’s evident the depleted reproductive capacity of the parents plays a role in degeneration.
If degeneration was the result of racial mixing and heredity, then we shouldn’t be finding such differences in deformity in the same family.
To determine the true cause of these deformities, Dr. D. P. Murphy of the University of Pennsylvania examined 1,476 physical deformity cases between 1929 and 1933. He found that “miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births occurred more often in the pregnancies immediately preceding the birth of a defective child.” It’s almost as if these are warning signs of depleted reproductive capability.
Murphy also found deformities “are 24 times more common in siblings of defective children than in the population at large,” suggesting that “deformities are primarily the result of influences which affect the germ cells prior to fertilization.” In other words, the reproductive capacity and health of the parents before conception is the main cause of deformity.
Maternal health
For obvious ethical reasons, few causal studies have been conducted to prove the effects of parental nutrition on child deformity. We’ll use studies on domestic and wild animals instead.
During Price’s time, it was common knowledge among zookeepers that members of the big cat family did not reproduce in captivity unless the mother was from the wild.
A zoo specialist went to Africa to study this problem. He observed a lion kill a zebra and head straight to eat the liver. After selecting some other internal organs, the lion abandoned the carcass to the jackals.
This discovery changed the history of feline reproduction in captivity. When organs were introduced, reproduction in captivity was possible even among the young. “Whereas the price of lions used to be fifteen hundred dollars for a good specimen, they were now so plentiful that they would scarcely bring fifteen cents.”
These wild animals have an instinctual knowledge of what foods are good for them. On one occasion, rats gnawed their way into a room where Price’s lab rabbits were kept. Only the brains were eaten. On another occasion, the blood was sucked and the eyes were eaten.
As it turns out, liver and eyes are the densest sources of vitamin A on the planet, and a lack of vitamin A in the mother readily causes deformities.
Meigs and Converse, in 1932, studied evidence from cows in Beltsville. Cows were fed low-quality hay with low levels of chlorophyll, a precursor to vitamin A. “Of six calves born of these cows, two were dead, one was unable to stand and died shortly after birth, and three were both weak and blind. These three calves died at 57, 62, and 71 days of age.”
Professor Fred Hale of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station studied pig reproduction. “He produced 59 pigs that were born blind, every pig in each of six litters where the mothers were deprived of vitamin A for several months before mating and for thirty days thereafter. There were serious defects of the snout, dental arches, eyes, and feet.”
This all seems pretty discouraging, but there is hope.
“One of these vitamin A deficient pigs that had previously farrowed a litter of ten pigs, all born without eyeballs, was given a single dose of cod liver oil two weeks before mating. She farrowed fourteen pigs which showed various combinations of eye defects, some had no eyes, some had one eye, and some had one large eye and one small eye, but all were blind.”
Next, “matings were made between blind pigs. These were fed rations containing ample vitamin A, and normal pigs with normal eyeballs were produced.”
The deformity from lack of nutrition can be corrected, and another study further confirms this. One group of pigs was confined in a barn while the other had access to pasture. The confined group produced almost all abnormal offspring while the pasture-raised group produced normal offspring. The following year, the experiment was repeated reversing the groups, and the same results occurred.
Paternal health
Does the responsibility fall entirely on the mother? Prior to conception, it is not completely so. McKenzie and Berliner of the University of Missouri conducted a study on sheep and found “the percentage of abnormal sperm increased to 84% under unfavorable conditions and reduced to less than 15% under favorable conditions.”
In 1937, H. Stiasny and K. Generales found that the normal man produced 19% defective sperm, the chronic alcoholic produced 75% defective sperm, those with an inherited mental defect produced 62%, hereditary deafness produced 62%, hereditary blindness produced 75%, epilepsy produced 58%, and schizophrenia produced 54%.
“With a high percentage of abnormal sperm the ova either are not fertilized or that fertilization takes place and that prenatal death occurs,” with Mall finding in 1917 that “15% of conceptions in England are expelled as deformities.”
Moench and Holt found that when sperm abnormalities are above 25%, clinical sterility is usually present, preventing would-be deformed children from being conceived or born. However, if conception and birth do happen, the health of the sperm cell plays a significant role in the health of the child.
Child and adolescent nutrition
The potential of the body is determined primarily by the health of the sperm and egg cells, but fulfilling this potential depends on the nutrition of the child both before and after birth. Before birth, the child’s health depends entirely on the mother’s health. After birth, the child’s health depends on their nutrition.
Simply put, we do a bad job of feeding infants in modern society. Not only do we corrupt ourselves, but we also corrupt other species: a veterinarian reported that the most seriously deformed pups are those that are spoiled and fed the foods they like best.
We also do a bad job of feeding adolescents. Price observed the highest incidence of tooth decay in adolescent girls and next in adolescent boys.
During adolescence, if the demands of rapid growth aren’t met, the body borrows minerals from the skeleton to maintain vital functions. Trying to maintain a slim figure during these periods adds further injury. Expressions of this skeletal damage include osteoporosis, gingivitis, and excess curvatures like rounded shoulders.
Adolescence is also when the full severity of deformities is realized, caused by the eruption of permanent teeth and the development of adult features.
In addition to the physical side, there is the mental side. Lichtenstein and Brown showed that IQ fell with increases in age during puberty: at age nine, IQ was 100; at age eleven, IQ was 89; at twelve, IQ was 83; at thirteen, IQ was 74. Not surprisingly, the first cases of delinquency appeared most frequently at age thirteen.
Soil Deterioration
In 1938, United States soil productivity decreased by up to 50%. The transportation of food and nutrients from the farmland to the cities, eventually to be dissipated by the sewage system into the ocean, was to blame.
Nutrient depletion
Price observed, “never in the history of the world has there been such a large-scale depletion of the soil by transportation away from the tilled and pasturage areas.” Correspondingly, the highest mortality rates in the U.S. were from states with the longest history of settlement.
It requires only a few centuries, or a few decades in some systems, to produce such soil depletion that plant and animal deterioration results. Only a few intelligent civilizations have stood the test of time. Not all primitive societies made it unscathed.
The burial sites of the Western Plains pueblos, a civilization of over a thousand years, show a progressive increase in cavities, skeletal deformities like arthritis, and reductions in height which suggests the increasing depletion of the soil. The rise and fall of past civilizations like ancient Greece and ancient Rome are also in part due to soil depletion. Will our civilization have the same story of soil depletion?
Price noted that “in Nature's program, minerals are loaned temporarily to the plants and animals and their return to the soil is essential.” This return must be done through careful planning of composting and manuring. The annual spring overflow of water systems also helps to replenish soil nutrients, as done by the Nile, Yangtze, and Yellow River.
Can’t we just fertilize the soil with what we have lost? It’s not that simple, even if we determined the exact amounts and ratios of all the nutrients needed. If bioavailable phosphorus was supplied to the land at once, it would kill the plant life. The phosphorus must be made slowly available by processes like the decomposition of compost.
Wind and water erosion
In Europe and America, not only do we disregard soil replenishment, we destroy replenishment for future generations.
We ruthlessly clear forests whose roots are needed to keep the nutrients from plant and animal decomposition intact. These forests also hold back moisture during the melting of snow and rainy seasons, preventing floods and ensuring a healthy flow of water over a long duration.
The nutrient-dense soil that has taken millenniums to build has been washed away in a few decades. The heavy rains rush madly to the lower levels and carry with them not the rich topsoil that has been washed away, but clay and rocks. The plains are buried with this unproductive matter, making it impossible to use the fertile soil underneath.
The Ohio River drains the slopes of the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi drains the Rockies. “The bare ground will have as much soil washed off in 10 years as the unbroken prairie will lose in four hundred.”
The other major destructive force is the wind. When the vegetation is removed and the soil is left bare, the wind blows up the soil and creates dust storms.
Price commented, “through our Western States, it is not uncommon to see buildings and trees partially buried in these rolling dunes of drifting sand. When we were flying over eastern Australia in search of groups of primitive aborigines, we saw great forests gradually being engulfed with these marching billows of sand so that most of the trees were covered to their tips.”
The Decline of Modern Civilization
Price was deeply alarmed at the accelerating rate of degeneration of his time. If all this was happening in 1938, what about now? It’s only gotten worse, despite our scientific advancements.
Average medical costs per person, inflation-adjusted to current prices, were $819 in 1938. It’s nearly 16 times that, at $12,914 nowadays. The percentage of people suffering from chronic diseases was 1.9% in 1938. It’s nearly 24 times that, at 45% nowadays.
Interestingly, the percentage of our budget spent on food declined from 40% in 1938 to 10% nowadays. Might the cheap, highly-processed “food” be playing a role?
Price’s wise warnings were not heeded, and we’re seeing the effects. Average heights peaked 30 to 40 years ago and have since started declining. Life expectancy is decreasing in developed countries. IQ scores in America have started dropping for the first time in nearly a century.
However, there is hope. This hope does not lie in the modern healthcare industry, with which we’ve only gotten sicker. This hope comes from the primitive cultures that have lived for thousands of years with immunity to degeneration. We’ll explore the wisdom of these cultures in Part 3.