Sanctaparenta, there is a difference btwn modern “underdeveloped” countries and pre-20th century “primitive” cultures. I think the thing you misunderstand is that the whole point of the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is that people in truly unindustrialized parts of the world, I’m talking about people who have been completely untouched by industry, not people who have been met by “missionaries” or who have received government aid of any kind, those are the people who are healthier than we are. That is what Dr. Price found early in the 20th century when he made his travels. He visited over 20 different communities around the world and no matter where they lived, whether it was in the tropics or in the glaciers, or anywhere in between, people who were untouched by modern processed foods had no or almost no cavities, almost perfect bone structure, little if any tuberculosis, and fertility problems were extremely uncommon. Compared to modern Americans, I think you’d be stunned. How many women do you personally know that are suffering with fertility issues of one kind or another, whether it’s difficulty in conceiving, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies, birth defects, you name it, it’s our problem. How many people do you know who have cavities? Too many to count!! How many people are either obese or too thin? This is a modern phenomenon, not an ancient one. Yes, the third world countries and the “primitive” communities that have been touched by our “help” have become quite worse for it. I’m not knocking missionary work in general. Of course we want to spread the Gospel to them, and if there is a true physical need, help them to provide for themselves, teach them if they have forgotten how to care for themselves, provide temporary medical help if necessary. But when it comes to food and certain ways of living, we really ought to let them be. What we need to do is make sure they have enough of what is locally available to them, teach them how to hunt, fish, farm, etc for themselves of the foods that are available to them. Many of them have forgotten how to do this because they have learned, just as we have, to depend on others for their sustenance. What we do not need to do is give them boxes of Cheerios and such like. Modern American food is not what they need. It’s not local to them. It’s not natural food. It will in many cases addict them chemically to our food and they will give up their own nutrient dense foods in favor of ours, and then they will begin to starve and have health issues. People in third world countries nowadays who are so sick with various diseases, I believe, are not so sick becase no one has come to their aid, but because we have interfered unnecessarily and have not respected their food choices. If they eat whale blubber and fermented milk that sits in the ground for a year before it’s consumed, and they are thriving in terms of their health, then we should leave them alone. It may not seem appetizing to us, but the fact is, they know what is best for themselves, at least they used to. Dr. Price noticed that some in these communities that he studied, who were untouched by industry, some would leave their traditions and start eating some of the food from the industrialized world, and as soon as they did, they developed the very same health problems that everyone else had. Before modern transportation, it wasn’t possible to visit faraway countries so easily and give them so much junk. Yet somehow those people survived (and thrived) for millenia. It is our generation that is slowly dying off, slowly beooming more and more helpless…to the point of not even being able to reproduce properly. When you get to that point, the end of humanity isn’t far in sight.
Don’t confuse malnutrition with starvation. We Americans are far from starving. We eat usually far too much, but we are malnourished. We are not gaining enough nutrients from our food because they’ve been processed so much. The foods we do eat are usually loaded with chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and have even been manipulated by scientists in labs when they were still in seed form. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg! Many of these plants can’t even reproduce themselves! They have to rely on scientists to reproduce them. They are freak foods that do not impart much of anything to us, except harm. We take synthetically made vitamins to make up for it, but these do little good because they are also not natural sources of nutrition and may even be toxic. These people whom Dr. Price studied on the other hand, did not travel very far, so they had to eat locally, whatever was available to them, whatever that happened to be. God created the world such that people could live a robust life, no matter where they lived. We do not have to travel far distances in order to eat well. But we do travel far, very far, even to the other side of the world. And we are sicker than they are.