So why do I have Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome?

I sort of glossed over this in my last post. The commonly accepted "reasons" for BWS are as follows:

• unknown
• unclear
• complex
• genetic mutation

So it's not different at all from the majority of human maladies that the medical profession seeks to explain with many studies showing… nothing useful at all, but make them a lot of grant money.

To me, the answer is clear, although admittedly complex. It is a genetic mutation on chromosome 11, manifested by poor gene copying. So everyone knows DNA… it's the blueprint for life! How is it made? Well, glossing all the chemical processes, DNA makes RNA, and gives it a copy of itself, which the RNA then copies back to replace DNA. This process is constant in our bodies.

So what happens if there's a mistake? Of course, we all know - genetic mutation. Simple question and answer. Okay, then try asking why there is a mistake in copying. Go on, you can do it: Why would there be a mistake in copying?

Well, as an ink pad takes up ink from the stamp, sometimes we don't roll the stamp around enough and it doesn't get fully covered in ink. You could say, the stamp is lacking in ink. So when you make an impression on paper with that stamp… the design is mostly there, but missing a little bit.

So goes gene copying… and the ink is nutrition. Lack of nutrition and the RNA cannot copy the DNA properly. This is the cause of my Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome and the vast majority of all genetic problems.

Chapter 17: One Origin of Physical Deformities

Continuing my review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price...

From time to time, there are certain phrases which stand out to me as beautiful. On page 276, Price writes as a description of poorly formed dental arches and crowded teeth that they are "the inhibition of Nature's normal procedure." For that is what happens when nutrition is not correct for the body to build itself, let alone do activity.


A lady asked me the other day, "How do you know your daughter's healthy?" I was so dumbfounded I could hardly reply, "When I look at her I see perfection, and when I look at most children today, I see deformity." Our society takes this as an affront, and dismisses such comments out of hand. Nevertheless, it is what I believe. We must be able to look at people and know if they are healthy or not. Price has helped me to open my eyes and see healthy people and unhealthy people; deformed and well formed. We are so afraid of passing judgement on others, that we cannot see what we need to see in order to make informed decisions about whether what we are doing is working or not. This is not about passing judgement on others - in fact, it is for the express purpose of helping others. A person's genetic problems are largely not their own fault (although they can be) - genetic problems are almost exclusively a result of parental nutritional deficiencies.


The caption to Figure 103 reads: "This is depressed reproductive capacity of the parents." Price said what our society no longer allows us to say: parents are at fault for unhealthy children. I will state what I know to be true here succinctly: "Almost all genetic problems are congenital problems, which are nutritional problems." Environmental factors such as toxins can play a role sometimes, but lack of nutrition is the main problem.


So in looking at races, we can see that there are racial patterns which are inherited. For example, if we see someone with red hair, we generally think of Scotland. Slotted eyes is East Asia. These are simple examples, but there are many barely perceptible features which allow us to recognize a "stranger". Price writes:

If the change in facial form were the result of racial admixture, we should not have the types of deformity patterns that these cases show. Indeed, in the same family we should not find several different deformity patterns. The lack of development downward of the upper anterior incisors and the bone supporting them is illustrated for the younger child, in Fig. 103 lower right. It will be noted that when this girl's molar teeth are in contact her front teeth still miss occluding by a considerable distance. p.281

I had the same problem when I was young, so I had an appliance to try to correct the situation - and it did for a few years, but guess what? My front teeth don't occlude:

Part of this problem in my mouth has to do with the macroglossia that came with my Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome, but because of the position of my teeth in general, and the fact that I'm missing a couple of the back molars, it is clear that my arches did not form correctly. Thankfully, I can chew and swallow just fine, although breathing was difficult when I was younger because of the largeness of my tongue.

I am a product of modern civilization: "Two serious defects from which many individuals in our modernized civilization suffer are impacted teeth and the absence of teeth due to their failure to develop." (p.294) These don't happen in healthy individuals and are not a normal part of the human condition - and they are not random events as has been shown in Price's research. He claims much of the problem is lack of Vitamin A in one or both parents before conception or during gestation, and will discuss the cause of this in the next chapter.

A new calf!

Comet & her heifer calf

Our Milking Shorthorn, Comet, calved this morning - it's a little heifer! She calved just fine - mother and daughter are doing splendidly, learning to know each other.


To read more and see a video of the pair, please check out the new blog section on farmergord.com. (The post is here.) 


Finally, we have our own pure, unadulterated, raw milk to drink!

Maine Traditional Diet?

It's been just over a year since I started reading Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. Somehow I thought I'd have had time to finish it more quickly. At any rate, I'm still progressing with my reading as I get the farm geared up for this growing season. Our new cow, Comet, a Milking Shorthorn, is due to calve in less than three weeks, so I've been reading all I can on the subject of cattle and nutrition. In one of those books, I came across this:

I once knew a family with eleven children who lived about forty years ago in an isolated area of Maine before food stamps and convenience foods. They seemed to live most of the year on nothing but home-baked beans and the milk from their cow. They were all magnificently, bloomingly healthy. They obviously knew how to use milk right. p.87 Keeping a Family Cow (rev. ed.) by Joann Sills Grohman (the book was originally published in 1975)

I couldn't help but think that perhaps this sort of people could have been studied to great benefit by Dr. Price. Maybe he didn't know about them? Or perhaps because it's just one family, it's not a big enough sample. Anyway, being financially poor is not a prescription for poor health, so long as we eat properly!

Chapter 16: Primitive Control of Dental Caries

Continuing my review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price...

In the first paragraph of chapter 16 we read:

We are concerned now with discovering whether the use of foods, which are equivalent in body-building and repairing material to those used by the primitives will, when provided to our affected modernized groups, prevent tooth decay or check it when it is active. p.253

!! What ?? He's now going to tell us if we can stop tooth decay by the food we eat? Yup.

Price has categorized the dietaries of the primitive peoples he studied:

1. Dairy (high Alps Swiss, Arabs, certain Asians)
2. Animal organs and eggs (North American interior natives, Andean tribes)
3. Seafood (Islanders, coastal peoples)
4. Small animals and insects (Aborigines, African interior tribes)

Each group he observed used foods from two or more sources, and the sources don't really matter - only the adequacy of the minerals and vitamins present in those sources are important.  He writes that we should obviously focus on foods near us, but understands that "It would be fortunate indeed, if our problems were as simple as this statement might indicate." (p.254) He then lists three problems to overcome:

1. Strength of character and will power to eat what our bodies need rather than the foods that we like.
2. Sedentary lifestyle of the modern = little energy needs and little hunger.
3. Nutritional content of food.

To the first problem, I have no answer... It seems that each of us must struggle with our own character and listen to our own bodies. Perhaps we can find good ways to support one another in this struggle. I am surprised that in 1939 he wrote that 25% of the energy of the North American diet was supplied by sugar. (p.256) As our diet has changed over the past few years, Susan and I have noticed a change how "sweets" taste to us.... they're easier and easier to resist.... but not entirely, yet.

The second problem is an interesting one, and perhaps we live in a time when more people on earth are sedentary than ever before. Each person controls what they do during their day. Bodily movements, while perhaps subtle, are one of the most important aspects of "exercise". While I pity someone with a desk job, I, too have had such jobs in the past and found a simple way to overcome the lack of movement: walking to work and sometimes hiking on weekends.

The third problem is one I am trying to solve in my work. As I work with my animals and plants, I am seeking to improve the soil (and thus the nutrient content of my food) based on what I see working in nature. This relates back to chapter 15 and the quote about wild animals having perfect health. That's what I want to replicate in my farming. That means rebuilding the nutrition of the soil.

Price mentions that drying foods better preserves the vitamin content than canning. While in the past we haven't done a lot of canning, this advice might keep us from investing too much in canning equipment and have me build a solar food dehydrator instead.

He writes a bit about what he did to improve his patients' diets and seemed to universally recommend butter oil and cod liver oil, a 1/2 teaspoon 3 times per day. He believes that they are more powerful when given together. For certain these are nutrient dense foods, but it seems to me that those who live near the sea did not have dairy, and those who had dairy did not live near the sea. At any rate, it is a reparation formula for nutritionally deficient moderns, not a part of the diet of primitive peoples.


So was his program of nutrition for his patients successful? If one can believe what he writes, it was:

Clinical data demonstrate that by following the program outlined dental caries can be prevented or controlled when active in practically all individuals. This does not require either permission or prescription but it is the inherent right of every individual. p.271 

 The last part of this quote is the second to last sentence in the chapter, and it speaks to me on several levels. Simply, it is an empowering statement and a radical idea, coming from a man who's living was earned "fixing teeth". Teeth fixers earn they're living from people with bad teeth, not perfect ones. Why was he so eager to have people fix their teeth and prevent dental problems? I think the answer lies in his love of humanity. In all of his writing I feel that he loves the idea of humans living in a natural state and eating natural, local foods - and he recognizes that this possible perfection comes not from commerce, but as an "inherent right."

Beef Horn Broth

Fern the Highland cow

Fern's horns

Beef Horn Broth

So the other day I made a beef horn broth from a Highland cow named Fern. It's taken me a few days to get up the gumption to try it as I had never read or heard of anyone doing this before. I probably added a bit too much water for the amount of horn, so it didn't gel solidly, but nonetheless it gelled nicely. It smelled okay, so I heated up a little in a cup and added some salt. The result was actually very smooth. It wasn't what I was expecting (which was something I was prepared to spit out!). What to do with it now?

Chapter 15: Characteristics of Primitive & Modernized Dietaries

Continuing my review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price...

As I farm in a permaculture context I look to nature for the prime example of the way plants and animals grow. What this means is that I forget whatever the experts have said and look at what exists in as natural a form as I can find. This is my way of farming - observation. It was also Weston A. Price's way of doing science. Nowadays science has been largely relegated to observations that can be made in a lab, but the vast majority of what exists cannot be studied in a lab. So as Price travelled, he looked at peoples with good health and recorded a bit about what made them healthy. Here he notes a general concept that I have held for a long time:

As a further approach to our problem, it is important to keep in mind that, in general, the wild animal life has largely escaped many of the degenerative processes which affect modern white peoples. We ascribe this to animals instinct in the matter of food selection. It is possible that man has lost through disuse some of the normal faculty for consciously recognizing body requirements. In others words, the only hunger of which we now are conscious is a hunger for energy to keep us warm and to supply power. In general, we stop eating when an adequate amount of energy has been provided, whether or not the body building and repairing materials have been included in the food. p.230

There are many things which differentiate us from the lower animals, but it could be that we have tried to distance ourselves from their world, too much. We all have cravings at one time or another, but rarely do people pay attention to these cravings. A few years ago, Susan was craving salt... not just a little, now, but she was eating handfuls of salt. Unfortunately, we didn't think anything of it at the time and until it was almost too late. Uncontrollable salt cravings may indicate a diagnosis of Addison's disease. And so every craving has an underlying reason. That reason may be innocuous, serious, or even life-threatening, as in Susan's case.


The point here is that moderns are not very good at listening to what their body's tell them. And in some cases they ignore their bodies. I confess that I have often recognized that my body has been telling me that it is tired, but it translates into "hungry"... and I eat something sweet to keep me going on into the night. I should have just stopped what I was doing and gone to sleep. Most of those occasions happened at university while I was studying. The pressures and volume of study required is not good for the human body... so I am glad I gave up that life.

Here in Chapter 15 price gives a summary of all foods from the groups studied. There are things here that are not in the preceding chapters, so it is worth wading through the repetitive text. This is the goldmine of information that one could use to build their own diet. In fact, I'd say that a person could reasonable skip the whole of the previous chapters and pick up the book at chapter 15 and do pretty well. 

I was quite surprised to read that Price is complaining about vegetable oil being a big problem, since he published in 1939. I was under the impression that it came into widespread use in the 50s. So I did a little digging and found that cottonseed oil was common at the turn of the century and that Crisco vegetable shortening started selling in 1911. So it's a lot earlier than I had thought. I've been having to dismantle my timeline for processed foods lately and create a new one. I'm actually working on a processed foods timeline that I hope to share at some point. For now, I'll direct the reader here to a massive database of the history of food.

So what was the reason that vegetable oils, among others, were so commonplace by his time? It has to do with that phrase again: MODERN FOODS OF COMMERCE. And here the key ingredient in transportation. Price lists the foods that are good for transportation: 

• white flour
• sugar
• polished rice
• vegetable fats
• canned goods

Today, our transportation system is vastly quicker than it was in Price's time and we can get fresh salad greens all over the continent from southern California in a matter of days. If I wanted to, I could sell the organs from my pigs to someone who lived in Maine. And yet it seems we are left with the legacy of the development of our food system and even more boxed, bagged and canned food than ever.


He mentions it merely in passing, but it is clear to Price that vegetarian or vegan diets are not an option for those interested in optimal health:

As yet I have not found a single group of primitive racial stock which was building and maintaining excellent bodies by living entirely on plant foods. I have found in many parts of the world most devout representatives of modern ethical systems advocating the restriction of foods to the vegetable products. In every instance where the groups involved had been long under this teaching, I found evidence of degeneration in the form of dental caries, and in the new generation in the form of abnormal dental arches to an extent very much higher than in the primitive groups who were not under this influence. p.250

The last sentence of the chapter was inspiring at first:

The space of the entire book might be used for discussing the nutritional wisdom of the various primitive races. It is a pity that so much of their wisdom has been lost through lack of appreciation by the whites who early made contact with them. p.252

But then a sort of aggravation came over me. I got to thinking, "Why didn't you write that book, then?" Or why didn't somebody... And is it even possible to every get this knowledge back?


One of the most common complaints I hear about this kind of diet from people with whom I share these ideas is "It'll be so much work to even find these foods. If you can even find them." And I haven't had a ready answer for them, until now. Price writes that "The primitives have obtained, often with great difficulty, foods that are scarce but rich in certain elements." (p.231) So it is not unreasonable that we too should work hard to find foods to nourish our bodies? Humans cannot live in unmitigated convenience. So back to the farm work it is then...

A video that's helpful...

This here video is funny and close to how we think... we're not paleos, but much of the thinking is the same... one major difference is that dairy and grains are good for us, contrary to paleo diet - with the caveat that dairy must not be heat treated and grains must be fermented. Anyway... I thought the video was cute, so I wanted to share it...



I like the way Paelos think... at least they're trying to understand what humans were meant to eat. God provided all we need in relatively simple forms.

Chapter 14: Isolated and Modernized Peruvian Indians

Continuing my review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price...

Again, Price reminds the reader of the plight of the natives he is studying - and with clear disdain for the white perpetrators. Do these look like healthy people? I think the average contemporary North American would have no ability to discern. If we are to regain our health, we must be able to discern good health from poor health.

FIG. 88. The modernization of the Sierra Indians through the introduction of foods of modern commerce has produced a sad wreckage in physique and often character. The boy at the upper left is a mouth breather because his nostrils are too small to carry sufficient air. The girl at the upper right has a badly underdeveloped chin and pinched nostrils. Both boys below have badly narrowed arches with crowding teeth. (my underlining)

Of an Amazon tribe he writes, "In the entire group associated with this chief I did not find a single tooth that had been attacked by dental caries." (p.224) That would be 0%! I'm not one for sarcasm, but that seems to be all that comes to mind...

My, those poor, uncivilized, naive, backwards barbarians - perhaps we should go down and help them modernize so they too can enjoy all the benefits that we do!

The native foods of the Amazon Jungle Indians as Price records were: fish, animals, birds, water fowl, eggs, plants and fruits... nothing special listed here... and no details... but there's probably not much that modern folks would recognize as "food".


So I'm trying to get my head around what should be recognized as healthy and what should be recognized as food. When we look at the cupboard or fridge and declare: "There's nothing to eat!" what is going on? Why is it that at times like that it has to be instant snack food or it feels like we might die? Or is it that we're tired? Or overhungry? Or undernourished? 


At any rate, how do we get past those moments? Perhaps we should prepare some healthy snacks ahead of time? Or perhaps develop more will power? Or maybe it has something to do with eating proper meals on time each and every day?

Chapter 13: Ancient Civilizations of Peru

Continuing my review of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price...

photo by alex.val

How did Weston A. Price's mind work? It seems he wasn't just an average fellow. When he looked at Maccu Piccu, he knew that it "probably represents the highest development of engineering, ancient and in some respects modern, on the American continent." (p.209) But he wasn't content with that observation - indeed, anyone might readily see this - but Price wanted to know what kind of people were capable of making this place. That is what drives him - he wants to know how great peoples are great, from a health standpoint. He wants to know what sort of human beings were strong enough and healthy enough to make Maccu Piccu.

Figure 83

Figure 83 (p.212) shows a perfect arch in an ancient skull. The 3rd molars (wisdom teeth) are formed perfectly and nothing is out of place. There's hardly a North American today that can say the same! Price asks the reader to look at the "broad sweep of the dental arches and freedom from tooth decay." (p.213)

I don't remember the history of my teeth and don't have a comprehensive record, but I do know that I have had many trips to dentists and many fillings. As for wisdom teeth, I must have had two pulled on the bottom, as I have 16 teeth on my top and only 14 on the bottom. Susan had all of her wisdom teeth pulled (surgically extracted). They just looked at the x-ray and told her parents that there was no room for them to come in - so they were pulled before they even broke through the gum line. The same for her friends.

my teeth

My dental arch is poorly formed and my teeth have always been crowded. As you can see from this photo, my 3rd teeth top & bottom, left & right are all sticking out and too long. When I was young, I had the nickname of "Dracula" because my canines stuck out even when my lips were closed. Also, you can see a gap between my upper and lower front teeth - even though my jaw is clenched shut. And this is after having had an appliance in for several months when I was about 12. Part of the problem has been my enlarged tongue, which continually pushes those teeth apart, but it is  clear that there were other problems in the development of my arches.

According to Price, the ancient Peruvians ate seafood, plant food, llama, alpaca, guinea pigs, potatoes, corn, beans and quinoa. Sounds pretty good to me!