Introduction

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: Introduction

A critical examination of these groups revealed a high immunity to many of our serious affections so long as they were sufficiently isolated from our modern civilization and living in accordance with the nutritional programs which were directed by the accumulated wisdom of the group. In every instance where individuals of the same racial stocks who had lost this isolation and who had adopted the foods and food habits of our modern civilization were examined, there was an early loss of the high immunity characteristics of the isolated group." p1

The major point of his book is summed up here: the peoples he met were healthy before meeting civilization's food - and there was significant degeneration after starting a "civilized" diet.

While it has been known that certain injuries were directly related to an inadequate nutrition of the mother during the formative period of the child, my investigations are revealing evidence that the problem goes back still further to defects in the germ plasms as contributed by the two parents. These injuries, therefore, are related directly to the physical condition of one or of both of these individuals prior to the time that conception took place. p2

Our society says that pregnant women should eat healthy, get some non-strenuous exercise, not drink alcohol, not smoke and rest a lot. Some might add to that the taking of a daily pre-natal multivitamin. Most of that is good advice, but if we're talking genetics, by the time conception takes place its mostly too late, and by the time most women find out they're pregnant, it's way too late. Nutrition should be a lifelong thing, of course, but it should be especially important to both men and women of reproductive age. A good book on this subject is Ramiel Nagel's book "Healing Our Children". Another, albeit somewhat less enlightened book is "Let's Have Healthy Children" by Adelle Davis.

The forces involved in heredity have in general been deemed to be so powerful as to be able to resist all impacts and changes in the environment. ...defects...are products of the environment rather than hereditary units transmitted from the ancestry. p3

Price had no idea, but he was very correct here. And this is very unpopular, literally. The popular conception of genes and heredity and DNA is that we inherit our genes from our parents who got it from their parents and so on... and there's nothing that could have been done about this and there is most certainly nothing we can do about it.


Nutritional Genomics is a new area of science that is proving and explaining what Weston Price found years ago: what nutrition we provide our body with determines not only which genes are turned on or off, but also how our genes are copied; that is whether they are copied correctly or incorrectly.


Many diseases are caused directly by the poor copying of our DNA. This is mutation. And mutations are not random (read: disease is not random) - they are always facilitated by a particular cause. Have you ever used a photocopier that is running low on toner or used a rubber stamp that didn't quite get ink all over it? The end result is a poor copy, one that is difficult to read... Imagine then that the reader of that copied document needs to make sense of it... the reader will supply information to fill in what is missing. Some of the time what is supplied might be correct, but certainly some of it will be wrong. This is what happens with genetics. Our genes are constantly being copied by our body - all cells regenerate - so if we don't provide the correct nutrition, it's like not having enough toner in the photocopier: the copies of our genes will be poor and when they get read the next time, they might provide information that is poor enough to cause disease.


So heredity exists insofar as what genetic possibilities are present in an individual, but remember that we have many genes which are "in waiting" - this in how it is possible for a diseased person to produce healthy offspring. If it were not so a diseased person could only produce diseased offspring.


Mainstream science and media have only recently started acknowledging this truth which throws out all of 20th century genetics. Here's an article by the BBC. Ever heard of genetic screening for pregnant women? "Oh, your family has a history of disease x, so your baby might be at risk for disease x." And the pregnant woman suddenly becomes very sad and considers aborting because of the potential that her doctor has presented, even though she had had a good feeling about her baby. This is a cruel practice and now out of date, as genetic screening is completely useless in the face of the results of proper nutrition.


And by the way, science no longer knows what genes are... in speaking of the last few decades of the 20th century, Evelyn Fox Keller says: 

“The stability of the DNA, the fidelity with which it’s replicated turns out to be… not to be a property of the DNA, but a property… it’s an achievement of the cell. It’s established by a very complex set of molecular motors that are constantly proofreading and editing and fix.. and repairing the DNA. And as to development, well, what we knew about learned about development the more dynamic the process became where you know all these different parts of the cell… different components of the cell… are involved and activating and transcribing and or determining or specifying which parts of the DNA are to be transcribed, how they’re to be transcribed, how they’re to be translated. The simple idea of going from DNA to RNA to protein to us, was just… was falling apart." from an interview with the CBC Radio program IDEAS: How to think about science, Paris, 2002.

What we were all taught in school about genes is pretty much out. In fact, genes probably don't exist anymore. Well, at least the concept of a gene doesn't exist. See the above interview or Evelyn Fox Keller's book,  "The Century of the Gene" for more of the story. I would also commend the work of Rupert Sheldrake, Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski.