Wednesday, February 29, 2012

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.

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