His travels took him to the Inuits of Alaska, the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest and central Canada, Melanesians and Polynesians, Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, descendants of the ancient Chimú culture in coastal Peru, and tribes of Africa, including Maasai, Kikuyu, Wakamba, Jalou, Muhima, Pygmies, Baitu and Dinkas. In each locale, he examined and photographed teeth, faces and other features he found interesting. In short, Dr Price produced a fascinating record of people living their traditional lifestyles at a moment in time when it was all about to end.
In every culture of the dozens he studied – without exception – he found tooth decay, tooth loss and dental abscesses or infections to be uncommon, typically affecting no more than 1 to 3 per cent (and sometimes none) of the teeth he examined. He also noted the absence of gingivitis and periodontitis, and few to no crooked or crowded teeth. While a keeper of meticulous records, he also observed that facial structure was different, with primitive people enjoying what he called ‘fully formed facial and dental arches’ and a lack of narrowed nasal passages.
Even more remarkably, Dr Price specifically sought out members of these cultures who had recently transitioned to consuming ‘white man’s food’ – people who were bartering for the breads, pastries and sweets of Westerners visiting or bordering their land. In every instance, he observed an astounding increase in tooth decay, affecting 25 to 50 per cent of teeth examined, along with gingivitis, periodontitis, tooth loss, infectious abscesses, crooked and crowded teeth, and reductions in the size of the maxillary (midfacial) bone and mandible (jawbone). Nearly toothless mouths in teenagers and young adults were not uncommon.
The traditional diets of these societies were typically fish, shellfish and kelp among coastal cultures, and animal flesh and organs, raw dairy products, edible plants, nuts, mushrooms and insects among inland cultures. With only two exceptions (the Lötschental Valley Swiss, isolated by the Alps, who consumed a coarse rye bread, and the Gaelic people of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, who consumed crude oats), grains, sugars and processed foods were notably absent. (The Swiss had an intermediate number of dental caries, more than other cultures studied, while the Gaelic population did not.)
What is even more startling about Dr Price’s observations of the rarity of tooth decay and deformity is that none of these cultures practised any sort of dental hygiene: no toothbrushes, no toothpaste, no fluoridated water, no dental floss and no dentists or orthodontists. While Dr Price’s observations cannot be used to precisely pinpoint the nutritional distinctions between modern and traditional cultures, they nonetheless make a powerful point. Anyone wishing to read Dr Price’s account can find it reproduced in a recent reprint.34
This social ‘experiment’ has also occurred in the opposite direction: a return to traditional diet and lifestyle after a period of Westernization. In 1980, Dr Kerin O’Dea, while at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, conducted an extraordinary experiment: she asked 10 diabetic, overweight Aboriginal individuals living Western lifestyles, all of whom retained memories of prior lifestyles, to move back to their origins in the wilds of northwestern Australia and follow their previous hunter-gatherer diet of kangaroo, freshwater fish and yams. They began their adventure with high blood glucose levels of (on average) 209 mg/dl, high triglycerides of 357 mg/dl, as well as abnormal insulin levels. After seven weeks of living in the wild, killing animals and eating familiar gathered foods, the 10 lost an average of 17.6 pounds of body weight and dropped their blood glucose to 119 mg/dl and triglycerides to 106 mg/dl.35 Of the original 10, five returned nondiabetic. In a 2005 lecture, Dr O’Dea remarked: ‘I was struck by the change in people when they were back in their own country: they were confident and assertive, and proud of their local knowledge and skills. At the time we were not able to measure markers of psychosocial state, however observation suggested a very positive change.’36
Search the four corners of the earth today and you will find that the only surviving hunter-gatherer population that’s untouched by modern diet is the Sentinelese of the North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. Because their language is strikingly different from all languages in neighbouring lands, it is thought that the Sentinelese have been isolated since anatomically modern humans first migrated to this part of the world 60,000 years ago.37 Attempts to visit their island have been met with volleys of arrows, spears and rocks, so observations are limited. From what has been observed, however, they are lean and healthy, hunting, fishing and gathering foods without the ‘benefit’ of agriculture.
We have to be careful not to regard the life of the hunter-gatherer human as idyllic or problem-free: they had plenty of problems. While it is widely believed that stress is a modern phenomenon, this is absurd. Which is more stressful: struggling to pay your bills or having a marauding, bloodthirsty tribe of humans slaughter your friends, seize the women and enslave the children? We need to observe some of the practices of primitive cultures, such as head shrinking by the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon or cannibalism by the Carib of the Lesser Antilles and Venezuela, to remind ourselves that the world of humans can be an inhospitable place. Violence inflicted by and upon humans has characterized our existence from the start. While violence is certainly still a part of modern life, legal and political constraints that became necessary as human populations developed greater reliance on the practice of agriculture make it far less a part of day-to-day life than it was, say, 50,000 years ago. Yes, there is a bright side to agriculture and civilization.
The development of civilization and the cultivation of the seeds of grasses: two processes that ran parallel over the past 10,000 years that led to concepts such as sedentary non-nomadic life, land ownership, centralized government and many other phenomena we now accept as part of modern life. But when we observe what happens to cultures unexposed to the seeds of grasses who are then compelled to consume them, we observe an exaggerated microcosm of what the rest of the world is now experiencing.
Eat Like an Egyptian
Tooth decay, dental infections, crooked teeth, iron and folate deficiencies, diabetes, degenerated joints, weight gain, obesity: I’ve just described the average modern person. Take a member of a primitive culture following their traditional diet and feed them the processed foods of modern man – complete with the enticing products of the seeds of grasses – and within a few years, we’ve given them all the same problems we have, or worse. Yes, without ‘modern civilization’ they might succumb to the greedy ambitions of a violent neighbouring clan, but with grain in their lives they’ll have to engage in battle while sporting a 44-inch waist, two bad knees and a mouth that’s missing half its teeth.
While obesity and the diseases associated with it are virtually absent from hunter-gatherer cultures, neither are they entirely new. Diseases of affluence developed even before geneticists introduced changes into grains. Hippocrates, a Greek doctor in the 3rd century BC, and Galen, a Roman doctor of the 2nd century AD, both made detailed studies of obese people. William Wadd, an early-19th-century London doctor and a lifelong observer of the ‘corpulent’, made this observation after the autopsy of an obese man:
The heart itself was a mass of fat. The omentum [a component of the intestines] was a thick fat apron. The whole of the intestinal canal was imbedded in fat, as if melted tallow had been poured into the cavity of the abdomen; and the diaphragm and the parietes [walls of organs] of the abdomen must have been strained to their very utmost extent, to have sustained the extreme and constant pressure of such a weighty mass. So great was the mechanical obstruction to the functions of an organ essential to life, that the wonder is, not that he should die, but that he should live.38
What is new is that overweight and obesity have been transformed from that of curiosity to that of epidemic. The situation we confront in the 21st century is all the more astounding because modern epidemiologists and health officials declare that the causes of the epidemic of overweight, obesity and their accompanying diseases are either unclear or that the burden of blame should be placed on the gluttonous and sedentary shoulders of the public. But the answers can be discerned through observations of primitive societies plagued by none of the