1 — North American Indians | Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number one.  Quote: "The rigorous winters reach 70 degrees below zero. This precludes the possibility of maintaining dairy animals, or growing seed, cereals or fruits. The diet of these Indians is almost entirely limited to the wild animals of the chase. This made a study of them exceedingly important. The wisdom of these people regarding Nature's laws, and their skill in adapting themselves to the rigorous climate, and very limited variety of foods, and these often very hard to obtain, have developed a skill in the art of living comfortably with rugged Nature that has been approached by few other tribes in the world. The sense of honour among these tribes is so strong that practically all cabins, temporarily unoccupied due to the absence of the Indians on their hunting trip, were entirely unprotected by locks, and the valuables belonging to the Indians were left in plain sight. The people were remarkably hospitable, and where they had not been taken advantage of, were very kind. Many of the women had never seen a white woman until they saw Mrs. Price. Their knowledge of woodcraft as expressed in skill and building their cabins so that they would be kept comfortably warm and protected from the sub-zero weather was remarkable. Their planning ahead for storing provisions and firewood strongly emphasised their community spirit. When an Indian and his family moved to a campsite on a lake or river, they always girdled a few more trees than they would use for firewood, so that there would be a plentiful supply of dry standing timber for future visitors to the camp. They lived in a country in which grizzly bears were common. Their pelts were highly prized, and they captured many of them with baited pitfalls. Their knowledge of the use of different organs and tissues of the animals for providing a defence against certain of the affections of the body, which we speak of as degenerative diseases, was surprising. When I asked an old indian, through an interpreter, why the Indians did not get scurvy. He replied promptly, that that was a white man's disease. I asked whether it was possible for the Indians to get scurvy. He replied that it was, but said that the Indians know how to prevent it, and the white man does not. When asked why he did not tell the white man how, his reply was that the white man knew too much to ask the Indian anything. I then asked him if he would tell me. He said he would if the chief said he might. He went to see the chief and returned in about an hour, saying that the chief said he could tell me because I was a friend of the Indians, and had come to tell the Indians not to eat the food in the white man's store. He took me by the hand and led me to a log where we both sat down. He then described how, when the Indian kills a moose, he opens it up and at the back of the moose just above the kidney, there are what he described as two small balls and the fat. These he said, the Indian would take and cut up into as many pieces as they were little and big Indians in the family, and each one would eat his piece. They would eat also the walls of the second stomach. By eating these parts of the animal, the Indians would keep free from scurvy, which is due to the lack of vitamin C. The Indians were getting vitamin C, from the adrenal glands and organs. Modern science has very recently discovered that the adrenal glands are the richest sources of vitamin C in all animal or plant tissues. Wherever the Indians were living on their native diet, chiefly moose and caribou meat, their physical development was superb. At the point of modernization, including the use of foods of modern commerce, the health problem of the Indian is very different. These modernised children are dying of tuberculosis, which seldom kills the primitives." And that is an excerpt from a book entitled, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and their Effects, by Mr. Weston A Price. Now, this book fascinates me for a lot of reasons. Mostly in a nutritional sense. That is the main topic. And it seems like these isolated Indians just ate meat, fish, vegetables, grains, even fruit. Maybe they got their hands on some berries in the summer, but who really knows. But yeah, effectively for most of the year. They had three options: moose, caribou, or grizzly bear. Now, in following his diet and lifestyle, were told that they kept remarkably healthy and had superb physiques. And were immune to certain kinds of infectious disease, like tuberculosis. They didn't seem to suffer from any kind of chronic disease either. Until that is, they began to rely on the foods in the white man's store. At point of contact with modern civilization, and the foods of modern commerce, the health of the Native American Indian, and their ancient populations, rapidly declined. So how can we make sense of this? We developed nations are supposed to be on the cutting edge of things like science and medicine, and obviously nutrition is a big part of that. And very little of this information would seem to fit our paradigm. Think about the foods the Indians ate almost exclusively. Moose, caribou, grizzly bear–it's meat, it's red meat. Contrast that with the mainstream thoughts of today, where most people think meat causes cancer, that saturated fats are going to clog your arteries. Oh, and did you know you're also now ruining the planet? These ideas, these stories we've been telling ourselves about nutrition, and nowadays, even sustainability and ethics, seem to fly in the face of that which indigenous cultures have practised since antiquity. The North American Indians were apparently so robust and healthy, that they could live comfortably in extremely harsh conditions. I don't know about you, but negative 50 degrees celsius seems pretty damn cold. They also built their own houses with their own bare hands. We can safely assume they didn't have power tools. They looked after their own. They were socially- organised. And they didn't steal from each other. Oh, yeah, and they also hunted grizzly bears without modern weapons. So it seems pretty clear that this group of humans knew how to thrive despite the harsh conditions. And if they hadn't been able to they wouldn't have been there. They'd have died out or moved on. But they were there. And apparently they did have all they needed. So maybe we might learn something from them. After all, it seems like they also knew all the medical condition scurvy, and how to cure it before the white man in the area did. They didn't know that something called vitamin C prevented scurvy. But this is just the Western name we invented to describe it. They sure did know what foods prevented it and where to get them from. And funnily enough, they weren't fruits or vegetables. Remember, they didn't have any of those. No, the foods that the Indians ate in order to prevent scurvy were organ meats...animal foods, which, as we're told, are some of the richest sources in all animal or plant tissues. Now I know this might seem a bit strange and out of place. It's odd when new information clashes with the things we think we know. I myself grew up thinking that we needed absolutely needed to eat fruits and vegetables. In order to get important nutrients, uniquely important nutrients like vitamin C, and fibre, and these kinds of things. But the thing I've learned since going down this nutrition rabbit hole is that the mainstream story is not the whole story. It's not even close. Our modern nutrition guidelines are in conflict with human history at large. They don't account for observations like that of the Native American Indian, and their ancestral diets. These kinds of observations, like finding healthy people who eat a diet high in animal foods, don't fit the modern paradigm so the information is largely ignored, or written off as being 'unscientific' or 'not supported by the evidence base' or something like that. We also like to undermine the intelligence of these groups by labelling indigenous has primitive, and by calling them savages. Anyone who questions the mainstream narrative risks, their reputation, being ridiculed by their peers, and then conveniently ostracised. But the thing is, this isn't science. That's the antithesis of science. It's group-think. And it's sad to see how it dominates modern day conversations around health and nutrition. There should be no room for this black and white, binary viewpoint. Remember that the white man's mistake was to think that he knew too much to ask the Indian anything. And this was not just true in North America. By the way, this book was written back in the 1930s is quite old, but also seemingly ahead of its time. In my view, it's one of the best books on nutrition that was ever written. And that's why I'm here to share it. Now, at this point, you might jump in and say, hang on, this is only one group in one place in the world. It's anecdotal. It's observational. How is this relevant to the rest of us? Well, that's the thing. This book doesn't just cover one North American Indian tribe. It tells the story of people from all over the world. Mr. Weston A price, who came from a small town in Ontario, Canada, travelled the world for years back in the 1930s, when travel was not so easy, by the way, searching for groups of humans, healthy humans, that he could study. Because all the people that he was surrounded by, in western civilization, were not that healthy. He went looking for humans who had not been modernised, who weren't eating the foods of modern commerce. Humans who were still living as their ancestors had done for hundreds or thousands of years before. He was looking for control groups. And that's what makes this book so damn interesting. As we'll see Dr. Price found what he was looking for. And if you follow along with me, we'll visit the Swiss from the heart of the Alps in Europe, the Gaelics from the Hebrides, which are islands off the coast of Scotland. The Eskimo, also called the Inuit, from North America, African peoples from the Massai in modern-day Tanzania, all the way up to the Arab cultures in the Middle East. Melanesians, Torres Strait Islanders, Australian Aborigines. The Polynesians: Samoans, Tongans, Taihitans, the New Zealand Maori, and the Peruvian Indians of South America, the people of the Andes, descendants of the Inca. Now, despite their geographical differences, Dr. Price found a clear pattern, a common thread that linked all of these people together. Now, this book doesn't have all the answers when it comes to nutrition. But if you think of health and well being a nutrition as I do–as one big puzzle–this book is so important because it's like finding one of the corner pieces. And I am excited to share some more of these stories with you. So that's it for me today. I hope you found this insightful, please let me know. And I look forward to speaking to you in the next one. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai