What Weston Price Got Right (And Wrong)
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Weston Price: What Stood The Test of Time?
This is Dr. Weston Price, a dentist. You may guess from the photo, or perhaps already knew, his work is not new in 2023. We usually feature current health experts here, but we’re taking a day to do a blast from the past, because his ideas endure today, and inform a lot of people’s health views. So, he’s a good one to at least know about.
What was his deal?
Dr. Price (1870–1948) wanted to study focal infection theory—the idea that repairing root canals allowed bacterial infections that caused everything from heart disease to arthritis. His solution was that the teeth should be extracted instead.
This theory was popular in the 1920s, was challenged in the 1930s, ignored in the 1940s (the world was a bit busy), and by broad medical consensus anyway, rejected in the 1950s. But, while it was being challenged in the 1930s, Dr. Price decided to find more evidence for its support.
The result was his famous world tour of peoples living traditional lifestyles without the influence of “modern” diet. His findings, and the conclusions he drew from them, extended to far more than just dental health.
What did he find?
Dr. Price found that people living traditional lifestyles, with their traditional diets based on locally-sourced foods, had much better overall health. Of course, he was a dentist and not a general practitioner, so aside from examining their teeth, he largely relied on self-reported diagnoses of illness, or lack thereof.
In short: he found that people in places without modern medical institutions had fewer diagnoses of disease. From this, he concluded that incidence of disease was much lower.
There was also an unexamined element of survivorship bias—an undiagnosed disease is more likely to be fatal, and he questioned only living people, which skewed the stats rather. Nor did he examine infant mortality rate nor adult life expectancy, both of which were not great.
Was it all useless, then?
Actually no! He did hit upon some observations that have stood the test of time:
- He correctly concluded that modern diets with sugar and white flour were ruinous to the health.
- He correctly concluded that locally-sourced food, and grass-fed in the case of pastoral farming, tended to have much more nutritional value than the mass-produced results of intensive farming.
- He correctly concluded that many modern preservation methods robbed foods of their nutrients.
- He correctly concluded that many grains and seeds are more nutritions when fermented/soaked/sprouted.
About that “locally-sourced food”: the reason locally-sourced food tends to be more nutritious is that it has required less in the way of preservation for a long trip around the world, and will also tend to be fresher.
On the other hand, this does mean a lot of the foods that Dr. Price recommends are very much subject to availability. It may well be true that the Inuit people do not eat a lot of fruit and veg (which mostly do not grow there), but if you live in Nevada, maybe locally-sourced whale fat is just as difficult to find.
One person’s “this fatty organ meat contains the vitamin C we need” may be another person’s “that’s great; I have an apple tree in my garden though”.
Want to learn more?
Dr. Price’s most influential work is his magnum opus, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”. It’s a fascinating book in its historical context, but do be warned, it was written by a rich white man in 1939 and the writing is as racist as you might expect. Even when making favourable comparisons, the tone is very much “and here is what these savages are doing well”.
If you don’t fancy reading all that, here are two other sources about Weston Price’s work and conclusions, presented for balance:
- The Weston A. Price Foundation (Official Website)
- Weston Price’s Appalling Legacy (Science-Based Medicine.org)
Enjoy!
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More Salt, Not Less?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I’m curious about the salt part – learning about LMNT and what they say about us needing more salt than what’s recommended by the government, would you mind looking into that? From a personal experience, I definitely noticed a massive positive difference during my 3-5 day water fasts when I added salt to my water compared to when I just drank water. So I’m curious what the actual range for salt intake is that we should be aiming for.❞
That’s a fascinating question, and we’ll have to tackle it in several parts:
When fasting
3–5 days is a long time to take only water; we’re sure you know most people fast from food for much less time than that. Nevertheless, when fasting, the body needs more water than usual—because of the increase in metabolism due to freeing up bodily resources for cellular maintenance. Water is necessary when replacing cells (most of which are mostly water, by mass), and for ferrying nutrients around the body—as well as escorting unwanted substances out of the body.
Normally, the body’s natural osmoregulatory process handles this, balancing water with salts of various kinds, to maintain homeostasis.
However, it can only do that if it has the requisite parts (e.g. water and salts), and if you’re fasting from food, you’re not replenishing lost salts unless you supplement.
Normally, monitoring our salt intake can be a bit of a guessing game, but when fasting for an entire day, it’s clear how much salt we consumed in our food that day: zero
So, taking the recommended amount of sodium, which varies but is usually in the 1200–1500mg range (low end if over aged 70+; high end if aged under 50), becomes sensible.
More detail: How Much Sodium You Need Per Day
See also, on a related note:
When To Take Electrolytes (And When We Shouldn’t!)
When not fasting
Our readers here are probably not “the average person” (since we have a very health-conscious subscriber-base), but the average person in N. America consumes about 9g of salt per day, which is several multiples of the maximum recommended safe amount.
The WHO recommends no more than 5g per day, and the AHA recommends no more than 2.3g per day, and that we should aim for 1.5g per day (this is, you’ll note, consistent with the previous “1200–1500mg range”).
Read more: Massive efforts needed to reduce salt intake and protect lives
Questionable claims
We can’t speak for LMNT (and indeed, had to look them up to discover they are an electrolytes supplement brand), but we can say that sometimes there are articles about such things as “The doctor who says we should eat more salt, not less”, and that’s usually about Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a doctor of pharmacy, who wrote a book that, because of this question today, we’ve now also reviewed:
Spoiler, our review was not favorable.
The body knows
Our kidneys (unless they are diseased or missing) do a full-time job of getting rid of excess things from our blood, and dumping them into one’s urine.
That includes excess sugar (which is how diabetes was originally diagnosed) and excess salt. In both cases, they can only process so much, but they do their best.
Dr. DiNicolantino recognizes this in his book, but chalks it up to “if we do take too much salt, we’ll just pass it in urine, so no big deal”.
Unfortunately, this assumes that our kidneys have infinite operating capacity, and they’re good, but they’re not that good. They can only filter so much per hour (it’s about 1 liter of fluids). Remember we have about 5 liters of blood, consume 2–3 liters of water per day, and depending on our diet, several more liters of water in food (easy to consume several more liters of water in food if one eats fruit, let alone soups and stews etc), and when things arrive in our body, the body gets to work on them right away, because it doesn’t know how much time it’s going to have to get it done, before the next intake comes.
It is reasonable to believe that if we needed 8–10g of salt per day, as Dr. DiNicolantonio claims, our kidneys would not start dumping once we hit much, much lower levels in our blood (lower even than the daily recommended intake, because not all of the salt in our body is in our blood, obviously).
See also: How Too Much Salt Can Lead To Organ Failure
Lastly, a note about high blood pressure
This is one where the “salt’s not the bad guy” crowd have at least something close to a point, because while salt is indeed still a bad guy (if taken above the recommended amounts, without good medical reason), when it comes to high blood pressure specifically, it’s not the worst bad guy, nor is it even in the top 5:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Thanks for writing in with such an interesting question!
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“Skinny Fat” Explained (& How To Fix It)
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“Skinny fat” is a term you may have seen floating around social media. It describes people who have a low body weight but a high body fat percentage, often resulting in flabby appearance despite being within a weight range considered healthy. Many try dieting and exercising, only to find that neither work.
This video explains what’s going wrong, and how to fix it:
Diet & exercise won’t work if it’s not right
This problem occurs because common weight-loss approaches, such as restrictive dieting and excessive cardio, fail to improve body composition:
- Restrictive dieting reduces both fat and lean mass, keeping the body fat percentage unchanged
- Cardio burns some calories but the underlying metabolic issue hasn’t meaningfully changed, so any loss will be temporary (and most of any immediate loss will be water weight, anyway)
The key to overcoming skinny fat is resistance training. Lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises helps build muscle, which not only lowers body fat percentage (by simple mathematics; add more muscle and the percentages of other things must go down even if the total amount is the same) and improves overall definition, which is something most people consider nice. However, the real value here is that it actually addresses the underlying metabolic issue—because muscle costs calories to maintain, one’s basal metabolic rate will now be faster, even when you’re sleeping.
This then becomes… Not quite a self-sustaining system, because you do have to still eat well and continue to do resistance training, but your body will be doing most of the work for you, and you’ll find it’s a lot easier to maintain a healthy body composition than to get one in the first place, for exactly the metabolic reason we described.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is a different, but adjacent issue (and very important for avoiding metabolic disease risks)
Take care!
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Is Marine Collagen Worth Taking?
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Questions and Answers at 10almonds
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
I wanted to ask if you think marine collagen is decent to take. I’ve heard a lot of bad press about it
We don’t know what you’ve heard, but generally speaking it’s been found to be very beneficial to bones, joints, and skin! We wrote about it quite recently on a “Research Review Monday”:
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Planning Ahead For Better Sleep
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Sleep: 6 Dimensions And 24 Hours!
This is Dr. Lisa Matricciani, a sleep specialist from the University of South Australia, where she teaches in the School of Health Sciences.
What does she want us to know?
Healthy sleep begins before breakfast
The perfect bedtime routine is all well and good, but we need to begin much earlier in the day, Dr. Matricciani advises.
Specifically, moderate to vigorous activity early in the day plays a big part.
Before breakfast is best, but even midday/afternoon exercise is associated with better sleep at night.
Read more: Daytime Physical Activity is Key to Unlocking Better Sleep
Plan your time well to sleep—but watch out!
Dr. Matricciani’s research has also found that while it’s important to plan around getting a good night’s sleep (including planning when this will happen), allocating too much time for sleep results in more restless sleep:
❝Allocating more time to sleep was associated with earlier sleep onsets, later sleep offsets, less efficient and more consistent sleep patterns for both children and adults.❞
Read more: Time use and dimensions of healthy sleep: A cross-sectional study of Australian children and adults
(this was very large study involving 1,168 children and 1.360 adults, mostly women)
What counts as good sleep quality? Is it just efficiency?
It is not! Although that’s one part of it. You may remember our previous main feature:
The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
Dr. Matricciani agrees:
❝Everyone knows that sleep is important. But when we think about sleep, we mainly focus on how many hours of sleep we get, when we should also be looking at our sleep experience as a whole❞
Read more: Trouble sleeping? You could be at risk of type 2 diabetes
That’s not a cheery headline, but here’s her paper about it:
And no, we don’t get a free pass on getting less sleep / less good quality sleep as we get older (alas):
Why You Probably Need More Sleep
So, time to get planning for the best sleep!
Enjoy videos?
Here’s how 7News Australia broke the news of Dr. Matricciani’s more recent work:
Rest well!
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The Cough Doctor
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The Cough Doctor
This is Dr. Peter Small, who worked in epidemiology since the beginning of HIV epidemic. He became a pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology. As such, his work was a guiding beacon for the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis. He’s travelled the world spending years in various institutions studying all manner of respiratory illnesses…. These have ranged from tuberculosis to pneumonia to lung cancer and (back to epidemiology) Covid-19.
He’s now the Chief Medical Officer at…
Hyfe
Hyfe, a medical AI company, was founded in 2020. Its objective: to build acoustic tools for respiratory diagnostics and monitoring.
In other words: it records coughs and collects data about coughing.
❝It’s ironic how much people focus on counting steps while ignoring cough, which is far more consequential. Hyfe is a science-driven company with the technology to make cough count. Particularly now, with increased awareness of cough and the rapid growth of digital health driven by Covid-19, this technology can improve the lives of patients, the care provided by doctors, and the efficiency of health systems.❞
~ Dr. Peter Small, CMO, Hyfe
How does it do it?
Hyfe’s AI monitors the number of times a person coughs and the sound of the cough through any smartphone or other smart device.
This data collected over time provides increasingly more reliable information than a single visit to the doctor! By constantly listening and analyzing, it can detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How big is this “big data” effort?
Hyfe maintains the largest cough dataset in the world. This means it can compare the sound of a patient’s cough with more than 400 million cough-like sounds from 83 countries across all continents.
The human brain doesn’t handle big numbers well. So, just to illustrate: if the average cough is 1 second long, that means it’d take more than 12 years to listen to them all.
Hyfe, meanwhile, can:
- listen to many things simultaneously
- index them all against user and location,
- use its ever-growing neural net to detect and illustrate patterns.
It’s so attentive, that it can learn to distinguish between different people’s coughs in the same household.
❝Companies like Google Health see even basic information such as getting an accurate count of the number of times a person coughs a day as a useful resource, and part of a larger need to collect and chronicle more health information to refine the way doctors diagnose disease and manage treatments in the future.❞
What are the public health implications?
The most obvious application is to note when there’s a spike in coughing, and see how such spikes grow and spread (if they do), to inform of contagion risks.
Another is to cross-reference it with data about local environmental allergens. Knowing how things like pollution and even pollen affect individuals differently could be helpful in identifying (and managing) chronic conditions like asthma.
What are the private health implications?
❝It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better❞
~ Dr. Peter Small
Dr. Small’s colleague Dr. Cai, speaking for Google Health on this project, sees even more utility for diagnostics:
❝When I was in medical school, never ever did they teach us that we could listen to somebody cough and identify whether that person has TB (tuberculosis), COPD, or a tumor. But I keep seeing more and more studies of people coughing into a microphone, and an algorithm can detect whether somebody has TB with 95% specificity and sensitivity, or if someone has pneumonia or an exacerbation of COPD❞
~ Dr. Lawrence Cai
And the privacy implications?
Perhaps you don’t quite fancy the idea of not being able to cough without Google knowing about it. Hyfe’s software is currently opt-in, but…
If you cough near someone else’s Hyfe app, their app will recognize you’re not the app’s user, and start building a profile for you. Of course, that won’t be linked to your name, email address, or other IDs, as it would if you were the app’s user.
Hyfe will ask to connect to your social media, to collect more information about you and your friends.
Whether you’d like to try this or perhaps you’re just curious to learn more about this fascinating project, you can check out:
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Acid Reflux Diet Cookbook – by Dr. Harmony Reynolds
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Notwithstanding the title, this is far more than just a recipe book. Of course, it is common for health-focused recipe books to begin with a preamble about the science that’s going to be applied, but in this case, the science makes up a larger portion of the book than usual, along with practical tips about how to best implement certain things, at home and when out and about.
Dr. Reynolds also gives a lot of information about such things as medications that could be having an effect one way or the other, and even other lifestyle factors such as exercise and so forth, and yes, even stress management. Because for many people, what starts as acid reflux can soon become ulcers, and that’s not good.
The recipes themselves are diverse and fairly simple; they’re written solely with acid reflux in mind and not other health considerations, but they are mostly heathy in the generalized sense too.
The style is straight to the point with zero padding sensationalism, or chit-chat. It can make for a slightly dry read, but let’s face it, nobody is buying this book for its entertainment value.
Bottom line: if you have been troubled by acid reflux, this book will help you to eat your way safely out of it.
Click here to check out the Acid Reflux Diet Cookbook, and enjoy!
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