What the old diets had in common

In the 1930s a Cleveland dentist named Weston Price closed his practice and spent a decade traveling to the most isolated peoples he could reach: villages in the Swiss Alps, the Outer Hebrides, Inuit communities, Pacific islands, African tribes, Aboriginal Australians. He went to look at their teeth. What he found, and photographed, and published in 1939 as Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, was that people eating their traditional diets had almost no tooth decay and broad, well-formed faces, and that within a generation of switching to white flour, sugar and canned goods, their children had crowded teeth, cavities and narrow jaws.

The traditional diets varied enormously, fish and seal fat in one place, dairy and rye in another, root vegetables and insects in a third. What they shared was that nothing came from a factory, that animal foods were eaten whole, including organs and bones, that much of the food was fermented or aged, and that fat from healthy animals was prized rather than feared.

I'll say the plain thing. The seat here is Price's 1939 book, which is a remarkable piece of observation, and not the foundation that later took his name and campaigns for raw milk and against vaccines, which Price had nothing to do with. The book's lesson is sound and modest: traditional diets, whatever their content, were whole, and the degeneration he saw followed the processed foods, not any particular macronutrient.

For the table chamber, Price is the ancestor of Pollan's seven words. Eat food, by which he'd mean food your great-grandmother in any country would recognize.