excerpts from the 1939 book by Weston Price, DDS
It is most remarkable and should be one of the most challenging facts that can come to our modern civilization that such primitive races as the Aborigines of Australia have reproduced for generation after generation through many centuries — no one knows for how many thousands of years — without the development of a conspicuous number of irregularities of the dental arches. Yet, in the next generation after these people adopt the foods of the white man, a large percentage of the children developed irregularities of the dental arches with conspicuous facial deformities. The deformity patterns are similar to those seen in white civilizations…
It is doubtful if many places in the world can demonstrate so great a contrast in physical development and perfection of body as that which exists between the primitive Aborigines of Australia, who have been the sole arbiters of their fate, and those Aborigines who have been under the influence of the white man. The white man has deprived them of their original habitats and is now feeding them in reservations while using them as laborers in modern industrial pursuits.
I have seldom, if ever, found whites suffering so tragically from evidence of physical degeneration, as expressed in tooth decay and change in facial form, as are the whites of eastern Australia. This has occurred on the very best of the land that these primitives formerly occupied and becomes at once a monument to the wisdom of the primitive Aborigines and a signboard of warning to the modern civilization that has supplanted them…
Those individuals who had adopted the foods of the white man suffered extremely from tooth decay as the whites did. Where they had no opportunity to get native food to combine with the white man’s food their condition was desperate and extreme… It is quite impossible to imagine the suffering that these people were compelled to endure due to abscessing teeth resulting from rampant tooth decay. As we had found in some of the modernized islands of the Pacific, we discovered that here, too, discouragement and a longing for death had taken the place of a joy in living in many. Few souls in the world have experienced this discouragement and this longing to a greater degree…
It should be a matter not only of concern but deep alarm that human beings can degenerate physically so rapidly by the use of a certain type of nutrition, particularly the dietary products used so generally by modern civilization…
Tooth decay is not only unnecessary, but an indication of our divergence from Nature’s fundamental laws of life and health.