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Hehe...sorry. I shouldn't have come in halfway. I did miss the part about raw body organs Primal. Nothin like a raw spleen on whole wheat Posts: 1412 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Steven, the first rule of hatrack is someone will always know more than you on any given subject. Once you realize that, it might be easier for us to have a real discussion about this with you.
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I encourage you to study the issues for yourselves. Or, simply get heart disease and cancer, and die from those diseases. or, you could hang out somewhere in the middle and have crappy health for 40 or 50 years.
I'll be the 1st to admit that strong, dense bones and straight teeth are no protection from smallpox, Ebola, anthrax, etc., or car wrecks, suicide bombers, etc. Tens of millions of Native Americans died from infectious diseases brought from Europe, and they had good bone structure and teeth from good diets.
I'm not going to b.s. around anymore. half the reason I keep talking about this stuff is because of a product Dr. Price came up with called butter oil. he centrifuged extremely high-quality raw butter to get an oil that he used to heal people's cavities. It sounded a little odd to me, but since I have had tooth sensitivity issues for years, I decided to try it. A couple in Nebraska started producing it (noone made it for about 50 years after Dr. Price died) about 5 years ago. I have eaten probably close to a gallon of it over the last 8 months or so, and every time my teeth get sore, I eat 2-3 ounces of butter oil in the morning, and the soreness is gone by the afternoon. Whether or not you think Price was right about organ meats, shellfish, and fish eggs, to me, sore teeth going away in a few hours just from an oil is pretty interesting.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Or, simply get heart disease and cancer, and die from those diseases. or, you could hang out somewhere in the middle and have crappy health for 40 or 50 years.
quote:every time my teeth get sore, I eat 2-3 ounces of butter oil in the morning
You know, it might not just be us with heart disease. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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twinky--you're joking, right? Because I know you didn't just implicate high-quality raw dairy in small doses in heart disease. Bear in mind that plenty of eskimo tribes have, for God only knows how long, survived well into old age on almost nothing but blubber, fish, and meat. Witness also the excellent health of East African tribes that eat almost nothing but meat, milk, and blood.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by steven: Whether or not you think Price was right about organ meats, shellfish, and fish eggs, to me, sore teeth going away in a few hours just from an oil is pretty interesting.
You know, it's funny. Occasionally, I get sore teeth as well, and it usually goes away in a couple of hours or less without me doing anything. I find that pretty (un)interesting.
Posts: 1357 | Registered: Mar 2002
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My teeth were sore daily for years. Since adding butter oil to my diet, they almost never get sore. Butter oil doesn't actually work as fast as virgin coconut oil or fresh coconut grown on rich soil, in my personal experience, but the combination of the two is better than either one alone. Price believed in the combination of cod liver oil and butter oil, but I prefer oysters, shrimp, and dried fish roe to cod liver oil. The cod oil goes rancid easily, and can cause depression and liver and kidney problems if overdosed.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by steven: twinky--you're joking, right? Because I know you didn't just implicate high-quality raw dairy in small doses in heart disease.
I was mostly joking, but the connection between fat, cholesterol, and heart problems is certainly worth keeping in mind when you're talking about multiple ounces of butter on a daily basis.
quote:Bear in mind that plenty of eskimo tribes have, for God only knows how long, survived well into old age on almost nothing but blubber, fish, and meat. Witness also the excellent health of East African tribes that eat almost nothing but meat, milk, and blood.
This is meaningless. They have fundamentally different lifestyles than we do -- "we" being comparatively sedentary North Americans. Unless you (or Dr. Price) can control statistically for this, it's much more difficult to draw conclusions from it than you're suggesting.
If I ate nothing but meat and blubber while maintaining my current lifestyle, I wouldn't expect to live a very healthy life.
Added: It's also worth noting that "well into old age" is relative. You would need to look at the average life expectancy. Collecting such data retroactively (e.g. excavating skeletons and attempting to determine the age of death, then generalizing your findings to the population) is possible, of course, but it needs to be taken with some caveats.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Price found plenty of people in their 60's and beyond who ate plenty of animal products.
I'm only going to say this once--it's not just the food, it's the quality. The difference between grain-fed cows whose livers were 3 days from shutting down due to inappropriate diet and cows who graze all their lives on fresh grass is pretty huge. You can expect there to be similar differences in health and longevity between person A who eats the sick cow and person B, who eats the healthy cow. There's a big difference between muscle meat and organ meat, as well.
Until the 1920's big cats rarely reproduced well in captivity. They either couldn't get pregnant, or their children were too sick to reproduce. Zoos all over the US had to import new lions and tigers all the time.
Then, one day, a scientist traveling in Africa happened to catch a lion taking down its prey. The lion went, as they usually do, for the guts and the liver first. Yummy yummy for the lion. The rest is history, big cats no longer have to be imported to US zoos. They are fed organ meats as a rule, and they reproduce just fine.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Price found plenty of people in their 60's and beyond who ate plenty of animal products.
"Plenty of people" is still relative. What were the average life expectancies of the populations? Did he attempt to estimate them? "Plenty of people" in the Western world live into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Taken alone, that doesn't mean we have long (or longer) lifespans; you have to look at the average in a population.
Aside from that, you didn't really address anything I said, because nothing in your post in any way contradicts anything I wrote. If it was intended as a rebuttal, as it seems to have been from your tone, it doesn't rebut my post.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Originally posted by steven: The rest is history, big cats no longer have to be imported to US zoos. They are fed organ meats as a rule, and they reproduce just fine.
As a rule, actually, they aren't. Here's a website talking about the nutritional needs of large cats in captivity. Regular meat meets most of their needs, but they need added calcium either from suppliments or chewing on bones, and added vitamin A.
At the Minnesota Zoo, the tigers are fed horse meat with vitamins and minerals added.
The San Diego Zoo feeds their lions a ground meat diet made for carnivores, as well as an occasional large bone, thawed rabbit, or sheep carcass.
Couldn't find a single site that mentioned feeding big cats organ meats. Care to back up your statement?
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Edit: Also, reproduction is a very delicate thing. It doesn't just depend on diet, but a ton of other things like age, hormonal balances, viability of the sperm, condition of the uterus, etc. Unless you can prove these things were all accounted for, I don't buy it.
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Dr. Weston Price found his way to Quackwatch, it seems.
quote:a dentist who maintained that sugar causes not only tooth decay but physical, mental, moral, and social decay as well. Price made a whirlwind tour of primitive areas, examined the natives superficially, and jumped to simplistic conclusions. While extolling their health, he ignored their short life expectancy and high rates of infant mortality, endemic diseases, and malnutrition. While praising their diets for not producing cavities, he ignored the fact that malnourished people don't usually get many cavities.
quote:Price also performed poorly designed studies that led him to conclude that teeth treated with root canal therapy leaked bacteria or bacterial toxins into the body, causing arthritis and many other diseases. This "focal infection" theory led to needless extraction of millions of endodontically treated teeth until well-designed studies, conducted during the 1930s, demonstrated that the theory was not valid.
Melvin Page, D.D.S., one of Price's disciples, coined the phrase "balancing body chemistry" and considered tooth decay an "outstanding example of systemic chemical imbalances." Page ran afoul of the Federal Trade Commission by marketing a mineral supplement with false claims that widespread mineral deficiencies were an underlying cause of goiter, heart trouble, tuberculosis, diabetes, anemia, high and low blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, rheumatism, neuritis, arthritis, kidney and bladder trouble, frequent colds, nervousness, constipation, acidosis, pyorrhea, overweight, underweight, cataracts, and cancer. Page also claimed that milk was "unnatural" and was the underlying cause of colds, sinus infections, colitis, and cancer.
The guy really doesn't seem like his 'findings' need to be taken seriously at all. I'll bet I could find more young earth creation scientists than I could find of the holistic dentistry persuasion.
On the subject of American/English health thing, I'm pretty sure that quality of health care factors in, somewhat. For all the ribbing that the brits tend to take, they have better teeth than Americans, on average.
They've universal dental coverage to blame for that.
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I just think it's funny that, in the face of these three simple facts
FACT--Every group Dr. Price studied mentioned shellfish, fish eggs, and organ meats as the best foods for two things, 1. health, and 2. reproduction
FACT--African tribes all over the continent would travel hundreds of miles on foot to trade for shrimp, no other reason, and
FACT--Peruvians and Ecuadorians from the Andes would travel hundreds of miles on foot for dried fish glands from the ocean, for the specific purpose of feeding to women to ensure that their babies would be born healthy
you still don't get it.
$50 is still on the line. What do I have to do, increase the amount? $100? $150? What's it take?
How about this--we ask the great man, Unca Orson himself, to read the book, hear all sides, and decide. What will convince you? Whose opinion will you accept? If not our esteemed old dude, OSC himself, then who or what?
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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While I respect OSC as a writer of fiction, I would not trust him to decide whether the sky is blue. The man grinds enough axes to supply a berserker convention.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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The same standards that all other research purporting to be scientific is held to: peer-reviewed scientific journals. Price's work was measured by that standard and found wanting.
From your posts (and yes, I read your earlier threads when they were current), it seems to me that you've read his book, been convinced in a very epiphany-like manner, and now wilfully ignore all evidence that might contradict any aspect of Price's work.
Aside from that, your three "FACTs," even if they are true exactly as you stated them, are completely meaningless for drawing conclusions about what constitutes a healthy diet. These groups mentioned certain foods as being healthy, and indeed went to great lengths to obtain them. Curiously, members of these groups also had comparatively low life expectancies. Should we infer, then, that shellfish are bad for you? Of course not! That would be completely unscientific. [Added: To make it abundantly clear, those groups didn't have antibiotics, clean drinking water, and numerous other contributors to long lifespans.] Dr. Price's reasoning and your own are flawed in exactly the same way: you're drawing conclusions from perceived correlations (even if the correlations are there at all, which isn't clear) without controlling for other factors.
Rather than us reading Dr. Price's book and doing your work for you, why don't you read some of the 70+ years of research that has come since Price?
Added: I can't speak for others, but I don't need Dr. Price, even if he was right about everything, to tell me that the North American diet is generally not healthy. It probably wasn't healthy at the turn of the 20th century and it certainly isn't healthy now. So there was nothing revolutionary about his work at the time and that is still the case today. Where you diverge from me is when you (and Price) start claiming causal relationships where none have been shown to exist. Price's work certainly didn't show them because Price's work was poor, non-rigorous science that did not stand up to the scrutiny of the scientific community.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:Originally posted by steven: [QB] I just think it's funny that, in the face of these three simple facts
FACT--Every group Dr. Price studied mentioned shellfish, fish eggs, and organ meats as the best foods for two things, 1. health, and 2. reproduction
FACT--African tribes all over the continent would travel hundreds of miles on foot to trade for shrimp, no other reason, and
FACT--Peruvians and Ecuadorians from the Andes would travel hundreds of miles on foot for dried fish glands from the ocean, for the specific purpose of feeding to women to ensure that their babies would be born healthy
you still don't get it.
The missing juncture is the point where a traditional practice is equivalent to a scientifically verifiable health benefit that is superior to what is available now.
Chinese traditional medicinists will use powdered horn ivory and tiger penises as cure-alls for health and sexual vigour. That it is a traditional practice that can be observed will not make the jump from observation to conclusive benefit. For instance, powdered horn ivory and tiger penis actually does nothing for a person's sexual prowess. Alas.
Yet, using your metric, if Dr. Price observes something in a traditional culture (where people have less of a life expectancy than my nation, natch) and makes a spurious conclusion that the practice is equivalent to some miraculous medical cure-all, you need a scientific establishment of the benefit. The 'FACT(s)' presented by you operate on a procedure of:
1. Price saw a culture doing this 2. Price assumed that it was a miracle health cure-all 3. ? 4. Profit!
There's no validation for someone who is using a rational, skeptical process. It's a dangerous leap of faith that you are condemning people for not making with you.
My standard is scientific. What's yours?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: Umm, maybe you didn't see that he capitalized the word 'fact'. Argument over.
I can't fight it! It's true!
FACT-- More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
FACT-- Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
FACT-- In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
FACT-- More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
FACT-- Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.
FACT-- Newborn babies can choke on bread.
Now the Weston A. Price foundation can add bread to its 'dangerous foods' list along with soy.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I don't doubt Americans are less healthy than many other groups, for reasons ranging from a lack of solid, widely available prenatal care to the mentioned automobile use to the refined grains that make up some of the most widely consumed baked goods to the high amounts of aluminum, lead, mercury, and other toxins in a variety of products we consume and tolerate in our local environments.
I think, however, that scapegoating a single factor as the definitive cause of ill health in all Americans is probably misleading at best.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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Or, maybe they just have better things to do with their lives than attempt to pointlessly argue on an internet forum about research that has already been debunked many many times over several decades.
Posts: 1357 | Registered: Mar 2002
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No, they both said they were interested in making $50. I emailed KoM 8 days ago. Still no response. Squid doesn't have an email in his profile. I told him to email me.
No one even reads my posts. That's half the reason I don't bother trying very hard here.
I've seen unbelievable improvements in my health since changing my diet. My hair started going gray at 25. Since going raw, I haven't seen a gray hair on my head. I used to have to exercise to keep my stamina up. Now, my stamina weakens much more slowly over the weeks and months in winter when I can't go hiking. My tendinitis stays under control so long as I watch my diet. Panic attacks are largely gone. I recover more quickly from injuries. And here's my favorite--squatting on the balls of my feet for 15 minutes when I was 23 or 24 and ate a poor diet would cause knee pain that lasted for 3 days. Now I can squat for 45 minutes and not even feel it an hour later. It's all diet. A lot of it happened when I went raw, but raw veganism never healed my teeth like coconut oil, butter oil, fish eggs, and shellfish.
It's not that I don't think you can be a healthy raw vegan, but you need to eat your food really fresh, like chimpanzees do, and the food has to be of excellent quality. Plenty of chimps and other primates eat nothing but fruit, greens, and the occasional insect, and have straight teeth. I tried a similar diet on grocery-store fruit and greens, but slowly, slowly, my teeth got more and more sore over time. Coconut reverses that, but I can't see a good reason to be vegan if your health is better with some animal products.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:No one even reads my posts. That's half the reason I don't bother trying very hard here.
Actually, steven, I think the reverse is true.
quote:I've seen unbelievable improvements in my health since changing my diet. My hair started going gray at 25. Since going raw, I haven't seen a gray hair on my head. I used to have to exercise to keep my stamina up. Now, my stamina weakens much more slowly over the weeks and months in winter when I can't go hiking. My tendinitis stays under control so long as I watch my diet. Panic attacks are largely gone. I recover more quickly from injuries. And here's my favorite--squatting on the balls of my feet for 15 minutes when I was 23 or 24 and ate a poor diet would cause knee pain that lasted for 3 days. Now I can squat for 45 minutes and not even feel it an hour later. It's all diet. A lot of it happened when I went raw, but raw veganism never healed my teeth like coconut oil, butter oil, fish eggs, and shellfish.
I think the people arguing with you are trying to make the following point: you're using nothing but anecdotal evidence to support a theory that is very outdated and are reluctant to look at more recent information. Your conclusions are based exclusively on 80 year old materials and research originating from one person.
quote:It's not that I don't think you can be a healthy raw vegan, but you need to eat your food really fresh, like chimpanzees do, and the food has to be of excellent quality. Plenty of chimps and other primates eat nothing but fruit, greens, and the occasional insect, and have straight teeth. I tried a similar diet on grocery-store fruit and greens, but slowly, slowly, my teeth got more and more sore over time. Coconut reverses that, but I can't see a good reason to be vegan if your health is better with some animal products.
I can't think of a single person who is vegan exclusively for health reasons - the motivation seems to be a mixture of health, politics and morality, in proportions varying on an individual basis.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Destineer, I had a friend who went raw. I'm not absolutely 100% raw these days, but most of the cooked food I eat is either dried or lightly steamed. I most prefer raw goat milk/cheese, coconut and raw coconut oil, dried salmon eggs, raw or steamed shrimp and oysters, and fresh greens. I just can't eat fruit anymore. It makes my teeth too sore.
Erosomniac--ONE study? Ever heard of Dr. Francis Pottenger and his Cats?Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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On the contrary, this thread demonstrates that a number of people do. What you don't seem to do is read the replies, which is what led to my comment that you systematically ignore anything anyone posts that contradicts any aspect of Price's work.
For example, the implied causal relationship between straight teeth and overall health in your most recent post is at the very least unsupported, but you continually make statements like that as though they were indisputable facts. And you're using the word "plenty" again when it doesn't really mean anything. I'll explain what I'm saying. Take these two statements:
(1) Plenty of primates eat foods X and Y. (2) Plenty of primates have straight teeth.
This tells us nothing about whether there is a relationship between 1 and 2 in primates, let alone specifically in humans. And, of course, it doesn't suggest anything about the possibility of a relationship between straight teeth and overall health. This is precisely the problem with Dr. Price's work: he drew conclusions without adequate supporting evidence.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Eh. I'll get around to it. I've got these dashed Norwegian taxes to do first. And really, my thesis and my girlfriend are more interesting than some doctor from the thirties. You are fairly low on my list of priorities.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:FACT--Every group Dr. Price studied mentioned shellfish, fish eggs, and organ meats as the best foods for two things, 1. health, and 2. reproduction
Since I do not wish to reproduce, I am going to deep fry everything from now on. Including vegetables.
quote:FACT--Every group Dr. Price studied mentioned shellfish, fish eggs, and organ meats as the best foods for two things, 1. health, and 2. reproduction
Since I do not wish to reproduce, I am going to deep fry everything from now on. Including vegetables.
-pH
You haven't lived until you've had deep fried cotton candy.
Alternately, you can dip your favorite candy bar in batter and then deep fry THAT.
(What's sad is that while I'm joking about either of these things sounding appetizing to me, the company I work for sells machines that do BOTH. Ho. Ly. Crap.)
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Price, Pottenger, Price, Pottenger, Price, Pottenger. Can none of you hold both of those studies in your head simultaneously? I'm probably going back to Costa Rica pretty soon. How about I take 5-10 Hatrackers along to see the strangely straight-toothed Indians in the jungle who have strangely wide ribcages?
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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So, rather than address my points, you prefer to move the goalposts and make another unsupported assertion?
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I kind of wish my skeleton in general were narrower...I suppose I should've eaten more processed food as a child...
I wonder if Planned Parenthood can use this deep-frying method as a new way to encourage young people to use birth control. After all, everything that's deep-fried is tasty.
quote: I wonder if Planned Parenthood can use this deep-frying method as a new way to encourage young people to use birth control. After all, everything that's deep-fried is tasty.
I would definitely have no problem with the voluntary sterilization of the stupid.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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"Just don't expect me to admit that straight teeth and general health are directly correlated."
Do you really think that's what Price asserted? No. He found, clearly, that a narrower skeleton correlated to a large, but not absolute, degree, with poorer health. You can have a narrow skeleton and straight teeth.
What I find so interesting is that Native Europeans have the widest/shallowest skeletions, and Native Africans the narrowest/deepest, given the same diet. I don't think we have to look far to find which group has naturally better health.
Crooked teeth are an indirect result of the narrowing of the skull. They are not a direct effect.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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Wait, so are you saying that consuming raw food has changed the size and shape of your skeleton?
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Eh. I'll get around to it. I've got these dashed Norwegian taxes to do first. And really, my thesis and my girlfriend are more interesting than some doctor from the thirties. You are fairly low on my list of priorities.
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Destineer--Price found a number of tribes that were very careful about what was to be fed to women who were planning to get pregnant. He also found that children born to women over 40 who ate their traditional diets during pregnancy did not have a higher risk of birth defects than children born to younger women eating the same diet. He knew, even back then, however, that children born to women over ages 35-40 have a higher rish of birth defects in our society.
He concluded from all this that the mother's diet before, during, and after a baby's birth (including breastfeeding time) was critical in determining the child's skeletal formation, as well as overall health.
I never said, no matter what anyone thinks, that "straight teeth=good health". It is possible to have a very narrow skull and straight teeth. However, it's relatively less likely. Generally speaking, either the lower or upper jaw, or both, will be too small to easily accomodate all the teeth. Underdevelopment of either the upper or lower jaw is nearly always one of the results of poor dietary practices.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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