Book
Price WA. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc; 1939. 527 p.
Why we cite it
A foundational text for ancestral and traditional diet movements. Documents Price’s decade-long ethnographic investigation of isolated populations eating traditional diets versus those who had adopted modernized Western foods, finding consistent patterns of dental and physical degeneration with dietary modernization. The observational methodology and some interpretations reflect its era, but the core observation — that whole-food traditional diets correlated with better health outcomes than processed modern diets — remains influential.
About the author
Weston Andrew Valleau Price, DDS (1870–1948), was a Canadian-born dentist who graduated from the University of Michigan dental college in 1893 and practiced in Cleveland, Ohio. He founded the research institute of the National Dental Association (which became the American Dental Association) and served as chairman of its research section from 1914 to 1928. By 1930 he shifted his focus to nutrition, traveling for over a decade to isolated populations worldwide to study the relationship between traditional diets and health. He died in Santa Monica, California in 1948. The Weston A. Price Foundation was founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon Morell, named posthumously in his honor.
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