“Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston A. Price is, to my mind, the greatest book about nutrition ever written. You’ve probably never heard of it, and even if you have, I’d wager you’ve never read it. Which is a real shame.
It’s a shame you’re not the only one who hasn’t read Price’s book. If it had been more widely read at the time of its publication — 1939 — and its essential insights taken up by the mainstream medical establishment, the entire history of nutritional science might be wildly different. Instead of 80 years of declining health marked by an explosion of every kind of chronic disease imaginable, we might have seen a new golden age of health.
Bad bacteria in the mouth can end up in the brain and influence dementia progression.
There would be no need for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to come along and “Make America Healthy Again,” because Americans would all be jacked and glowing and living their best lives, fortified by wholesome diets that provided them with the nutrients that are essential to proper human flourishing.
Weston Price’s thesis was simple: Modern diets — specifically diets made up of food produced in factories — are causing our bodies to degenerate. If that sounds scary, well, it should.
What makes a good face?
Price became a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio, at the turn of the 20th century. As the years rolled by, he began to notice more and more of his patients, especially the children, displaying profound signs of ill health. It wasn’t just that their mouths were starting to fill with cavities. It was that their jaws weren’t developing and aligning properly, the roofs of their mouths weren’t forming right, and their cheeks and nasal passages were narrowing. The entire structure of the face was basically giving way and collapsing.
And with these unpleasant physical changes, which made his patients less attractive, came mental and behavioral changes too, none of them good. Many of the children, in particular, had trouble concentrating and learning.
Price knew these changes had something to do with changes to the foods his patients were eating. Being a scientific man, Price wanted to be sure. So he decided to find control groups to compare his patients with. Together with his wife, Price traveled the globe, from the arctic circle to Australasia, even stopping in the Highlands of Scotland and the Swiss Alps on the way, to look at small-scale societies whose diets had not yet been affected by modern industrial processes.
What Price discovered was that wherever a society continued to eat as their ancestors ate, so long as that meant eating nutrient-dense animal foods — organ meat, fatty cuts, blood, dairy, rendered fat, shellfish and seafood, eggs — then none of the problems Price had been seeing back home in Ohio were visible. Groups who still cleaved to their ancestral diets displayed what Price called “perfect health,” and it extended well beyond their faces: They grew tall and muscular, they were free from disease, they were vigorous and happy.
Price demonstrated something fundamental that scientific researchers are only just beginning to appreciate: That oral health and the development of the face are a powerful index of general health. Chances are, a person with an unhealthy mouth will have an unhealthy body. (A recent study showed bad bacteria in the mouth can end up in the brain and influence dementia progression.)
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The only way out is chew
Another essential insight from Price is the role of food texture in facial development. Price noted that modern diets are much softer than ancestral diets (people in traditional societies also used their mouths in day-to-day tasks like leatherworking).
What this means is that the musculature of the whole face and especially the jaw has less chance to develop because it gets less use. Muscle is muscle and responds in the same way to stimulus, whether we’re talking about the biceps or the masseters of the cheek and jaw. Use it or lose it. The facial muscles remain open to development throughout our lives.
One easy way to reverse the modern atrophy of our faces and to develop a jaw that could kill is to chew gum. Chewing gum also has powerful anti-stress effects, which is never a bad thing in our increasingly aggravating world. And, of course, chewing gum also looks cool.
The problem with most gum today is that it’s made of plastic. Yes, most synthetic forms of chewing gum use a base made of polymers derived from petroleum. You might as well break a piece off your iPhone casing and chew that. Another recent study showed that gum can release as many as 3,000 plastic particles and that chewing around 180 small sticks of gum a year could result in the ingestion of 30,000 microplastic pieces.
Then there are the artificial sweeteners, which are linked to a wide variety of health issues, from gut dysbiosis and diabetes to brain cancer, in the case of aspartame.
Mastic over plastic
Here’s my recommendation. Chew mastic gum instead, just like the ancient Greeks did 2,500 years ago.
Mastic is a resin taken from the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus). Authentic mastic, the very best, only comes from trees on the Greek island of Chios, and there’s no better brand than Greco Gum.
Unlike the bag of mean little shards and dust you’ll get if you buy mastic on eBay, every tin of Greco Gum contains fat, juicy droplets that crunch satisfyingly in your mouth and then become a soft, sucking mass you can really get your teeth into.
Mastic has a very pleasant, fresh taste, a bit like pine, and you can reuse it multiple times.
As well as being entirely natural, mastic gum has potent antibacterial properties. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, recommended mastic to treat digestive problems and colds and to freshen the breath. I chew mastic most days, and my head wouldn’t look out of place buried in the ground on Easter Island. Try it. Build a face fit for stone.
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Maha, Mastic gum, Facial muscles, Health, Lifestyle, Gut health, Mouth health, Weston price, Nutrition and physical degneration, Rfk jr, Provisions
