I have been reading Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. He felt that rather than look exclusively at the sick and diseased and what could be done to help them, he should look at the healthy and what made them that way. He studied isolated people who were just starting to be affected by the world commercial civilization.
This book is supremely depressing on one hand yet gives hope on the other. Depressing, in that he chronicles the "degeneration" of the native people as they stray from their native diets and lifestyles and adopt that easier commercial diet and lifestyle which causes physical degeneration and disease because of its deficiencies. The misery caused by dental disease alone is shocking. Hopeful, in that he shows that isolated people without much modern medical care and living on simple diets can thrive and be extremely healthy, having high resistance to many diseases and apparently few, if any, degenerative diseases. On reading the Silver List postings, one is struck by the multitude of postings by sick people and the often bizarre and extreme symptoms and illnesses that they have. Considering this, one wonders if one is making a mistake in the approach. Condemning modern medicine as allopathic, ie treating only symptoms, yet at the same time, we adopt the same paradigm, searching for a silver bullet, a special substance to cure us. Occasionally, we hear from someone such as John Rigby, like 'a voice crying out in the wilderness,' exhorting us to make diet and lifestyle changes that would affect the cause of disease and immunity rather than treating its symptoms. While I do not agree completely with John's insistence on vegetarianism (which, in my view, is philosophically rather than factually based, and is not born out by Weston Price's research) this approach does seems to be actually curative of disease. That is, health is mostly based on proper nutrition - and we are not really eating the right stuff. Along with that is the problem of eating things which are not really good for us but taste so good, such as refined and processed flour, sugars, and oils; literally 'junk' foods. As one who has had this diet to a certain extent, and also displays some of the "degeneration" he identifies with respect to dental arch, crowded and decayed teeth (albeit with fillings and crowns), and a not particularly robust constitution, the start of some degenerative disease such as (mild) arthritis etc, and a lover of sweet things, refined foods, alcohol, stimulants, etc this is a problem* -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver List archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] OT Archive: http://escribe.com/health/silverofftopiclist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
