The Eskimos and many Indian tribes put a very high value on fish eggs.
The therapeutic value of foods rich in the X Factor was recognized during the years before the Second World War. Price found that the action of “high vitamin” Spring and Fall butter was nothing short of magical, especially when small doses of cod liver oil were also part of the diet. He used the combination of high vitamin butter and cod liver oil with great success to treat osteoporosis, tooth decay, arthritis, rickets and failure to thrive in children.
Other researchers used such foods very successfully for the treatment of respiratory diseases such as TB, asthma, allergies and emphysema. One of these was Francis Pottenger whose sanatorium in Monrovia, California served liberal amounts of liver, butter, cream and eggs to convalescing patients. He also gave supplements of adrenal cortex to treat exhaustion.
Dr. Price consistently found that healthy “primitives”, whose diets contained adequate nutrients from animal protein and fat, had a cheerful, positive attitude to life. He noted that most prison and asylum inmates have facial deformities indicative of pre-natal nutritional deficiencies.
Like Price, Pottenger was also a researcher. He decided to perform adrenalectomy on cats and then fed them the adrenal cortex extract he prepared for his patients in order to test its effectiveness. Unfortunately most of the cats died during the operation. He conceived of an experiment in which one group of cats received only raw milk and raw meat, while other groups received part of the diet as pasteurized milk or cooked meat.
He found that only those cats whose diet was totally raw survived the adrenalectomy and as his research progressed, he noticed that only the all-raw group continued in good health generation after generation–they had excellent bone structure, freedom from parasites and vermin, easy pregnancies and gentle dispositions. All of the groups whose diet was partially cooked developed “facial deformities” of the exact same kind that Price observed in human groups on the “displacing foods of modern commerce”–narrowed faces, crowded jaws, frail bones and weakened ligaments. They were plagued with parasites, developed all manner of diseases and had difficult pregnancies. Female cats became aggressive while the males became docile. After just three generations, young animals died before reaching adulthood and reproduction ceased.
The results of Pottenger’s cat experiments are often misinterpreted. They do not mean that humans should eat only raw foods–humans are not cats. Part of the diet was cooked in all the healthy groups Price studied. (Milk products, however, were almost always consumed raw.)
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