Nasty, Brutish & Short

Sally Fallon

1st July, 2003

In the 1930s US dentist Weston Price travelled the world to study the diets of ‘primitive’ peoples. He found a startling lack of disease and proof that a system of environmentally-friendly local food production is the best way to ensure human health.

In the US, one person in three suffers from allergies, one in 10 will have ulcers and one in five is mentally ill. Every year a quarter of a million infants are born with a birth defect who then undergo expensive surgery or are hidden away in institutions. Other degenerative diseases – arthritis, multiple sclerosis, digestive disorders, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and chronic fatigue – afflict a significant majority of US citizens. And learning disabilities such as dyslexia and hyperactivity make life miserable for 7 million young people and their parents.

These diseases were extremely rare only a generation or two ago. Today, chronic illness afflicts nearly half of all Americans and causes three out of four deaths in the US. Most tragically, these diseases, formerly experienced only by the very old, now strike children and those in the prime of life. We have almost forgotten that our natural state is one of balance, wholeness and vitality.

Things were not so bad in the 1930s, but the situation was already then serious enough to alarm one dentist in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr Weston Price was reluctant to accept the conditions exhibited by his patients as normal. Rarely...

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