Page 28 - Winter2009

the land base or the person. That is the definition environments lived free of cancer for literally thousands and thousands of
of civilization. years. Organic agriculture turned the soil into nearly a desert, and brought
Think of the Great Plains—this once fertile cancer to a people who had no cancer. Weston Price got in at the tail end of
region extending from Minnesota to Texas. Ac- this inquiry in the 1930s and documented the health of these people from
cording to early white explorers, the top soil on the standpoint of their teeth. But again whenever we look at the health of
the Great Plains was twelve feet deep. Interest- nonindustrialized peoples we see the same thing: these are people without
ingly, by the 1930s, before chemical agricul- cancer, and also without heart disease. Any anthropologist can tell you
ture, before GMOs, before Monsanto, barely a this bone was from a hunter-gatherer, a pre-grain eating person, and this
hundred years of growing grains—and growing bone, by contrast, from a grain-eating person, because the latter has holes
them organically—turned those twelve feet into in it and looks like it has arthritis and it not as thick and strong. You can
a mere twelve inches, which in the Dust Bowl of see physical degeneration almost every place where people have switched
the 1930s blew away to the Gulf of Mexico. That from indigenous diets to primarily grain-based diets.
is what happened because of organic agriculture.
For those of us who say the solution is to simply HUNTER-GATHERER DIET
to go back to organic agriculture, remember that So the next step is to discover what these healthy people ate. As you
the Tigris and Euphrates Delta became the desert know, Weston Price found healthy isolated peoples who were eating small
of Iraq solely through organic agriculture, and amounts grains, usually prepared through a fermentation process. But
maybe some over-grazing. the basic diet of these people was about 65 percent animal foods with a
But the point is that the hunter-gatherer definite predominance of fats over protein. It was not a low-protein diet
indigenous populations that were dependent but a diet that included adequate protein, and then about thirty-five percent
upon animals feeding on perennial grass-based fermented grains, low-starch seeds, nuts and vegetables and perhaps a

RUNNING SHOES, MONKEYS AND CANCER

I sometimes say that having access to the Weston Price philosophy is a bit like taking a test and knowing the answer
beforehand. When you wonder how to proceed with any subset of human endeavor, you can look backward to find
(or remember) the right answer. Along with this, I’m sure you’ve heard about the “hundredth-monkey” effect. This phe-
nomenon refers to the instantaneous, paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once
a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability. When the hundredth monkey
learned to wash sweet potatoes, then every monkey in the world was supposedly washing sweet potatoes as well via this
process.
There are certain things that bubble up out of the culture at certain times. The thing that is bubbling up right now,
for the obvious reason that we are poisoning and killing ourselves environmentally and in a lot of other ways, is this big
question of how we should live. This question affects even very small, specific matters in our lives.
I read a book recently called Born to Run. The theory of this book is that human beings evolved running and walking
barefoot. As soon as you run and walk with shoes on you will have injuries to your legs and back. In fact they point out
a study from the American College of Orthopedic Medicine that seventy percent of all runners have a significant injury
within a year, and the number one thing that correlates with the likelihood of having an injury is the price of your run-
ning shoes. The higher the price of your shoes the more likely you are to injure yourself. Because the foot craves to find
a hard place to impact the ground, and the more expensive running shoes have more cushion in the heel and now even
springs, you really have to grind your leg in order to find that hard place. That puts stress on your ankle and knee and
then hip and then back. We even know the physiological mechanism of how that works. But as I said, you already know
the answer to the question of what to put on your feet, because the healthiest people, the ones who didn’t have leg and
back problems were these “uncivilized” people who walked and ran barefoot all the time. You already knew the answer
to that conundrum; we just had to fill in the science.
This thinking process can be applied to shoes; it can also be applied to electromagnetic fields, to cell phones. If you
look at the life of these “uncivilized” people, they didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t have electromagnetic fields. If you
ask me when to go to bed at night, ask instead when did they do it? They went to bed when it got dark and woke up
when it got light. If you have a serious illness like cancer and you know these people never had cancer, then you might
want to consider emulating their lifestyle strategy not only in their diet but in every possible way: walk barefoot on the
beach; when you wear shoes, wear shoes with flat soles; throw away your cell phone; live as far away from a cell tower as
you can; go to bed when the sun goes down and don’t sleep near any electric appliances like alarm clocks, and certainly
not under an electric blanket.
26 Wise Traditions WINTER 2009