Industrial Nutrition Advice Part 5: Weston Price

Weston Andrew Valleau Price, 1870–1948

Weston Price is a familiar name in more homes today than a generation ago, thanks to the internet and especially the Weston A. Price Foundation and Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. Certainly, Price’s travels to study the anthropology of health and nutrition, and his hands-on work with orphans and schoolchildren deserve much credit. But while his travels and field studies remain his most popular contribution, I rather think it is Price’s clinical treatment of children and mothers in America (of white, black, and native ancestry) that deserve the greatest attention. Price, like May Mellanby, stepped beyond nutritional theory, and helped prove in real people what kind of diet works to achieve good health. His documentations are further testimony that such near-lactovegetarin approaches have incredible utility in persons of all races. His clinical and calculative use of cod liver oil and butter is also noteworthy.

Today, the Weston A. Price Foundation tends to propagate a high meat and egg message, which is simply inconsistent with Price’s own advice. Surely, like McCollum, McKay, and McCarrison, Price was aware of some primitive peoples who appeared in good health and who ate high quantities of meat. But the peculiarities of such a high meat diet were not (and have never been) adequately studied (high content of organ meats, entrails, and bones; and perhaps even additional calcium or other alkaline salts); it is really only a…