Healthiest Cultures in the World - In the Early 1900's

The Healthiest People in the World

The book that changed how I see God, food, and the way I feed my family — and the old skills I’ve loved learning ever since.

Every now and then a book comes along that quietly rearranges the way you see everything. For me, that book was Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price. It is, without exaggeration, the foundation I built my family’s whole way of eating on. Someone once asked me how we eat the way we do and where it started — so let me tell you.

A dentist who went looking for healthy teeth

In the 1930s, Dr. Price was a dentist watching tooth decay and crowded, crooked teeth take over his patients’ mouths, and he wanted to know WHY. So he did something remarkable: he closed up his questions in the lab and went out into the world. He traveled to isolated communities on nearly every continent — Swiss mountain villages, Gaelic islanders, Alaskan and Canadian native peoples, Pacific Islanders, African tribes, Aboriginal Australians — groups that were still eating the traditional foods of their ancestors, untouched by the modern grocery store.

What he found astonished him. Among people eating their native diets, he documented remarkably low rates of tooth decay — in some groups only a tiny fraction of teeth showed any cavities at all — along with broad, well-formed faces, straight teeth with plenty of room for wisdom teeth, and sturdy, resilient health that lasted into old age. And this was without a single dentist in sight. It started as a study about cavities and became something much bigger: a record of what happens to human health when we eat the way our bodies were designed to be fed.

What happened when the “foods of modern commerce” arrived

Here is the part that has never left me. Price didn’t just study the healthy groups — he was able to watch, sometimes within a single family, what happened when white flour, sugar, and canned, factory-made foods (he called them the “displacing foods of modern commerce”) arrived and pushed out the traditional diet.

The change showed up FAST, often in a single generation. The children born after the diet shifted tended to have narrower faces, crowded and crooked teeth, less-developed jaws and airways, and far more decay — along with a rise in the physical and even mental health struggles their parents hadn’t known. To see it laid out generation by generation, in his own photographs, is sobering. It became a powerful motivator for me: I want to feed my children and grandchildren in a way that helps them grow up strong, healthy, and well — whole in body, the way those traditional families were.

It wasn’t God who caused the suffering I’d seen. It was what man had done to food — changing it from what it was created to be.

The mission that made me ask “why?”

I have to tell you why this book struck me so deeply. From 1996 to 1998 I served a mission in Chile. In the areas where I served, I met so many people with heartbreaking teeth. I remember one woman in particular — truly beautiful — but when she laughed, her smile was nearly empty, and the few teeth she had left were black with only small spots of white.

For a long time it troubled me. I couldn’t understand why God would let people suffer simply because they didn’t have access to modern dentists and doctors. Reading Price’s work gave me an answer that changed the way I saw my Heavenly Father. The suffering wasn’t His design at all. So much of it traced back to what had been done to the food — how far it had drifted from what God made and intended it to be. That realization didn’t make me fearful. It made me want to be a wise steward of what lands on my family’s table.

So how DID they eat?

The diets Price studied varied enormously depending on what was available — fish here, wild game there, dairy in one place, roots and grains in another. But underneath the variety, there were beautiful common threads:

Clean, real animal foods. Whether it was fish, fowl, or four-legged animals, the meat came from creatures living as they were meant to — no contamination, no factory feed. And nearly every culture treasured the organ meats, especially liver, as the most nourishing part. (Turns out they were right — liver is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on earth.)

The mysterious “X Factor.” Price found a fat-soluble nutrient concentrated in the butter and fat of animals grazing on rapidly growing green grass. He couldn’t identify it, so he simply called it “Activator X.” He linked it to strong teeth, robust facial development, and protection from disease. Here’s the exciting update the old version of this post didn’t have: in 2007, researchers working with the Weston A. Price Foundation finally solved the mystery. Activator X is now recognized as vitamin K2 — a fat-soluble vitamin that helps direct calcium to the bones and teeth where it belongs, working hand-in-hand with vitamins A and D. It’s found in grass-fed butter and dairy, egg yolks, organ meats, and fermented foods. Which is exactly why grass-fed and pasture-raised matters so much to me.

Fruits, vegetables, and (near the sea) mineral-rich sea greens — grown or gathered close to home and eaten in their season.

A word about the raw milk

You can buy vitamin K2 as a supplement now, but I don’t — I get mine the old-fashioned way. I DO buy raw milk, from a small dairy I know and trust, where the animals are on pasture. It matters to me that cattle eat what they were built to eat: grass. Cattle are ruminants, and grain-heavy feedlot diets can actually throw off their digestion (there’s a real condition called ruminal acidosis) — one more reason I want my dairy coming from healthy, grass-fed animals.

A stewardship note, not a fear note. I love raw milk, and I also want to be honest with you: raw milk isn’t automatically safe just because it’s traditional. Because it isn’t pasteurized, it can carry bacteria like Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter, and the risk is highest for pregnant women, babies and young children, older folks, and anyone with a weakened immune system. The source is EVERYTHING — know your farmer, know their standards, know how the milk is handled and stored. Laws around raw milk also vary a lot from state to state. Do your homework, and make the call that’s right for your own family.

The old skills: soaking, sprouting, and fermenting

Something else those cultures had in common: they didn’t just eat whole foods, they PREPARED them wisely. They rarely ate grains without soaking or sprouting them first. There’s real wisdom in that — soaking, sprouting, and sourdough-style fermenting help break down phytic acid, the compound in grains and seeds that can bind up minerals like calcium, iron, and zinc and keep your body from absorbing them. Our great-grandmothers didn’t know the chemistry; they just knew it worked.

And to carry food through the winter, they fermented. Learning to ferment has been one of the pure joys of this whole journey for me. Instead of bottling with high heat — which kills the natural enzymes — fermentation preserves food while actually multiplying the good bacteria and enzymes that help your gut. I’ve learned to make kimchi, gingered carrots, sauerkraut, and garlic put up with nothing but sea salt and water. My family has had so much fun brewing fermented drinks like beet kvass and kombucha. It really isn’t hard once you start — it just took a little while to trade my old way of cooking for these older, wiser ways.

Learning to cook the way they did

The book that taught me HOW is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, the current president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Honestly, it feels like two books in one — recipes on one side of the page, and columns packed with research on the other. I could sit and read those side columns for hours and soak up a lifetime of information. Her work is complex, careful, and beautifully detailed.

I’ll confess something a little embarrassing: I had NO idea how to make yogurt, buttermilk, or cheese from milk. I remembered tossing a jar of cream back and forth to a friend as a country girl — I knew somebody’s mom wanted butter — but I’d never made it myself. So it was a THRILLING day when we scooped fresh butter out of our Vitamix (set on the lowest speed) and pressed it into a little French butter crock that keeps it good on the counter — no refrigerator needed. What?! I couldn’t believe it.

Then came the day I made curd cheese for my kids, and I felt SO empowered — it was delicious, and they gobbled it up. Learning to separate the curds from the whey, using that whey to gently ferment breads and break down the grains… each little skill made me feel more capable and more connected to the way people have fed their families for thousands of years.

Kimchi and eggs (and $70 in savings)

Those traditional cultures often ate their fermented foods right alongside their meat, which helps the body break down and digest the proteins. There’s a wonderful Hawaiian breakfast that pairs kimchi with eggs, and I’m telling you — when I eat my eggs with a little kimchi, I don’t get that heavy, weighed-down feeling afterward. It’s lovely on salads and sandwiches too.

And can we talk about the cost? A quart of kimchi at the store runs around $20. Following Sally Fallon’s recipe, I can make roughly $80 worth for under $10 — and it’s EASY, and it tastes so much better than anything in a jar.

The two books I’d put in everyone’s hands

If any of this stirs something in you, these are the two I’d start with — the true diamonds of my bookshelf:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon — your hands-on kitchen companion.

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston A. Price — the research that started it all. 

There’s a lovely summary book called Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine that I’ve gifted to friends, but nothing matches sitting with Price’s own words and photographs. I’d also encourage you to sign up for the Weston A. Price Foundation newsletter — little jewels of information land in your inbox regularly.

A gentle word on the science. Price’s work is nearly a century old, and his method was careful observation, not the controlled studies we’d use today — so I hold the big picture with conviction and the fine details a little loosely. And happily, the big picture has held up well: whole, minimally processed food supports better health than refined and factory-made food; grass-fed animal fats really do carry vitamin K2; and how we prepare grains genuinely affects the minerals we absorb. Take the wisdom, keep asking good questions, and always partner with your own trusted health provider for the specifics of your family’s needs.

This post began as an answer to a reader who simply asked, “How do you eat?” I’m so glad you asked. I hope, more than anything, that it points you toward eating food closer to the way God made it — not out of fear, but out of gratitude and good stewardship for the bodies He gave us.

“All wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature, and use of man… every fruit in the season thereof; all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving.” - Doctrine & Covenants 89:10–11

With much love,

Steffanie

A note on sources: Dr. Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939); Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions. The identification of Price’s “Activator X” as vitamin K2 (MK-4) was published by the Weston A. Price Foundation (Chris Masterjohn, 2007). Raw-milk safety guidance reflects long-standing CDC/FDA public-health information; state laws vary. K2’s role in directing calcium to bones and teeth, and the effect of soaking/sprouting/fermenting on phytic acid and mineral absorption, are both well established in nutrition science.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This content is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Raw dairy carries risks; please make informed decisions with a qualified provider, especially if you are pregnant, feeding young children, or immunocompromised.