For the Indians living inside the Rocky Mountains in the far North of Canada, the successful nutrition for nine months of the year was largely limited to wild game, largely moose and caribou, as well as growing plants, in the winter they made use of bark and buds of trees. Travelling the world, observing and recording, like Darwin, he made a revolutionary discovery that is slowly percolating into medical science. Then you start checking the effects on the dental health on the primitive tribes of the contact with modern diets, and it becomes apparent that tooth decay is one of those effects.

Within one generation of eating "modern foods" - dental health markedly deteriorated, as did general health. Still, this book is so immensely important and influential to many, because we live in an age where there are virtually no people left on the planet that are eating completely traditional diets. It is not surprising his work is not taught to dentists training now as the pharma industry control our ill health. Some of the material he discovered is common knowledge now: the importance of vitamins, the role of sugar and refined flour in tooth decay.I’m not particularly interested in dentistry but have been having dental issues and thus found my way to this book. They got enough nutrition in their foods that the saliva composition protected their teeth without brushing or modern methods of cleaning teeth. Sidney Mintz told an amusing story about her meeting with a German gentleman, who was deeply impressed when her smile revealed a mouthful of black teeth. In addition to tooth decay, their dental arches were deformed, so their teeth were crowded and crooked (like mine).

An example of a mental deformity in infants that is related to nutrition is the increased risk of downs syndrome for children born to parents over forty years of age.The photos of these beautiful, vibrant people will blow you away, and make you reconsider what "normal" and "healthy" really is. Modern diets have tended to focus exclusively on the former, which means that the vegans are right, in a way - meat does present serious risks when it comes from the feedlot system, but a diet that contains no animal products whatsoever not only cannot deliver vitamins and minerals efficiently, but has been rejected by the primitive cultures of the world, who have not suffered tooth decay, degenerative disease, or mental retardation in the process. Modern DNA testing reveals that the indigenous populations of the Americas are from varied regions of the world who, most likely, arrived at different times and locations. And I just think that’s something that we really need to try and learn about because in our society we’re absolutely dragged down by health problems and social cohesion problems. So this should really have been an amazing finding to educate people of the time and instruct how we conduct our societies and sort out what we eat, because what is the point of civilisation?

Science moves very slowly, and it could easily be several hundred or 1000 years before we get it all sorted out.

He goes on to document what happens when these healthy communities are introduced to modern foods and the results are tragic. White flour was little more than highly refined carbs, which rapidly enter the bloodstream — empty calories.

When the proper chemical content of the saliva is reinstituted, bacterial growth is stopped and the tooth will harden in the area of the cavity.This is one of those books that comes to you as a recommendation and often arrives as you travel on your own health journey. He was watching a serious health crisis emerge right before his eyes, and he didn’t understand the cause.