1939 · Weston A. Price
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
What this work is
A dentist's account of travels in the 1930s to isolated communities in the Swiss Alps, the Outer Hebrides, the Arctic, North America, the Pacific islands, Africa, Australia, and Peru. In each place Price examined teeth and photographed faces, comparing people on their traditional diet with relatives who had switched to white flour, sugar, and canned goods. He reports more tooth decay and narrower dental arches in the modernized groups, and analyzes the nutrient content of the traditional foods.
Then and now
Price showed that people of the same stock had sound teeth on traditional food and rotting teeth on modern processed food. Dentistry and nutrition science ignored the finding and kept treating decay with drills and fluoride. The mainstream dismisses the book as a fad diet.
Verdict
SCIENTIFIC
The work follows the scientific method, and the paradigm it assumes passes. Both layers must pass. The verdict is scientific.
1·This work · inside the paradigm
SCIENTIFIC
Follows the scientific method within Terrain Theory.
2·Paradigm · Terrain Theory
SCIENTIFIC
Passes all three tests.
How the verdict is decided
The verdict grades both layers: the paradigm this work assumes, and how the work was carried out inside it. Both must be scientific for the whole thing to be scientific. A clean method inside an unscientific paradigm is unscientific. An unscientific method inside a better paradigm is unscientific. A split on either layer is mixed. The worse layer decides.
1·This work
Did this work test its claim with methods that are independent, falsifiable, and non-circular?
SCIENTIFIC
This work claims that peoples on their traditional diets have sound teeth, broad faces, and strong bodies, while the same peoples on modern processed food get tooth decay, deformed dental arches, and physical degeneration. All three tests pass.
Independently Verifiable
Pass
Price photographed teeth and faces in populations eating different diets, and anyone can see decayed teeth and deformed arches without accepting any nutritional theory first.
Falsifiable
Pass
If people on traditional diets had the same tooth decay and facial deformities as people on modern foods, the claim would have been disproven on the spot.
Non-Circular
Pass
The groups were sorted by what they ate, not by a test built from the conclusion, and the outcomes were visible physical features that do not require the nutritional model to be observed.
Why
Decayed teeth and narrow arches show in a photograph to anyone. Traditional eaters with the same decay would have killed the claim on the spot. The groups were sorted by what they ate, not by a test built from the conclusion.
2·Paradigm · Terrain Theory
Does the framework this work assumes pass the three tests?
SCIENTIFIC
Independently Verifiable
Pass
The condition of the host is visible in this book through teeth, bone structure, and physical development, and none of those require a pathogen model to be seen.
Falsifiable
Pass
If traditional diets produced the same degeneration as modern foods, the terrain claim would have failed, and Price would have had nothing to report.
Non-Circular
Pass
The terrain was assessed by looking at the organism's physical condition, not by running a test that presupposes terrain theory to produce its result.
Why
Terrain theory holds that the condition of the body decides health, and that condition can be seen without any germ model. Price looked at what happened to bodies when food changed. He did not diagnose with model-built tests. He looked at teeth, faces, and bone. On traditional food, bodies developed one way. On modern food, they developed another. Tooth decay and a narrow arch are physical facts, not readings, and a filling does not fix the diet that caused them.
From the work
Search for controls among remnants of primitive racial stocks has been resorted to as a result of failure to find them in our modernized groups or to find the controlling factors by applying laboratory methods to the affected clinical material.
The data presented show the level of susceptibility to dental caries (tooth decay) in each isolated primitive group and, contrasted with that, the level of susceptibility in the modernized natives of the same stock.
These data reveal an average increase in susceptibility of thirty-five fold.