Barefoot Ken

eating in a calorie deficit is the most humbling experience in fitness.

In the 1930s, a dentist named Weston A. Price travelled the world studying traditional diets and the dental health of populations that had not yet adopted Western food. He visited the Swiss alpine villagers (raw dairy, rye bread, occasional meat), the Gaelic fishermen of the Outer Hebrides (oats and seafood including fish organs and eggs), the Maasai (milk, blood, meat), the Inuit (seal, walrus, fish, virtually no plant food), and dozens of others. What he found in every traditional population: broad facial structure, well-developed dental arches, near-absence of tooth decay, strong bones, robust physical development. What he found in the same populations once Western flour and sugar arrived: narrowed dental arches, crowded teeth, cavities, reduced facial development in the next generation. All the traditional diets he studied were rich in animal products. None of them were built on low-fat, high-grain principles. The divergence happened at exactly the moment the Western food arrived. Price called it "displacing foods of modern commerce." His book was published in 1939. We spent the next eighty years doing the opposite of what it recommended.