--- Ken Stuart <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> >Most of the kids in her class are already
> >showing signs of improper nutrition.  Pale, thin
> >faces, crowded teeth, stunted growth, glasses, (at
> the
> >age of 6)
> 
> Sorry, but none of those things are diet related,
> they are genetic.

Hard to believe you've been onlist as long as you have
and you still haven't figured this one out. Here's a
quote from a NY times article I saved a couple of
years ago about the Maya Indians in Guatemala.  

"In the early nineteen-seventies, when the
anthropologist Barry Bogin first visited Guatemala,
the country's two main ethnic groups seemed to live on
different social planes. The Ladinos, who claimed
primarily Spanish ancestry, were of average height.
The Maya Indians were so short that some scholars
called them the pygmies of Central America: the men
averaged only five feet two, the women four feet
eight. The Ladinos and the Maya shared the same small
country, so their differences were assumed to be
genetic. But when Bogin, who now teaches at the
University of Michigan, began taking measurements he
soon found another cause. "There was an undeclared war
going on," he says. The Ladinos, who controlled the
government, had systematically forced the Maya into
poverty. Whether they lived in the city or in the
countryside, the Maya had less food and medicine, and
they had much higher rates of disease. 

A decade and a half later, after civil war had erupted
and up to a million Guatemalans had fled to the United
States, Bogin took another series of measurements.
This time, his subjects were Mayan refugees, between
six and twelve years old, in Florida and Los Angeles.
"Lo and behold, they were much taller than the Maya in
Guatemala," Bogin says. By 2000, the American Maya
were four inches taller than Guatemalan Maya of the
same age, and about as tall as Guatemalan Ladinos. "As
far as I know, it's the biggest increase of its kind
ever measured," Bogin says. "It shows that they
weren't genetically small. They weren't pygmies. They
were suffering." 

And from a study at the turn of the century,

"The men of the northern Cheyenne, he found, were the
tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth
century: well nourished on bison and berries, and
wandering clear of disease on the high plains, they
averaged nearly five feet ten.) Then he enlisted
anthropologists to gather bone measurements dating
back ten thousand years. In both Europe and the
Americas, he discovered, humans grew shorter as their
cities grew larger. The more people clustered
together, the more pest-ridden and poorly fed they
became"

For more info go here,

http://www.westonaprice.org/brochures/wapfbrochure.html

And look at the two images next to the following text,


The photographs of Dr. Weston Price illustrate the
difference in facial structure between those on native
diets and those whose parents had adopted the
"civilized" diets of devitalized processed foods. The
"primitive" Seminole girl (left) has a wide, handsome
face with plenty of room for the dental arches. The
"modernized" Seminole girl (right) born to parents who
had abandoned their traditional diets, has a narrowed
face, crowded teeth, and a reduced immunity to
disease.

Mark




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