I used to take Weston-Price's accounts at face-value, but I changed my mind 
once I started hearing about the common ill-health of the Maoris well before 
any white settlers arrived, with their modern foods. A Maori woman, as 
evidence,  pointed me to Philip Houghton's seminal  work "The First New-
Zealanders" which goes into detail(with data taken from burial sites etc.)  on 
the widespread arthritic and dental decay among Maoris in the 18th century 
and  even before that period - yet Weston-Price holds them up as prime 
examples of the success of his diet!  So I'm a bit of a sceptic as regards his 
other claims re the Swiss/Orkney Islanders et al. 

When you think about it, it's all too easy to obtain dodgy data, in these 
cases. For example, most hunter-gatherer tribes simply did not have the 
resources to support the sickly  members of their groups, with the ill and 
crippled members mostly being left out to die, and it generally required greater 
effort to help sustain/feed  each individual, so that  most of the remaining 
survivors had to be fitter than the average, simply by default(but that's to do 
with good genes and higher, daily levels of exercise and nothing to do with 
diet, as such). 

Also, what is interesting is that the supposedly "healthy" native diets that 
Weston-Price so extols often weren't much protection against the diseases 
brought in by Westerners( smallpox is a classic example) - and, in most cases, 
these native tribes didn't even adopt Western-type diets until a century or 
more  after being decimated by such settler-borne disease.


Geoff

On Mon, 14 May 2007 16:58:23 -0400, Keith Thomas <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:



>Right, Tom. When I think of the worst aspects of neolithic diets, I have in my 
minds eye 
>hoardes of emaciated Egyptian slaves living a life of drudgery and eating a 
gruel of weevly 
>grains under the blazing sun. But the sturdy dairy-farming peasants in the 
Swiss mountains 
>described so eloquently by Weston Price are also neolithic. I guess  we have 
to be careful 
>how we use the term.
>
>What image do other readers have in their mind's eye when they hear the 
term "neolithic 
>diet"?
>
>Keith