Pregnancy / Prenatal Nutrition and Birth Defects

Dr. Price’s first profound observation was the speed at which the teratogenic effects of processed, canned, preserved, adulterated, sweetened, and refined foods could be recorded in the local population and the gene pool. The indigenous populations held up a mirror to the advancing modern cultures of the world and Dr. Price captured the reflection on film. The mirror reflected an image that said, “When we eat as poorly as you, we lose our genetic strength within a single generation and are soon plagued by the diseases you know so well.” If a picture says a thousand words, the thousands of photographs taken by Dr. Price and the stories behind them are revealing far beyond words. The fact that Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is not part of the corpus curriculum of every school in the healing arts is an indictment against their authority to teach the tenets of health.

Studies in Deficiency Disease, published in 1921 by Major-General Sir William McCarrison, preceded Price’s work. It came to similar conclusions based on McCarrison’s studies with the famed Hunza people in the Himalayan Mountains near what is today northern Pakistan. McCarrison was a British physician assigned to the army serving in India during the first two decades of the 20th Century. He was fascinated with the robust health and extreme longevity of the Hunza, where the age of 100 was common. Living at about 9000 feet in a glacial valley, vigorously working to the end of their lives, their ubiquitous physical well being inspired McCarrison. He studied their diet and noted that as these isolated people came into commercial contact with the British army and consumed their foods, they soon forfeited their legendary health.

McCarrison, who became the mentor of the famed naturalist writer and publishing magnate J. I. Rodale, set up the Nutrition Research Laboratories at Coonoor in India and conducted careful food experiments with animals. He recorded the same results that Price would later observe. The first crucial effect of refined and adulterated nutrition was the destruction of the endocrine system, upon whose biochemical messengers the entire body is dependent. In his book, he noted that the British diet, which was also common in the U.S. and Europe, was custom-made to damage the endocrine system in humans and animals. He noted that destruction first occurred in the adrenal glands, and then cascaded to the thyroid and pancreas and finally the central nervous system. In a speech to the British Medical Association in 1936, reflecting on his forty-years of research (for which he received a Knighthood) he said ³,

“Contacts of nutrition with obstetrics and gynaecology are many. It will suffice to mention some of them: the impediments which the effects of rickets and osteomalacia may present to parturition; the relations of food, in particular of fats, mineral elements, and vitamins, to fertility, pregnancy, and lactation; the role of linoleic acid (sometimes called vitamin F) in favouring fertility; the probable effect of fat in facilitating the transference of vitamin A through the placenta to the fetus; the need for an abundant supply of vitamins A, B, and C and of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and iron to pregnant and lactating women, and their need for adequate supplies of vitamins D and E and of iodine; the role of vitamin E in preventing habitual abortion; the effects of vitamin A deficiency on the reproductive tract — vaginal cornification, prolonged gestation, difficult parturition, uterine bleeding, variations in size of the placenta, tissue necrosis of the uterine wall — effects which in their turn may favour endogenous or exogenous infection.... All these observations indicate the necessity for the proper feeding of prospective mothers, and of pregnant and nursing women: a necessity as much in the interests of the child as of the mother.”

The great nutritional pioneer, Dr. Royal Lee, addressed the biological conveyance of acquired behavior (habits of the progenitor) to one’s progeny in a speech before the American Academy of Applied Nutrition, February 23, 1950:

“The exact mechanism by which an acquired trait can become hereditary is in fact fairly well established. It seems that each specialized cell of the body produces continually, and discharges into the blood stream, what might be called ‘blueprints’ that guide or determine the nature of regenerating new cells that can assimilate these specialized organic substances, which act as blueprints. Biologists call these factors determinants, and there is clear evidence that the germ cells of the sex glands obtain these determinants from the blood stream and pack them into the chromosomes, where they can in turn accomplish their function of determining the characteristics of the offspring as they unfold during the development of the embryonic tissues. It is now easy to see that if both parents are lacking in the specialized cells of the islets of Langerhans, the offspring of such parents is bound to have either a weakened group of these islets, or none at all, depending on the severity of the parent’s disability. It is of further interest to find that these determinants owe their specific nature to the pattern of trace minerals of which they are composed.

“Therefore, trace mineral deficiency, it is evident, can act also to impair hereditary transmission. And as these trace minerals in the determinants are combined organically into protein linkages, it is evident how the nature of these minerals in our foods can be of vital importance. Compost gardening, in building up the organic mineral levels of the soil, is here justified, and its results explained.”4 Dr. Lee’s statement should serve to explain why juvenile diabetes is increasing so rapidly in the Western world and wherever else high carbohydrate diets, loaded with sugar and glucose, have been adopted.

Furthermore, Lee’s conclusion about trace minerals was supported by McCarrison’s observation that the glacier-fed soil of the Hunza valley was extraordinarily mineralized by the slow grinding of the glacier and springtime inundations. Even their fresh river water was cloudy with minerals. He never saw a single rotted tooth or osteoporosis among the Hunza, even in those over 100-years old (unless they abandoned their ancestral diet). Birth defects were virtually nonexistent.