Prenatal Nutrition and Birth Defects

In every language, the first words spoken by a woman after delivery are, “Is my baby healthy?” The first words spoken by a woman upon learning that she is pregnant should be, “Am I well nourished?”

Evidence of human birth defects dating back over three thousand years is reported in archeological literature. Excavated ruins of ancient Babylon revealed detailed reports of infant defects.1 Achondroplastic dwarfs (failure to develop healthy cartilage at the ends of the long bones, resulting in a form of congenital dwarfism) have been unearthed in ancient Egyptian tombs. Pictures drawn on ancient Peruvian pottery depict cleft lips and palates and missing limbs on babies. Aboriginal cave drawings in Australia depict gruesome deformities of infants.

The term “birth defect” refers only to structural or physiological abnormalities that develop at or before birth. However, defects in the developing fetus are most often revealed later in life. Evidence shows they often are caused by malnutrition in fetal development at a critical time when nutrients are needed to form organs. Half of all infant deaths in the US are attributed to birth defects.2

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, published in 1939 by Dr. Weston A. Price, is an enduring classic with a message that puts the people of Earth on notice: Eat right, or destroy your progeny. During the 1920s and 1930s, Dr. and Mrs. Price traveled the globe to all habitable continents photographing and recording the insidious effects of the modern diet on newly exposed indigenous people, their offspring, and their culture. Dr. Price, a superb field photographer, made a stunning visual record of the physical characteristics of native populations living on traditional diets and the subsequent altered features of their children as these family units came in contact with and incorporated modern, adulterated foods. Regardless of the setting — a naval base installation in the tropical South Pacific; a new trading post in the arctic; roads built to connect previously remote alpine valleys; or encroachment of coastal cities into an arid expanse of isolated “outback” (Australia) — the result of the contact and assimilation was always the same: the indigenous people were seduced into eating the “foods of commerce” (as Dr. Price referred to them). Within a single generation, their freedom from chronic disease was lost and physical degeneration set in. The next generation paid a high price and it got worse with each subsequent generation: tooth decay, tuberculosis, physical deformities, arthritis, diabetes, diseases of the GI tract, infertility, cancer, and mental illness. Diseases often lacking names or descriptions in the local language soon became as common as they were in the modern “civilized” population.