In the early twentieth century, Westerners were tantalized by the possibility that superhuman races lived just beyond the boundaries of the map. One of the most talked about groups of people were the Hunza, a sometimes-nomadic band of goat and yak herders living in the mountains of what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. British explorers to these parts claimed to have encountered a rarified land where cancer did not exist, where nobody needed glasses, and where it was commonplace to live beyond a hundred. If these accounts were true,
then such people would present Western medicine with a mystery. What was their secret? Pure air? Mineral-rich glacial water? Caloric restriction? True or not, enterprising businessmen soon discovered that the word Himalayan was bona fide magic—at least when it was printed on the tonic water bottles they were selling. Amid this circus of conjecture, capitalism, and hucksterism, one extraordinary dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, was determined to inject some much-needed science.
This man of introspection and quiet charm invested his own money in an amazing series of journeys, attempting to either verify or impeach these rumors. If people possessing extraordinary fitness were found, he planned to systematically analyze what made them so different from the patients at his dental practice in Ohio.
Price was not exactly the kind of man you’d expect to see rounding mountain trails on a mule. But there he was, a bespectacled, slightly pudgy man of average build pushing sixty. A reserved, meticulous man, his data collection was equally detailed and methodical. His passion for truth was driven by adversity, having lost a son to a dental infection. He became, in his words, distressed by “certain tragic expressions of our modern degeneration, including tooth decay, general physical degeneration, and facial and dental-arch deformities.”54 Price couldn’t countenance the idea that human beings should be the only species so riddled with obvious physical defects—like teeth growing every which way inside a person’s mouth. After years of studying the source of orthodontic problems in active clinical practice as well as in his lab (animal research was a common practice among the early twentieth-century medical practitioners), he recognized that nutritional deficits could lead to the same kinds of facial deformities in animals that he was seeing in his patients. Contrary to what was believed by many to be true at the time, Price’s lab evidence helped convince him that crooked teeth didn’t come from “mixing of races,” being “of low breeding,” bad luck, or the devil. Nutrition science offered a better explanation.
Price’s preliminary work in the lab had helped to convince him that human disease arose from the “absence of some essential factors from our modern program.” 55 Using the now-dated language of his time, he
reasoned that the clearest path to understanding those missing factors would be “to locate immune groups which were found readily as isolated remnants of primitive racial stocks in different parts of the world”—
hence the need to travel—and to analyze what they were eating.56 His plan was simple: count cavities. Count them in mouths of people living all over the globe. Whichever group has the fewest cavities, and the straightest teeth, wins. No fillings or orthodontics allowed. Price was betting that healthy dentition could be used as a proxy for a person’s overall health—an assumption that proved correct—and so the number of cavities could be used as an objective, inverse measure of health across people of any racial and cultural background. It was an elegant and efficient plan.
The expeditions involved lugging several 8 x 10 cameras, glass plates, and a full complement of surgical dental equipment. Fortunately, Price had help from a seasoned explorer often featured in National Geographic, his nephew Willard DeMille Price, who no doubt greatly enhanced the elder man’s ability to return with equipment intact. The resulting tome, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, lays out the products of Price’s exhaustive research along with his conclusions. Price was right. Not only were there entire groups of people who enjoyed perfect, cavity-free teeth and spectacular overall health, their finely tuned physiology owed itself to the fact that their traditions enabled them to produce foods with spectacular growth-promoting capacity. Of course, from their perspective, there was nothing extraordinary about their fantastic health.
To them, it was only natural.
Price went into his data collection looking for beautiful sets of teeth.
But after staring into his subjects’ mouths, Price stepped back to notice that something undeniable was staring back at him: robust health and undeniable physical beauty. The perfectly aligned teeth he’d been looking for belonged—with rare, if any, exception—to beautiful people.
Beautiful faces with beautiful cheekbones, eyes, noses, lips, and everything else—the total package, the physical representation of physiologic harmony.
In each of the eleven countries Price visited, people who had stayed
in their villages and continued their native dietary traditions were consistently free of cavities and dental arch deformities. Price couldn’t help but notice they also were just plain healthy. So healthy that on his first outing, to Lotchental, a Swiss mountain village isolated by a palisade of towering mountains, he was as awestruck by the townspeople as by the scenery, writing, “As one stands in profound admiration before the stalwart physical development and high moral character of these sturdy mountaineers, he is impressed by the superior types of manhood, womanhood, and childhood that Nature has been able to produce from a suitable diet and a suitable environment.”57 He repeats this theme again and again, as he travels the world. It seems as if Price felt that the beauty and vitality of a given landscape could be conducted into the bodies of those who populated that landscape through the foods they drew from it.
FORM AND FUNCTION: A PACKAGE DEAL
From the beginning of humanity’s historic record, one can find numerous references to the idea that physical beauty and health are related. And although social taboo currently proscribes explicitly discussing that relationship, to many it remains patently obvious. True, you may remember your high school football star as less than handsome, riddled with acne, wearing thick glasses and braces, and dependent on pills and an inhaler. But usually our high school heroes receive recognition, admiration, and jealousy as a result of good looks and superior athletic skill. This admiration emerges partly from the fact that we instinctively recognize obvious physical endowments like exceptional stamina and coordination as a byproduct of the ultimate gift—good genes. The genius of Price’s work is that he dared to scientifically examine the connection between outwardly visible signs of health and nutrition using the same systematic approach we bring to bear when studying any other biological phenomenon.
OLD-FASHIONED BREAKFAST:
FRESH, LOCAL, AND UNPROCESSED
This milk is rich in nutrients bioconcentrated by the goat, which is free to graze on the choicest shoots growing over vast plains of mineral-rich soil. Many small farmers in the United States still raise their animals on pasture, offering the customer a healthy alternative to milk produced by grain-fed animals.
The preference for beauty (in our own and other’s faces) emerges as a result of the instinctive pattern recognition process that I will describe in detail in Chapter 4. For now, it is crucial to understand that what we consider to be beautiful also serves a survival function. As unfair as it seems, less attractive people have more health problems.58 All congenital syndromes that distort facial architecture are associated with impairments in physiologic functions like breathing, talking, hearing, walking, and so on. There are hundreds of such syndromes codified so far, recognized on sight by trained pediatricians and resulting in disabilities ranging from poor vision (as in Marfan’s Dandy Walker, Cohen and Stickler syndromes—just to name a few) to sinus inflammation and susceptibility to infection (Fragile X, Cornelia De
Lange) to hearing loss (chromosomal deletions at 22q11.2, Coffin Lowry) to chewing and swallowing difficulties (Rhett, CHARGE, arthrogryposis).59 Price recognized that growth anomalies too subtle to warrant characterization as a congenital syndrome are, nevertheless, also associated with functional problems. For example, underdeveloped mandibles don’t just look unattractive, they also don’t hold teeth very well, which makes it hard to chew and increases the risk of cavities.60, 61 To our animal minds, these physical traits represent potential liabilities, a weakness in the tribe bordering on contagion. This reaction is deeply ingrained, and it may be why even health professionals are reluctant to investigate the root causes of visible physical anomalies. But Price felt differently. He rejected the age-old notion that the blessings of health and beauty are reserved for those few with the purest souls—the biological equivalent of divine right. His thinking was truly outside the box and even today his research findings are ahead of their time.
If you’d like to get a taste of the kind of vitality Price discovered, what people looked like, and how they lived, do a quick Internet search for indigenous tribes. Start with the San, Maasai, Himba, Kombai, Wodaabe, or Mongolian nomad. Or watch any TV show about tribal life.
When you look at the people’s faces, notice how particularly well-formed their features are. That is because their diets still connect them to a healthy living environment whose beauty, in a very real sense, expresses itself through their bodies.
One of the first documentary films ever made is called Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life, filmed in 1925 by Meriam C. Cooper (who later made King Kong). Cooper documents the lifestyle of the Baktiari tribe in the Zardeh Kuh Mountains of what is now Iran. It tracks one leg of the 200-plus-mile journey the tribe made twice a year in the seasonal search of fresh pasture for their goats and pigs. Up and down the rocky mountainsides, old men, pregnant women, and little children herd their stubborn, hungry animals, the leaders breaking through waist-deep snows in bare feet. Five thousand people travel with all their belongings across the 200 high-altitude miles in a little over a month. In distance alone, they covered the equivalent of twenty marathons a year. How did
they do it? Genetic wealth. Our twentieth-century Western perspective calls on us to label their lifestyle as subsistence living, since they lacked the accoutrements associated with prosperity. But they didn’t carry their gold in leather satchels. Their treasure was safely hidden inside the vaults of their genetic material, and it endowed every member of the tribe with chiseled features, strong joints, healthy immune systems, and the stamina to achieve athletic feats that few of us would dare attempt.
And remember, they did this every season.
PROFILES IN GENETIC WEALTH
Native Thai (left), Danish barmaid (middle), Ethiopian woman (right). Notice their well-formed features, indicative of ideal geometric facial construction. Whether a people draw nutrition from the family farm, the sea, or the savannah, real food acts as a kind of conduit through which the beauty of the environment can be communicated into our bodies and expressed as human form.