Wed, Jan-28-04, 01:10
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Senior Member
Posts: 2,018
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Plan: Atkins
Stats: 320/220/195
BF:
Progress: 80%
Location: Pensacola, FL
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From the above link:
Quote:
When Dr. Price interviewed a surgeon named Josef Romeg in Alaska in 1933, Dr. Romeg had been for 35 years caring for both the native people and the settlers who inhabited the seaport trading villages. Price wrote that Romeg told him that in those 35 years, he'd never seen a single case of cancer among the native people living in remote areas where they ate none of the white man's foods—sugar, flour, canned goods, and vegetable oils. These were what Price called the "foods of commerce," which the white men traded for animal skins. Dr. Romeg said that when the native Alaskans began eating these refined foods, they became subject to all of the diseases the white men suffered with-dental disease at first, then rheumatoid arthritis and tuberculosis, and after a few years, cancer. Romeg said that he had taken to sending the sick ones back to their native villages, far from the white man's foods, where they often recovered.
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As impressive as Weston Price found the physical strength of primitive Eskimos, he was even more impressed with their character. He wrote of their courage, honesty, openness, dedication to family and community, and their ability to survive and thrive in their harsh northern environment. And that brings me to my next story, once again set in the far north. Great, unexplored areas of northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory were still inhabited by Indians in the 1930's when Price visited. Groups of Indians lived in the regions inside the Canadian Rockies in the far north, where winter temperatures of seventy below zero precluded the possibility of growing cereal grains or fruits, or of keeping dairy animals. The diet of these Indians was thus almost entirely limited to wild animals and some plants and berries in the summer.
One old Indian was asked through an interpreter why Indians did not get scurvy, which as you know is from vitamin C deficiency. He replied that scurvy was a white man's disease; while it was a possibility for Indians, they knew how to prevent it and white men did not. When asked why he did not tell white men how, he replied white men knew too much to ask Indians anything. Asked how, he went to his chief for permission to tell. Upon returning he explained that when an Indian kills a moose, he opens it up and finds the small ball in the fat above each kidney. He cuts these balls-the adrenal glands-into pieces that are immediately eaten, one by each Indian in the family.
The adrenal glands, we now know, are among the richest sources of vitamin C in all animal or plant tissues. Cooking destroys vitamin C. The Indians' empirical knowledge and use of different organs and tissues of animals has certainly been verified by modern methods of analysis. Their wisdom preceded these methods, and the discovery of vitamin C, by thousands of years.
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