WESTON WHO?

This is a question that I get quite often here in Victoria BC, Canada.  

I mention that I volunteer for the Weston A. Price Foundation, and I am met with a puzzled look, followed by the somewhat amusing question, "Weston Who?"  

It occurs to me that it is a shame that we Canadians generally don't know much about one of our native sons who is truly a Canadian hero.  In our circles as real food advocates and supporters of local farmers, many of us have come across Dr. Price's seminal book, 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration' first published in 1939.  But outside of these circles, it seems that most Canadians have never heard of Dr. Price. 

Who was this man that many refer to as the Charles Darwin of Nutrition?

SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT DR. WESTON A. PRICE (1870-1948)

• Weston Andrew Valleau Price, the ninth child in a family of 12, grew up on a farm in Newburg, Canada. This backwoods Canadian family produced an inventor, a medical doctor, two dentists, a Methodist minister and a resourceful farmer son.1
• The Price family lineage goes back through a long line of Celtic princes, traced as far as 230 AD. The name derives from ap Rees or ap Rice, a family centered around the town of Brecon in Wales.
• Price’s nephew, Willard DeMille Price (son of Albert, his inventor brother), was a famous writer, explorer and traveler whose reports were often featured in the National Geographic magazine.
• Price became interested in diet as a prime factor in dental decay after he was stricken with typhoid fever in 1893. At the time he was practicing dentistry in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His older brother Albert nursed him back to health, but during his illness Weston’s teeth had decayed alarmingly. He went back to the family farm to convalesce where not only his health improved, but his dental deterioration was arrested. The following spring, he and his uncle William Delmage camped for an extended period in the back country of Canada, living on salmon, small game and berries. Delmage was a man of great intuitive wisdom who understood the role of natural food sources for refurbishing and sustaining the body. The backwoods diet worked wonders for Weston Price.
• Weston shared an interest in electricity with his brother Albert. He taught “applied electricity and electro-therapeutics” at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) from 1897 to 1904. After he left the faculty in 1904, his subject matter was dropped from the curriculum.2
• In 1899, Weston Price and his wife Florence built the Bon Echo Inn on the shores of Mazinaw Lake in southeast Ontario. Florence suggested the name Bon Echo because of the marvelous echo that rebounded from the face of the granite cliff on the opposite shore. The remote site presented an incredible challenge and building the 28-room inn was “a feat which never could have been accomplished without the indomitable persistence of Dr. Price and his sublime indifference to the almost incredible difficulties that beset him at every turn,” according to Merrill Denison, a later owner of the Inn. Dr. Price and his wife operated the Inn during the summers until they sold it in 1910. The site later became Bon Echo Provincial Park.3
• Dr. Price and his wife lost their only son Donald to complications from an infected root canal, which Price himself had put in. Price went on to write a 1000-page tome on the problems of systemic dental infections from root canals.
• After selling the Inn, Price established a dental practice in a house at 8926 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. (He lived several blocks away on Lamont Street.) At the height of his career, the practice included several dentists on the first floor and a laboratory on the second floor where Mr. Howdy, a chemist of German origin, performed analyses for fat-soluble activators in hundreds of samples of butter and other foods sent to Dr. Price from all over the world.
• Dr. Price was a devout Methodist who taught Sunday school at his neighborhood church. However, later in life he expressed dismay over the fact that Christian missionaries were so often the vector for the introduction of modernized foods into native populations.4

The Weston A. Price Foundation describes the work accomplished by nutrition pioneer, Dr. Weston Price, this way:  "Dr. Price's studies of isolated nonindustrialized peoples established the parameters of human health and determined the optimum characteristics of human diets. Dr. Price’s research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.  Dr. Price is credited with discovering the “X” Factor, or Vitamin K2 as it is known today."

If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Weston Price and his legacy of WAPF Wise Traditions, check out the foundation's web page.   Also, an initiative of the foundation, Nourishing Our Children is an exceptional resource with over 80,000 followers on Facebook - take a look!  

I, for one Canadian, can't begin to express my gratitude for the fact that Dr. Price worked so diligently to record his research and the wisdom he garnered from our healthy ancestors.  And I am especially grateful for the fact that this information has been made available to us all the world over, for free, through the tireless work of Sally Fallon Morell and the Weston A. Price Foundation that was named in honour of this great man.  

Knowledge of Wise Traditions foodways has made a profound difference in the health of my family, as well as for the many others who have been fortunate enough to have found the answer to that funny little question, "Weston Who?"

REFERENCES

1. Donald Delmage Fawcett, “Weston A. V. Price, Truly a ‘Great’ Uncle,” PPNF Journal.
2. Frederick Clayton Waite, AM, PhD, History of the School of Dentisty or Western Reserve University, 1940.
3. Bon Echo Provincial Park newsletter, 2002, page 10.
4. Personal Communication, Donald Delmage Fawcett, nephew of Weston A. Price

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