 Thank you, Erin. Am I on? Okay, I'm on. Okay. I'm going to get right into a road map of what I'll be talking about. Many of you know Western price very well, but there's some people in the audience who don't so for the sake of all of them I'll say a few words of formally introducing him and also of his critics and I'll inevitably get into a little discussion of some of the Economic realities and complications of the diet in the legend, which was the very first place that he went to I'll say a little of my history of my involvement in the legend how and Then a little bit about the village genealogies That I came across and I'll give some representative results What you're all waiting for and then some conclusions and the status of the study Okay, Western price was a dentist who practiced in Cleveland, Ohio in the early part of the 20th century and he reported that he saw increasing amounts of Dental problems among his patients and these dental problems were not only more tooth decay But also things like orthodontic problems just the things that were spoken about earlier this morning He said that in his research. He was not able to find any causative agent any Injurious factor as he put it so he eventually concluded that there was an absence of some Nutritive factor That's not surprising for when he was working the early part of the 20th century was when vitamins were being discovered so he was effectively saying there may be yet some other vitamin that might be responsible for the Increasing difficulties his patients were having He wanted to have as controls a group of people that didn't have the injurious factors And he ended up being guided by anthropologists and explorers who Claimed that they discovered all around the world that there were people who Had really healthy teeth even though they were living under what the Western world would call very primitive conditions Okay, he chose populations that were on the verge of being modernized so that there were some people in Each group that were eating their traditional foods and some people who were transitioning to modern foods That would allow him to eliminate the possibility that there were genetic factors that were responsible for the bad teeth Which was an idea that was out there especially the idea that mixed-race people would have bad teeth and by Choosing people the way he did he could eliminate that possibility in every case that he went to he found that the people who Were still eating their traditional diets had healthier teeth than the people who were transitioning to the modern foods and he published his evidence as Photographs and there's also Written work in a book called nutrition and physical degeneration The price sponge nutrition foundation has kept it has a has copies of it out there with a special deal You can talk to them about Okay Many but not all the groups were hunter-gatherers or Fisher-gatherers. They were essentially what we would call paleolithic diets, but they were not all like that some of them were eating were what we would call pastoralists and one of the exceptions was the high alpine region of Switzerland where the mountain people were Said to be eating a diet of Grains and dairy Okay, as a matter of fact his first destination was Alpine Switzerland and the first Destination within Alpine Switzerland was a valley called the Lötzchen Valley, which you see here and in German would be called the Lötzchen Tau and Price states in his book That the people had no doctors and no dentists because they had so little need of them Well, let's put a little box around that What does he mean by need? It may be true that there were some medical interventions that did more harm than good So sometimes people were better off without doctors, but that was not always the case many times Doctors did do very worthwhile things But if he meant that people were in such good help that they didn't need doctors then we're gonna have to look at that in terms of the demographics Okay in the Lötzchen Tau Price's host was the parish priest prior Johan Siegen The term priores is a historical term that goes back to the origin of the church about the 1200s and Evidently Western price relied on priores Siegen's command of the English language and Siegen was said to be Self-taught in English at least according to some of his relatives now That's very impressive that he was self-taught in English but I cannot imagine that he understood nuances of the English language and it is my hypothesis that There may have been some language Understandings when Western price said that he wanted to know about the traditional diet Western price was talking about the diet before the time of The introduction of steel rollers that allowed for the milling of grains so that it made refined white flour very accessible to everyone he was talking about the process for creating trans fatty acids and and The increased use of sugar to Western price. I'm sorry to a priores Siegen I believe that the term traditional diet meant the time before The Colombian exchange before the the introduction of foods to Europe from the Western hemisphere things like the potato the tomato corn tobacco at any rate Price doesn't mention potatoes in his description of the Luchintal although he does mention it later on in 1932 when he goes to Fisbert Terminan, which is another village in the high Alpine region he He in the Luchintal he really only talks about what was the traditional diet of basically dairy products milk cheese and also Grains primarily the sourdough rye bread Okay, so the question though is that There have been a number of other studies of the Luchintal and People have Done research especially on the the rather sudden condensed timeframe of modernization that took place that didn't really take place until after 1913 when the tunnel made the railroad tunnel made the valley more accessible and so Yeah, okay people were talking about the extreme poverty and some people were saying that Thank goodness for the potato. Nobody starved and very few people had Were harmed by it in any way or at least that's what they were saying and that was That that was what gradually came in in the decades after the After the potato came in which started somewhere it looked like around Maybe the 18 1820s or so 18 teens or 1820s now panning out to worldwide The diets of the groups that Western price looked at very tremendously. There was no one single food There was essential for everyone but all the groups had higher levels of vitamins both fat soluble and water soluble vitamins and The modernized groups were losing some of that diversity Okay, so beyond the fat soluble vitamins a d&e Western price was asserting. There was yet something else something that he called an activator X not too long ago Chris master John wrote an article suggesting that it was a vitamin K2 or one of Or several of the vitamin K2 that were essentially that that basically what activator X was doing is the same as what the What what vitamin K2 is now known to do? Okay for the alpine Swiss the vitamin K2 was found primarily in the butter from The cows when they were up on the high alpine pastures and Here I have to get into another little aside on diet several authors have effectively Stated these are mostly Swiss authors who state that many of the poorest people in the mountain regions of Switzerland would Make butter out of cream and then they would sell the butter they would take it down into the lower elevations so it was the more affluent people at the lower elevations who actually got to eat the high vitamin butter and the poorest people up in the mountains were giving up their butter and With for cash and with the cash They were buying things like manufactured goods like musical instruments marching band is huge in these valleys and Other manufactured goods and also foods like drum roll here coffee alcohol tobacco and sugar Not necessarily a good nutritional exchange, but that's what some people were actually doing So that puts a real monkey wrench into any assertions. They ate this diet and therefore they had this health We're not really sure exactly what people were eating Health-wise Okay, so from Price's time onward Price did not work for a university. So all of his research papers and his photographs did not become part of a University archive Instead they became part of what for a while was the Western Price Memorial Foundation after acquiring the research papers of Francis pottinger and a number of other Researchers it became the price pottinger nutrition foundation If you want more details of the story at the beginning of this book pottingers cats also out there in the lobby it'll tell you the whole story of the history of How it became the price pottinger nutrition foundation found it in I guess the 1950s is that 1952, okay now in 1998 Sally Fallon and Mary Enoch published nourishing traditions, which made a big splash. It was almost like a nutritional manifesto and Around the same time actually I think it was 1999 Sally Fallon also started the Western a price foundation Which I understand is what many people first when they hear about Western price. They hear it through that foundation It has been very aggressive in its outreach and that may be why so many people know about it and it has also led to the growing awareness has led to growing criticism and Many people have challenged the accuracy of the things that Western price has been saying and a common question that the critics ask is What about the short life expectancy and high rate of infant mortality in the groups that price researched? Okay, so that question is Well, that's the way the question is put but it's usually put in the context of a discussion about nutrition so that if there's If there was high child mortality the implication is that well could the diets have been that good if there was high child mortality so we're going to have to look at the At the demographics with that question in mind also Okay, so my study the price sponge and nutrition foundation had a list of characteristics of all of the groups that price looked at and One of the characteristics was that each group had some period of under nutrition. They were not eating low calorie diets But at a certain time of year for one reason or another they would have a period of under nutrition and So I went to the Luchintal. It was actually not my first trip, but I figured that since the region was Roman Catholic There would be a rather easy way of finding out what the rules for fasting and and abstinence from meat were and I did find some of the the old Catechisms that they gave those rules in order to help me in my study. I joined an organization called The club for furtherance of the Luchintal our museum. We would call it the Friends of the Luchintal our museum It's it's an organization of people who Donate money and make suggestions for special programs that the museum should have This was very beneficial to me. It gave me an opportunity to meet several people in the Valley I met for one the genealogist and historian Ignat Spellwald Who about whom you will see a lot more of his work? I had a chance to meet and interact with Joseph Ziegen who was a nephew of the prior Johan Ziegen that you saw before and He and his wife Clara, I've been very fortunate to have them as mentors when I've been in the Valley Okay, so while I was in the Valley or initially looking at short-term fasting processes. I Learned of a genealogy that Ignat Spellwald had produced for the village of Kippel. It was published in 2006 Subsequently there was a genealogy published in 2015 There was another genealogy published in December of 2018 the Publication date the rolling out was a big deal in the village of blotting it Was it resulting in a publication party where most of the village turned out which just shows you how much effort? Everybody in the village put to make the genealogies as complete and as accurate as is as is possible Okay, what's it doing? Okay? The genealogies are organized according to families Each family has a unique index number and then there are other index numbers that allow Linking of families too earlier and to later generations Okay, the way that Genealogies or the way the Individual families are set up is the mother and father elicit at the top then all children are listed underneath If the children got married the lemnus eight symbol mathematicians would call it the infinity symbol indicates marriage to somebody Okay, and there is also a Village indicating which village the person lives in and that includes a number of villages that are outside of the valley So you can distinguish between people are still living in families that are living in the valley Versus families that are part of the Lichenthaler diaspora Okay, one other thing you might have noticed already. I'll show that family once more This by the way is a simulated family. Nobody in the Lichenthal has these last names I've picked these last names as being the last names of American presidents or other American people that I know for the sake of privacy. I'm not going to show any Individual real families even if they're a couple hundred years ago You can see that there are a couple of individuals who are listed as dying on the day of birth and there are other families where there are children who are dying fairly young and this led me to realize that The records provided in the genealogies could give me a quantitative indication of child mortality In the valley and maybe a qualitative indication of longevity longevity is much harder once you start dealing with adults because you've got migration and people leaving the valley so This question of how much child mortality was there is a prerequisite to the question of What about the high child mortality isn't the diet then not very good and so forth Well, this is the route to being able to look at that Okay, so my expanded project became not only looking at short-term fasting processes, but also looking at The the results of the genealogies I transferred all the data of all the children into a spreadsheet and Then I have a basis for analyzing that spreadsheet Okay, and now I didn't Cover everybody. I was I limited myself to people who are born between 1700 and 2000 and I also Entered only people whose families were living in the Luchntal. I did not include anybody in the Luchntal or diaspora Okay, and here is the example of the entire spreadsheet There are over 6,600 individuals that I've Covered there are a few columns that that indicate which index which Genealogy the person is in and which index number there's some other columns that give Quantitative information give the information of birth and death about the mother and what the gravid number of the individual is and then a series of columns on the individual's date of birth date of death whether the person is a twin and male or female There are some other columns that indicate that somebody might be have survived to adulthood because There's a marriage partner even though they ended up disappearing. No, it seems to me that Okay Deriving okay deriving information. I use Microsoft Excel. I don't want to go to a more fancy Database program because I want it to be as accessible to other people eventually as possible and the Conditional counting count if and count if functions are adequate for just about everything that I need Okay, the the queries are organized as other spreadsheets in the workbook with all the data being one spreadsheet and It does require a fairly fast computer when I started out I was using an Intel i3 processor and if I did an entry that required recalculation of everything It would take about 20 seconds before the computer would let me do anything else With an i7 and more memory. It takes me only about one second Okay Now here's a simple example of what can be done. This is the births per year recorded in the genealogies You can see the births are going slightly up over time until there's the birth dirt earth around the 1980s Okay, deaths per year. I can also calculate now the very low numbers over here around 1700 or so that's an artifact. That's first of all. I didn't I didn't enter into the spreadsheet anybody earlier than 1700 and secondly the death registration Book from the village from from the village church From 1688 to 1713 was missing So that's why there seem to be so few the other thing you can notice on this is that there There are a few Crisis mortality years where the death rate is much higher than in other years and indeed there are people know about Epidemics that occurred in the valley at various times Okay Now the genealogies Show another limitation which is the bane of people trying to do demographic research using church records And that is that there are a certain number of individuals Who have birth records, but there is no death record. What happened to them? The problem is that there are two separate reasons why there can be no death record Okay, first of all There were some parish priests who would not Record the deaths of infants and young children So sometimes they would record a record of the birth and then just put a cross by that Name that would indicate that the child had died, but sometimes there's nothing but the other reason is the person successfully grew up to adulthood and then emigrated and so These two different reasons can have different effects on on the demographics Okay Now listing of a marriage partner I showed that before is one way of showing that somebody survived to adulthood Another way is those big fat books have an enormous number of pictures and if they have a picture of somebody then Who is let's say wearing a military uniform or someone who is a young woman or an older woman Then you know they survive to adulthood Okay, this is just an indication of the individuals with no information beyond baptism all the people way over on the right are people who There's no indication past baptism. That's because they're still alive But all the people on the left side from 1700 up to about 1900 These are people that we can presume have died, but we don't know why we don't know when or how old they were Okay, so for some queries it doesn't matter but for other queries that we really want to know whether we're counting everybody or just the people for whom we have death records and That can make a difference in terms of the way the quantities come out Here's an example of what happens. This is actually a graph made from a hundred different Countiffs functions This is the survival curve of everybody born in the 19th century. What you see is a Certain amount of infant mortality then the mortality is less it never disappears, but then it starts getting greater after age 60 and Until by age 100 everybody is gone Okay, here is the same plot except I've added in what happens if I don't include only those with death records But I also include all those that I know have survived past age 15. That actually changes the percentage that have died early on I can't fill out the rest of that curve because I don't know what the Distribution of deaths of people that are lost to follow up. I don't know what that distribution is Over the lifespan, so I can only fill out that first part of it. There are ways of filling in With let's say a Kaplan-Meyer type of plot But I think there's some philosophical problems with doing that if you're looking to compare the Diet within the Luchental against the diet of people who have left Okay Here's another plot of basically at the same data and what they accept that it's been broken out into singletons versus Twins and you can see that one of the worst things that can happen to you Is to be born as a twin then Okay, that's almost always what happened is one twin would survive and the other would die Okay Here's one more plot of the same data again this time broken out by gender There's a slightly higher death rate of males in infancy There's no indication that Women die all faster during their child-bearing years. That doesn't mean there were no deaths Due to childbirth in fact there were but it means that the number of deaths due to accidents that tended to befall men Was just as great as the deaths that That befell women because of childbirth In fact that these curves overlap each other so closely that it almost scares me it makes me wonder whether I have somehow missed something and Okay, the one thing That this kind of plot is not good for it doesn't tell you any detail about what happened with infant mortality You can see that it's there, but Here is the next plot deaths in the first 12 months of life again obtained by the same count ifs functions And you can see that over half of all of the infant mortality is neonatal mortality and if we Drill down even deeper into that into deaths in the first 30 days of life There are a number of deaths In on the day of birth or a couple days later Almost as many as occur all through the rest of the the neonatal period Okay, so I was talking about You could see that some people had died You notice that a child dies on the day of birth But he's already baptized and This is very common in the Roman Catholic regions of Switzerland that baptism was of central importance, so Baptism usually occurred on the day of birth if there were any signs of life a beating heart Even if they couldn't get the child to start breathing It's got a beating heart. It's alive quick baptize it before it dies and So the distinctions between miscarriage still birth and neonatal death are treated differently in different cultures And this actually makes comparisons between different cultures very difficult Okay, in the legend how there were more live births dying on the first three days than there were still births and By contrast in Protestant villages in Germany the ratio would be the other way around and In England still birth registration was not even required until 1927 and it's believed that a lot of people who died a Lot of babies who died right after birth were quietly buried as still births and they were never even counted Okay, so this sort of summarizes the mortality through age five It It shows that the black and the gray are the neonatal mortality You can see it almost in some cases over half of all the more Mortality through age five is neonatal mortality Okay, now just looking in general You can look at this and say gee, you know this this is kind of a high level of Infant mortality Despite the fact that that most of it is neonatal mortality But if you consider that in the context of the 19th century and before in many populations, especially the unhealthy urban populations the The death rate Was sometimes over 50% so in that term in that sense The legend all is not doing badly, you know, they're Yes, they've got infant mortality, but it's nothing like the worst of what what you see Okay, now one final point. I want to make is there is a basic problem already alluded to that Dataset of six over six thousand six hundred people is really pretty small and it does not allow for good statistics of some things I have here a graph of the acceptance of iodized salt in the canton of valace where the Lichentau is located it goes from zero percent in 1923 up to about a hundred percent Less than ten years later that was more much faster acceptance than many cantons in Switzerland Okay, so I tried this was back in 2015 when I only had the data from the village of Kippel and Yeah, statisticians are gonna jump all over me. You've heard the old saying that correlation is no proof of cause and effect This is a very meager correlation when I'm dealing with early childhood deaths By the onesies and twosies but they seem to stop right around when iodine was introduced into the but then I got the other genealogies and The correlation Such as it was is even worse So I can't even say that early childhood mortality stops at the time of of the of the introduction of of iodized salt Okay, so that's that's as much as I plan to show What are the conclusions first of all there exist? Written accounts describing the diet as people from the richest to the poorest really experienced it While living in the mountains of Alpine Switzerland There exists village genealogies that allow quantitative counting of births and deaths in various age categories Put these two together and what do you have? First lesson is The more you know the more you know you don't know There's there's enough uncertainty about exactly what different people were eating. Maybe it was the people eating the who were selling their butter and Eating low-fat cheese and low-fat milk. Maybe the one they were the ones who had the highest child mortality Okay, as for Western prices assertion that people in the Lichentale had little need for doctors No That's excessive as long as there was any child mortality They could have stood having good doctors and they could have benefited from good medical care As far as the people who ask the what about questions and want to denigrate Western price As far as I'm concerned, they seem to be riding the waves of the collective Consciousness that there was high child mortality in the past and they're Projecting that onto the Lichentale. The Lichentale was far from being the worst it yes, it had some child mortality, but everything from differences and stillbirth reporting to to a variety of other things Made a lot of other places much worse than the Lichentale Okay, and finally an assignment of blame to the diets I've listed some of the other factors most of them, you know very well about Sanitation personal hygiene refrigeration motorized transport less horse manure to feed flies and antibiotics and the one that I think is a fairly significant one is Neonatal intensive care units and I haven't even gotten into the one other really important one Which was breastfeeding versus artificial feeding of babies, which was very important for the post neonatal period Okay, so finally why I mentioned what what was that? What were the people eating there were no food frequency questionnaires? So I think I mentioned that point already that It may have been the poorest Families who sold their butter and bought Less healthy foods in place of the butter that may have had the highest child mortality And with that I will stop I will mention that there are perhaps Hundreds of thousands of queries that I could do And so I will be paying close attention to what questions and if you ask because that might actually shape What I decide to give priority in putting together a book and all of this and with that I will stop and thank you for your attention That was a great presentation. Thank you. I think this work is really important I think you give your iodine graph a little bit to not enough credit because the I mean not that there aren't other things that could have explained that but the peaks of Mortality are clearly higher before the iodine than than they are afterwards And I actually thought the second graph was made that more clear rather than less clear I wanted to ask about the potatoes. So it's been a while since I read nutrition physical Degeneration I imagine you read this chapter many times as you're doing this work and see you probably have much more detailed memory of it, but my Impression is you know priced it and just go ask the priest what they were eating But he's got a bunch of photos of the bread that they were cooking in their thing and Surely he would have if in the villages he that he was visiting where if they were eating potatoes Maybe is limited by the time of year that he visited them Surely he would have someone would have shown him some potatoes even if they couldn't communicate very well with him Like they showed the bread and cheese and also he seems to have Noted that there was variation in different villages and so his point wasn't that this is the diet of the valley But rather you know he makes the comment for example in one place that they drank wine in this village and they didn't in the other village and He makes comments about that so How How do you think can you elaborate a little bit on how you think price would have? Visited the people and interacted with them and somehow missed the potatoes Well, okay, as I said, he did not miss the potatoes altogether In his discussion of the Luchenthal, which is only a portion of what he talked about in Alpine, Switzerland I don't see that he's mentioned them Okay That didn't mean the fact that there were potatoes did not mean that The sourdough rye bread went away that continued to be in fact the village of Latin continues to have Sort of like a Special event every summer where they fire up the village oven and they make Sourdough rye bread the old-fashioned way so it's it's a matter of It What people actually ate varied very widely I think he may have given some of that but I just had the impression as I read it that You know them but the potato is more important than what he was talking about and of course What the heck does that do to this whole question of? Paleo and high glycemic index and so forth What what I can tell you is that the potato certainly came in by 1815 1816 and maybe before that was the year that Mount Tambora exploded and there was a year without a summer it was one of the hunger years in Europe and And so People quickly figured out that it took less effort per calorie Growing potatoes than it took growing sourdough rye bread and because you have to go through several steps of making the sourdough rye Where you just boil the potatoes So Yeah, unfortunately, there were no food frequency questionnaires. So real exact Correlations between disease and what people are eating are going to be hard to come by I Don't know if that Thanks, Greg for the really informative discussion I Think it's really tremendous that you've gone back to really Explore some details that you found to be Absent and to look at the data. So I think that Chris's question was really a very very important one and I appreciate you addressing that I Just want to set one item straight as far as the record is concerned and that is a Little bit of a misunderstanding of the book nourishing traditions, which everyone credits Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. Well, this was written in the mid 1990s and one of the authors was also the price pot and your nutrition foundations director Pat Connolly So, thank you. You find that in an early in the earliest edition, but you don't see that in Subsequent editions. Okay. Okay. I will add that to any future talk. Thanks again. Thank you Well, thank you very much Greg We look forward to your similar presentations on the genealogies of all the other places that Weston a price visited and reported on Unfortunately, many of the true hunter-gatherer diets are hunter-gatherer groups Didn't really have genealogies one one feature of the Roman Catholic Church And this being a thoroughly Roman Catholic area was they kept good records and even though the records were not perfect They're there and the genealogist Ignats Ignats Belwald Used them along with other records that he gathered from people That's gonna be difficult to duplicate. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a good point and the paleo anthropologists and archaeologists have Great methods for reconstructing and estimating these kind of things like childhood mortality and health and diet from pollen Analysis tooth wear analysis and but it's much less complete and it's more obscure than the these kind of records That are found in Switzerland. Well, let's thank you Greg for your talk and let's thank him once again In eight minutes from now the next session will start so don't go too far, but definitely stretch