As I mentioned in Chapter 2, Weston A. Price travelled the world to study indigenous peoples and found generally pristine health. He also tracked down members of these populations who had left to enter the modern world and found they’d fallen to the same degraded health and tooth decay that had set him on his journey in the first place.
There were other differences between indigenous societies and modernized ones. Price found that indigenous peoples enjoyed generally high nutritional density and profound ancestral wisdom. And their methods for acquiring food were quite unlike the robotic routines many of us employ today: drive a cart down the supermarket lane and fill a cart with boxes, bags, cans, bottles, and the ever-present sweet, sugary drinks.
Eat, drink, and repeat.
So what was the magic of indigenous nutrition? It wasn’t magic, but logic. If you’re not driving a car, parking, driving a shopping cart, using your ATM card and driving back home, you might have to scrounge through the bush, track down prey, kill it, dress it, haul it back to camp, and present it to voraciously hungry souls.
If that’s your situation, are you going to toss the liver?
How about the bone marrow? The brain?
Or what about other nutritionally dense offal, such as sweetbreads and the like?
When luxury abounds, waste abounds, and hunter-gatherers didn’t have the luxury to waste anything. And it just so happens that the “nasty bits” are the most nutritionally dense, as has been illustrated with liver.
It turns out that there’s a nutrient in such things as liver, fish eggs, and all sorts of things people don’t commonly eat anymore, but ate preferentially throughout human evolution.
That nutrient may be what has now been identified as vitamin K2, of which there are many sub-forms. Some K2 sub-forms are found in the tissues of various animals, and others are produced by bacterial fermentation in such things as certain cheeses and natto, a Japanese dish of fermented soybeans.
The jury is still out on which is optimal or whether there’s a marked difference, but the history of evolution makes me suspect that the animal forms are what we evolved to eat. Humans are very poor at converting the plant form of vitamin K (K1) to the more active form (K2). But ruminant animals convert it very efficiently, so they eat the greens, produce K2, and we eat them.
Vitamin K2 has been used in relatively high doses to reverse arterial calcification in rodents. And as shown in an excerpt in this post at Free the Animal, Weston Price used a combination of cod liver oil and a special formulation of pastured butter oil to not only halt dental decay, but reverse it:
“Weston Price was primarily interested in Activator X because of its ability to control dental caries. By studying the remains of human skeletons from past eras, he estimated that there had been more dental caries in the preceding hundred years than there had been in any previous thousand-year period and suggested that Activator X was a key substance that people of the past obtained but that modern nutrition did not adequately provide. Price used the combination of high-vitamin cod liver oil and high-Activator X butter oil as the cornerstone of his protocol for reversing dental caries. This protocol not only stopped the progression of tooth decay, but completely reversed it without the need for oral surgery by causing the dentin to grow and remineralize, sealing what were once active caries with a glassy finish. One 14-year-old girl completely healed 42 open cavities in 24 teeth by taking capsules of the high-vitamin cod liver oil and Activator X concentrate three times a day for seven months.
“Activator X also influences the composition of saliva. Price found that if he collected the saliva of individuals immune to dental caries and shook it with powdered bone or tooth meal, phosphorus would move from the saliva to the powder; by contrast, if he conducted the same procedure with the saliva of individuals susceptible to dental caries, the phosphorus would move in the opposite direction from the powder to the saliva. Administration of the Activator X concentrate to his patients consistently changed the chemical behavior of their saliva from phosphorus-accepting to phosphorus-donating. The Activator X concentrate also reduced the bacterial count of their saliva. In a group of six patients, administration of the concentrate reduced the Lactobacillus acidophilus count from 323,000 to 15,000. In one individual, the combination of cod liver oil and Activator X concentrate reduced the L. acidophilus count from 680,000 to 0.
The principal point is that vitamin K2 is implicated in the proper absorption of minerals. Think of it this way: we’re rock and tissue. K2 helps calcium and other minerals to go everyplace they should (bones and teeth), and no place they shouldn't (arteries).
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