Are You Eating Foods of
Modern Commerce? By Dr. Donald Piccoli
people were different. And it made helping them less complicated. What I mean by that is people were literally made of different stuff than they are now. Oh, they all had the same basic material make up, but the quality was different. Back then I noticed that most people’s bodies began to break down in their late 50s or early 60s as they began to develop new health problems. “Don’t get old,” and “Ahh, the golden years” were sayings I heard frequently. As time went on this breakdown began occurring while people were only in their 40s…and then it was in their 30s. Today we see patients in their 20s and even teen years experiencing what we used to see in people in their 50s or 60s. And I rarely saw sick children back then. I believe most practitioners who had already been in practice for many years by the 1980s would have made the same observation that I make today regarding people who they saw in their early years in practice in 1930s and 40s. Today, chronic illnesses are ever increasing, affecting about half
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of all Americans. Cancer and heart disease were rare in the early 1900s. And regarding children, even in the 1950s, a physician was unlikely to ever see a child that would be diagnosed with autism. Personally, when I was growing up I knew of no autistic children. Now approximately one in one hundred and ten are diagnosed with autism. As Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, PhD write in the classic nutrition cookbook Nourishing Traditions, “In America one in three persons die of cancer, one in three suffers from allergies, one in ten will have ulcers and one in five is mentally ill. One in five pregnan- cies ends in miscarriage and a quarter of a million infants are born with a birth defect each year. Add to that arthritis, multiple sclero- sis, digestive disorders, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, epi- lepsy and chronic fatigue. Learning disorders such as dyslexia and hyperactivity affect five million young people. These diseases were extremely rare only a generation ago.” Patients are presenting with many more health issues these days than they used to. A typical person who comes to see us for help is
12 Natural Nutmeg April 2013
hen I began practice in the 1980’s,
usually female, between the ages of 35 and 55. She has had at least one surgery which may include tonsillectomy, mul- tiple root canals, Cesarean section, partial or total hyster- ectomy and may also have had her gall bladder removed. Common complaints are indigestion, bloating after eating, gas and constipation, afternoon fatigue, irregular menses, PMS symptoms, waking up in the middle of the night with her mind racing and difficulty falling back asleep. She suffers bouts of depression, complains of eczema that “just doesn’t want to go away” and is using a prescription topical cream. She takes medication for thyroid, anti-acids and has been on, is presently taking or considering taking anti- depressants. Her mother passed away in her early 70s of an auto-immune disease that doctors couldn’t quite put a name on, her sister is undergoing treatment for breast cancer for the second time at age 49. Her older brother is overweight and diabetic, takes insulin injections, a statin and two blood pressure medications along with eye drops for glaucoma and her father is starting to show signs of Alzheimer’s.
Does this sound atypical or can you actually relate to this per- sonally or with people you know? Not too many years ago most of the above would have been considered rare to unheard of. So what happened? What caused all this? And more importantly what can we do about it? Let’s take a look at a few of the known reasons for all this health deterioration before offering some solutions.
Understanding Human Nutrition
The works of Dr. Weston Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger are considered a must-read in understanding human nutrition and how we have come to find ourselves in this situation today. Dr. Weston Price was a dentist in private practice in Cleveland,
OH in 1930 when he began to see his patients were presenting with more and more degenerative dental related conditions including deformed dental arches, crooked teeth and multiple cavities, as well as systemic diseases that he reasoned were connected. The clinical researcher in him got the best of him and he de-
cided to travel the world to study the health of “primitive people”, as was the vernacular of the day, which were disease-free and lead- ing productive lives. He had learned of different areas of the world where these people lived and wanted to know why these people were healthy and others were sick. He wrote that in areas where the
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