Chapter 45: The Spiritual Impacts of Physical Deprivation

(New chapter added Sept 11, 2024. Citations and images are available in the book.)

The first core spiritual practice is to feel a practical, aware gratitude for the gifts of life. A person can live from this place of gratitude even when times are hard, but children who experience chronic deprivation can find it difficult to feel gratitude as their baseline, default approach to life.

In Chapter 42, I defined spirituality as how a person relates to themselves and the world. From this perspective, everyone experiences spirituality. It does not necessarily have anything to do with supernatural gods or mysticism. Each person relates to themselves and the world around them in certain ways, and they can approach life from a basic sense of abundance and trust or deprivation and fear.

Unhealthy cultures train people to experience life from a place of chronic deprivation, with each person experiencing this in their own way. Authorities commonly train people to believe that obedience and selfishly accumulating money are the best way to acquire abundance in the face of scarcity. But when practically everyone obeys authorities and profits from their neighbors, they do not generate shared abundance, only a further sense of chronic lack as they reinforce the worst aspects of their unhealthy culture.

This book has described a few ways that children and adults can be kept in a state of chronic deprivation:

• Financial deprivation: Chapter 10 reviewed how families can be kept in a state of chronic financial desperation. When adults in a child’s life are constantly anxious or scared, a child can easily learn to “do whatever it takes” not to experience that in their own adulthood, including by taking exploitative or dissatisfying jobs.
• Deprivation of loving touch: Chapter 42 reviewed ways that children can be raised with chronic deprivation of loving touch, and how this lack of abundance trains the opposite of gratitude and reciprocity — it trains selfishness and pain. Different children may respond differently, but these hurtful attitudes are common outcomes of raising children without loving touch.
• Peace deprivation: Part 6, 7, and 8 reviewed how authorities keep people divided and afraid or angry towards others in their own culture. This makes it very difficult to experience a deep relaxation and peace. Stress, worry, or anxiety can easily become normal attitudes.
• Self-worth deprivation: Chapters 17, 18, and 30 reviewed how authorities can train people to believe that they are, in a very basic way, “not good enough” and thus undeserving of a life of abundance.
• Sexual deprivation: Chapter 25 reviewed how unhealthy cultures deprive many people of life-long, satisfying, uncoerced sexual fulfillment.
• Deprivation of trustworthy people: When a person is surrounded by untrustworthy or inauthentic people, it can be difficult to cultivate a deep gratitude for life.
• Deprivation of meaningful work: Chapter 41 reviewed how people are forbidden from standing up to the abuses and exploitation at the heart of their unhealthy culture. When people learn to ignore the biggest problems and ignore their own dissatisfaction, they can learn to focus on lesser problems instead, and life can seem meaningless as a result.

In unhealthy cultures, different people are deprived in different ways and different amounts. Some people have many sexual partners but have few trustworthy friends and work relationships; other people have parents that gave them plenty of loving touch but also grow up in extreme poverty. When people have such very different experiences and develop different spiritual attitudes as a result, it can become very difficult to empathize with neighbors and resolve big political problems.

How else could different people physically experience the world, so that life seems either basically abundant or basically lacking?

Food

Growing up, I had the vague sense that food gave me energy. If I ate enough I would have energy, and if I didn’t eat enough, my energy would flag. I had a vague sense that eating nutritious food was important, but I did not really understand why.

It turns out, food provides people with much more than energy. How each person eats, and how their parents ate before, during, and after pregnancy, can profoundly impact how they experience life, including how their body develops, how easily they heal from injuries, and whether they experience chronic pain and disease.

Similar patterns of nutritional deficiency play out in both humans and nonhumans.

Nutritional Deficiency in Nonhumans

Nutritional deficiencies have been well-studied in nonhumans.

In one study, pregnant rats were fed a diet that lacked vitamin E, and researchers noticed a much longer gestation. The baby rats later developed slowly and became either very thin or very fat. Either way, the young rats were frail and had thin skulls.

When mother rats were fed a diet deficient in vitamin A, they experienced a very long gestation and both the mother and child rat would often die. The rats recognized what was missing in their diet. In one instance, rats gnawed their way into a box holding rabbits and consumed only the part of the rabbit that contained the highest levels of vitamin A — the eyes. They left the rest of the rabbits behind.

Cows can also suffer eye soreness and even blindness from vitamin A deficiency. During a drought, when a herd of cows was forced to eat a diet low in vitamin A, researchers found that almost 30% developed eye soreness or even blindness. Approximately half the calves born during this time were deformed or somehow not healthy. Many cows’ health improved after they could eat a nutritionally complete diet again.

Vitamin A deficiency can diminish a dog’s balance as well as hearing ability. One researcher encountered total deafness in dogs who were heavily deprived of vitamin A.

Nutrients provide the basic building material of the body. Consider the analogy of a house. When a house’s siding is damaged, even if a skilled person is present, without new siding, they will not be able to properly fix the house. Likewise, when a body lacks nutrients, without the right material, it will not be able to heal or grow properly. Without nutrition, the necessary building material simply isn’t available.

What does nutritional deficiency look like in humans?

Weston Price Learned About Nutrition by Studying Healthy Cultures

By the early 20th century, many physicians were very concerned about people’s declining health.

Sir Arbuthnot Lane, a distinguished English surgeon, said, “Long surgical experience has proved to me conclusively that there is something radically and fundamentally wrong with the civilized mode of life, and I believe that unless the present dietetic and health customs of the White Nations are reorganized, social decay and race deterioration are inevitable.”

Dr. Earnest A. Hooton wrote in his book Apes, Men, and Morons, that “human teeth and the human mouth have become, possibly under the influence of civilization, the foci of infections that undermine the entire bodily health of the species… degenerative tendencies in evolution have manifested themselves in modern man to such an extent that our jaws are too small for the teeth which they are supposed to accommodate… as a consequence, these teeth erupt so irregularly that their fundamental efficiency is often entirely or nearly destroyed.”

In other words, people’s bodies were developing so poorly that, in some cases, the pieces did not even fit together properly, with the underlying jaw being too small for the teeth it was supposed to hold. What could cause such fundamental problems?

Weston Price was an American dentist in the early 20th century who wondered why dental cavities were so incredibly common. Most dentists endlessly studied the various dental diseases and injuries without discovering the root cause, but Price took a different approach: he went around the world studying healthy cultures to learn how people lived without developing cavities.

While Price’s research focused on nutrition and individual physical health, he also noticed the same deeper patterns so many other observers have noticed too. After studying healthy cultures around the world, he wrote that “few impressions can be more vivid than that of the absence of prisons and asylums.” In contrast, he described how “serious and disturbing” it was in unhealthy cultures to see a widespread “increase in the percentage of individuals with unsocial traits.”

With healthy cultures serving as his control groups, he studied what healthy humans are like and learned many ways that people in unhealthy cultures are predisposed to dental and many other health problems.

Racism and hatred were major obstacles to understanding widespread health problems in the United States. Chapter 22 described how Christians had been trained to look down on “primitives” and “savages.” Price warned his readers to avoid “prejudice against the wisdom of so-called savages.” Likewise, ideologies of racial purity intended to make poor whites side with rich whites had trained people to believe that racial mixing was the cause of the worsening health that physicians observed.

Price found something different: as people of all “races” switch to poor diets, they show similar health problems regardless of their skin color. In Price’s words, “primitive races share our blights when they adopt our conception of nutrition.”

Dental Cavities are an Unhealthy-Culture Disease

Weston Price went all around the world, visiting Australia, Pacific Islands, South America, Africa, North America, and Europe. In each region, he studied two types of groups: people of healthy cultures who maintained their traditional diets, and people who lived nearby — often just a few miles away — who had adopted diets of unhealthy cultures. He documented his findings in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, including pictures of the people he encountered.

Prior to encountering European unhealthy cultures, the Maori of New Zealand showed a level of health almost unheard-of in Europe.

They ate a large diversity of seafood as well as grubs and roots. Analysis of ancient Maori skulls showed that about 1% showed any sign of cavities. About one out of every 2,000 teeth had a cavity. All of these pre-contact skulls showed normally-formed dental arches.

These healthy people showed physical abilities that astounded the Europeans. One night, a Maori person and European were looking at Jupiter in the sky. The Maori person was able to distinguish the individual moons of Jupiter with their bare eyes. They could tell when a moon became eclipsed by Jupiter, something the European could only see with their telescope.

Everywhere Price visited, he took pictures of the people living on their traditional diets as well as locals and white people who were living on the unhealthy diets of highly processed foods.

When the British took over New Zealand, they forced many Maori to eat diets based on sweetened and canned foods, white flour, and syrup. Price described how these Maori and local white people developed similar deformities in their dental arches, as well as similar rates of cavities.

One researcher informed Price that approximately 86-98% of white people in this region had cavities, as did 95% of Maori who lived on a similar diet. This was plainly visible in the photos that Price took:

Price encountered the same pattern when he visited Australia. He noticed that the people of healthy cultures, “have been able to build good bodies and maintain them in excellent condition” despite living in a region with extremely low rainfall. He was impressed that they “have maintained a vigorous existence in districts in which the white population which expelled them is unable to continue to live. Among the white race there, the death rate approaches or exceeds the birth rate.”

Price was again impressed with their physical abilities. He described young men who were able to hunt kangaroos and wallabies, animals that could even outrun Europeans on horseback. They could see animals move from a mile away that white people could not see at all.

When people of healthy cultures maintained their traditional diets, they had very healthy teeth and skull development:

Unfortunately, like people around the world, when they transitioned to nutrient-poor diets, their teeth and bones suffered dramatically:

One study of people of healthy cultures who had been forced onto the LeParouse reservation near Sydney, Australia and fed processed food showed that 100% had dental cavities. Price found many whites and native Australians who had such large deformities that breathing through the nose was difficult.

Price’s research contradicted many commonly-held beliefs in American dentistry that persist today as I write in 2024. For example, many dentists continue to believe that most periodontal (ie gum) disease stems from the buildup of tartar. This tartar contains toxic substances which irritate the gums, and many dentists seek to prevent gum disease and cavities by removing the tartar.

However, Price found many people of healthy cultures with strong teeth and healthy gums and no means of removing any tartar that built up. He especially described the Eskimos of North America, many of whom had teeth worn down almost to the gum line, but who still had very healthy gums and no periodontal disease.

Amazingly, Price was not the only person to notice the radical change in dental health in recent centuries. Many anthropologists had already learned that a skull without cavities was more likely to be ancient. One anthropologist, named Dryer, said, “caries [cavities] is a comparatively modern disease and that no skull showing this condition can be regarded as ancient.”

Clearly, people of unhealthy cultures struggle to eat well, and this has had huge impacts on people’s health all around the world for millennia. Unfortunately, the problems are not limited to dental health.

The Many Impacts of Nutrition Deprivation

Nutrients such as calcium and phosphorus are crucial for bone development, and when these are missing in nutritionally-poor diets, people’s skeletons suffer as a result, manifesting in many different ways.

These pictures of people’s heads make it obvious how strongly people’s bodily development can be affected by nutrition. Other aspects of people’s development can be harder to observe, but still have profound influences on people’s lives.

Childbirth

When skeletons do not grow to their full size, with all the pieces in their proper proportion, childbirth can become much more challenging. Dr. Kathleen Vaughan studied people of healthy cultures in southern Asia along with people who ate heavily processed foods. In her book Safe Childbirth, she acknowledged that a woman’s physical development, rather than race or other factors, determines her ability to safely and comfortably give birth.

Many stories of people of healthy cultures show that childbirth was not particularly stressful for the women. During Price’s travels, he noted, “With several of these tribes… the ease with which childbirth is accomplished is so great that it is looked upon as quite an insignificant experience.” Chapter 13 reviewed De Las Casas’ comment about the Arawak women: “pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth…”

While I’m sure women of healthy cultures living in their traditional way still sometimes experience difficult births, many stories show that this is the exception rather than the rule.

Weston Price found many stories of women of healthy cultures struggling with childbirth after adopting unhealthy cultures’ diets. Price described the “evidence of a rapid decline in maternal reproductive efficiency after an abandonment of the native foods and the substitution of foods of modern civilization.” When he visited the Six Nation Reservation at Brantford, Ontario, he spoke with a doctor who had worked there for 28 years and said the hospital had come to be used largely for “young Indian women during abnormal childbirth.”

Price also met a doctor in Anchorage, Alaska who worked with Eskimo women. The doctor said he had never arrived in time to help with the birth of an Eskimo woman who lived on her traditional diet, and he told the story of one Eskimo woman who gave birth to 26 children. Several times, she had given birth during the night and decided not to wake up her husband, letting him meet the infant in the morning. After the Eskimos’ diets changed, the doctor reported that women commonly needed to be carried to the hospital where they would be in labor for days.

Difficult births are much more common in unhealthy cultures. Poor nutrition has many impacts, including making the hips constricted, making the physical act of birthing more difficult and painful than it otherwise would be.

Other patterns show that, even when a person starts out with sufficient health, long-term nutritional deficiency can lead to long-term problems with pregnancy. For example, researchers found that miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births were not randomly distributed among a given woman’s pregnancies. Rather, they were much more likely to happen immediately before a pregnancy leading to the birth of a child with severe mental disabilities. In other words, the poor nutrition manifested in difficulties with multiple, back-to-back pregnancies over years as the poor food took its toll on the women.

In unhealthy cultures, many older girls and young women are trained to feel chronically insecure about their appearance and weight, and this too can have tragic consequences. Weston Price noted that when girls and young women starve themselves to stay thin, they deprive themselves of nutrients at exactly the time when they are physically developing into womanhood. Since the body prioritizes the development of new growth, when girls and young women starve themselves, their bodies will take minerals out of existing bones in order to grow, weakening themselves in the process.

Many healthy cultures have recognized that the father’s health is also important, and if he is unhealthy, the baby may also suffer. As one example, a full-blooded Eskimo woman married a white man, and she ate her own diet but prepared his imported foods for him. Thus her children had a mother who ate well but a father who ate poorly. Several of her children had incomplete facial development and restricted dental arches. Studies of sheep and pigs also show that the father’s health strongly influences the offspring’s health.

The Christian Bible and Jewish Torah both contain a passage where God supposedly condemns women to experiencing painful childbirth: “To the woman [God] said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.'” For years, I thought this was simply the statement of a mean-spirited patriarchal god, propagated by religious authorities that wanted to perpetually keep women at a lower privilege level than men. However there may be a deeper meaning: childbirth very likely became much harder after the transition to an unhealthy culture, as both women’s and men’s diets worsened, producing girls who grew up with less fully-developed skeletons and thus struggled to give birth.

Chapter 8 showed how the transition out of the “Garden of Eden” was not a one-off event but a repeating pattern, and difficulty in childbirth may be part of that pattern. When people are forced out of a healthy culture and trapped in an unhealthy culture, it becomes more difficult to eat well, and more-difficult childbirths are one tragic result.

Posture and Skeletal Strength

Bones can soften without proper minerals, predisposing people to a variety of structural problems.

Price found one young woman who had a very contracted pelvic arch and she and her child almost died during childbirth. They tried to have a natural childbirth but ultimately switched to a caesarian operation. Price noticed that the young mother aged rapidly during nursing, as she developed a stooped back and rounded shoulders as shown below.

Price also found that people on poor diets can develop bowed legs.

Mental and Social Effects

Weston Price found many examples of people who developed mental disabilities, likely due to nutritional problems during pregnancy and childhood. One example shows the strong influence of nutrition on people’s mental and physical development.

Price described a 16-year-old man who had the genitals and mental capacity of a 4-year-old. This boy-like man commonly played on the floor with blocks. He had frequent, long-lasting nausea.

He also showed several skeletal problems. Some bones in his hands had not fused properly, limiting his hands’ functionality. His maxillary arch (above the upper row of teeth) was so much narrower than his mandibular arch (lower row) that it fit entirely inside, meaning he could not chew food. Price believed his pituitary gland had not been stimulated sufficiently due to his deformed skull structure, limiting the gland’s activity and his physical and mental development.

Even worse, this young man’s left nostril was entirely blocked and his right nostril nearly blocked, severely impacting his breathing. He had likely mouth-breathed his entire life out of necessity. At night, he had to sleep with a rolled-up coat under his neck to prop his mouth open. Whenever his mouth closed, he would begin suffocating and wake up.

Price offered the young man a surgery where he widened the upper dental arch by 1/2.” Just by changing this aspect of his facial bone structure, Price noticed “a very great change in his physical development and mentality.” In a short time, he passed through developmental stages that usually take years. He grew 3″ in the following four months, and a mustache started growing immediately. Within 12 weeks, he had a man’s genitals.

The mental changes were also distinct. He began playing pranks and calling people with the telephone. At home, his mother could send him to the grocery store with money, and he could know whether he had received the correct change from the clerk. He could travel 90 miles by train to visit Price, including switching between multiple trains and streetcars without trouble. This showed how even a single aspect of skeletal development — the reduced upper arch size — severely impacted the boy’s overall development.

Price found many other signs that nutritional deficiency was negatively impacting society. He visited the Ohio State Penitentiary which had 4,000 inmates. He asked the prison’s doctor if he’d noticed any strange patterns with the inmates’ mouths which weren’t observed in people outside of prison. The doctor said that the mouths were often too small, so that the tongue did not fit well inside. Price observed more than half of the prison population, and everyone he observed showed some sign of deformity in the face or dental arches.

While this prison population showed some effects that were not common in the general population, nearly all Americans at the time had severe nutritional deficiencies. Using estimates from his own patients as well as data from the United States Department of Agriculture and Department of Labor, Price calculated that people’s calcium intake was 44%-74% of the government-recommended amount, and their phosphorus consumption was 23%-45% of the government-recommended level. However, many governmental dietary recommendations still set a low standard. Price found that healthy-culture diets often had 1.5x — 50x the nutrition of unhealthy-culture diets.

Bone Fragility and Healing

Many people take for granted that elderly people develop frail bones that break easily and, after breaking, heal poorly if at all. Weston Price said, “We look upon this as one of the inevitable consequences of advancing age.”

However, Price believed that fragile and poorly-healing bones can be attributed more to diet than to age.

In one story, a 4-1/2-year-old boy broke his leg after falling in the kitchen. He suffered from persistent convulsions, “rampant” tooth decay, and a bad cough. At the time Price was called, the leg had been broken for 2-3 months but had not healed at all.

The leg had not broken because the impact was hard, but because the boy’s diet included so few minerals that his bones had little structural strength. The body essentially removed minerals from the bone to maintain the needed mineral levels in the bloodstream. Price also found that the convulsions were due to low calcium-content in the food. To heal the broken bone, Price knew the child needed minerals, including calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium.

Price quickly adjusted the boy’s diet, which had mostly consisted of white bread and skim milk. Instead, Price had the family feed him wheat gruel from freshly-ground wheat, whole milk, and a teaspoon of very high-vitamin butter with each meal.

The boy showed immediate signs of improvement. The night after he ate this meal for the first time, he had no convulsions. His health rapidly improved in the coming weeks, and convulsions never returned. Six weeks later, the mother called for the little boy but couldn’t find him. He was climbing up the downspout and had reached the second story of the house! After he came down and his mother scolded him, he proceeded to jump across a fence. With better nutrition, he was able to recover good health and energy.

Price often found that people physically shrank as their bodies’ nutritional needs went continuously unmet. He witnessed many people who lost 2-6″ within 10-20 years. He estimated that, in the communities he studied, between 25-75% of Americans were affected by nutritional deficiencies which led to physical and mental disabilities, including childhood trouble in school. About these struggling children, he said, “their I.Q.’s are generally lower than normal and they readily develop inferiority complexes growing out of their handicap.”

Breathing

Air is the most important resource that the universe provides for humans. In a safe environment and with a little training, healthy humans can live several days without water and many weeks without food. I have personally gone more than 90 hours without water and never felt thirsty, and I once went two weeks without food without feeling hungry. But no one can last more than several minutes with air.

In his book Breath, James Nestor explored how to breathe properly, and why so many people breathe poorly. Building on Weston Price’s research, he found that nutrient deficiency didn’t fully explain why people’s heads and airways had shrunk over the past few centuries. It turns out, a core aspect of eating is chewing, and chewing too little prevents teeth, tongues, faces, mouths, and throats from fully forming.

Processed foods like white bread and cooked white rice are soft, and most unhealthy-culture foods require little chewing. Instead of chewing for hours per day, many people in unhealthy-cultures chew very little, and most “chewing” is relatively easy with soft, low-fiber foods that offer little exercise for the jaw. For over a century, researchers including Scottish doctor James Wallace and American anthropologist Robert Corruccini have noticed that a population’s airways and faces would narrow when they switched to processed food and did not need to chew much. This was observed with humans as well as nonhumans like pigs.

Thus, eating nutrient-rich food and chewing it well are both important.

Nestor also shared research by George Catlin, who lived with many North American healthy cultures in the 1830s, including the Lakota, Pawnee, Omaha, and Blackfeet. He encountered people who seemed extremely physically healthy, with teeth “as regular as the keys of a piano.” Nobody seemed sick, and chronic health problems or deformities were rare or non-existent. He learned the same practice from all of them: nose-breathing.

Catlin wrote, “The air which enters the lungs is as different from that which enters the nostrils as distilled water is different from the water in an ordinary cistern or a frog-pond.” He learned from the people of healthy cultures that mouth-breathing reduced a person’s strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease. On the other hand, nose-breathing had the opposite effects.

Catlin found that mothers in all these communities trained their babies to nose-breathe. They would carefully close the baby’s mouth with their fingers after breast-feeding. While sleeping at night, the mother would close the baby’s lips if they opened. Some groups strapped their babies to a straight board and propped a little pillow behind the child’s head to encourage the mouth to stay closed at night.

These studies were not merely theoretically interesting for Catlin. He had severe sleep problems, sometimes even coughing up blood. He snored heavily. He wrote, “I became fully convinced of the danger of the habit [of mouthbreathing], and resolved to overcome it.” He intentionally nose-breathed while awake and bandaged his head to keep his mouth closed while asleep to develop new habits. His aches, pains, and bleeding stopped, and he reported feeling healthier than at any time in his life. Another approach to prevent mouth-breathing is to carefully tape the lips closed before sleep.

Chronic poor breathing, whether due to bad habits, congested airways, or developmental problems, can easily create a sense of chronic deprivation or lack. Chapter 25 noted how humans are like fire, and just like fires need oxygen to live, so do people. Reduced breathing for any reason reduces a person’s vitality.

In his book, Nestor provides many techniques for improving one’s breathing. Many structural problems that restrict airways can be improved, though the easiest problems to fix are bad habits. Problems like sleep apnea, snoring, unrestful sleeping, and others can sometimes be resolved simply by learning to breathe properly.

Takeaways: Build and Share Physical Abundance while Cultivating Gratitude

It Takes a Village

It can be challenging to eat well in unhealthy cultures. In many cases the challenge stems not from food availability, but from social isolation. A pregnant woman is especially in need of a high-nutrition diet right at the time when it can be most physically difficult for her to work. Especially if the mother-to-be has no reliable partner or savings, eating well during pregnancy can be difficult.

One story from Fiji shows how a whole community can act to support pregnant mothers and the next generation. In one healthy culture which Price did not name, women would tell the chief immediately when they became pregnant. He would then organize a feast in honor of their community’s newest member that would arrive in a few months. At this feast, other members of the community pledged to adopt the child if the parents should die, ensuring that the children would be taken care of no matter what. Furthermore, at this feast the chief would appoint one or two boys to go to the sea daily and harvest high-nutrition crabs for all the expectant mothers. Showing deep solidarity, the entire culture took responsibility to ensure that the next generation was as healthy as possible. They did not expect the pregnant women to fend for themselves.

Price also found healthy cultures who helped the father-to-be eat well too, recognizing the impact of his health on the child’s wellbeing.

Any present-day community can adopt a similar way of supporting pregnant families. Where I live in western North Carolina, often a family’s close friend will host a meal train, where people can sign up to bring a home-cooked meal to the family on a particular date after the birth. By itself, this does not support the parents’ nutritional needs before birth, but it does strongly support young families for weeks or even months after the pregnancy, a time that can be stressful. Everyone benefits from the meal trains too. The receiving family is grateful for the support, and contributing friends are happy for the opportunity to meaningfully help them.

Spiritual Implications of Poor Diets and Poor Breathing

All these aspects of physical health can heavily impact a person’s spirituality, that is, they can impact how a person relates to themselves and the world around them. Attitudes of entitlement, explored in Chapter 30, are all examples of spiritual patterns. An entitled person believes they deserve their lot in the world they were born into, whether good or bad. An unentitled person does not.

Unhealthy cultures commonly train people to believe that their life situation, whether good or bad, is due to some inherent quality when this often is not the case. For example, Price said that many poorly-fed American children underperformed at school and developed beliefs in their own inferiority. Would the children have thought so little of themselves if they learned they had simply been eating poorly, and if they were helped to eat better?

Many doctors and religious authorities teach heart-closing beliefs in people’s inherent badness or conditional goodness, as discussed in Chapter 18. Medical authorities can promote beliefs about hereditary defects, when the truth is that not all multi-generational problems are genetic. While some diseases may be genetic, in many cases, parents simply pass on their habits to their children, including their attitudes, how they eat, how they breathe, and more. Religious authorities can promote belief in inherent badness due to inherent sin, when the simple truth is that people who are trapped in poverty often cannot feed themselves adequately. Political authorities may propagate the belief that “racial mixing” causes problems, or certain social classes or religions are inferior, when all humans are subject to similar negative consequences of poor eating and breathing.

Thus, authorities can train people to see inherent deficiencies in themselves, when really the problems are quite concrete and often fixable. Unfortunately, people’s health can also have other consequences for their spiritual attitudes.

If a person consistently struggles to heal from injuries or disease, are they more likely to relate to themselves as basically strong or basically weak?

If a frail person becomes injured easily due their parents’ and their own poor diet, could they more easily see the world as a dangerous, risky place and prioritize keeping life safe and comfortable?

If a woman feels an urge to give birth but consistently finds it painful, difficult, and dangerous, and her children are weak or disabled, how might that impact her attitude towards life?

If a person feels chronic pain, are they more inclined to see life as basically abundant and joyful, or basically miserable and unpleasant?

If a person constantly breathes poorly and suffers from low energy, anxiety, and other troubles, is life for that person more likely to seem basically abundant or basically deprived?

These spiritual troubles due to chronic pain, poor diet, poor breathing, fragility, and so on can compound with other aspects of a closed heart. For example, people may develop chronic muscular tension as they learn to hold back certain feelings and urges, as described in Chapter 25. People can easily feel “stressed” and “pressured” by life as a normal, default state, and this has a physical basis: many people’s chronically tensed muscles indeed create very real stressors and pressures on their body, often including their head and heart. Thus, simply learning to relax can change a person’s outlook on life.

This book has explored many ways that authorities intentionally divide people, including with racism, sexism, privilege, synthetic hate, class, propaganda, and many other techniques. When each person or group lives in chronic deprivation in their own ways, whether from a lack of loving touch in childhood, safety, sexual intimacy, nutrition, or even air, this itself can create division, as different people develop different attitudes and beliefs about “how life is” and whether it’s possible to live a life of pleasure and solidarity with other people. These are spiritual differences, as people within the same unhealthy culture can relate to themselves and the world around them in very different ways.

Different kinds and degrees of deprivation can cause people to adopt different attitudes. Thus, even if they could agree on the “facts” of a social or political issue, they might still make very different choices about how to respond. This makes political unity very difficult to achieve.

Experiencing deprivation can also make it hard to practice that first core spiritual practice of practical, aware gratitude. For example, I find it difficult to feel grateful for my food when I’m eating poorly. I rarely feel grateful to be alive when I’m breathing poorly.

I learned another spiritual lesson that helped me: gratitude is a relationship, not just a feeling. It has been really helpful for me to develop relationships with the things I feel grateful for, rather than just practice thankfulness as an abstract, isolated feeling. When I receive the gift of abundant air by breathing properly, it’s easy to feel grateful for the air. Feeling thankful for my food is a lot easier when it actually tastes good and feels nourishing. In other words, when I develop a relationship with the air and food, it is a lot easier to cultivate that practical, aware gratitude.

Anyone can choose their spirituality at any time — that is, anyone can choose what attitudes to adopt towards themselves and the world around them. And, people’s physical experiences of the world can predispose them to embracing attitudes of abundance or attitudes of scarcity and deprivation. Unhealthy cultures deprive people in countless different ways to encourage people to close their hearts and approach life from a place of scarcity and fear rather than abundance and gratitude.

Food Recommendations

Weston Price gave many dietary recommendations in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. While no one needs to study nutrition for years to eat well, there are some nutritional facts many people find surprising when I bring them up.

The biggest discovery I made is this: a nutrient may be present in a food, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the body will process it. In some cases, one nutrient may need a second nutrient to be present in order to be absorbed by the body. In other cases, anti-nutrients may be present such as phytates. These are naturally-occurring chemicals that inhibit nutrient absorption when eaten. Anti-nutrients are commonly found in seeds, grains, and legumes.

A seed contains many nutrients and calories, enough for the plant to grow underground and push up little leaves before receiving any new energy from the sun. Why doesn’t the seed start growing the moment it comes into being in the mother-plant? Why does it wait until it is in the moist ground to grow? The anti-nutrients prevent the seed from using up its nutrients and calories before it’s ready. When a seed is exposed to water in the soil, this moisture deactivates the anti-nutrients, unbinding them and allowing the seed to sprout.

Likewise, if humans want to access the nutrients in seeds, they need to deactivate the anti-nutrients by soaking them.

Many healthy dietary practices are as simple as soaking seeds. Eat a variety of colors of food. Eat hard and soft foods when it’s safe to do so. Eat minimally-processed foods not treated with chemical pesticides. Eat dark leafy greens and healthy fats. Enjoy how your food tastes rather than just gulping it down or ignoring it while watching TV. Enjoy fermented foods. Listen to your body and notice what foods in which combinations feel good, and which don’t.

People of healthy cultures around the world have lived on a wide variety of diets. When humans tune into their own sense of what their body needs, and they are not oppressed by a ruling class, they will find a diet that works for them. For those of us still in unhealthy cultures, there is still much we can do.

I’ve never been interested in food chemistry. Although discussions of the huge range of vitamins, fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and other things may be helpful, I want to learn how to sense the foods I eat and figure out a diet that works for me without having to mentally understand the dozens or hundreds of different nutrient needs. Luckily, humans have been eating well without chemists or dentists for hundreds of thousands of years. In addition to the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, for those who want to learn more about healthy eating, I recommend Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions as well as Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation. For those who want to eat wild foods, I recommend Sam Thayer’s foraging books, including The Forager’s Harvest.

The Spiritual Implications of Mistreating the Earth

Weston Price did his research in the 1920s and 1930s, a time before chemical pesticides were widespread. Even much of the unprocessed food was nutritionally deficient because soils had been depleted due to poor farming practices. Processing removed much of the remaining nutrition, leaving little left.

Even back then, dozens of government officials from around the United States confirmed that they had seen soil productivity diminish by 25-50%. In the century since then, many chemicals and fertilizers have been developed to allow crops to grow in depleted soils, though they often have not increased the nutritional value of those crops. Widespread eating of low-nutrient crops continues to yield malnourishment around the world I write in 2024.

Unfortunately, in many ways, food quality has further deteriorated since Price’s time. Many soils are contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins. For example, much modern rice is heavily contaminated with arsenic. Rice easily absorbs arsenic, a poison that can affect a person’s whole life if they are exposed during pregnancy or as a young child. The rice plant’s affinity for arsenic wasn’t a problem until the past few centuries, when arsenic pollution seeped into the soil due to pollution from heavy industries around the world. In 2019, American researchers noted that rice commonly has arsenic levels exceeding the US Environmental Protection Agency’s legal limit for arsenic in water. Arsenic and many other human-produced poisons are making food even less healthy over time than it was during Price’s time.

This arsenic is only one example of a widespread problem. Toxic chemicals known to cause fertility issues, cancer, liver damage, and diabetes have been found in rainwater in Europe and the United States that exceed Environmental Protection Agency levels, which are already too forgiving. Any amount of poison is too much. No one can protect themselves from polluted rainwater, as it becomes part of our drinking water and even organically-grown food cannot be protected from poisons in the rain.

In every culture, humans treat the soil the same way they treat each other. Healthy cultures treat the Earth well, and they eat well and maintain their health as a result. Unhealthy cultures treat the Earth poorly, both the farm animals and the soil in which the plants grow. The results of this poor treatment of the Earth show up in our bodies in countless ways, as Weston Price documented.

All this teaches me that treating ourselves better and treating the Earth better are one and the same. We cannot achieve one without achieving the other, because humans and the Earth really are one being together. We are what we eat. While I am grateful for organic farmers who seek to protect their little patches of soil, there is only so much people can do in isolation.

Ultimately, protecting ourselves and protecting the Earth will require taking the same stand: creating a culture where nobody rules over anybody else.

Next, dive deeper on the path to a healthy culture in Chapter 46: Embracing the Sacred Feminine.