ANCESTRAL EATING: Seafood, pt.2

In this instalment, I'm going to consider some very powerful reasons why you should limit your intake of seafood and maybe even not eat any at all

Welcome back to ANCESTRAL EATING. Last week I talked about how many of the groups Weston Price studied in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration achieved perfect health through the consumption of large amounts of seafood. However, there are reasons why you should not follow their lead and start gorging on salmon and shellfish, especially if the salmon is from a farm. I’ll discuss those reasons here, in this second instalment of this mini-series on seafood.

Note, once again, that I’ll be considering freshwater and saltwater varieties under the rubric of seafood: “seafood” is just a convenient label. If I’m talking about one variety in particular, I’ll make it clear.

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Last week, I showed that consuming seafood was one clear way of achieving what Weston Price called “perfect health.” In fact, of all the groups Price studied as part of his globe-trotting adventures, it was the Maori, consumers of maybe the largest quantities of seafood, that he singled out as the most impressive physical specimens he saw.

Price describes the Maori as standing on a “pedestal of perfection” for their “splendid physiques.” As an example, he recounts examining a Maori man who was 6’4” tall and a solid 230 pounds.

He describes the great pains the Maori went to in order to acquire seafood.

As among the various archipelagos and island dwellers of the Pacific, great emphasis was placed upon shell fish. Much effort was made to obtain these in large quantities. In Fig. 74… will be seen two boys who have been gathering sea clams found abundantly on these shores. Much of the fishing is done when the tide is out. Some groups used large quantities of the species called abalone on the West Coast of America and paua in New Zealand. In Fig. 74… a man, his wife and child are shown. The father is holding an abalone; the little girl is holding a mollusk found only in New Zealand, the toharoa; the mother is holding a plate of edible kelp which these people use abundantly, as do many sea bordering races.

For Price, the stunning development of the Maori was the best recommendation there could be for a diet that is rich in seafood.

The Maori race developed a knowledge of Nature's laws and adopted a system of living in harmony with those laws to so high a degree that they were able to build what was reported by early scientists to be the most physically perfect race living on the face of the earth. They accomplished this largely through diet and a system of social organization designed to provide a high degree of perfection in their offspring. To do this they utilized foods from the sea very liberally. The fact that they were able to maintain an immunity to dental caries so high that only one tooth in two thousand had been attacked by tooth decay (which is probably as high a degree of immunity as that of any contemporary race) is a strong argument in favor of their plan of life.

Price had similarly flattering things to say about other inhabitants of the Pacific islands and about the inhabitants of the Scottish Isle of Lewis, who ate significant amounts of flatfish and shellfish, especially lobsters, and prized the organ meat of fish as well. Baked cod’s head stuffed with cod liver and oats was a particularly delicacy among the fishermen, crofters and shepherds of Lewis.

While Price’s recommendations stand, and if we were to travel back in time to the 1930s when he made them, I would endorse them without qualification, the truth is that circumstances have since changed in ways that now make eating seafood rather hazardous. I’m referring, in particular, to the massive pollution of the world’s waters — the seas, oceans, rivers and lakes — as well as overfishing and the development of new commercial factory methods of farming aquatic life.

Because of the dreadful state of the planet’s waters, which act as great funnels for our trash and the byproducts of industry, drawing them all together into a vast toxic soup, fish and shellfish are contaminated with a wide variety of nasty substances, from microplastics and heavy metals, to flame retardants, non-stick coatings and even radioactive material from nuclear power plants (thanks, Fukushima!).