Weston A. Price
A dentist and anthropological researcher whose 1930s fieldwork documented the absence of tooth decay, cancer, and skeletal deformity among populations eating traditional raw foods. Treated as corroborating historical evidence, though his framework stopped short of fully raw animal foods.
Weston A. Price, D.D.S., was a dentist and researcher who practiced during the same period as Francis Pottenger and whose observations about diet and physical degeneration Aajonus regarded as important, though incomplete, foundational work. Price noticed in his dental practice that the children of his patients were experiencing problems their parents had not: more tooth decay, teeth that did not fit properly into the dental arch, crowded and crooked arrangements that reflected, in his view, a broader state of compromised health. He began to suspect that something in modern diets was deficient in ways that older diets had not been, and he set out to find among primitive populations the nutritional factors that protected them.
Price traveled during the 1930s, a period when many indigenous cultures still lived primarily on local foods, most of which they ate raw. He found cultures without tooth decay and children with properly formed dental arches. He documented the account of an American medical doctor living among Eskimos and northern Native Americans who, over thirty-five years of observation, had never seen a single case of cancer among natives eating their traditional foods. When those same natives adopted processed foods and developed tuberculosis and other diseases, the doctor sent them back to their native villages and their traditional diets, and they usually recovered. Price searched specifically for the nutritional factors that distinguished the healthy primitive populations from those whose health had deteriorated after contact with industrialized food.
Aajonus referenced Price in the context of establishing a lineage of researchers who had demonstrated, through direct observation, that raw and traditional foods supported health in ways that modern processed diets did not. In his book "We Want to Live," Price appears in the index alongside Pottenger as a figure whose work pointed in the direction of the Primal Diet framework, though Aajonus regarded Pottenger's controlled experimental work with cats as the more rigorous scientific demonstration. Price's contribution was anthropological and observational rather than laboratory-based, and Aajonus treated it as corroborating evidence that cultures eating raw, unprocessed, locally sourced foods maintained structural and systemic health that disappeared when those foods were replaced.
Price And The Weston Foundation
Aajonus's most sustained commentary on Weston Price as a figure is inseparable from his commentary on Sally Fallon and the organization she founded in Price's name. Aajonus described a situation in which, while Sally Fallon was serving as president of the Price-Pottenger Foundation, the board of supervisors, nine of the twelve members, were in favor of his books and wanted to move the organization more toward Pottenger's work and in support of the direction Aajonus represented. Three members sided with Sally Fallon. There was, in Aajonus's account, a substantial conflict between these two factions on the board.
As a result of that conflict, Sally Fallon left the Price-Pottenger Foundation and formed the Weston A. Price Foundation separately. Aajonus noted that during the period following his books and the formation of her new organization, her lecturers would direct people who were dealing with serious disease toward his work, saying effectively: go to Aajonus. Aajonus found the logic of that position puzzling, asking why someone would wait until they had a serious disease before coming to his approach rather than adopting it earlier.
Aajonus's Critique of Fallon's Diet
Aajonus was direct in his view that Sally Fallon, the person most associated with popularizing Weston Price's legacy, did not look well to him. He described her as having water puffiness that he attributed to fermented and cooked foods, which formed a significant part of the diet the Weston Price Foundation promoted. He framed this as his personal opinion but stated it clearly and without softening it. He said he liked Sally and acknowledged that she had helped more people than he had, but he maintained that her diet was not good in the long run.
He positioned the Weston Price Foundation's approach as a possible transitional stage, a step that might move someone in the direction of the Primal Diet but not the destination itself. The fermented foods, cooked preparations, and heated dairy products that the Weston Price framework endorses were, in Aajonus's view, insufficient and potentially problematic over time compared with a fully raw animal food diet. He framed the Foundation's approach as useful perhaps for people who were not yet ready to commit fully to raw foods, but not as an endpoint.
Price's Supporting Research Findings
The specific findings Price documented that Aajonus cited include the absence of tooth decay, properly formed dental arches, and the absence of crowded or crooked teeth among populations eating traditional raw and local foods. Price also found the absence of cancer among native populations subsisting on traditional diets. The Eskimo and northern Native American data, mediated through the testimony of a physician who had observed those populations for thirty-five years, was particularly striking to Aajonus as evidence that processed foods introduced disease and that return to traditional foods could reverse it.
Price's observation that deformed teeth reflected the overall state of compromised health aligned with Aajonus's broader framework that physical structure, dental condition, and systemic health are all products of the same nutritional foundation. Price identified this relationship through clinical observation across many cultures, and Aajonus treated that body of observation as consistent with and supportive of his own framework, even though Price did not advocate for a fully raw diet in the way Aajonus did.
Farmer-To-Consumer Defense Fund
In one passage, Aajonus described a situation involving a farmer named David and the FDA, in which an attorney associated with what he called the Farmer-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund became involved. Aajonus said of this organization that it had "nothing to do with Farmers Defense at all" and called it "a scam, a sham," adding that he was not certain whether Sally Fallon was directly responsible or whether it was the attorneys, but that they were, in his view, destroying farmers. He recounted telling the farmer to instruct the attorney that he was no longer representing him, and directing the farmer instead toward his own lease agreement structure.
In his newsletters, Aajonus elaborated on this concern about the Farmer-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, describing it as an organization that took membership fees from farmers, called itself pro-small-family-farmer, and then, according to his account, encouraged farmers under pressure from the FDA to accept guilty pleas and restrictions that caused some of them to lose their family farms and livelihoods. Aajonus stated that he intervened in 2010 and stopped four farmers from signing over guilt and jurisdiction to the government through his lease program. He expressed suspicion that the organization might be a front intended to deprive farmers and consumers of their rights rather than to protect them, though he qualified this by saying he did not know with certainty whether it was a legitimate organization or not.
Price in the Published Framework
In "The Recipe for Living Without Disease," Price appears in the index as "Dr. Weston Price" with a page reference of 182, alongside Pottenger at pages 165-166 and 181-183, situating him as a referenced figure in Aajonus's written framework. The index entry is brief, but his inclusion in the text alongside Pottenger signals that Aajonus treated Price as part of the historical foundation that established the importance of raw and traditionally prepared foods, even while Aajonus's own framework went considerably further than Price's recommendations in insisting on fully raw animal foods without cooking or pasteurization.
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