Is there a Key to Unlocking Optimal Human Development?

What Weston A. Price, Modern Science, and Pregnancy Teach Us About Nourishment

When I first discovered the work of Weston A. Price, I remember thinking, How is it possible that so few people know this story?

Here was a dentist practicing in the early 1930s who became so perplexed by what he was seeing in his patients that he left the comfort of his dental practice and traveled the world looking for answers. He wasn't searching for a better way to fill cavities. He wanted to understand why some people seemed to need fillings in the first place.

The question had begun much earlier.

Price noticed that many of his wealthier patients—people who had access to the newest conveniences and the most modern foods—often suffered from rampant tooth decay, crowded teeth, and poor oral health. Yet reports from remote communities painted a very different picture. Modest Swiss mountain farmers living simple lives, eating dark rye bread, raw dairy from cows grazing on alpine pastures, and foods produced from their own land, seemed to have almost no cavities at all. Their children often had broad faces, wide dental arches, and beautifully aligned teeth without orthodontics.

That observation ignited his curiosity.

For nearly ten years, Price traveled to remote villages scattered across the globe—places that had remained largely untouched by the modern food industry. He visited Swiss families living high in the Alps, Inuit communities in the far north, Aboriginal Australians, Polynesians, Maasai, Native American tribes, Gaelic villagers in the Scottish Isles, and traditional peoples throughout South America.

Their languages were different.

Their climates were different.

Even their diets looked remarkably different.

Some lived almost entirely on seafood.

Others relied heavily on dairy.

Some consumed organ meats as prized foods. Others depended upon fermented grains, root vegetables, or tropical fruits.

At first glance, it seemed impossible that these cultures had anything nutritional in common.

Yet Price kept documenting the same remarkable observations.

Children with broad, well-developed faces.

Wide dental arches with room for every tooth.

Little need for orthodontics.

Strong bodies.

Healthy pregnancies.

Robust children.

And astonishingly little tooth decay.

What united these cultures was not a particular diet.

It was nourishment.

Their foods were whole, seasonal, mineral-rich, and deeply rooted in the landscape around them. Whether they lived on fish, dairy, meat, or grains, each culture possessed sacred foods reserved for those preparing to conceive, carrying a pregnancy, or recovering after birth. Without understanding vitamins or micronutrients as we describe them today, they had arrived at the same conclusion through generations of careful observation.

The next generation depended upon the nourishment of the present one.

Then something changed.

As roads were built and trade expanded, white flour, refined sugar, canned goods, industrial oils, and processed foods began making their way into these once-isolated communities.

Price was struck by what happened next.

It was rarely the parents who changed first.

It was the children born afterward.

He photographed narrower faces.

Smaller dental arches.

Crowded teeth.

Increasing tooth decay.

Changes in facial development that seemed to appear within a single generation.

Price even wondered whether nutrition before conception and throughout pregnancy influenced the formation of the pelvis itself, shaping future childbirth in ways that medicine had never fully considered.

Not every conclusion Price reached has been confirmed by modern science. Human development is extraordinarily complex, influenced by genetics, hormones, environmental exposures, infections, and countless other factors. Yet nearly a century later, the question he asked still feels remarkably relevant.

What allows a human being to fully express their genetic potential?

Today we have language that Price never had.

We call it epigenetics.

Genes are not simply fixed instructions waiting to unfold. They respond to the environment in which they are expressed. The DNA inherited from our parents provides the blueprint, but the womb becomes the baby's first home—a place where nutrients, hormones, inflammation, stress, environmental exposures, and maternal health all participate in an intricate conversation that shapes development.

Pregnancy is not simply growing a baby.

It is directing an extraordinary symphony of construction.

Every vertebra.

Every tooth.

Every nerve.

Every muscle.

Every airway.

Every organ.

Every connection within the developing brain.

Long before a baby takes its first breath, an astonishing amount of architecture has already been completed.

Modern research has increasingly supported this idea. The field known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease has shown that the prenatal environment can influence lifelong health, affecting metabolism, cardiovascular disease, bone development, immune function, and susceptibility to chronic illness decades after birth.

Perhaps the womb is not simply where life begins.

Perhaps it is where lifelong resilience begins.

As a midwife, I find myself wondering what Weston Price would notice if he walked into a modern newborn nursery.

Would his attention still be drawn to teeth?

Or would he be asking different questions?

Today we routinely encounter tongue ties, lip ties, buccal ties, infants struggling to establish an effective latch, children who later require orthodontics because their jaws have not fully developed, babies born with umbilical hernias, boys with undescended testes or hypospadias, and an increasing number of children who struggle with airway development and nasal breathing.

No thoughtful clinician would suggest that all of these conditions arise from a single cause. They do not. Genetics, maternal metabolic health, environmental toxins, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, inflammation, medications, and nutrition all interact during fetal development. Biology rarely offers simple explanations.

Yet I cannot help but wonder whether these observations belong in the same conversation.

Not because one condition causes another.

But because they all ask the same question.

What does optimal human development actually require?

Perhaps the conversation should move beyond treating isolated diagnoses and return to understanding the conditions under which human beings thrive.

One of the greatest nutritional misunderstandings of our time is the belief that eating enough is the same thing as being nourished.

A woman can consume more calories during pregnancy than any generation before her while remaining profoundly deficient in choline, iodine, zinc, magnesium, DHA, vitamin A, vitamin K₂, collagen, or complete protein.

Her stomach may be full.

Her cells may still be hungry.

I often think about this when women tell me they cannot stop eating during pregnancy.

Before asking how much they are eating, I wonder whether their bodies are still searching for the nutrients required to build another human being.

There is a profound difference between fullness and satiety.

Fullness is a stretched stomach.

Satiety is a body that quietly whispers,

"Thank you. I have what I need."

Perhaps this explains why diets built around refined flour, sugar, and highly processed foods often leave us searching for more.

These foods provide energy.

But energy alone cannot build bones.

Or teeth.

Or connective tissue.

Or hormones.

Or the extraordinarily complex structures forming inside a developing baby.

Our ancestors may never have spoken about micronutrients, but they clearly understood nourishment.

Across continents and cultures, mothers were offered the very best foods available.

Fish eggs.

Liver.

Bone marrow.

Butter from spring pasture.

Shellfish.

Egg yolks.

Slow-simmered broths.

Long before laboratories measured vitamins, generations had observed that these foods supported healthy pregnancies and thriving children.

No one was counting calories.

They were feeding the future.

Around the same time that Price was traveling the world, another physician, Dr. Francis Pottenger, was asking similar questions through a different lens.

His now-famous experiments with several generations of cats have significant limitations and cannot be directly applied to humans. Yet they introduced an intriguing idea: that nutrition could influence health not only within one lifetime, but across generations.

Today we understand that concept far more clearly.

We recognize the roles of epigenetics, developmental programming, the microbiome, maternal metabolic health, and environmental exposures.

The language has changed.

The question has not.

Can nourishment echo through generations?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

One of the most astonishing realities of pregnancy is that a baby girl growing inside her mother is already forming the eggs that may one day become another generation.

Three generations are present within a single pregnancy.

You.

Your child.

And, potentially, your grandchildren.

That realization changes the way I think about preparing dinner.

A pot of broth simmering on the stove.

Pasture-raised eggs for breakfast.

Wild salmon.

Mineral-rich vegetables.

Beautiful butter.

Slow-cooked meat.

These are no longer simply healthy meals.

They become acts of stewardship.

Small daily choices that quietly ripple forward into generations we may never meet.

Perhaps the question was never simply,

"What should I eat during pregnancy?"

Perhaps the deeper question is this:

What does a human being require in order to become fully themselves?

Every culture Weston Price visited answered that question differently on the surface. Some relied on fish. Others on dairy. Others on organ meats or fermented grains.

Yet beneath all of those differences was remarkable agreement.

Pregnancy (and the window proceeding it) deserved the very best food available.

Not because mothers were expected to be perfect.

Not because babies needed to be bigger.

But because everyone understood that new life deserved deep nourishment, the kind that begins before we conceive.

The roof of the mouth.

The developing pelvis.

The architecture of the airway.

The immune system.

The brain.

The bones that will one day carry that child through life.

All of them begin long before birth.

Genes may provide the blueprint.

But nourishment helps determine how completely that blueprint can be expressed.

As a midwife, I find tremendous hope in that.

It reminds me that every nourishing meal prepared during pregnancy is far more than breakfast or dinner.

It is a quiet act of faith.

An investment in someone you have not yet met.

A love letter written in bone broth and butter, in egg yolks and oysters, in slow-cooked meats and vegetables grown in living soil.

Perhaps Weston Price never truly spent his life studying teeth and pelvises.

Perhaps he spent it reminding us that human beings flourish when we remember how to nourish them.

And perhaps that is still the invitation before us today.