Was Price biased and did he miss something significant?

[Guest guest]

I've been reading the book " Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers " now and

it's making me wonder if Weston A. Price missed something in his

studies of what the native people ate, which is what they drank. He

was a Methodist, right? So am I, and in the Methodist church, while

they don't actively preach against drinking (anymore?) they won't

allow you to serve alcohol on church property, not even for wedding

receptions. It makes me wonder if Dr. Price had an unconscious bias

agains alcoholic beverages.

The heather beer in Scotland/Ireland was credited with many

healthful virtues, as were almost all forms of fermented honey

(which contained propolis, royal jelly, pollen, and some venom,

since they used to boil the whole hive to get at the honey). I'm

finding out that many of the old " beers " had all kinds of herbs

added for flavor and medicinal value, such as ginger wherever it was

available, and mugwort, spruce, pine (sources of huge amounts of

vitamin C), sage, nettles, burdock, dandelion, juniper, yarrow, and

on and on.

I find it interesting that many of the essential oils in herbs don't

dissolve as well in water as in alcohol, making tea a weak form of

them. The author of the book, Buhner, theorizes that a lot

of the traditional cures were altered because of prohibition and the

protestant reforms against alcohol and other inebrients. In fact,

the reason hops was allowed in beer was because it makes one sleepy,

and " if one has to get drunk, better to be a sleeping drunk " was

their philosophy.

It boggles my mind that the herbs we take weakly in teas or small

amounts of tinctures, they were drinking mugfuls of on a daily

basis. And perhaps rightly so claiming they owed their good health

to the beverages.

Then the question for me: can I overcome my Methodist upbringing and

learn to like any of these? LOL!