Things To Wonder About

The Maasai

These are photos of the Maasai who inhabit southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. What is interesting about the Maasai is all of their needs for food were met by their cattle. They ate the meat, drank the milk daily, and drank the blood on occasion. Note that the Maasai cattle were of the Zebu variety.

In the summer of 1935 Dr. Weston Price visited the Maasai and reported that according to Dr. Anderson from the local government hospital in Kenya most tribes were disease-free. Many had not a single tooth attacked by dental caries nor a single malformed dental arch. In particular the Maasai had a very low 0.4% of bone caries. He attributed that to their diet consisting of (in order of volume) raw milk, raw blood, raw meat and some vegetables and fruits, although in many villages they do not eat any fruit or vegetables at all. He noted that when available every growing child and every pregnant or lactating woman would receive a daily ration of raw blood.

Dr. Weston Price was a Cleveland dentist. He has been called the “Isaac Newton of Nutrition.” When Dr. Price analyzed the foods used by isolated peoples he found that, in comparison to the American diet of his day, they provided at least four times the water-soluble vitamins, calcium and other minerals, and at least TEN times the fat-soluble vitamins, from animal foods such as butter, fish eggs, shellfish, organ meats, eggs and animal fats—the very cholesterol-rich foods now shunned by the American public as unhealthful.

Unfortunately, the Maasai cattle herds are not what they once were. Coupled with modern civilization pressure, the stable diet of the Maasai today consists of cow's milk, maize-meal and they herd goats and sheep.

My question would be, how could a people like the Maasai with much less food availability compared to modern western civilization, maintain such health?

You might be wondering how they obtained the needed vitamins and minerals we emphasize obtaining from fruit and vegetables? The answer - they obtained them from the "food chain". Their cattle ate the necessary nutrients and those nutrients were passed on to the foods the Maasai obtained from the cattle.