When I first read that some socionists use visual identification to help them decide on a person's type, I immediately thought of Weston Price.

I don't know the real history of VI, but I guess it developed because people noticed 'twins' or 'lookalikes,' people who had the same personality type and who also looked amazingly similar to each other. I myself use some kind of informal, intuitive VI that I cannot put into words. When I look at strangers, I decide whether someone is 'my kind of person' or not. I quickly judge them as 'friend or foe' somehow just by glancing at their faces. It's easiest for me to do this with other Caucasians, as they are mostly the people I've interacted with my whole life, and I haven't spent much time with large numbers of people of other races.

So I believe that there might be some truth to VI, but I think it probably shouldn't be used all by itself as the ONLY method of identifying someone. I think VI would work best if you identified them using several different methods at once, and then, after identifying large numbers of people, you would start to recognize particular patterns among the faces. There could be a connection between the genes that command the brain to form a particular personality pattern, and the genes that control the development of the face and body.

About Weston Price:

Weston A. Price was a dentist. He traveled to many different countries to observe the primitive tribes that had been untouched by the modern lifestyle. People had observed that the bodies and the teeth of the primitive people were much healthier than the bodies and teeth of the modern people living in the cities.

I'm making a long story really short - Weston Price wrote a whole book about his research, called 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.' I'd love to show pictures from the book - it's full of photos - but I don't have an easy way to get them onto the computer right now.

He observed that not only were the teeth of modern people decaying and falling out, but also, the people had narrow faces, weak jaws and receding chins, and other bone structure deformities that people in the primitive tribes did not have. The primitive people had large, broad faces. Their teeth did not need orthodontic braces, as the teeth were all in the correct positions in the mouth and the mouth had plenty of room for them. But the modern people's teeth often appeared in front of each other and in the wrong positions. Primitive people's wisdom teeth grew straight into their line of teeth the way they were supposed to, while modern people's wisdom teeth grew at strange angles and did not form properly and were usually removed.

Some people believed that these deformities were genetic. They believed that you were just unlucky and doomed to endure your bad genes. However, Weston Price observed that if the families of the primitive tribes adopted a modern diet, if they started eating canned food and white flour (which, at the time, wasn't supplemented with any synthetic vitamins at all, if I recall correctly), then they would have children whose deformed faces and maloccluded teeth looked exactly like those of the modern people. Nothing in their genes had changed - only the diet of the parents had changed.

He connected this to the deformities of calves born to cattle that were eating grass on poor soil. If healthy cattle were brought to areas that had mineral deficient soil, then they would start giving birth to calves that were severely deformed.

He analyzed the primitive diets and found that they had much higher levels of all the vitamins and minerals than the modern diets had. The modern diets were especially poor in the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, while the primitive diets were rich in those vitamins.

He used all of his research to prescribe diets to modern people who were losing their teeth or people who wanted to have children. They would notice that the children born before the healthy diet had the deformed faces and also had various health problems and behavior problems. The children born after the parents adopted the healthy diet had fully formed faces, perfectly lined up teeth, and better behavior and health overall. (Note: Some recent observers have also connected deformities with pesticide use, as they saw deformed faces and teeth in the whitetail deer living in areas where pesticides had been sprayed. So it's not just a deficient diet that causes the problems, it can also be exposure to chemicals.)

There is no such thing as '*THE* Weston Price Diet.' Weston Price himself didn't go around telling everyone to use 'The Weston Price Diet.' So it isn't just one set of rules that you can follow. There were many different primitive diets that he observed in the tribes. They had some things in common. I could tell all about that but it's easier to read it on their websites.

The diet needs a LOT of troubleshooting! Some of the things that people talk about eating are very dangerous and can make you extremely sick. For instance, Sally Fallon wrote a cookbook called 'Nourishing Traditions,' which attempted to give instructions about how to cook foods that met the nutrition criteria, but I have tried a couple of those things, and they DID make me sick.

I got sick from trying to eat lacto-fermented vegetables, in particular, a jar of kimchi from the grocery store. I got sick from eating fish eggs - caviar - and I got EXTREMELY sick from eating bone marrow, as in, I ate only a tiny, tiny crumb of it, a couple millimeters long, and I got so sick I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital. I won't go into detail about all the things that happened, but I thought I might die from eating the bone marrow. And people on the internet talk about eating bone marrow like it's a delicacy and like nothing bad happens. So either 1. large numbers of people are sociopathic liars (but I asked one of my neighbors - a nice lady who I trust - if she had ever eaten bone marrow, and she said she had, and it didn't make her sick), 2. there's a special way to prepare the bone marrow that prevents it from making you sick, or 3. some other explanation. Anyway, don't just run out and try to eat all the things that the people in the books and on the websites talk about eating! If you try anything at all, please, PLEASE, eat only a teeny, tiny piece of it, and then wait a while to see if it makes you sick. I was recently looking at a list of 'Murphy's Laws,' and one of them was 'If nobody's doing it, there's a reason why.' There's a reason why a lot of these foods are not commonly eaten.

So yes, the diet requires a lot more research and troubleshooting.

Well, this all relates to VI. If you look at the Weston Price photographs, you will learn to see the face and jaw deformities in modern people. Some of the facial shapes that people are trying to associate with personality types might be affected by the deformities. Almost everyone would have slightly broader faces, no matter what their personality types were.

The deformed heads and faces were also associated with brain deformities in severe cases. Weston Price speculated that moral decay in society might be caused by the deformities, as the brain could not grow and develop properly, and so people could not become the best people they could be.

The pictures of the healthy primitive people were much more beautiful than the pictures of the deformed faces, so beauty is not entirely genetic, and to some extent, you can prevent your children from being ugly. (Not entirely, but somewhat.)

I figured this would be of interest to anybody who is trying to use, or study, visual identification.