Home | Preventative Dental | ...Diet for Optimal Dental Health |

Diet for Optimal Dental Health

Tooth decay can be dramatically helped and even reversed through diet alone. In fact, diet is the single most important factor in the health of your teeth.

The role of diet in dental health has been extremely well documented in the work of Weston Price, a dentist who performed research on native diets. Weston Price travelled the world in the 1920-30's examining native diets of remote communities across the world just as they became exposed to the supposed 'benefits' of a modern diet. Price travelled extensively, from the Scottish isles, to isolated Alpine villages way in the mountains of Switzerland, to Eskimo and Intuit indians to the tropics of the south sea islands.

Weston Price searched for the healthiest human specimens he could find. Remember, these were people who had no exposure to modern medicine, who did not have doctors, nurses, drugs or even an aspirin. What he found and recorded was the native diet and lifestyle of the most healthy people on the earth, and recorded their diet and its affect on their dental health.

All of the people he studied had no professional dental treatment. Most had no toothbrushes. Many had never even seen a doctor. Despite not brushing twice a day with a fluoride toothpaste, and flossing one a day they managed to have perfectly formed dental arches and fantastic, healthy teeth with next to no cavities.

Weston Price analyzed the common elements of these diets and concluded that the introduction of refined sugars and processed foods had an immediate and destructive impact on dental health.

Recently Ramiel Nagel wrote a book called "Cure Tooth Decay" based on the work of Dr. Price. You can either buy his book or read the original research in Weston Price's classic Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Dentists will tell you that tooth decay is caused by the bacteria s. Mutans feeding off sugars in the mouth and creating acid which breaks through the enamel. Brushing and flossing will obviously help to decrease the plaque and decrease dental disease.

The dietary approach concentrates on firstly removing the refined sugars and carbohydrates in the first place to prevent the bacteria from multiplying. Secondly, the dietary approach builds up the teeth and enamel, promotes bone growth and provides the gums with all the nutrients they need to fight off the bacteria. Using nutrition alone Price managed to prevent over 95% of dental cavities. Once the body was functioning properly, Price found that we can actually start to repair dental cavities. Obviously you won't be able to re-grow a tooth, but the body was able to repair tooth damage caused by dental cavities.

What is the diet?

The basic steps are to follow a "hunter gatherer" diet avoiding all processed foods and almost anything that is packaged.

1 Eliminate all processed foods, junk foods, white bread. bagels, and all other products using white flour. Eliminate all grain products that are not spouted. Remove all sugars particularly white and brown sugar from the diet as soon as possible. This is harder to do than it sounds. You will not be eating any biscuits, cookies, muffins, sandwiches, breakfast cereals.

2 Eliminate all the bad Hydrogenated Oils
and margarines, alcohol, tobacco, pasteurized milk, soft drinks and artificial sweeteners of every kind.

Eliminating these items from the diet will stop the S. Mutans from easily feeding on sucrose products or carbohydrates that will break down into sugars.

The next stage is to replace these foods with food that will specifically help to nourish bone growth and tooth enamel. The steps you take are:

1 Take cod liver oil supplement, or Krill oil which is virtually proven to be free of mercury.

2 Make your own stocks from chicken, marrow, fish bones etc. the traditional way and freeze the contents so that you can have a daily broth full of calcium and gelatin that can be easily absorbed by the body for bone growth.

3 Eat fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kombucha, natto, pickled vegetables, and other foods that contain high levels of natural probiotics.

4 Drink raw unpasteurized milk or Kefir.

5 Eat foods high in Vitamin K2 such as marrow, natto, high vitamin butter, egg yolks, hard cheese, chicken liver and salami.

6. Ensure that your receiving adequate amounts of Vitamin D through natural sun exposure if possible and have your Vitamin D levels tested.

A full explanation of the diet is beyond the scope of this article, but you can read more details in Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, or Ramiel Nagel's book.

http://www.newtrendspublishing.com/SallyFallon/index.html
http://www.curetoothdecay.com/