PREVENTING CAVITIES IN WAYS OTHER THAN USING FLUORIDE
12-6-11
More and more people are coming to the conclusion that we should not be drinking and eating fluoride.
Some still believe that applying fluoride topically is the best way to prevent tooth decay. I disagree. I say we should avoid all fluoride.
We are not doing anything to instruct people about the other things they could be doing for their teeth. To get them to stop fluoridating and using fluoridated toothpaste, we ought to tell them what else they could do for their teeth that would be better than fluoride.
So I asked what we should be telling them:
Don’t eat sugar, bread, pasta, candy, cake, sugary cereals
Brush after meals with non-fluoridated toothpaste
Use tiny tooth brushes for cleaning between teeth
Take calcium and magnesium supplements?
Eat less animal products – which acidifies blood and sucks calcium out of bones?
Chewing xylitol gum?
Antibacterial therapy—such as treatment with chlorhexidine gluconate rinse, mentioned by Featherstone
But let’s not join any fad such as Atkinson or Weston Price. Weston has his critics:
https://www.whattoserveagoddess.com/weston-price-foundation/
http://www.vegsource.com/articles2/fuhrman_dietary_myths.htm
Weston was right on several points. About processed foods – white flour, phosphate rising powders, cereal, sugar, jam, corn syrup, vegetable oils and canned milk. About eating grains. We did not evolve to eat unsprouted grains.
And he was half way right about raw milk. It is better than commercial milk. But it is still for calves. There is calcium in the milk but it is calcium phosphate. We do not need more phosphate. Cow milk has no magnesium, no potassium, no iron, and no essential fatty acids. It is a totally different composition than mother’s milk. Nature leaves those things out of cow’s milk because they are found in the grass which calves start eating shortly after birth. And milk has too much protein. Too much protein is just as much a problem as too little. Most get far too much protein.
Raw milk is better than commercial milk, and people should have the right to produce and buy and sell it. But in this era of tenacious microbes, I suggest you boil it first, as do the Indians. Better yet, avoid it too. It uses up your caloric allotment and gives you none of the nutrients you need along with too much protein.
When it comes to a meat centered diet, there is a problem with returning to an originalist Weston Price diet: The food is not available. You will not find lean, healthy organic meat in any significant quantity at a price that most people can afford. The bad money drives out the good, and the cheap meat drives out the expensive. Even hunted meat can be polluted because wild animals can go everywhere and eat grains treated with pesticide. Wild animals can be infected with the wasting “mad cow” diseases. Hunted meat is very expensive when you factor in the cost of guns, licenses, travel, and clothing. Weston says to eat organs, but we know that the body stores things it cannot excrete in the organs.
The meat that the aborigines of Borneo ate with Weston is not available today.
Commercial animals are fed phosphate fertilizer, and so their meat contains more FLUORIDE. Commercial chickens are fed ARSENIC.
Fish has DHA and vitamin D. Unfortunately we treat the oceans both as our grocery store and our sewer. We have polluted our salmon and tuna with mercury and our filter feeders with PCBs.
We have over populated the planet and we no longer have the right to eat “high on the hog”.
Weston was right on another point: If you want to eat meat, eat insects, as low on the food chain as possible.
Any grains should be sprouted to get rid of the phitates in the hulls. That’s the problem with bread made from flour.
The key to healthy teeth is eating a lot of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, rich in minerals, and avoiding processed foods, including as you said white flour, phosphate rising powders, cereal, sugar, jam, corn syrup, vegetable oils and canned milk.
And if you have to eat meat, it should be an occasional condiment not the main course three times a day. We eat a lot more meat now than we did before refrigeration. A large part of the diet of Australian aborigines and African bushmen is vegetables.
Too much meat and milk and eggs acidifies blood and requires that calcium be pulled out of bones. Blood pH cannot vary much.
Plant a garden and grow your own
https://www.whattoserveagoddess.com/wp-content/uploads/red-leaf-lettuce1.jpg
https://www.whattoserveagoddess.com/chapter-18/
During the winter or if you live in an apartment, sprout lentils, mung, spelt, wheat, beans.
The problems with an all vegetable diet are:
No DHA, which some cannot manufacture out of flax if they are sickly.
No B-12, which must be supplemented with nutritional yeast.
No vitamin D, and there is not enough sun in Seattle. Take D-2 supplements and take twice as much.
If you want to go Weston, raise chickens in your backyard and eat their eggs and the roosters. And eat that aphid encrusted kale in the Spring. That’s the closest you can come in an environmentally responsible way.
I have been a strict vegan for 30 years. Note that I am not dead yet, as Weston would imply I should be.
However, I do not expect others to be so extreme. I do the vegan thing for religious and environmental reasons.
But I have figured out that the world is not going to switch to veganism any time soon.
Veganism is not the solution for everyone. Nor is the Weston Price diet.
***
I renew another question:
Is it possible that the explanation for the drop in tooth decay generally is that occasionally children and adults are administered rounds of antibiotics to fight colds? Would general antibiotics also kills tooth decay germs such as mutans streptococci and lactobacilli?
Does the drop in tooth decay correlate inversely with the rise in use of antibiotics?
Sincerely,
James Robert Deal , Attorney
James@JamesRobertDeal.com
***
My original question:
12-5-11
Questions to ponder:
People will ask, well if fluoride is not good for teeth, what is good for teeth?
Not eating sugar, bread, pasta, and what else?
Is the sugar in fruit bad for teeth?
Using floss?
Calcium and magnesium supplements?
Tiny tooth brushes for cleaning between teeth
Flossing
Brushing after eating with non-fluoridated toothpaste
Eating more vegetables – rich in calcium
Eating less animal products which acidifies blood and sucks calcium out of bones?
Chewing xylitol gum?
Antibiotic mouthwash (referred to by Featherstone)?
Hypothesis: Is it possible that the explanation for the drop in tooth decay generally is that occasionally children and adults are administered rounds of antibiotics to fight a cold? Which also kills tooth decay germs?
Does the drop in tooth decay mirror the rise of antibiotics?
Sincerely,
James Robert Deal , Attorney
James@JamesRobertDeal.com
From Aliss:
Hi James,
Dr. Weston A. Price was a dentist and root canal specialist in Cleveland in the 1930s and wondered many of the same things. Like many of his time and today, he thought vegetarian diet with lots of fibre from whole grains was the healthiest diet for humans. He really wanted this to be proven. But more than a dentist, he was one of those lateral thinkers with a truly scientific mind. Dentistry as a profession was changing from extractions towards prevention, hygiene, and preserving decayed teeth with fillings, root canals and crowns. He was concerned about the increase in numbers of child patients with worse decay than ever. In fact his own child died from infection after a root canal on a decayed tooth. This devastated him of course. It made him rethink whether dentistry should be focused on saving teeth with technofixes. He thought rotten teeth might be caused by the civilized diet – especially white flour, phosphate rising powders, cereal, sugar, jam, corn syrup, vegetable oils and canned milk. Note that many of these processed foods are quite high in fluoride. Phosphate baking powders in particular supply both aluminum and fluoride.
So on his yearly vacations, he decided to search the world for so called primitive cultures not exposed to these foods and examine their diet and health. He took meticulous notes, sent food samples back to his lab for analysis of nutrients, did dental exams, and took thousands of photos. His tome is called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and is available from the Price Pottenger Foundation of California. It has been reprinted numerous times. He was first enamoured of fluoride due to the propaganda of the time, and then disillusioned when his scientific data certainly did not match any of the claims.
Price was surprised to learn that diets rich in animal fats and proteins, especially organ meats such as liver, and animal source minerals especially bone and gelatine broths, sea food and milk products, with the lowest intake of agricultural grains and legumes produced the healthiest peoples with the best teeth and bones, from the Arctic to the southern Kalahari. No vegans. None of these people cleaned their teeth but they had beautiful, white, strong enamel and 32 teeth in perfect alignment in broad jaws. Except for the Swiss village where some of the kids had green slime on their teeth but no cavities or gum disease (must have been chlorophyll producing probiotic strains!) Healthy cultures that included grains and legumes had elaborate methods of soaking, fermentation and phytate removal before eating, and these foods were cooked with meat, bones, lard or fish or served with eggs or insect larvae rich in fats. Cultures that depended mostly on grains had poor dental health, smaller stature and weak bones. But wherever a settlement had been exposed to modern processed foods that displaced the local traditional foods, there was an immediate decline in the physical health and appearance of the children born after that time, with malformed faces, decayed teeth, rickets and TB. It was quite dramatic.
One of the few fluoridation studies that controlled for some nutrition variables was done right here in the Toronto area by Dick Ito who is now one of the most aggressive pro-fluoridation public health politicians (not elected and not accountable to us, of course). It showed that the most significant factor in childhood dental decay in Brampton (fluoridated) vs. Caledon (not) was whether the kid was taking a daily multi vitamin-mineral supplement. Ito’s conclusion says fluoridation benefit was not evident at all but dental fluorosis was higher in Brampton. Duh. Ito pretends not to hear you when you question him about this previous research. I am sure he would remove his name from the study if he could, given his political stature now, but it’s on PubMed.
Aliss
