Your pearly whites

About a year or two ago, I was surfing the 'net trying to find better natural ways to care for teeth. My teeth were randomly giving me pain, and my daughter's teeth were starting to decay (classic baby bottle teeth, even though she never had a bottle!). Somewhere during my surf, I read something about the power of your teeth to re-enamel themselves at night when they are clean. I was fascinated by this concept. Could it be true? Do teeth really produce a new protective coating on a regular basis? And if they can, then wouldn't it be possible for cavities to heal? Why doesn't the dentist ever tell you this?

Oh yes, it is possible. I read another statement by a dentist who admitted that sometimes yes, he has seen cavities heal. But sometimes they just get worse. And since he has no idea which course the tooth will take, he treats all cavities the same. He drills them and fills them.

Excuse me? What if you went to the doctor with an infected finger, and he took a look at it and said, "Hmmm, I've seen these heal before, but I've also seen these get worse. And I'm not sure what to do to make it heal, so I'm just going to cut the bad part off."

What's wrong with this picture? Are there any dentists that are trying to figure out how to help our teeth heal? Well, there was a dentist, his name was Weston Price. In 1915, he was a prominent dentist that was appointed as the research director for the National Dentist Association (now the American Dental Association). He actually did some serious research, he traveled the globe for years looking at people's teeth everywhere. Amazingly, he found that some of the people with the best teeth didn't even own toothbrushes! They were the people like the Eskimos or the different tribal groups in Africa that ate their traditional uncivilized food (no white flour, white sugar, pasteurized milk, canned tuna, etc.). He also noticed that once these people moved to the city and started eating city food, their teeth started to fall out. He researched what kinds of foods these healthy-teeth people were eating. He performed experiments on people who had decayed teeth by feeding them special diets, and their teeth stopped decaying and began to heal. His work was extensive and published in journals. So why don't most dentists talk about him and his work today? Hmmmm, good question. (Maybe the answer has to do with secret combinations of the food and/or health industries, but we won't go there right now.)

So, what can you do to make healthy teeth? The first part is easy: go through your house and locate every tube of toothpaste. Then dump them all in the trash (especially if they have flouride added). Toothpaste is full of chemicals that are just plain bad for you and your teeth (glycerin is one to avoid). Get rid of any whitening potions if they have ingredients that you can't pronounce. Keep your toothbrush if it has soft bristles. I got a natural-bristle tooth brush, it is really soft and I love it.

Now that you have no toothpaste, what do you put on the tooth brush? We brush our teeth with soap and hot water. (Hot water and soap for cleaning something, it's not really a new concept!) Rub your toothbrush across the surface of a bar of soap, don't use liquid soap. Preferably use some kind of natural home-made cold-process soap, not Ivory or Irish Springs (the homemade ones usually taste better anyway). Don't use a bar of glycerin soap, glycerin coats your teeth and takes a long time to rinse off. The amount of naturally-occurring glycerin in regular soap is okay. You can also buy special tooth soap from various places online.

Another thing you can find online are all kinds of natural potions and powders (and recipes for homemade versions) for cleaning your teeth. I have never tried any special powders, but I do brush my teeth with baking soda about once a week. I started this teeth cleaning routine about a year ago, and my random tooth pain totally disappeared almost immediately. It came back briefly when I tried using an electric toothbrush (too harsh for me), but I realized the problem and quit using it. Later I got in a flossing frenzy, but that bothered me as well, so I quit the daily floss. An oral irrigator would be gentler than floss (I have one in my Amazon shopping cart). The important thing is to listen to your teeth, respond when they complain, and find gentle cleaning methods that make them happy.

Now that we've talked about cleaning your teeth, we need to address the much more important piece of the puzzle: your diet. Brushing your teeth will not stop tooth decay, it will only slow it down. If your diet were completely ideal, you would have no need to brush (except maybe for cosmetic and kissing purposes). The ideal diet was first researched by Dr. Price, then added and experimented upon by other doctors and dentists. I recently purchased a book called Cure Tooth Decay (got it on Amazon for $26 with free shipping). It was written by Ramiel Nagel. He studied the work of Dr. Price and others, tried out some experimental diets on himself and his daughter (who had the same problem as my daughter), and wrote his findings in this book. I had looked at this book online for quite some time before I decided to cough up the money to buy it. If you are interested in keeping your teeth, you should really read this book (try looking at your local library, or borrow it from me if you live in Ketchikan). It is a great summary of the work of the dental pioneers, plus he has great advice about communing with your teeth (in an almost spiritual manner) to know what food they need and to help them heal.

What else is in the book? I really can't write everything in this blog post (I don't have room). But I will sum up a few things I've learned. Dr. Price's studies said that people who had healthy teeth ate regularly from at least two of these following food groups:
1. Raw dairy products from grass-fed animals.
2. Organ and muscle meat from fish and shellfish.
3. Organs of grass-fed land animals (liver and kidneys, mmmm).
4. Creepy crawlies like bugs and insects.

Foods to avoid are: refined foods (white flour, white sugar, white rice), too many sweets (even fruits), hydrogenated oils, pasteurized & homogenized milk products, processed & packaged foods, junk food, fast food, caffeine, soda, farm-raised fish, and basically anything else that you consider regular store food.

Okay, now you're thinking, "What? I guess I need to move to a farm and start producing all my own food, because how else am I going to get that kind of food? And I'm not eating bugs, yuck!" (I agree with you on that one, I'm not eating bugs either.) Well, I used to feel that eating right would be absolutely impossible, and if possible then way too expensive anyway. But one thing my grandma always said was that grocery bills are cheaper than doctor bills. How much do you/could you spend at the dentist? Or doctor? Remember, healthy teeth are a sign of a healthy body. And what kind of price tag can you put on your health?

I am a super cheap girl with a really tight grocery budget, and I live on an Alaskan island that has not one single cow (and definitely no grazing pastures), but I am doing what I can to eat less store food and more traditional food. I have taken small steps to help me get closer to my goal. We got chickens so we don't have to eat factory eggs from the store anymore. I bought a copy of Nourishing Traditions, an awesome cookbook that teaches how to prepare whole foods in traditional ways, like soaking whole grains and fermenting your own sauerkraut. (Plus it has great recipes for things like mayo and ketchup so you won't have to buy those ready-made full-of-junk things at the store). I started getting the organic produce box from Full Circle Farm (flown up on Alaska Airlines from Seattle) and somehow squeezed that into my food budget every other week. And my most recent conquest was scraping enough money together to get a shipment of meat up from Thundering Hooves, a nice place that has their own pasture-raised meats. We ate some steak the other night, and I am never settling for the disgusting store meat again! My next goal is to overcome the dairy problem. No, there are no cows in Ketchikan, but there are goats! My husband is building the goat shed, and we are talking to all the owners of pregnant goats in the area, arranging our future purchase of two or three dairy goats, yay! My other goals for this year are to get a good garden going and to catch more seafood to fill our freezer.

Yes, it is a process. No, it isn't easy. It's not easy to completely change almost everything you know about cooking and so-called healthy food. But yes, it is possible. And yes, my family and I are worth it!

One easy thing you could do to get started is to take a supplement. The book recommends Green Pasture's naturally fermented cod liver oil and high vitamin butter oil. You can buy them separately or combined in one bottle. A spoonful a day will give you the most important nutrients from two of those four food groups: grass-fed dairy and seafood organs. The supplement is no substitute for a healthy diet, you should still avoid all the refined foods and too many sweets. I'm thinking about ordering the cod liver oil/butter oil combo. It would help pack some powerful nutrients into my family as we work towards a better diet (and are waiting for our goats). And we have been snacking lately on some homemade raw liver pate, let me tell you it is yummy. My kids really like it.

Wow, this post got really long. My parting words are, read the book. It will fill your mind with logic and clarity and hope to make your teeth (and whole body) a healthy, healing machine.