Cure Tooth Decay Review

Healthy teeth are a reflection of overall good health. If you are suffering from dental problems it affects your entire body. Conventional wisdom tells us to brush the sugars off our teeth and try to control bad bacteria but it never addresses what the sugars do our blood that may cause the decay and that sugar consumption causes fluctuations in blood sugar levels that cause the calcium and phosphorus ratios in the blood to fluctuate along with it. It also never addresses the fact that we may not be getting the nutrients to keep our teeth healthy. We have this view that our teeth are separate from the rest of our body and that outside of brushing and flossing there is not much we can do to keep them healthy, but how can this be true when everything in our body is affected by what we eat? Wouldn’t the same be true for our teeth?

I’ve always known there was a connection between dental health and the rest of my health. I just had no idea how large a role nutrition played in it. When I was about 13 I had a dentist fill my mouth with mercury fillings. We had been seeing dentists regularly since we were small with no cavities, then moved and this new dentist suddenly found numerous cavities in mine and my brothers teeth. He lost his license shortly after, not from us, but I have always felt something was fishy there. Regardless, that experience made me never want another cavity again, so I became obsessed with having good dental hygiene, but in spite of my actions I later developed more cavities. I couldn’t understand. I was doing everything mainstream told me to do yet I still had new cavities and felt very helpless. Blaming your genes for things might bring peace of mind for some people, but that has never been an acceptable answer for me. There has tobe something I can do better to improve everything in my life.

So I wouldn’t say I had an average diet growing up. My mom was some what educated on some natural things. We ate a lot of fruit, nuts, oatmeal, vegetables, conventional meat and WHOLE grains. Not traditionally prepared whole grains but the conventional type. I even sprinkled wheat germ on my plain yogurt. We also had skim milk and I never drank much soda although there were those in my house who did. So why would I have these teeth issues? We had some junk food but was it enough? I was eating a healthy diet, right? Well, later I learned that skim milk was not good, and neither was the conventional meat, and that my nuts had to be soaked and my grains sprouted but was that good enough? NO! Still new cavities.

It wasn’t until I read the book Cure Tooth Decaythat I learned that many of the things I had been doing in the name of health were hurting me. That healthy, hearty breakfast of oats was loaded with phytic acid and that whole grain (rye, wheat, spelt, kamut, and barley) sprouted bread was full of bran, germ, phytic acid and toxic lectins. The book explains that: “Phytic acid has a strong inhibitory effect in adults, particularly on the absorption of iron. Even a small amount of phytic acid in ones diet can lead to a significant reduction in iron absorption. While grains, particularly whole grains, are rich in phosphorous, up to 80% of this phosphorous is bound up as phytate, which is not absorbable by the body. Phytic acid inhibits enzymes that we need to digest our food, including pepsin, which is needed for the breakdown of proteins in the stomach, and amylase, which is required for the breakdown of starch into sugar…Grains also contain tannins which depress growth, decrease iron absorption, and damage the mucosal lining of the gastrointestinal tract. In addition to tannins, saponins in grains may inhibit growth.” (page 67) Sorry to go biology class on you but I think in order to break the conventional myths about grains we have to have it spelled out for us and I personally need to know how things work. I think it is important to go into detail on the grains because it may be one of the most common touted health foods that is not being prepared the way traditional people ate them. We all know sugar is bad for our health but how many people know about the effects of phytic acid?

So let’s address the sugar. If you follow conventional wisdom then you can eat all of the candy, cakes and sugar beans you want as long as you brush them off your teeth when you are done but this is setting you up for failure. It doesn’t matter if these sugars are processed or natural, they all affect the fluctuations in some way but obviously white sugar is the worst. What you must know and the book explains is that fluctuations in your blood levels from sugars can cause calcium to be pulled from your teeth or bones. Having your blood sugar levels out of control creates an environment for tooth decay. It is not the sugar in the mouth that is the problem, it is the entire body. I think it’s important for us to start thinking of our entire body when we think of our teeth. And for the beer drinkers, unfortunately modern beer has not been fermented like ancient beers and exposes the drinker to toxins and can cause cavities as well.

So I covered how I was eating some of the wrong things but the book also goes into the things I was leaving out that are critical to not only tooth health but overall health. This book introduced me to so many new delicious nutrient dense foods that we weren’t previously eating that are full of fat soluble vitamins. I had already learned of the benefits of raw dairy, liver, fish, ghee and cod liver oil but I never would have added broths, sardines, animal organs, bone marrow, or skate liver oil full of fat soluble vitamins to our diets. Nor would I be considering others that we haven’t tried like blood, duck eggs, caviar or fish heads.

The book has many good recipes. My favorites are the broth and egg nog and how to prepare grains without phytic acid. Even if you are a vegetarian, the author Ramiel Nageloffers tips on how to heal your teeth. Other things he addresses are the role of hormones and tooth decay, the dangers of fluoride, the importance of breastfeeding, why you shouldn’t remove your wisdom teeth unnecessarily and toxic dentistry procedures like mercury. I also found the chapter “Your Bite: The Hidden Cause of Cavities,” extremely important to me as a parent. I will never get my kids braces after reading this book and learning how they damage the bone, the bite and facial aesthetics. A whole myriad of health issues come from these unnecessary practices. There are other safer options that Ramiel covers.

The book is a wealth of information that I can’t possibly cover in a short review all you can learn from it. It is right up there at the top of my list with The Continuum Concept. I think our teeth are clues to our overall health. We need to treat them like the jewels they are and take extreme measures to take care of them. You are not helpless victims of your genes when it comes to cavities and there is more you can do than brushing and flossing. Thank you for reading and I wish an abundance of health to you and your children.

Not from the book, but excellent quotes to think about:
One would be more justified in stating that the principal cause of dental decay are the dentists, and even prove it – because wherever there are many dentists, the dental health status of the population is significantly worse than where there are few dentists or none at all.” ~Dentist Dr. Johann Georg Schnitzer speaking on a dentists congress in Berlin, Germany

The dental establishment is scared to death that the public is going to realize that the entire profession has been making a living by repairing the results of a disease they could have been curing all along!” ~Dr. Robert O. Nara, D.D.S.

Someday, hopefully soon, the dental profession will become extinct… it will happen as soon as the public learns about the cause and cure of cavities and gum problems. No one I’ve ever known in over 30 years has not wanted to solve their own problems… once they know how.” ~Dr. Robert O. Nara, D.D.S.

This entry was posted on December 31, 2011 at 6:25 am and is filed under Eating, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.