Nutrition & Dental Health: Page vs. Price

[Guest guest]

Here are excerpts from today's post on Matt Stone's excellent blog, 180 Degree

Health. He challenges some of Price's theories and I think he's probably right

on these counts.

Tom

http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com/2009/05/suckled-by-triceratops.html

Back to some roots. Like roots of your teeth. Let's talk about teeth.

It always strikes me as amazing just how much deformity is masked by the fine

works of orthodontics. Because we all look fairly normal, and somewhat similar

to humans observed by Weston A. Price for example, this peculiar and alarming

development gets more or less swept under the rug.

Last week my poor girlfriend had a fresh installment of some of the meanest

looking heavy-duty braces I ever did lay eyes on. This is in preparation for a

heinous jaw surgery coming up in a year or so.

Although my sweet little biscuit has been traumatized to death by this, it has

been quite funny to run into people we know and have her say, " Yeah, Matt said

he wanted a younger-looking girlfriend, so… "

What's been remarkable is that nearly every single person we've run into has

their very own jaw surgery story. Three out of three people we ran into at the

grocery store yesterday had some kind of reconstructive jaw surgery to fix their

overbite, underbite, crossbite, and various oddities of the mandible. I'm still

one of the few that I've met in my life that grew up in my generation and never

had braces – although I probably could have used them on the bottom teeth. Okay,

those badboys are all kinds of crooked. There, I said it.

It is really mind-boggling to think at just how freakish we would all indeed

look if it wasn't for orthodontics, and this is really a trait that humans and

humans alone possess. If a horse had teeth like the average kid these days,

they'd put it out of its misery and feed it to the dog – you know, the dog with

the perfectly straight teeth.

Throw out the thousands of tools and the magic of dentistry to keep the crooked

teeth we do have from rotting out completely, and you've got yourself a society

of people with grill's straight out of Night of the Living Dead.

I bring this up because I was trying to post a heartfelt comment at Dr.

Fuhrman's blog the other day, http://www.diseaseproof.com/, and once again had

it shot down. I spent a half hour on it, uploading pictures to my website and

everything – concluding it with " what Dr. Fuhrman has been saying has been right

all along! " Still, nothing. Shunned. But I knew better. Those who eat either all

plants or all animals evidently have an extreme intolerance for my radical and

supposedly treacherous practice of omnivorism.

Although I'm far from being in agreement with Dr. Fuhrman about saturated fats

being some deadly poison that magically jumps up into people's arteries like a

guided missile, I do agree that dental health and physical/mental/emotional

health exist together.

Unlike many Weston A. Price worshipers; however, I acknowledge that having

healthy teeth doesn't really seem to have that much to do with the amount of fat

soluble vitamins and calcium in your diet. Sure, you need some, there is a basic

requirement of course, but as Melvin Page points out, who was a far better

dentist and health practitioner than Price:

" …calcium deficiency is one of the most common dietary deficiencies in the

United States. Yet milk consumption in the United States is the highest in the

world. The answer, of course, lies in the part played by vitamins and hormones.

When these are not present nor functioning correctly, calcium will not be

absorbed properly no matter how much is put into the digestive tract. "

This gets back to the idea that " you are what your body does with what you eat, "

which is a much more truthful statement than " you are what you eat. " That was

the beauty of Page, who understood that vitamins and minerals, although they are

important essentials in our function, are not the be all end all. It was the

hormones and glands Page found, that mattered most when it came to overall

health and vitality.

Page didn't dwell on how much liver or fish eggs or insects were in a person's

diet to achieve good dental health. He even excluded all milk from the diet –

the beloved sustenance of Weston A. Price devotees (his exclusion probably

wasn't necessary, but the point is – he didn't need this precious nutritive

resource to produce great results). Instead, he monitored glucose metabolism and

calcium to phosphorous ratios in the blood, which, when normal, resulted in both

excellent dental and overall health. In other words, these were the diagnostic

signatures of a healthy person.

How did he fix these problems? If there was too much phosphorous and too little

calcium in the blood, did he give calcium supplements like a mainstream

nutritionist might? Nope. He noted that calcium and phosphorous regulation had

very close ties to the blood sugar level. What made the blood sugar fluctuate up

and down like nothing else – well beyond normal parameters, altering mineral

metabolism? Refined sugar.

Surprise, refined sugar causes bad teeth! News flash! You heard it here first.

Okay, okay. Everybody has always said that because it was so obvious. The

question is why. Modern science says " because sugar feeds the bacteria that

cause tooth decay. "

Weston A. Price and many others fell victim, at least in part, to the belief

that refined sugar and grain caused cavities because it lacked the vitamins and

minerals that other foods contained.

Melvin Page discovered, and I agree wholeheartedly, that refined sugar had more

of a drug like effect that no other food could achieve – not even fruit juice,

and the ingestion of it ruined dental health. Refined sugar is inherently

harmful, and just as McCarrison found, even a diet with 90% of calories coming

from white rice and full blown nutritional deficiencies amongst certain groups

in India – tooth decay could not be found. Only on a diet that contained white

sugar and white flour (falsely accused I would bet), were cavities the norm and

not the exception.

The last sentence – no one would argue with. Only the " why's " are hotly debated.

Considering that my teeth were far healthier eating an almost non-dairy

vegetarian diet (many years ago) consisting of primarily whole foods (beans,

grains, fruits, vegetables, olive oil, etc.) than it was eating a diet of

shellfish, meat, eggs, milk, fruits, vegetables, whole and refined grains and

WHITE SUGAR in my youth, I certainly can't give all the credit to fat soluble

vitamins and calcium for dental health. Nor would Fuhrman.

What causes crooked teeth, which is irrefutably a facial deformity no different

from having three arms, just more common? I'm guessing, knowing what we know

about deformity, that it stems from a systemic imbalance having something to do

with a combination of factors. It's obvious that poor overall health and crooked

teeth are close cousins. The greatest root hormonal cause appears to be a low

metabolism (low active thyroid), which alters mitochondrial DNA and impairs the

transmission of healthy characteristics from parent to child. Therefore anything

that can help overcome this problem naturally improves health, improves dental

health, improves fertility and successful reproduction by other criteria,

digestion, glucose metabolism, yada yada yada.

....

A nutritionally-mediocre diet with no sugar in it is far better than an

extremely nutritious diet with sugar on top – especially if refined sugar is

ingested on a daily basis, which is where the metabolic damage is really done.