It’s been two years since I wrote about how to use your diet to improve your dental health.  I also wrote about my thoughts on toothbrushing not being a critical factor to healthy teeth and cavity prevention.  And when I wrote about the many uses of baking soda as well as about the uses of coconut oil, I mentioned that I use baking soda and coconut oil as toothpaste alternatives.  Though I haven’t been using commercial toothpastes for over four years, I’ve never shared my reasons here.

I have several concerns about toothpaste.  One is fluoride, which is a commercial waste product and toxin that despite all the hype hasn’t been proven to prevent tooth decay. (If you’re interested in learning more fluoride, you can start at this site).  It’s baffled me for years that there are warnings on the tube of toothpaste like “Do not swallow” and “In case of accidental ingestion, contact the poison control center” since swallowing a pea sized amount of toothpaste can poison a young child – but while we lock up chemical cleansers so they don’t get into it, we don’t even consider the free access our kids have to toothpaste.  Not only do we not keep them away from it, we lovingly open their tiny mouths and rub it all over their teeth.

Then there’s the another thing that puzzles me.  Dentists tell you to brush well after eating sweets, and then the paste you use to brush your teeth is filled with sweeteners.  Doesn’t that seem….well, contradictory?  You dip your brush in something sweet to rub away the residues of sweet food?

There are ingredients like the detergent sodium lauryl sulfate that may cause irritation to sensitive gums (linked to canker sores for many people).  And then there’s a very problematic ingredient called glycerin.  A good diet can substantially increase the strength of your teeth, and even remineralize them when decay has occurred (yes, that means you can heal your teeth through high quality nutrition).  Your teeth can only remineralize if they are clean, but glycerin coats your teeth with a film that prevents them from being able to absorb nutrients (and it takes 27 rinses to wash off the glycerin).  You can see how this is working against your efforts to build stronger teeth!

These are some of the reasons we don’t use toothpaste.  I’ll write about what what you can use as toothpaste alternatives as well as share about my kids’ dental history in another post.

(This post is part of Fight Back Friday.)

Avivah

Since I know that other moms are probably also interested in how to improve their children’s dental health, I thought I would share some information that I’ve found valuable.  First of all, improving dental health is integrally linked with improving the overall state of the body’s health. The state of your teeth is a reflection of what’s going on in your body.  This contradicts the typical way of looking at the teeth as only cosmetic and independent from the rest of the body, but is a very important distinction. 

The following is what I’ve gleaned from various sources, and made notes on for myself – I’m far from an expert on nutrition.  From what I understand, improving your dental health is a two pronged approach: 1) eliminating/minimizing low quality foods that deplete the nutrients from your body, and 2) adding high quality food that build up the body to your diet. 

What are foods that should be minimize, and ideally eliminated?  There are reasons that each of the following are problematic, but I’ll just share the list of what to work on for now:
– sugars/sweeteners
– hydrogenated fats, margarine
-iodized salt
– processed foods
– pasteurized milk products
– soy foods
– unsoaked grains (even whole grains)

Of this list, I still sometimes use unsoaked whole grains and flour (but I’ve made big improvements in that area!), but otherwise I pretty much have eliminated everything else.

The body needs both calcium and phosphorus, and a lack of it seems to be the cause of tooth decay. Whole grains and soy foods are high in phytic acid, which bind with the phosphorus and escort a significant amount of the nutrients in those foods right out of your body. Soaking them neutralizes the phytic acid so that your body can benefit from the nutrients in your food.

Increasing foods that build the body up:
– bone broths
– cod liver oil
– butter oil

These are the three things I’ve seen most highly recommended to build up teeth. Of these three, I’ve so far only done the bone broths. I use broth quite a bit so that it’s part of our regular diet, even when the kids don’t see it (like to cook rice in). 

Other good things for general health that also positively effect the teeth and should be included as much as possible in the diet are:

– raw milk
– raw butter
– raw honey
– sea salt
– lacto fermented veggies (they strengthen digestion and assimilation)
– soaked/sprouted/fermented grains and flours
– pastured eggs
– saturated fats (animal fats and coconut oil)
– high quality animal protein (meat, chicken, fish)
– lots of veggies

 Of this list, I do most of them most of the time.  Sometimes I use supermarket eggs or regular store butter, but otherwise I’ve integrated all of the other suggestions into our diet.  You’ll notice that some of these are replacements for the list of things to eliminate, raw milk for pasteurized milk, sea salt for iodized salt, soaked grains for unsoaked grains, etc.  So it’s more like you’re substituting one thing for another than actually adding new strange things to your diet.

By the way, as a substitute for margarine and hydrogenated vegetable oil, I use coconut oil.  It perfectly substitutes for shortening.  I also occasionally use extra virgin cold pressed olive oil.  I also render beef/lamb fat and use that to add nutritional value to dishes.  (This is a great irony to me, since this is the kind of thing I used to very much avoid eating, thinking it was bad healthwise.)

Herbs for strengthening teeth:
– horsetail, lemon grass, red raspberry, nettle, lemon balm – I’m guessing these are good because of the vitamin c, but I can’t say for sure.

Avivah

This past week I took all of the kids in for their six month dental check ups.  After my 5 yo was checked, the dentist told me that he’s been doing a good job brushing since everything looked good.  I smiled and said that was nice to hear.  Then the 9 yo was checked, and she told me the same thing.  At that, I had to tell her the truth – that it was more a credit to their diet than to their diligent toothbrushing.

The horrifying truth is, the 5 yo hardly ever brushes, and the 9 yo isn’t much better.  Yeah, they’re supposed to brush their teeth every night (that’s what I tell them to do after dinner when I send them upstairs to put on their pajamas and get ready for bed- and until very recently I thought that’s what they did), but a few nights before the trip to the dentist, my 9 yo son informed me that it had been weeks since he brushed his teeth.  I’d like to think he has a poor sense of time and meant days, but in the best of scenarios, it wasn’t too regular.

The dentist couldn’t believe it.  She told me that she can generally tell who brushes well and who doesn’t by the kind of teeth they have, and that she never could have guessed that they don’t brush regularly.  My kids were just totally contradicting her experience.

Then she checked my 13 yo daughter, who is really responsible about everything, and when it comes to toothbrushing, she never misses a day.  Even when her braces were taken off, all of her teeth were perfectly white – most kids have yellowish marks around the whiter area of the teeth where the braces were.  Anyway, here’s the big irony – she had a cavity.  Miss Perfect Brusher.  Okay, so it was between the teeth and the bracket from her braces kept her from being able to get in there.  But still.  So much for regular brushing being the answer to cavities.  I’m not saying it doesn’t help – but there’s more to dental health than how often you brush.  Think about it – in traditional societies, people never brushed, and in cultures throughout the world, tooth decay was minimal.

So I told the dentist that my recent research on dental health has led me to believe that this child will always be the most vulnerable of all my kids to cavities.  Why?  Of all my kids, she’s the one with the worst teeth and is not coincidentally the one with whom I was vegan for part of my pregnancy with her. She’s also the one who had very crooked teeth (prior to her braces – her teeth are perfect now) and has hypoplasia on one back molar (this is caused by a malfunction in utero of the formation of dental enamel – you don’t see the results until the teeth emerge but that’s when the quality of it is determined).  I didn’t understand how she needed a root canal at the age of three when I only gave them a teaspoon of sugar daily in their breakfast oatmeal and minimal sweets once a week, otherwise had lots of veggies and whole grains (very little animal protein – just chicken once a week), only gave her water to drink (no soda or juice) – now I know.  She didn’t get the minerals she needed in utero at the crucial time to build strong teeth.  Apparently this is very common to vegetarians and children of vegetarian.  Kids need minerals that they don’t get in sufficient quantity in a vegan diet to develop strong teeth.

So while I wouldn’t tell my kids not to brush their teeth, it’s certainly overrated, and the role of superior nutrition is virtually never heard about – but it’s the nutrition that makes the real difference!

Avivah