Real Food Results: Stellar Dental Health for My Teens

Like most Americans, I had my share of processed foods and subsequent dental cavities as a young adult. My diet growing up in the 80's and early 90's was fairly standard, with lots of canned foods, Kool-Aid, cereals, PBJ sandwiches, processed meats, fat-free dairy, margarine, etc. Then, for a few years while I was in high school and college, I worked long hours at a pizza shop, at which I ate lots of pizza and drank many sodas, day in and day out.

I didn't really know any better. I ended up with numerous cavities that had to be filled, but I didn't quite connect it with my diet until years later.

Fast forward to 2005, when one of my engineering co-workers at NASA shared information about Dr. Weston Price's research with me. This literally changed the course of my life. It was the beginning of my decades-long passionate interest in natural health which continues to this day!

Dr. Weston Price's Research Into the Cause of Tooth Decay

In his seminal 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Price described his experiences of traveling around the world to find the cause of tooth decay and cavities. Dr. Price studied the health and diets of different populations worldwide in order to understand why so many of his patients in the USA had prevalent tooth decay and cavities.

Dr. Price learned that people who ate traditional foods had virtually no cavities or tooth decay, nor even cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. When people from the same villages started consuming modern foods (such as refined white flour, pasteurized milk, canned foods, and sugar), they developed tooth decay, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

The photos in Price's book speak volumes about the effects of diet on health. He sought out people consuming traditional versus modern diets in each region, and was thereby able to see profound differences in their health depending on their diets.

"This shows two boys; the older at the left has excellent teeth. He lived on the native diet of oat products and sea foods. His brother at the right used the imported white flour bread, sugar, jams and coffee shipped from the port about sixty miles away."

To learn more about Dr. Price's research, I recommend this excellent video:

25 Min VIDEO: Dr Price's Search for Health

Putting Dr. Price's Research Into Practice

I was fortunate that I learned about the research of Dr. Price before my first pregnancy. This allowed me (and my husband) to work on improving our diets before conception. With incremental changes over time, we stopped eating most processed foods and replaced them with nutrient-dense real foods such as grassfed beef, pastured chicken and eggs, butter, raw milk and cheese, homemade bone broth, sprouted and/or sourdough grains, fermented foods, and organic fruits and vegetables.

My husband and I both had health improvements from ditching processed foods and switching to real foods. We got sick less frequently and both had improvements in our chronic health issues. For instance, my acne rosacea and irritable bowel syndrome disappeared, and my husband had less frequent sinus flareups.

We've continued following the Weston Price-based diet for 20 years now, including during both of my pregnancies and throughout our teens' lives. Our kids have been raised on a real food diet along with a natural health lifestyle wherein I've been our "family doctor" and have treated my kids with homeopathic medicines for illnesses, injuries, and improving their overall chronic health. Our kids have never had any antibiotics, vaccines, or over the counter medicines. Our diets aren't absolutely perfect, but we continue to aim to do the best we can.

Real Food and Real Results: Stellar Dental Health

My kids' dental health has been stellar, as they've never had a toothache and never had to have any fillings for cavities. In the 20 years I've followed this diet, I haven't had any cavities, either. We have generally avoided going to the dentist (with the exception of palate-expanding orthodontic care) for most of my kids' lives.

Recently, the kids and I had a dental check-up; we mainly just wanted to get our teeth cleaned, but had to go through the full check-up process in order to do so. This was my first dental check-up in 15+ years, my daughter Alina's 2nd dental check-up ever, and the very first dental check-up for my son Ian.

The dentist was surprised to find that, even though we had some tartar buildup on our teeth, we had no cavities nor pre-cavities whatsoever.

This should have been a wakeup call for the dentist, as it flies in the face of the mainstream paradigm that brushing and cleaning teeth prevents cavities. I told the dentist that we had been following a special diet, but he wasn't very curious and just went back to business-as-usual. 😝