I already wrote a little about this book in my posts Tooth Decay and Germ Theory and Teeth Are Alive and Need Their Vitamins. I’m almost done re-reading passages in this book, and I’m getting ready to loan it out, so I thought I’d type up some parting thoughts before I forget them.
I remember asking one of my doctors once why he doesn’t try more dietary intervention. I thought he’d respond in a closed-minded way, but he surprised me and seemed to understand the ability of proper diet to promote major healing. His problem was that his patients simply had no discipline or desire to change their habits. They’d rather take a pill.
This is why the tone of the book bothered me, because I would love to know what my families, Fort Wayne Dentist thinks about the theories in the book, but I’d never suggest it to him because it’d be insulting. It reminds me a little of what I thought about Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
I’m not against critical thinking. If Nagel had kept it purely scientific, and stuck to pointing out, for instance, that brushing and flossing and using fluoride have gotten us nowhere in regard to tooth health, that’d be fine. That’s obvious, I think. But going after dentists and basically accusing them of being blinded by their greed…for me it crossed the line. We cannot see the hearts of men, and we shouldn’t pretend that we can. A dentist can in theory be both wrong and good at once, in the sense that he can do things that don’t promote tooth health out of ignorance, while simultaneously having genuine care for his patients in his heart.
However, comma.
This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t suggest the book…to you.
You are not a dentist, are you?
I didn’t think so.
We are currently making the dietary changes in the book in hopes of controlling the problems our two oldest children have with their baby teeth. My main concern, really, is that they have healthy adult teeth. After reading all of the nutritional guidelines, I’m pretty sure I know why the two of them have weak teeth–it goes back to spending years on special diets {where they could drink no milk of any kind}. I didn’t really know how to nourish them on this diet, and at that time there weren’t all the resources there are now. When we took Daughter A. in to the doctor that finally helped us, she tested almost completely deficient in calcium.
I suppose I ought to be grateful she has teeth at all!
So now they have a new “special” diet, only this one is much easier on me, and tastier, too. We threw out the oatmeal, and they eat eggs about five mornings per week. A lot of those eggs are from our backyard flock, but some are also store-bought because…well, it takes a lot of eggs to serve six people each morning! They’re taking fermented cod liver oil and butter oil, drinking raw pastured milk, eating real yellow butter
If you can’t tell from this list, the diet focuses on maximizing intake of calcium, phosphorous, and fat-soluble vitamins A {not pro-vitamin A…most children cannot make the conversion from beta carotene to Vitamin A}, D, and K2. Vitamin C is considered necessary for gum problems; as my children do not have these, I just let them eat fruit–especially unhulled strawberries {because most the Vitamin C is in the hull!} and call it a day. At the same time, Nagel suggests that we eat no grains, an exception being made for sourdough made from freshly ground flour with the bran sifted out. Thankfully, I took up making sourdough as a hobby, so this was not a stretch for me. There is a lot more to it, but these are the basics. This is considered therapeutic for children with poor teeth health. Though it is wise to make sure every child has intake of these vitamins and minerals, please don’t think I am turning into a food and nutrition Nazi!
I really try to balance the idea that my children seem to need a therapeutic diet at this point {I do believe God gives us wisdom to know these things, and that Hippocrates, being a pagan, still had wisdom when he said, “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.”} with the fact that it is false teachers that are picky about food and cause division in the Church over eating laws and using special diets and the like:
But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.
Ahem.
So we will see. It is really too soon to know if this will help them.
Of course, it won’t hurt them. That is what’s nice about trying something like this: no side effects.
We’re anticipating our first appointment with a biological dentist, because our daughter really might need intervention with a couple of her teeth, and this dentist is much gentler, not to mention metal-free. Nagel makes a strong case for not interfering with painless baby teeth, even if they are carious, and the pediatric dentist we saw wanted to do far more work than we were comfortable with. So we’re getting another opinion.
I feel like this book gave us the direction we were looking for. We knew our children had cavities, and we wanted them to have healthy teeth. Because of their history of allergies, we were concerned about putting metal in their mouths and giving them drugs to which they might be allergic {such as Novocain shots or antihistamine sedatives to help them relax during the procedures}. Our hope is that we will be able to avoid this now, especially since we knew intuitively what the book explains scientifically–that drilling and filling a cavity does not cure the underlying cause of the decay.
If you are looking for options in regard to tooth health, and you like trying to fix things yourself, this book is definitely a worthy read.
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