Liberation Wellness

The health of your gums is a sensitive barometer for the current trend in your overall bodily health.

That’s because the individual cells in the mouth are among the quickest to be replaced and have extremely short lifetimes compared to other types of cells.

A cell in the pancreas is replaced after about a year.  The entire skeleton is replaced approximately every ten years; a muscle cell around the ribs lasts an average of 15 years.  The cells of the gut are replaced at a 16-year average (except for the gut’s lining, which replaces quickly, like the soft-tissue mouth cells).  Over a lifetime, only about half of the heart cells will have been replaced with new cells, contrary to popular misconception.  And many if not all of the cells of the cerebral cortex last a person their whole life.  In contrast, the lifespan of a healthy gum cell typically ranges from only two to seven days, and is usually replaced in four or five days.

Because so many cells are being replaced so rapidly in the gums, any change in the factors that affect the health of tissue shows up quickly there.  These factors can include toxins, radiation, and infection, but the most prevalent factor is the availability of resources in the body to build these new cells, i.e., the quality of the nutrition that has been absorbed from our food.  It’s this short-term sensitivity that allowed Dr. Weston A. Price to perceive the clear correlation between whole, unprocessed, full-fat foods and correspondingly robust health on the one hand, and on the other hand between denatured, processed foods and poor health.

The mouth is not only a good indicator of our current health trend, but contains a lasting record of past oral health, by the presence or absence of cavities, whether currently active or long dormant.  Once a human adult tooth has been grown, it’s not growing any more, so any past episode of dental caries leaves behind either an unfilled indentation or a dentist’s filling.

I don’t know whether it was by genius or stroke of luck that Dr. Price set out to study isolated populations with excellent oral health.  But from his studies he was able to notice the correlations among a healthy oral history, vigorous bodily health, and a nutritious diet.  And he further discovered that all these people with good oral and bodily health shared the same dietary principles, the same ancient “primitive” diets followed since Neolithic times and passed down in cultural traditions.  And interestingly, even the remains of ancient people show that they had excellent teeth.

A person with evidence of being cavity-free for decades was someone who not only grew several gum-cell-generations of healthy gum tissue during that time, but also benefited from a steady accumulation of healthy slow-replacement cells in organs throughout their body, resulting in a high level of overall bodily health.

The typical calorie-rich but nutrient-poor diet of modern society leads directly to an uncontrolled population explosion of otherwise tame digestive bacterial flora, and this initiates gum infection.  Unchecked gum infections are usually the forerunners to tooth decay, and correspondingly “dental caries are likely to be accompanied by periodontal disease with further reaching complications” (from the introduction to Dr. Price’s book, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”).

When the first few denatured foods, such as refined sugar and white flour, were added to the world’s diet, the gums and teeth reacted quickly.  Dr. Price found numerous examples of this effect in the form of siblings who had dramatically different oral health, because one brother started eating white flour and sweets and lost numerous teeth, while the other continued to eat only traditional foods and had pristine teeth and gums.

But it was later, after the wholesale displacement of natural, pasture-raised and full-fat foods by technologically denatured and artificial foods, that we saw the rapid rise of modern chronic diseases.  It has now become normal that after reaching an age of four or five decades spent eating a conventional diet of fake foods, a significant proportion of the population starts being diagnosed with chronic diseases in the slow reacting organs, such as heart disease and cancers.

And of course, gum disease has become the norm, and most people carry in their mouth a memorialized history of poor oral health, in the form of fillings, crowns, implants and root canals.  There is a common misconception that cavities and gum disease only come from the topical application of refined carbohydrates, such as sugar and refined flour, to the surfaces and margins of the teeth and gums.  But the deprivation that comes from nutrient-poor foods is all that’s needed.  Dr. Price did some experiments in which he fed to rabbits a significant portion of their diet as sugar through a tube, so that it wouldn’t even touch their teeth, and they still developed dental caries.

There is no substitute for truly healthful nutrition, even in oral health.  It’s not progress to eat denatured foods and then apply sophisticated chemicals to the teeth to suppress the most acute symptoms that would naturally ensue.  The answer to tooth sensitivity from receding gums or deepening gum pockets is not to use toothpaste that’s formulated to coat the teeth with a desensitizing film, so you won’t feel the ongoing deterioration.  Since gum disease is painless most of the time, the strategy of coupling poor diet with cutting edge oral products could lead to serious problems by the time trouble is first noticed.

It’s better to learn to eat right and brush with just plain pure water, than to eat conventionally and use the most advanced toothpaste and oral care products.  A little localized support in a formula of natural tooth cleansers and beneficial herbs can be a helpful boost while on the road back to robust overall health.  But it can also be very helpful to use the health of your gums and teeth as a barometer of your current overall health trend, and to follow a truly healthful diet with increased diligence whenever your barometer starts to indicate any sign of vulnerability.

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.