The body is marvelously designed to keep itself healthy,

and not just for muscles, soft-tissue-organs, and bones.  We were made with a built-in process to maintain healthy tooth enamel as well.  Records of people with primitive technologies who ate traditional diets show they had the occasional broken tooth, but the remaining stub was often covered over with a sheen of newly formed enamel to protect the softer internal tooth structure.  Even though that degree of tooth self-repair is almost unheard of in modern society, our bodies also retain the same untapped potential.

The power of tooth re-enamelization—usually referred to as tooth remineralization—doesn’t rely on growing new tooth cells from the inside.  Teeth stop growing in that fashion during childhood.  Instead it relies on exposing the teeth to mineral ions in the saliva to maintain or repair the enamel.

A healthy person’s saliva is rich in ions of the minerals that make up tooth enamel,

especially calcium and phosphorous, and these ions are ready to deposit themselves into the crystalline lattice work of enamel material.  This is the process of enamel repair, but it’s also part of the original process of a tooth’s enamel maturation.  When a child’s new tooth first erupts, it’s still relatively soft until it’s had a chance to “soak up” minerals from the saliva, a process that takes months at least.

For fully formed teeth, saliva remineralization is used for maintenance instead of tooth formation.  When we eat, normal digestive bacteria work on the food, and in the process form acids that contact the teeth.  Bacterial activity and acid formation is particularly strong in the presence of refined carbohydrates and all forms of sugar, in other words, for the bulk of the typical American diet.  Acids leach away molecules from the enamel surface, a process called demineralization.

Healthy, mineral-rich saliva both reduces the effects of acid (by flushing it away from the teeth and by buffering the acidity) and also repairs enamel (by remineralization).  Most demineralization occurs when you eat and shortly after; most remineralization occurs when the mouth is empty of food, particularly when you sleep.  Both the demineralization and remineralization processes are slow, but over time the tipping point between the two can lead either to strong enamel or cavities.  We can actively support remineralization two ways: by nourishing ourselves to increase the ion mineral content of our saliva and by eliminating barriers between teeth and the saliva.

Ample nutrition is more than just consuming increasing amounts of minerals,

even the predominant enamel minerals of calcium and phosphorous.  It’s not the minerals you put in your mouth that count, but the minerals your body absorbs and can put to work.  Replacing conventional nutrition with the Liberation Diet maximizes mineral absorption and mineral utilization.  For remineralization, that means selecting foods that are mineral-rich in their natural state, preparing foods in ways that don’t leach minerals from the body, and ingesting high levels of the vitamins needed for mineral absorption.

The best foods to support remineralization are real milk and the foods made from real milk (such as cheese, yogurt, and kefir).  It doesn’t seem particularly insightful to be told we can get calcium from dairy.  But what is perceptive is the knowledge that not all milk is equally beneficial.  The nearly universal practice of pasteurizing milk makes most of its calcium insoluble, and precludes the benefits that people had derived from milk products for thousands of years.  Pasteurization also destroys milk’s vitamin D, upon which calcium absorption depends.  With almost all commercial milk being pasteurized, most Americans have insufficient vitamin D and upwards of 87% of Americans have a calcium deficiency.  A little guidance is sorely needed after all.

The Liberation Diet also explains how preparing foods can be just as critical as selecting the right foods.

A lot of people take pride in selecting whole grain flour and whole grain foods, but as commonly available, their health benefits are usually elusive.  Unless the grains are sprouted or fermented, the vast majority of their phosphorous (one of the critical minerals of enamel) is in the form of phytic acid, which does more harm than good.  Not only does it make the phosphorous unavailable, it also binds with calcium already in the body and actually reduces the  calcium available for use.  The mineral-reducing processes of high phytic acid is also at work from nuts, seeds, beans and tubers, unless properly prepared as our ancestors once did to reduce the phytic acid and free up the food’s minerals for absorption.

Besides considering foods that add or subtract minerals, an effective diet also provides for high levels of vitamins A and D, necessary for the body to absorb the minerals that are available in the mineral-rich food.  The Liberation Diet offers guidance for getting optimal levels of these often elusive nutrients.

After you’ve shifted your nutrition to allow your body to absorb the beneficial levels of minerals, in all likelihood it will take quite a while for such a dramatic change in your saliva’s mineral content to allow a new sheen of enamel to form over a broken tooth.  The body allocates resources to its most critical needs first.  For example, calcium is essential for the proper functioning of all cells, for nerve transmission, and for blood coagulation; these functions are critical to sustaining life even in the short term, and so have a higher priority than maintaining teeth enamel.  After having lived on a conventional diet of depleted and depleting foods for decades, you’ll find that it takes a while for the critical tissues throughout the body to reach their optimal levels, before the saliva also enjoys optimal mineral content.  But even just starting the shift in diet will start to help your saliva somewhat and thereby help to remineralize your teeth.

Right away you can help your teeth get the most benefit from saliva remineralization

by eliminating barriers between your teeth and the minerals available in your saliva.  The most common barrier to remineralization is the glycerin in toothpaste.  To make toothpaste have its desired paste consistency, toothpaste manufacturers generally add glycerin, a sweet, highly viscous chemical with low toxicity  that’s a cheap byproduct of making soap and biodiesel fuel.  Brushing with toothpaste leaves a transparent film of glycerin on the teeth that effectively isolates the teeth and stops remineralization.  It takes between ten and twenty rinses to remove the glycerin residue from the teeth.  Using toothpaste before going to sleep is a remineralization-inhibiting ritual.  Even nontoxic and “natural” toothpastes contain glycerin, as you can see by their ingredient lists.

Most toothpastes concede the loss of saliva remineralization and as compensation resort to adding sodium fluoride in order to make the remaining enamel more brittle. But fluoride is such a highly toxic systemic poison that a warning is required on toothpaste packages advising users to call a poison control center in cases of accidental swallowing.  In order to avoid fluoride and other toxins in toothpaste, some people use tooth soaps instead of toothpaste, but many soaps also contain glycerin, which leaves the undesired film.

There are alternatives to brushing with glycerin based dentifrices.  There are tooth powders that don’t interfere with saliva remineralization that you can make yourself from baking soda and sea salt  ( http://www.ehow.com/how_2152682_homemade-tooth-powder.html and http://www.ehow.com/how_5884033_make-tooth-powder.html and http://greencouple.com/2008/12/03/making-tooth-powder/).  There are also tooth powders on the market that are glycerin-free.  (I’m obviously biased in favor of my own brand, because of its additional herbs and vitamin C that help the gums, but strictly from the point of view of cleaning teeth while eliminating the glycerin barrier to remineralization, a number of tooth powders do the job well.)

The old-fashioned traditions of nutrition and hygiene really did contain a lot of wisdom that’s been lost in the hype of modern advertising.  Corporate boardrooms can’t make the the workings of nature conform to their notions.  At the end of the day, it’s best to accept with admiration and gratitude the beautifully balanced birthright of nature that keeps us healthy, and to cooperate with it as best we can.

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.

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