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The Tide Is Turning

Posted by John Chisholm on February 8, 2011

My impression has been that when Reader’s Digest starts carrying articles about a topic, it’s no longer of interest to just a few people on the fringe.  When I ran across the February 2011 article on Gary Taube’s book, Why We Get Fat—and What to Do About It, I saw that the cogent and traditional way of eating is really gaining traction against the low-fat and high-carb conventions.

Parts of the messages of Kevin Brown and the Weston A. Price Foundation are starting to penetrate mainstream awareness.  It’s encouraging, even though awareness by the mainstream press is still incomplete and still lags behind the more knowledgeable champions of healthy eating.  Jimmy Moore posted an article on Gary Taube’s book months ago.  (Jimmy  also provided a convenient link to a podcast of his interesting interview of Gary Taube— good stuff.)

Conventional Wisdom Is Not Holding Up
Taube’s book echoes what Kevin Brown has been saying for years, in Kevin’s own book, in his lectures, and on his website: the standard American diet has been making the population overweight, obese and prone to disease.  These observations challenge the simplistic thinking that says calories are calories no matter where they come from.  In fact, the body responds to different types of dietary calories in different ways, and the low-fat, high-carb diet upsets the body’s ability to regulate fat tissue properly.  Eating fat doesn’t lead to more fat storage in the body; eating high amounts of carbs leads to the insulin resistance that increases fat storage.  The high-carb diet also correlates to increased incidence in a multitude of diseases, from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and even gum disease.

The mounting evidence of researchers and mainstream publications who report on the failure of the standard American diet is like the proverbial handwriting on the wall.  Animal-produced foods are eventually going to lose their demonization.  So now what?  Do we turn to the supermarket aisles for the cheapest and most readily available animal-produced foods?  Not unless we want to trade in one set of health problems (obesity, diabetes) with another set (degenerative diseases such as arthritis and cancers).

Bad food Affects Us.  Bad Food Also Affects Our Animals
We humans do get all kinds of health problems from eating foods that our ancestors never ate and that we weren’t designed for, such as highly-refined grains, sugars and fake oils (care for cottonseed, anyone?).  Similarly, the livestock animals that produce our meat, eggs and milk get all kinds of health problems if forced to eat feeds that they weren’t designed for.  In agribusiness’s factory farms, the food that the animals were designed for, such as natural pasture grass, is replaced by commercial feeds that are both cheaper and cause quicker weight gain, for bigger profits.  The only thing that suffers is the health of the animals, and of the people who eat the unhealthful animals.

A mainstay of feeds for rapid weight gain is GMO corn, which has been shown to cause organ failure in animals, mostly in the kidneys and liver, but also in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and blood.  Another important constituent of feed is cheap protein in the form of animal renderings, which is all the animal byproducts scraped up and thrown out by the factory slaughterhouses, such as bone, feathers, eyeballs, offal, hair, hooves, diseased organs and the occasional bits of metal (from animal-ID-tags), plastic, and some restaurant grease.  Many rendering factories also accept roadkills  and carcasses from animal shelters, and add them to the mix.  To replace the mineral and chlorophyll of natural grass, the feeds for cows usually incorporate ground-up corn stalks and corn plant leaves that are left over after the crop of corn has been harvested; they can make up more than half the feed.

The feeds’ formulas are then topped off with hormones, to force rapid weight gain, and antibiotics, to combat the pathogenic infections that are bound to assail the animals.  The animals on factory farms are kept in pens whose floors (of dirt or concrete) are covered with the animals’ feces and urine, which become an ideal breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria.

It’s Not Smart to Subvert Nature
Grazing animals that are designed to eat grass (e.g., with multiple stomachs) and that were never meat eaters have been forced to eat feed that their systems can’t handle, including bits of animals of their own species.  Mad cow disease is just the most severe outcome so far of these unnatural farming practices.  Other more common diseases and organ failures are inevitable for the animals subjected to modern factory farming.  But agribusiness has figured out how to adjust feeds and hormones so skillfully that they can bring the animals up to harvest weight quickly enough to be killed just weeks before organ failure would debilitate the animals.

The result of all this tinkering with Mother Nature is to produce the most meat (or eggs or milk) for the cheapest cost.  But it’s not really a healthful practice to keep eating food produced by animals pumped up on hormones and antibiotics and on the verge of disease.

The Right Food Raised Right
The truly healthful alternative to an ineffectual diet that’s low-fat and high-carb is to get our food from traditional farming, that raises livestock by having them graze (literally eat living grass).  The animals are healthy because they’ve spent their whole lives feeding on their traditional diet in their natural environment: sunlit pastures where they absorb vitamin-D and the living enzymes and minerals from the grass.  As a bonus, grazing in pastures is much better for the environment than force-feeding artificial diets in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  The grazing keeps alive the native species of grasses as well as the food chain of animals that dwell there, from insects to small mammals to top predators.   Grazing also does not lead to the concentrations of fecal and urine waste that typically pollute the land around the CAFOs.

Cheap, fake foods that look the same as real are not “just as good” as traditional foods.  People are starting to question whether they’re eating the right things.  Let’s keep going to make sure we’ll all have access to the right food raised in the right way.  Let’s support our natural farmers and buy real food that’s been raised by them.

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.

Posted in Big Agriculture, diabetes, Food Safety, gmo, grains, grass fed beef, health, heart disease, insulin, jimmy moore, kevin brown, liberation diet, liberation wellness, obesity, Vitamin D, wellness, Weston A. Price Foundation | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Why All the Low Fat Dairy?

Posted by John Chisholm on November 30, 2010

The greatest health benefits of milk and milk products are conveyed by the milk fat, which contains critical fat-soluble vitamins, such as A, D, and K.  In light of that fact, why do you suppose so many conventional dairy products are low-fat?  Removing the fat from dairy products undercuts the very reason to consume them.  Why do they do that?  Much of conventional dairy is made low fat as an attempt to mitigate the unhealthy characteristics imbued into conventional milk by homogenization.

In its natural state, as produced by the cow, milk’s microscopic globules of fat are relatively large compared to the food-absorbing structures in the human digestive tract, i.e., the villi of the intestines.  Our bodies are designed to effectively extract important nutrients from the comparatively larger fat particles as they slide past and contact the villi, without entirely absorbing the fat in its relatively undigested state.

Homogenizing the milk changes the way our bodies interact with the resulting dairy products.  The process reduces the size of the milk fat particles so that they’re small enough to be entirely absorbed by the intestinal villi, and be transported directly into the bloodstream, bypassing the slower, natural digestive process that’s a hallmark of natural, un-homogenized milk products.  The improperly digested fats in the bloodstream are suspected of causing long-term problems.

Here’s how homogenization works: milk is shot through nozzles at high pressure onto a metal plate, so that the milk fat particles are broken down into tiny bits only a micron or so across.  That’s about 1% of the diameter of a human hair; their tiny size is what makes them so easily absorbed whole.  Conventional dairies have universally adopted the removal of nutritious milk fat as their “fix” for homogenization-induced problematical fat absorption.

Why Do Conventional Dairies Homogenize Their Milk?
Homogenization disguises the quality of the milk.  After it’s been homogenized, all milk appears uniformly white, regardless of quality.  Homogenization breaks the milk fat so much that the tiny particles bond with heavier molecules and don’t exert enough buoyancy to float to the top or congregate there.  In the old days, before homogenization, a consumer could easily compare the quality of milk by looking at how much cream (rich in milk fat) rose to the top of the milk bottle.  The milk with more cream came from healthier cows, who grazed in pastures with more nutritious grass.  After homogenization, cream won’t rise to the top, and no one can tell how rich or poor the milk is.

This makes things simpler and more profitable for conventional commercial dairies.  They can buy poorer quality milk at a lower price and no one can see the difference.  They can utilize the lowest-cost farmers who engage in the lowest-cost methods of raising dairy cows, such as packing thousands of cows together shoulder to shoulder in tiny confined areas that are much cheaper than many acres of pasture land.  Since the tiny confined areas would be way too small to grow enough grass to feed the cows, and since the confined areas are so crammed with cattle that no grass can possibly grow there, they feed the cows cheap byproducts from other industries, such as cottonseed husks, brewery grains, and corn silage (where the stalks and husks are ground up).  The resulting cows aren’t as healthy as cows raised in the pasture, but after homogenization no one can tell the difference.  And since the dairies (along with their competitors) are all going to homogenize and mix all the milk from all their farmer-suppliers, the conventional dairies can pay the lowest prices for even the milk raised by conscientious farmers who incur the higher costs of raising healthy cows who eat their natural diet in open pastures.  This industrial agriculture system drives farmers away from natural organic farming and into industrial farming.  This migration further reinforces the competition among farmers to provide even cheaper milk, by finding ways to cut even more corners.  Current methods include artificially injecting the cows with hormones to increase their milk production, and forcing them to give milk three times a day, instead of the old fashioned practice of once a day.

Homogenizing milk also provides a further “benefit” (to conventional dairies anyway, even if not to consumers).  Homogenization hides the dead bacteria in milk.  Just as homogenization keeps the cream from rising to the top, it keeps the dead bacteria in suspension also so that they won’t settle to the bottom.  Conventional dairies feel the need to homogenize all their milk to hide the effects of pasteurizing it. Pasteurizing milk—cooking it at high temperatures—kills whatever is living in the milk: the good and the bad, the enzymes and beneficial digestive bacteria and the pathogenic bacteria.  After being killed by pasteurization, the dead bacteria will cause a tell-tale “sludge” at the bottom unless the milk is homogenized.

Why Do They Pasteurize Milk?
For thousands of years people drank milk and ate cheeses without pasteurizing it and without ill effects.  In fact they consumed it with greater positive effect than our consuming modern conventional milk.  Natural whole raw milk, as it comes from the cow, is rich with live bacterial flora that help us derive the nutrients from the milk and that keep stray pathogenic bacteria from taking up residence in the milk.  Milk is an ideal medium for the growth of bacteria, but having been fully populated by beneficial bacteria and by immune cells, the milk is actually protected from contamination.  In its natural state, the healthful bacterial flora of milk remains in suspension throughout the liquid.

While cows raised organically in natural pastures produce whole, raw milk that effectively resists contamination, the cows raised in low-cost industrial operations produce milk that does not.  The conventional industrial farming methods that trap the cows in fecal-infested pens introduce so much pathogenic bacteria to the operation and to the cows that the harvested milk has routinely been infected by such quantities of pathogenic bacteria as to overwhelm the immunity that’s built into the cows and their milk.  The contamination is so prevalent that the cows must be fed a steady diet of antibiotics to survive.

Conventional dairy methods produce less healthy cows who are fed unnatural diets in such unsanitary conditions as to reduce their health.  Their milk is reduced into a less nutritious product that is contaminated to the point that it must be cooked (pasteurized) in order to make it safe to consume.  The pasteurization requires homogenization, which in turn makes the milk fat in the milk problematical, leading to low-fat milk products.  Conventional milk products may not be so good, but they are cheap and profitable.

Bad For the Environment Too
Conventional milk isn’t just bad for our bodies; it’s bad for the environment too.  The concentrated methods of industrial farming produce tons of concentrated animal waste that is rife with pathogenic bacteria and that cannot be naturally broken down in the small feedlots that are crammed with cattle producing even more waste.  The feces and urine from confined animal feeding operations pollute the surrounding land and the water table underneath—as well as the cows who have to spend their lives standing in it.

Natural Small-Scale Dairy Farming on Natural Pastureland
Small-scale farms that practice natural and organic practices don’t cause all the problems of industrial farming.  The cows eat grass as they were designed, not unnatural feeds of cheap byproducts.  They walk away from their waste, and avoid forced contamination.  The waste decomposes in the sunlit fields to nourish the grasses.  The cows live in sunshine to produce healthful vitamin D with which their milk is naturally imbued (so that it doesn’t have to be artificially “fortified”).  The cows are healthy, the milk is healthful.  The milk is rich with live enzymes that help people digest the raw, full-fat milk, and help them derive all of its health benefits.  Even people who considered themselves lactose intolerant often find that they can easily digest fresh raw milk raised on natural farms.

In real, healthy milk, there’s no need for pasteurization, homogenization, or low-fat.  Raw, full-fat milk from traditional farms provide safe nutrition that humans have enjoyed for thousands of years.  It can be part of our nutrition as well.  Kevin Brown’s book, Liberation Diet, explains how to build a diet around raw dairy and other naturally grown foods.  RealMilk can show you sources for real milk in your region.  When you look at all that low-fat dairy in a typical supermarket, and when you know the reasons behind it, you can choose better nourishment for greater health.  It’ll be good for you, and as it makes a comeback in agriculture, it’ll be good for our children and grandchildren as well.

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.

Posted in Big Agriculture, farm fresh, Food Safety, fresh and local, health, homogenization, immune system, john chisholm, kevin brown, liberation diet, low fat dairy, pasteurization, raw milk | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Healthy Milk Has Its Own Immunity

Posted by John Chisholm on October 31, 2010

Research and published reports are verifying via scientific methodology what has been cultural wisdom for millennia: fresh, raw milk is highly beneficial to those who drink it.  If the milk-producing animals are raised in their natural environment (out in sunlit fields, rather than in Confined Animal Feeding Operations), and if they eat their natural diet (natural grass rather than feeds processed from cheap agricultural waste-products and by-products), then the resulting milk is so beneficial that it actively protects itself and its consumer from any pathogens that may try to move in.

When animals are packed tightly together on CAFO’s, and are forced to spend their lives standing in the accumulated feces of thousands of animals, it may produce milk more cheaply than if raised in traditional ways.  But it also virtually ensures that the animals won’t be healthy enough to survive without antibiotics, that their milk will be of poorer quality than the milk of healthy animals living in pastures, and that their milk will be contaminated by dangerous levels of fecal bacteria.  In order to make this cheaply-produced but poorer-quality milk minimally suitable for humans to drink without becoming sick, the milk must be cooked until all the bacteria is killed (pasteurization).

Pasteurization doesn’t selectively kill just the pathogenic bacteria.
Pasteurization kills anything living in the milk, from the beneficial bacteria that crowd out pathogens and that even actively fight off and kill any pathogens, to the enzymes that make the nutrients in the milk digestible to us.  What’s left after pasteurization is a sterile medium containing all the fats, proteins and carbohydrates that are ideal for supporting bacteria—after all it used to support a wide array of beneficial bacteria.  But when they’re killed, milk is ready to support any stray pathogenic bacteria that happen to drift by, now that it lacks milk’s built-in defenses that used to prevent pathogens from colonizing and contaminating the milk.  In other words, what’s left is milk so dangerous that it must be processed and handled with elaborate safety systems to prevent contact with even a single bacterium.

It might not be so bad if we had a choice between (on the one hand) cheap, poor-quality, contaminated milk that has been cooked into sterility, and (on the other hand) high-quality, fresh, natural raw milk with all its built-in immunity and nutritional excellence left intact.  I’m pretty sure that the agribusinesses of CAFOs, feed-producers, and industrialized dairies are afraid of losing market share if their milk had to openly compete against healthy raw milk.  So regulations (formulated with the “help” of the largest agribusinesses) require that virtually all milk will be pasteurized and reduced to a similar level of depletion.

When pasteurization is required for fresh raw milk that’s been produced by cows in open pastures, we completely change the character of milk that was once highly nutritious and that could actively defend itself and its consumers from pathogens.  Further regulations require that the depleted milk will be subjected to highly elaborate safety systems that can afforded only by the big agribusiness producers.  Small farmers are driven out of business, condemning all milk to be raised by industrial methods that ensure fecal contamination.

Are these just the ravings of a food nut?  No, they’re reflected in the expert testimony of scientists who appeared in a US court about raw and pasteurized milk.  I found the court transcript fascinating.

Court Transcript:
Question: “Dr. Beals, based on your background, education, training, your experience, do you have an opinion to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty whether milk that is unpasteurized is safe for human consumption?” Dr. Beals: “My opinion is that it is, and historically it’s been shown clearly that it is.  Pasteurization was only introduced in about 1900.  And the history of human consumption of milk goes well back before recorded history.  And as a matter of fact, in recorded history we know that the domestication of animals for the purpose of providing fluid milk for human consumption is present in almost all civilizations around the world.  And recorded history and historians have well documented the fact that this consumption of milk was in fact very advantageous to civilization.

“If a food is unsafe for consumption, it is very quickly eliminated from the diet of cultures.  And in fact history shows that the consumption of milk from domestic animals has persisted throughout history, and on the basis of that, I don’t believe that there’s any argument but that the consumption of fresh milk is in fact safe, confers competitive advantage to those that drink it.”

Question: “Do you know if anybody has done research on the benefits of bacteria in cow’s milk?” Dr. Beals: “There are a few studies out there and more recently, very recently, studies on domestic animals in which very large numbers of beneficial bacteria have been cultured from direct milk, right out of the teat of the animals.”

Question: “Do you have an opinion about whether or not milk must be free from bacteria in order to be safe for human consumption?” Dr. Beals: “And the answer to that is that it does not need to be free of bacteria.”

Question: “Which is more likely to have a pathogen in it?  Some raw, fresh, unprocessed milk that has good bacteria in it or pasteurized milk where all the bacteria has been killed?” Dr. Beals: “Pasteurized milk where the beneficial bacteria have been killed.”

The Court [i.e., the judge]: “Your comment was that there’s a greater chance that pasteurized milk is contaminated with pathogens as opposed to raw milk?” Dr. Beals: “Not contaminated.  I believe the understanding was whether they were present in the milk.”

[After the swearing in of a second scientist:] Question: “Have you published research on that subject?” [The subject of bacteriocins, i.e., substances produced by beneficial bacteria which in turn kill pathogenic bacteria, e.g., Listeria] Dr. Hull: “Yes I have.  If Listeria, for example, is inoculated [introduced] into raw milk, then they’re actively killed by the raw milk’s natural antimicrobial systems.”

Question: “Did you say killed?” Dr. Hull: “Killed, yes.”

Question: “Is all milk the same?” Dr. Hull: “No, definitely not.”

Question: What types of milk are there?” Dr. Hull: Well, there is raw milk.  Raw market milk, I’ll describe first, is a living food.  And on the other hand we have pasteurized milk, which is a cooked—I would describe it as a dead food.  The raw market milk is living just as you and I are living because it contains a number of live components.  The first one—the first component is the competitive flora, which are the same microorganisms that live inside of our intestinal tract when we’re healthy.  It’s the same flora that’s used to make cheese and yogurt.  That competitive flora competes out other pathogens.

Question: “What’s the second component?” Dr. Hull: The second component is what nature provided in milk from the mammal, and that again we refer to as innate immunity.

Question: “What’s the third component?” Dr. Hull: “The third component is a group of enzymes which digest the milk.  Milk consists of fat, proteins, carbohydrates, and minerals.  They’re in a very complex state in milk, very concentrated form, and very difficult to digest without those enzymes.  Those enzymes there are specifically to digest each of those components down into smaller molecules.  Those smaller molecules are the things we absorb when we drink milk.  They’re also the nutrients for the competitive flora, the number one living system in milk.  So the natural enzymes in milk actually foster the protective flora in milk.  And so the three work together.  But in pasteurized milk, or cooked milk, if you like, those systems are essentially dead.

“So the two milks are very different.  One is a living food.  When we cook it, it’s a dead food.  And food safety issues with these two products are very different.

Question: “If you set these two milks out and let them sit at room temperature, what happens to them after a certain period of time?” Dr. Hull: “If we set raw milk, which is the living food, aside at room temperature, it will curdle, and that product is perfectly safe to drink.  If you set it aside at body temperature (in other words if you carry it around in your pocket or sit it next to a stove at body temperature), it will also curdle or sour, and that product is perfectly safe to drink.  It will not make you sick.  In contrast, if you set aside pasteurized milk at room temperature or body temperature, it will spoil and putrefy, and if you do drink it, it will make you sick.  In fact it will make you very sick.  And I think the two products are quite different in that respect.”

Excerpts from the transcript of the proceedings in the Superior Court of the State of California in and for the County of San Benito before Honorable Harry J. Tobias, Judge, April 25, 2008.
No. CU-07-00204

Organic Pastures Dairy Company LLC and Claravale Farm, Inc., Plaintiffs,
Vs.
State of Califirnia and A.G. Kawamura, Secretary of California Department of Food and Agriculture, Defendants.

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.

Posted in farm fresh, Food freedom, Food Safety, john chisholm, pasteurization, raw milk, Sun Exposure | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

We’re Not Designed for Gum Disease

Posted by John Chisholm on October 30, 2010

We’re Designed to Be Free of Gum Disease
Perhaps the best proof that humans were designed to be free of tooth troubles and gum disease is found in entire populations with excellent teeth and gums.   Biologically, there’s no real difference between these people and us in developed societies.

  • Fossils and skeletal remains of ancient people who did not have a starch-based diet show evidence of robust teeth without decay and cavities.  This was a common trait in many Neolithic societies, particularly among herding and fishing cultures.
  • Even fairly recent isolated societies who were technologically primitive and had no industrially-processed modern foods were free of gum disease, as observed first-hand by explorers and researchers, such as Dr. Weston Price, a Cleveland dentist who studied isolated populations around the world in the 1930’s.  Despite not having any professional dental care nor practicing any dental hygiene (such as tooth brushing), these societies were found to have cavity-free teeth and healthy gums.  (For a good overview of how to approximate the healthy, primitive diet in the current, industrialized world, read Kevin Brown’s book: Liberation Diet.)
  • Our bodies are designed to have a large variety of beneficial bacterial flora living in harmonious equilibrium in our mouths (and in the rest of our digestive tract) to help us obtain the nutritional value from the food we eat.
  • Different strains of bacteria specialize in breaking down the specific kinds of food in a person’s diet, and the population of any one individual strain is kept in check by other strains.
  • The body is designed to replenish and maintain the teeth and gums.  The gum cells are replaced with new cells quicker than almost any other body tissue, for robust tissue and rapid healing.  Any microscopic pits in the enamel of the teeth are meant to be replenished by minerals in the saliva (especially calcium and phosphorous), to keep the teeth robust.

The Modern Diet Brings Gum Disease
Modern processed food distorts the body’s careful equilibrium of natural digestive bacterial flora.  Sugars and refined carbohydrates (which quickly turn to sugars) activate a few of the bacterial strains into a frenzied population explosion, making them act pathogenic to gums.

  • Under the influence of refined carbohydrates and sugars, the population of a couple dozen (out of 300+) oral bacterial strains skyrockets and displaces many others in just a few hours.
  • The newly ascendant bacteria modify their environment (our mouth) to their liking, by forming a sticky biofilm on teeth called plaque, and then crystallizing the plaque into hardened, acidic calcifications called calculus.
  • The armored shelter of calculus irritates the gums, causing the gums they touch to form tiny lesions and recede.  Bacteria invade the gums through the lesions, causing an infection and its accompanying inflammation known as gingivitis.
  • Under continual reinforcements of newly-grown bacteria, the infection overwhelms the immune system so that gum and jawbone cells start to die, a condition called periodontal disease.
  • Teeth are also affected by the calculus cemented to them.  The acid of the calculus and of its bacterial residents dissolves away the minerals of tooth enamel, eventually providing a pathway for bacteria to invade and infect the soft inner tissue of the teeth.
  • Ancient diets that were centered on healthy fats and high-enzyme naturally-occurring foods did not trigger this chain of events.
  • Modern diets, based on starchy carbohydrates and denatured foods, both trigger the gum disease sequence and impair the body’s ability to respond to the biological insult.
  • Modern toxins, either in the general environment or self-administered, as by cigarettes, are also contributing factors.

Ancient Diets Are Hard to Duplicate
Almost none of the foods that once comprised ancient diets are common today.  The plants and even the animals of commercial farms have been displaced by laboratory-produced hybrids or GMOs, which are then further degraded by industrial processing, to the detriment of our oral and bodily health.

  • The foods available to us are mainly determined by their profitability to agribusiness, rather than by their health for us.  To gain industrial efficiencies in production and distribution, food is made more inert for long shelf life, by being denatured into a synthetic version of what nature used to give.
  • Almost all grocery food comes from a few raw ingredients, and the by-products of those few ingredients form conventional feed for animal-produced food, such as CAFO dairy, eggs, and meat.  (CAFO is industrial-farming’s term for their unnatural Confined Animal Feeding Operations.)
  • The few ingredients with the highest profit potential are GMO-corn, GMO-soy, proprietary wheat, and cotton (for the oil-producing seed that the fabric industry discards and then for the seed husks that the food-oil industry discards).  They’re bred for mass production, e.g., uniform height for machine harvesting, or tolerance to pesticides, not for health.
  • Refined foods that stay “good” for years on the grocery shelf (such as refined sugar, flour, crackers, canned goods, bottled drinks, and condiments) have been further depleted of what makes the food spoil, further reducing their nutrition.
  • Ancient practices of preparing food to increase its nutritive value have been displaced by industrial scale processing.
  • The small-scale natural farmers and natural food artisans are virtually our last and only source for truly healthful, wholesome food that provides missing nutrition. They deserve our support as much as we need their nutrient-dense foods.
  • If we diligently add nutrient-dense foods that supply missing nutrients, in all likelihood we’ll still wind up eating some modern foods.  These will continue to fuel a population explosion of plaque bacteria that will still have to be attended to.

Toothpaste Is Not Up to the Task
Brushing with toothpaste was supposed take care of the modern-day problems with oral health, but it doesn’t.  Gum disease remains at epidemic levels, tooth infection is commonplace and the chemicals in toothpaste actually make things worse.

  • Even though conventional advice uniformly claims that brushing with toothpaste and using floss is the answer, close to 80% of American adults still develop periodontal disease, in which gum or bone cells are dying off due to gum infection.  (Figure is for adults in the USA; it’s not as high in less wealthy countries.)
  • The accumulation of plaque and calculus is now so commonplace that even with brushing it’s normal to require teeth to be scraped twice a year with metal implements by a dental hygienist.
  • To give toothpaste its convenient paste form, a main ingredient is glycerin.  Unfortunately, glycerin leaves a filmy coating on the teeth, which stops the microscopic repair of tooth enamel that would otherwise occur naturally from saliva remineralization.
  • Artificial chemicals are routinely added to toothpaste to suppress specific symptoms.  Many are toxic: SLS is an engine degreaser added to make suds; triclosan is a chlorinated phenolic.
  • Sodium fluoride is a highly toxic byproduct from the fertilizer industry.  There’s enough in a regular-sized tube of toothpaste to kill a child.  Fluoride also exacerbates gum disease.  It’s added to toothpaste because it makes enamel more brittle, as a way to compensate for glycerin’s suppression of saliva remineralization.
  • Toothpaste does not address the underlying dynamics and imbalances that lead to gum disease.  The mechanical action of brushing does help, but the ingredients of toothpaste don’t.
  • Mouthwash typically tries to destroy all bacteria which it contacts.  It’s not only impossible to make the mouth sterile, the absence of beneficial digestive bacteria is counter to our natural design.

The Natural Support Your Gums Needs
Use a toothpaste replacement with a different approach: supporting your gums’ untapped ability to heal themselves with vitamin-C and effective herbs, while cleaning your teeth with natural cleansers.  You can mix your own or find one ready-made online, at some health practitioners’ offices, or in some natural products shops.

  • Cleaning teeth without coating them with remineralization-stopping film means brushing without glycerin-based paste.  A better alternative is a powder whose ingredients are dried to retain herbal potency and are finely ground to small particle sizes to promote rapid dissolving in saliva, for non-abrasion and penetration into crevices in the mouth.
  • To support the gums’ healing and the growth of healthy new gum tissue (e.g., gum pockets and receding gums), vitamin-C is critical to the growth and healing of connective tissue.  And gums are almost entirely connective tissue.  Look for vitamin-C in your tooth powder.  With gum cells replacing themselves faster than other tissue cells, gums respond to a boost of vitamin-C coupled with good nutrition.
  • Countering the stickiness property of plaque bacteria is important because plaque and calculus do their harm after gluing themselves to teeth at the gum margins.  Two special herbal ingredients that work against that stickiness-ability are cranberry and tea-tree-leaf powder (not the more intense oil).
  • For teeth cleansing without ingesting toothpaste’s toxins, try the traditional baking soda and salt.  (The best salt is an extremely fine powder of French grey sea salt, from a particularly clean part of the Atlantic Ocean called the Celtic Sea.)
  • When it comes to countering the acid that plaque bacteria produce and upon which calculus thrives, baking soda is a gentle but effective acid neutralizer.  Try to get plenty in your tooth powder.
  • For reining in runaway populations of plaque bacteria, look for herbs that are gently anti-microbial: peppermint, cinnamon, tea-tree-leaf, and cranberry.
  • For soothing sore, inflamed gums, the traditional herbs of myrrh and peppermint are quite effective.

Even in today’s world, we weren’t designed for gum disease, and it doesn’t have to be inevitable.

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.

Posted in good gums, gums, health, john chisholm, liberation diet, Nutrition, oral health, plaque, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Rescue Your Gums

Posted by John Chisholm on September 14, 2010

After several decades of standard American eating habits, most of us have experienced our share of dental and gum problems.  They stemmed from the extreme imbalance of bacterial growth in response to a diet built on cheap refined carbohydrates.  Back when human diets were built around nutrient-dense natural foods, it was typical to have lifelong robust oral health.  Now we find ourselves trying to regain our oral health, and finding it’s not easy to eat entirely as our primitive ancestors did.

But we can adjust our diets to be more like healthy pre-industrial ones, and we can complement our nutrition with the conscientious exercise of oral care habits and a careful combination of selected herbs, vitamin C and natural cleansers that address the foundation of oral health.  If your gums are crying for help, then you’ll see the best results by combining all of the practices described below.  After you’ve healed, and as your change in diet reduces the production of plaque-causing bacteria, you might consider reducing and then dropping some practices described toward the end of this article.

BRUSH
Even after your gums have been stabilized in good condition, brush with a dental powder (such as Good-Gums) instead of toothpaste.  In order to be a paste, toothpaste must contain a humectant, and the one the manufacturers have settled on is a sweet, inexpensive industrial byproduct called glycerin, which undermines the health of your enamel.  Glycerin leaves a filmy coating on your teeth, effectively sealing them from the minerals provided by nature in your saliva, thereby preventing the saliva from remineralizing your teeth—and thwarting a natural mechanism for maintaining enamel health.  Even “natural” and “healthy” toothpaste contain glycerin.

To compensate for this loss of saliva remineralization, most toothpastes add fluoride, an industrial chemical that causes teeth enamel to become brittle, a poor substitute for being replenished. Unfortunately, fluoride is so toxic that there’s enough in a small (4.6-oz / 130-gram) tube of toothpaste to kill a 9 year old child and enough in two tubes to kill a grown woman.  Fluoride has also been proven to exacerbate gum problems.  In addition, toothpaste commonly contains other still-toxic but less deadly chemicals, such as the engine-degreasing-detergent SLS.  Paste may be a convenient way to move the dentifrice into your mouth, but that small convenience is not worth the continual barrage of toxins.  And toothpaste can’t give the same amount of positive help to your gums.  The herbs and vitamin C that are so helpful for gum healing start to break down unless kept dry or in a vacuum, and because toothpaste is by definition wet and isn’t sold in vacuum-packs, toothpaste doesn’t include  therapeutic amounts —if any— of its ingredients.

It’s simple to brush with powder; this description describes brushing with the amount recommended for Good-Gums.  Use a brush with rounded tips that rated very soft (not just soft); if you can’t find one, soften the bristles under hot or warm water.  The way to start is to tap into the clean palm of your hand a small mound that would just cover a dime.  Use a moistened (not wet) toothbrush to spread the powder along the gum line, where it will dissolve.  Then you’re ready to brush.

If you’re using an electric toothbrush (e.g., Sonicare, et al.), angle the brush at 45-degrees so that the bristles just nestle into the gum line and gently let the vibrating bristles loosen any plaque.  If you’re using a manual toothbrush, angle the bristles at 45-degrees and gently move the toothbrush’s head in tiny circles so that the tips of the bristles just wiggle at the gum line, and not slide left-and-right or up-and-down.  Take your time when you’re trying to overcome gum problems.  For a manual toothbrush, each tooth should get about 20 wiggles; for an electric toothbrush, each tooth should get a couple seconds of vibration, even if that means running the brush for a couple of cycles.  Do not scrub with hard pressure, as that could irritate the gums and cause further gum recession.  Just let the vibrating bristles lightly nestle under the gumline with the dissolved Good-Gums, and let the wiggles or vibrations disrupt the biofilm of plaque.

After brushing the gum line, brush the enamel surfaces.  Brushing in this way will clean the teeth and apply Good-Gums to the gum line.

FLOSS
If you eat any concentrated carbohydrates (such as crackers, breads, pasta, grains, etc), then flossing should be standard practice.  And if you have any degree of gum issues, flossing with Good-Gums is better than with floss alone.  Good-Gums contains two special ingredients rarely found in toothpaste: cranberry powder and tea-tree-leaf powder (the natural leaf, not the distilled oil, which can be too intense.)  These herbs are known to help counter the stickiness property of plaque bacteria.  The rubbing action of the floss is designed to scour the soft plaque from the sides of the teeth and to shred the biofilm back into harmless disorganization.  A dissolved solution of Good-Gums helps.  Also the floss will carry some of the dissolved Good-Gums under the gum margin.

The way to floss with Good-Gums is to put a very small pinch of the powder in your mouth where it will dissolve in saliva.  Even though the salty flavor may tempt you to swallow, and it’s perfectly safe to do so, resist the inclination so that the solution can work in your mouth.  Swirl it over the teeth and gums on one side, either top or bottom.  Some people have tried to keep all of the solution between their teeth as they floss, but that’s not necessary and can lead to dribbling.  Let the solution fall back in your mouth and floss on the teeth that have been swirled.  If they dry out, simply close your mouth and swirl again.  Gently move the floss between the teeth until it nestles against one tooth right up under the gum margin, which is a prime location for plaque to start and gum infection to take hold.  Wrap the floss around the tooth and rub with the floss so that it scrapes down the side of the tooth.  Repeat for the adjacent tooth and for each tooth on that side of the mouth.  Take another pinch of Good-Gums for the other side of the mouth, and then repeat the process, and then again for the lowers (or the uppers).

INTERDENTAL CLEANING
If the condition of your teeth and gums was as bad as mine once were, then you can accelerate your healing by adding interdental cleaning to your oral hygiene routine, in addition to flossing.  Its intent is similar to flossing, but it gets some plaque and calculus that your floss does not.  As with the floss, put a pinch of Good-Gums in your mouth, but instead of using floss, slide an interdental brush (i.e., interproximal brush) between your teeth at the gum line.   Gently use the bristles to massage the gums between the teeth, while the bristles flick away plaque on the sides of the teeth.  (You can find interdental bushes at any pharmacy or grocery store.  I used to use an Oral-B brand, but after a while my gums grew back so much that the brush wouldn’t fit between most of my teeth, so I switched to the much thinner Soft-Picks).  As with floss, use a new pinch of Good-Gums for each quadrant (e.g., top-right or bottom-left) and let the dissolved liquid penetrate into the folds and crevices.

RINSE AND SOAK
A good way to use Good-Gums is to let it sink into the tissues, folds, and crevices for a longer amount of time than the incidental exposure from the above steps.  Put some Good-Gums into your mouth and let it dissolve.  Then swirl it over any areas of particular concern and hold it to let the liquid cover the problem area.  Gum tissues do absorb quite readily, so let the Good-Gums stay there for a few minutes.

MANUAL MASSAGE
For any particularly sore spots, you can use a clean finger to massage the dissolved Good-Gums right over the area of gum tissue that’s inflamed.  Manual massage both increases the blood flow to the area (which brings more immune system cells to the site of the infection), and helps the Good-Gums penetrate the tissue.

SUPRAGINGIVAL IRRIGATION
“Supragingival” means “above the gums,” and this means using an oral irrigator with a wand and tube connected to a low-powered water pump (e.g. Hydrofloss or Waterpik) to squirt liquid onto the gum line and between the teeth.  Lynwood, one of the Good-Gums people, uses a Hydrofloss and adds a little Good-Gums to the water before irrigating.  The oral irrigator flushes out some remaining residue above the gum line, and disperses the dissolved Good-Gums into crevices (but doesn’t really penetrate into gum pockets).  A supragingival irrigator can be expensive, but if you can afford one, it does affect hard-to-reach areas that brushing and flossing do not.  If you decide to use one, don’t add much Good-Gums powder, or there could be undissolved solids to clog up the pump or nozzle.  After each use, flush out the irrigator by running clean water through it.

SUBGINGIVAL IRRIGATION
“Subgingival” means “below the gums,” and this means flushing liquid right into gum pockets below the level of the gum line.  (Gum pockets are areas where the gum tissue that should be firmly attached to the tooth root have lost their grip and merely lie flat and detached along the tooth’s root.  Anaerobic bacteria can thrive in gum pockets.)  For really desperate spots, the frequent (once or twice a day) flushing of contaminants out of a gum pocket for a few weeks can help keep the level low enough for healing to occur.  None of the other practices described above can get deep into the pockets.  (Some brands of manual subgingival irrigators are: Perioflex irrigator and Pocket Care Mini-Irrigator.  Some supra-gingival irrigators also have subgingival tips available: Waterpik and Hydrofloss.)  The irrigation is done by placing the irrigator’s thin metal cannula (Latin for “hollow reed”) alongside the visible part of a tooth and gently sliding it into a gum pocket, where the gum has detached from the tooth root. The cannula doesn’t have to go all the way to the bottom; only as deep as is comfortable. Then you squirt liquid into the pocket. Low pressure is best and seems to disperse the liquid into a pocket just as well as high pressure, but without forcing bacteria into the tissues. A cannula with a side port (sideways opening near a rounded tip) is just as effective as one with an end port (opening at the end). If the pocket is quite deep, there may not be much sideways dispersion, so it’s best to repeat with the cannula in several places around the tooth.

What’s the liquid to use as a subgingival irrigant?  It needs to be a liquid that contains no solids at all, as even the most minute particles might clog up the tiny port hole in the cannula.  It’s possible to use dissolved Good-Gums, but it would have to be filtered. (e.g. I’ve snipped off the top of teabags, replaced the tea with Good-Gums, and then folded and stapled the teabag material with Good-Gums in the bag.)  Besides a “tea” of Good-Gums, you can use plain water, salt water, or hydrogen peroxide (3% in 97% water, available at grocery stores or pharmacies); historically all have been used extensively for subgignigval irrigation at home.  A pure sea salt and water solution can be soothing in a mild solution (at a ratio of about half a teaspoon per cup of water). And the hydrogen peroxide has additional antiseptic properties that are useful against plaque bacteria. You’ll want to spit out the debris and bacteria from irrigation. It’s particularly important not to swallow if hydrogen peroxide is your irrigant, because large amounts of it may cause irritation to the digestive tract. The hydrogen peroxide that’s disposed in the sink will break down harmlessly into water and oxygen.

Because subgingival irrigation necessarily means squirting liquid into a gum pocket and down toward the tooth’s root, you might feel a very uncomfortable temperature sensitivity unless you warm the liquid irrigant first. You have to make sure that the liquid is only warm, and not hot; before putting the liquid in the irrigator, it should just feel warm on the outer lip.  You don’t want to burn sensitive tissue.

DIET
The above measures will help disrupt the infecting plaque and help your body heal from it.  But it’s also important not to keep feeding the plaque bacteria, so that the numbers in their colonies stop their explosive growth.  Plaque bacteria thrive on sugars and on refined carbohydrates that the body quickly turns into sugars.  The fossil record and the scrutiny of primitive societies have shown that in the early days of humanity, before these kinds of foods were ingested, people almost never had cavities or oral infections.  Avoid or reduce the consumption of concentrated carbohydrates, not just sugar and sweets, but also crackers, breads, cereals, and pasta.

Let the condition of your teeth and gums be your guide as to how strictly and diligently you apply the above practices, and you should see rapid progress.

Nutritional guidance is available at Liberation Diet, and Good-Gums is available at the Liberation Wellness Store or at Good-Gums.

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.

Posted in good gums, gums, health, immune system, john chisholm, liberation diet, Nutrition, plaque, real food | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Oral Health for Bodily Health

Posted by John Chisholm on September 7, 2010

Contrary to popular belief, it’s very clear what’s behind the epidemic of gum problems in America and the rest of the developed world, and it’s not lack of dental care.  In our mouth, the carefully designed equilibrium among the strains of normally beneficial bacterial flora has gotten completely out of balance in response to humanity’s shift in diet from one that’s healthy-fat centric to one that’s refined-carbohydrate centric.  For thousands of years, technologically primitive people on the earlier diet had excellent teeth and gums without brushing, flossing, or having any dentists.  We won’t be returning completely to the diets of our primitive ancestors anytime soon, but we can take measures to reform our diet and make up the difference with a careful augmentation of behavioral habits using herbs, vitamins, and natural cleansers to keep gum disease, tooth decay, and associated bodily ailments at bay.

Where Oral Problems Come From
It’s a safe bet that, having lived most of our lives so far on a conventional diet, our mouths all contain similar monuments to a past of poor oral health: either fillings, crowns, implants, root canals, gum pockets, receding gums, or in extreme cases, loose teeth.  All of these are the result of bacterial infection brought about by our modern diet.  Because bacteria (both the beneficial and the harmful) are too small to observe directly, we don’t notice when a few strains of previously benign bacteria begin reproducing at such a terrific rate as to displace other beneficial strains that would otherwise keep them in check and harmless.  Under the influence of refined carbohydrates and sugars, the population explosion of a few bacterial strains and the displacement of many becomes significant in just a few hours.  (It’s not due just to direct exposure to the teeth; Dr. Weston Price demonstrated that dental problems occurred even after the ingestion of sugars through a tube, without direct contact with the teeth.)

The earliest signs of trouble are the formation of plaque, a colorless, sticky biofilm of bacteria, bacteria-by-products, yeasts, viruses, white blood cells, protozoa and mycoplasmas.  Plaque takes hold on the substrate of the teeth, especially in the margin between teeth and gums.  As a biofilm, the bacteria acquire abilities that free-floating (planktonic) individual bacteria cannot perform, excreting substances that are both adhesive and protective.  While it can’t be seen, its stickiness can sometimes be felt with the tongue.  In as little as 24 hours after attaching itself to the teeth, plaque have absorbed enough minerals from the saliva to start forming a hardened crystalline calcification (called tartar or calculus), which can be both felt and seen.  The rough surface of calculus serves as an ideal substrate for additional plaque, and is so hard and so adhered to teeth that brushing and flossing usually won’t dislodge it.

Both the soft plaque and the hardened calculus excrete acids that irritate the gums and cause microscopic lesions in the gum’s epithelial lining, through which plaque-forming bacteria can invade and infect the interior gum tissue.  The acids also dissolve molecules from tooth enamel, especially under the protective armor of the calculus, so that eventually there’s a pathway through which bacteria can enter and infect the soft interior of a tooth (a cavity).

The Immune Response
When bacteria infect the gums, the immune system goes to work to absorb or destroy the invaders, and any swelling, tenderness and redness are indicative of the battle between immune cells and the bacteria infecting the gums (acute inflammation).  When gum tissue is infected but the cells are still alive, the condition is called gingivitis.  If the immune system destroys the bacteria, and the lesions in the gum’s lining heal, then the temporary inflammation passes as merely a brief episode of gingivitis.

But often the bacterial reproductive rate is so rampant (under the influence of the modern diet) that the immune system is overwhelmed, and the infection proceeds to where cells of soft oral tissue start to die off, a condition called periodontal disease.  The immune system’s response to unrelenting infection is to shift to chronic inflammation, an attempt to isolate the infecting agent from healthy tissue.  Immune system cells identify the gum cells that are badly infected, and attach themselves to mark them for destruction.  Other immune cells seek out the gum cells that have been marked, and either devour them or destroy them.  This “amputation” of infected cells contributes to the death of a lot of the gum cells, but the tactic does not resolve the infection as long as the refined carbohydrate diet keeps sustaining the onslaught of additional bacteria.

Sometimes the infection and inflammation proceed fairly uniformly from the surface inward.  As the cells near the surface die, the gums visibly recede.  Sometimes, the infection follows a narrower path along the cells that attach the gums to a tooth; as these cells die a gum pocket forms between a tooth’s root and the gum tissue lying against it.  In that pocket, anaerobic bacteria set up shop, and the infection aggressively continues down alongside the tooth’s root, eventually killing some of the thousands of ligaments that hold the tooth to the jaw (causing loose teeth), or even killing some jawbone cells.  The common denominator of periodontal disease is some oral cell death, and it currently affects over three-fourths of the people over the age of forty.

Oral Issues Affect the Body
The damage caused by oral infection is not limited to the mouth.  Bacteria that have infected gum tissue get picked up by the circulatory system and transported by blood vessels throughout the body.  The same strains of plaque that are found in the mouth are also found in the blood vessels, and a very strong correlation between gum disease and cardiovascular disease has been found, where 91% of those patients had moderate to severe periodontitis.  Immune system cells, particularly the cytokines that mark infected gum cells for destruction, are also spread by the blood vessels, and they tend to attach themselves to tissue anywhere in the body that is already somewhat weak, making them targets for destruction as well.

This is the mechanism postulated behind the proven correlations between infected gums and the increased incidence of bodily diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, arthritis, and even pancreatic cancer.  The discoveries of these details by 21st century science confirm the observations made in the 1930’s by Dr. Weston A. Price that many instances of modern degenerative diseases can trace their origins to focal infections in the mouth.  Oral health is not just a cosmetic concern, but is central to our bodily health.

What We Can Do
The most important help for oral health is to keep improving our diet.  As pointed out by Kevin Brown, the essential nutrients necessary for human health include fats (essential fatty acids) and proteins (essential amino acids), but there are no essential carbohydrates.  We can thrive quite well without consuming them, and in terms of oral health we could probably dispense with any additional oral care practices if we did.  But a diet without carbohydrates might be too primitive to be feasible in the modern world, so we will have to deal with some bacterial response to our carbohydrate intake.

There are five related ways by which we can further help our body restore oral health: (1) Help control the overpopulated colonies of oral bacteria; (2) stop using products with toxins and irritants that make things worse; (3) remove bacterial plaque while it’s still soft and vulnerable; (4) help the body fight any infection already in the gums, and (5) help the oral tissues heal themselves.

Controlling overpopulated colonies of oral bacteria does not involve killing all the bacteria in the mouth, as many mouthwashes try to do.  Bacterial flora is necessary in the mouth to start the digestive process, and the moist, warm mouth is an environment so inviting for bacteria that it can’t remain sterile.  The idea here is just to take some of the edge off the huge numbers of oral bacteria in our mouths whose populations have exploded under modern foods.  Gentle antiseptic action can be provided by some naturally antimicrobial herbs, such as peppermint, cranberry, cinnamon, and tea tree leaf.

(Note that it’s the highly pulverized whole leaf of the tea tree that’s recommended, instead of the very concentrated essential oil.  The properties of tea tree are in the leaf, and have been used as an antiseptic for centuries by the Bunjalung aboriginal people of Australia.  But the steam-distilled essential oil is relatively recent industrially produced concentrate that’s many times more intense than the leaf, and can be too intense for some people.)

Brushing With Natural Assistance
Replacing standard synthetic oral care products with natural ingredients is important because the toxins in standard products adversely affect both the mouth and organs throughout the body.  Fluoride, a byproduct of the aluminum and chemical-fertilizer industries, is so highly toxic that each tube of toothpaste contains enough to kill a child.  Fluoride also disrupts enzyme activity in the mouth, leading to increased gum disease.  SLS is an irritant in toothpaste that’s a type of detergent de-greaser used on engines and added to make toothpaste look sudsy.  Even the glycerin, while not directly toxic and while giving toothpaste its convenient paste consistency, prevents enamel repair by coating the teeth to stop saliva re-enamelization, a natural process that restores tooth enamel.  Toothpastes rely on abrasives to clean teeth, but the amount that effectively cleans also scratches the enamel.  None of the artificial or toxic ingredients are necessary for oral health, and all are detrimental.

The third strategy is to remove bacterial plaque while still soft and vulnerable to disruption.  The intention is not necessarily to eradicate the bacteria, but to stop the plaque from calcifying into hardened calculus by mechanically breaking up the organization of plaque bacteria.  This will only be a temporary setback to the bacteria, and they will start to regroup into a sticky biofilm again.  But until reorganization, they’ve lost the ability to excrete the sticky and acidy substances that modify their surroundings for even faster bacterial reproduction, and also lost the ability to form calculus from saliva minerals.  For most people the actions of brushing twice a day and flossing daily are frequent enough to stymie the formation of calculus.

Brushing with toothpaste is not recommended, but effective, natural tooth cleaners can certainly make brushing more effective.  The traditional combination of baking soda and salt is a tried and true natural dentifrice, with the added bonus of baking soda’s ability to neutralize the acids produced by plaque.  The salt crystals should be pulverized into an extremely small mesh size, to ensure the salt dissolves quickly and completely.  The inclusion of cranberry and tea tree leaf powder will add an extra dimension, because they have the characteristic of countering the stickiness property of plaque, helping to loosen both plaque and calculus.  There are some natural dental soaps that can be helpful, especially if the teeth and gums are already in pristine condition, if a brushing schedule is diligently followed, and no active help will be needed either to dislodge plaque and calculus or to support the gum tissues in trying to fight infection and heal themselves.

Fighting Infection and Helping Healing
The fourth strategy involves helping to fight infection already in the gums, and we can again turn to the antimicrobial herbs of peppermint, cranberry, cinnamon, and tea tree leaf.  But bacteria within tissue aren’t as easily exposed as are the bacteria free-floating in the mouth.  However, help is available in the form of the salt (used above as part of the tooth cleanser), if it’s full-mineral sea salt.  High-mineral sea salt, such as French grey sea salt that’s harvested in clay-lined ponds, has nearly the same mineral composition and ratios as human blood and fluids, and the resulting compatible ion balance helps fluids move more easily through cells walls.

The fifth strategy is to help the gum tissues to heal themselves, and the greatest help of all is from vitamin-C with a bioflavonoid complex to help the body absorb and retain the vitamin-C.  Vitamin-C is required for the growth of connective tissue, and the gums are made almost entirely of connective tissue.  For someone with gum issues, no dentifrice should be considered unless it contains a healthy amount of vitamin-C.  Another excellent source of healing help is myrrh, which has been famous since biblical times as one of the most effective natural soothers and healing agents.

There’s a tendency to think of oral health as being totally independent from bodily health, but they are intimately connected, each side having influences on and showing the effects of the other.  A traditional, nourishing, “primitive” diet is the foundation of both oral and bodily health, and nothing will surpass its influence or make up for its lack.   But upon that foundation, natural support is helpful and available.

The carefully selected combination of the herbs, vitamins, and natural cleansers described above are all incorporated into a powdered dentifrice called Good-Gums to augment the body’s mechanisms for oral health.  Whether you use Good-Gums or mix your own dentifrice of natural ingredients, your body will respond well to its application through the conscientious exercise of oral care habits (which will be detailed in another article due in Sept. 2010).

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.

Posted in Artherosclerosis, cancer, good gums, health, heart disease, immune system, john chisholm, kevin brown, liberation diet, liberation wellness, oral health, sugar, Uncategorized, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Bacteria– Our Capricious Allies

Posted by John Chisholm on August 31, 2010

There’s a natural equilibrium involved in staying healthy, and an outstanding example can be observed in how well the body is designed for maintaining our eating apparatus: healthy teeth and gums.

Helpful Allies
Besides the obvious mechanical action of the jaws, teeth and tongue, there are biochemical processes going on in the mouth.  Enzymes from the food we eat and from our saliva are required for digestion and their presence is provided for by our biology and our diet.  In addition, bacteria that live in our mouth also play a crucial role in digestion, and are ultimately necessary for our survival.  Bacteria are so pervasive and abundant on Earth that they insinuate themselves into the survival mechanisms of all complex life forms.  A few infamous pathogenic strains have tarnished all bacteria with a bad rap, but instead of going to war against them all, let’s see and appreciate how well our bodies are designed to cooperate with our little allies.

We can’t avoid bacteria.  People used to think that most of the Earth’s biomass was in the form of forest trees, but recent discoveries of additional habitats for bacteria are leading to the re-evaluation that most of the biomass is actually in the form of bacteria.  Even in our own bodies, up to 10% of our weight is actually the weight of bacteria.  There are many times more of these single cell creatures living in and on each of us than there are human cells that comprise our body.  It’s estimated that 99% of bacteria on the planet are either benign or helpful, some indirectly, such as “fixing” nitrogen from the atmosphere to the nodules of food-plant roots, and some more directly, such as protecting us from pathogenic microbes.  We could not live without the services of our bacterial occupants.

By occupying the moist, hospitable environments of our mouth, nose, and throat, colonies of beneficial bacterial flora crowd out any harmful microbes that may attempt to take up residence.  Some strains of beneficial bacteria actively destroy pathogenic microbes as well.  Aside from keeping us healthy from pathogens, beneficial bacteria also are critical to our absorption of food.  Bacteria throughout the digestive tract, from the mouth to the stomach and the intestines, help in the process of breaking down the chemicals of food into molecules small enough for the body to absorb.

Designed for Equilibrium
In a typical mouth, over 300 strains of oral bacteria have been identified.  Under the conditions in which primitive humans have lived for thousands of years, all of these strains coexisted among themselves and with the human body in a healthful equilibrium.  Under modern conditions, the equilibrium has been upset, leading to a few strains of bacteria getting so out of hand that they infect gums and teeth.  The repercussions are an epidemic of gingivitis, periodontitis, tooth decay, and over time a host of bodily ailments.

But when in balance, the equilibrium worked so well that the skeletal and teeth remains of early humans show that they had excellent oral health.  As recently as the 1930’s, there were still isolated populations who lived and ate like our ancient ancestors and also had excellent oral and bodily health (as documented by Dr. Weston A. Price).  Before turning our attention to what upset the equilibrium, let’s look at how well this beautifully balanced system worked.

As mentioned above, the 300+ strains of oral bacteria lived in equilibrium and the digestion-aiding bacteria were allowed to grow just populous enough to work on the food that the humans ate.  Part of this equilibrium was the interplay between a person’s diet and the four-phase life cycle of bacteria.  At the (first) lag phase, bacteria adjust to their environment and make the vitamins and amino acids necessary to reproduce.  At the exponential phase, the bacteria multiply by having each bacterium split into two daughter cells, doubling in population from a few days to as little as a few minutes, the maximum rate differing according to the strain.  How well the different strains of bacteria are supplied with their specific nutrients also affect how quickly the first two phases progress.  When a person’s diet was such that the slower-replicating bacteria were fed nutrients that allowed them to keep pace with the faster-replicating strains (which received less of their favorite nutrients), then the bacterial habitat became so fully populated by the varieties of bacteria that they went into the (third) stationary phase, in which their growth declined.  With all niches in the mouth occupied, equilibrium among the bacterial strains prevailed.  Finally, for any single bacterium cell, the final phase is the death phase, where reproduction no longer takes place and the cell is absorbed for its nutrients and replaced by another cell.

After thousands of years and many generations of humans eating in a way to keep their bacterial flora in equilibrium, humans started developing and eating refined carbohydrates and sugars that turned out to be high-octane fuel for a few select strains of oral bacteria.  These particular nutrients, never before seen in nature and some pharmaceutically pure, jolted a couple dozen strains of bacteria out of their stationary phase and back into a runaway exponential phase.  Their out of control bacterial population could then displace fellow strains that normally would have kept them in check, and the overpopulated strains would overwhelm the gums’ defenses, leading to an infection of gums and eventually of teeth.

Safety Net
Prior to refined carbohydrates, when a hunter-and-gatherer or neolithic person’s diet temporarily got out of balance, bacterial populations would also fluctuate somewhat, but the body used its built-in safety systems to contain the resulting problems until a healthy diet returned the bacterial flora back to a normal equilibrium.  The gums are especially set up for efficient immune system response in times of temporary infection.

The connective tissue beneath the gum lining funnels specialized cells to the infection site that devour the invading microorganisms (phagocytes, mostly in the gum lining) or that kill them (lymphocyte white blood cells, mostly in the gum’s deeper connective tissue). As other live cells react to the toxins of the bacteria and to the microscopic battle taking place between immune system cells and bacteria, and as dead cells accumulate, the gum tissue at the infection site swells up. When the source of the irritation is removed and the bacteria population is brought under control, the immune system can handle the occasional invader and the entire episode is experienced merely as a temporary and reversible flare up of gingivitis—inflamed gums.

Besides fighting the invading bacteria, gums are also set up for fast healing.  Gum cells are among the quickest to be replaced and have extremely short lifetimes compared to other types of cells.  The lifespan of a healthy gum cell typically ranges from only two to seven days, and is usually replaced in four or five days.  Fast cell replacement rates make for fast healing, once proper nutrients are once again being ingested and after the varieties of bacterial strains once again find their relative balance.

Losing Our Way
After people started eating refined carbohydrates, sugars and denatured foods as a permanent part of their diet, there would be no return to the diet-induced healthy equilibrium.  The few problematical strains of bacteria develop in ways our ancient ancestors hardly ever saw.  An individual free-floating (planktonic) bacterium forms its own hard but tiny mineral shell, but it can’t do any real damage in that form. The bacterium biochemically attracts the minerals of like bacteria, until chains and then clusters form. These are still not too threatening. The clusters join together to form colonies, and the colonies form an even stronger attraction for each other. Eventually there’s a continuous, delicate mat of bacteria and other microscopic material covering the gum and tooth margin, called plaque. The bacteria in plaque thrive on an acid environment, and as they feed and multiply, the by-products of their feeding actually add to the acidity under the mat of plaque. If left undisturbed, this mat steadily builds a hard protective shell of calcified minerals, called calculus. Under the hardened calculus, the colonies of bacteria multiply even more rapidly.  The acids dissolve away enamel, eventually exposing the softer interior of the tooth, which can then be infected.

The immune system tries to fight off the invading bacteria, but the unnatural foods fuel the exponential phase of bacterial growth so much that new bacteria more than replace the casualties that were killed by the immune system.  Eventually the immune system changes tactics from trying to rid the body of the infectious agents (acute inflammation) to trying to isolate the infectious agents from healthy tissue in the body (chronic inflammation).  The immune system will “amputate” infected cells, and this process can be observed as receding gums, deepening gum pockets, and loose teeth (as periodontal ligaments are severed).  These deteriorated conditions that once were very rare are now so commonplace as to be considered a normal part of getting older.

But all is not lost.  Once the problem and its root causes have been understood, there are things that can be done to correct the problem and to return our teeth and gums to health.  First and foremost is learning and following the principles of healthy nutrition.  From this foundation, we can then take measures to reverse teeth and gum problems (the topic of another article due in Sept. 2010).  And in the process of improving our oral health, we’ll also improve our prospects for bodily health (another article due in Sept. 2010).

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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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Posted by John Chisholm on August 25, 2010

In school, we were sometimes presented with an example or case study which described all the salient facts and where the people of that time made the (obviously) wrong choice.  The outcome, depending on the subject matter of the class, could have been families suffering, companies losing money, or countries being conquered.  The correct choices seemed to be so hard to discern for the people in the examples, but seem so obvious in hindsight.  During my school years, the general reaction to these examples was to adopt a vague sense of superiority over the “dumb” people who couldn’t see the obvious.

Even though case studies have been presented to generations of students, the lessons don’t prevent new episodes of breakdown that will take their turn as future examples.  (In economics, lessons from the tulip-mania bubble of the 1630’s didn’t prevent the railway bubble of the 1840”s, the Florida land bubble of the 1920’s, or the dot-com bubble of the late 1990’s)  Obviously the participants weren’t “dumb,” but they couldn’t accurately perceive reality until the resulting situation became quite dire.  Because the pattern is so widespread and persistent in human history, perhaps we should quickly check to see if there is anything like that going on in our lives today.

Our Current “Case Study”

A likely candidate involves our current dire epidemic of chronic and degenerative diseases.  A century ago, fewer than one in twenty Americans contracted cancer in their lifetimes; now the figure is about half the men and nearly two-thirds the women.  Diabetes has likewise been on an explosive growth, with the percentage of those inflicted expected to double between the years 2000 and 2030; one third of Americans born after year 2000 are expected to contract diabetes in their lifetime.  Heart disease and strokes have become scourges of the modern developed world.  Even asthma has been growing tremendously since the 1960’s; in the 30 years since 1980 the rate has grown 250%.  The growth of tooth decay and gum disease, noticed by Dr. Weston Price in the 1930’s, has become endemic, giving rise to a booming business today in crowns, root canals and implants.  Obesity has grown from a tiny portion of the population a century ago to over a third; obesity rates have tripled in the last 30 years.  Having so many degenerative chronic diseases increase at the same time is more than a coincidence.

What could be bringing this on?  The worldwide increase in diabetes follows the adoption of a “Western-style” diet.  The prevalence of asthma is growing worldwide, even though it varies from place to place, with some countries having up to 60 times the rate as others; the highest are the developed Western countries whose populations ingest the most antibiotics as children, such as given to food animals by modern agribusiness.  The increase in heart disease and strokes follows precisely the dietary change in fats from those originating from pasture-raised animals to those artificially manufactured from hydrogenated plant oils.  The rise in cancer mirrors the increase in sugar (from 5 lbs. per person per year a century ago to 135 lbs.), which has been found to feed cancer cells and suppress the immune system.  Our diet has changed more in the last 75 years than in all the thousands of years that preceded it.

Objectively, it seems so obvious. Every correlation between dietary changes on the one hand and many degenerative diseases on the other has been documented.  And yet, it’s still hard to accept that the denatured and artificial foods that dominate the American diet can be at the root of so much detriment to our bodies.  What one day will be considered self-evident seems so controversial and hard to accept today.  Why do we respond so much like the people in the case studies we had read about in school?

Why It’s Hard to Discern

Back in school, the historical case studies were presented to us with all their salient facts, but not all the background noise of obfuscation and half-truths that the people of that time also had to contend with.  In hindsight, it’s easy to sort out the germane from the irrelevant.  Not so easy when people with a vested interest pursue a hidden agenda of obfuscation.   When it comes to our food supply, there’s a lot of motivation for confusion and deception: big money.

It used to be that our food supply came from many independent, decentralized farmers, all pursuing organic farm practices, the only kind of farming that existed at the time.  When farmers made up half the population (around 1880), or 30% of the population (in 1920), control of agriculture’s income was diluted.  By 1990, the situation had completely changed.  All but 2% of the population had been driven off their farms, and even among the remaining farms there was tremendous concentration.  Agribusiness applied the industrial manufacturing model to farming, and no longer did farmers raise many different types of crops and animals on the same farm, with the wastes from one operation becoming the inputs for another one.  Monoculture and single species animal-raising allowed for dominance by the few.  Just 3% of the remaining hog farms produce the majority of the hogs; 2% of cattle feed operations produce 40% of the cattle.  Consolidation, uniformity, and cheap chemical inputs allowed a few to take control of our food supply.

The seven biggest agribusiness corporations, which pretty much dictate the food supply by controlling seeds, grains, animal feeds, fertilizers and herbicides, have annual revenues of over $250 billion.  (To give some perspective on how large and influential such an amount is, it exceeds the annual federal budgets for the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Energy, Interior, EPA and NASA combined).  That’s the revenue of just seven companies, not of the whole agricultural sector.  The small incomes of the many farmers who work at or close to breakeven are not included, but they are continually squeezed into a smaller share of agriculture revenue, while the giant agribusinesses take an ever larger share.  Because food is not a discretionary purchase, the billions in current annual revenue are the anticipated trillions in future revenue stream.  That’s a lot of motivation for obfuscation.

And obfuscation is necessary because the very agricultural practices that reduce costs and increase profits are the same practices that denature our food to the point of ruining our health.  These practices include: chemical pesticides that are designed to poison living cells; chemical fertilizers that act like amphetamines for plants; CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) that continually expose animals to their own feces; artificial fats that humans were never meant to ingest; pasteurization to make dangerously contaminated milk safe (in the short term) but devoid of critical nutrients; artificial hormones given to milk-bearing and meat-bearing animals; a flood of antibiotics given to CAFO animals; animal feeds comprising waste by-products from other industries instead of the natural food they were designed to eat.  Newer practices that further denature food are continually adopted in the search for lower costs and higher profits, such as irradiation of food and the displacement of natural plants with GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

Obfuscation Tactics

With an ugly truth to hide, and with a strong motivation and plentiful resources, agribusiness has hired some of the brightest minds to figure out how to shape our perceptions of food so that we’ll docilely keep ingesting denatured food that makes us sick, while convincing ourselves that it’s all okay.

First and foremost is to make sure that denatured food looks quite a lot like real natural food.  Everyone is busy with so many demands on time and energy, that agribusiness can expect most of the denaturing practices to slip right past us if it doesn’t change the appearance of the food too much.  Can we really tell if the milk has rBGH in it, or if the corn sweetener that’s in all the convenience foods is GMO?  Especially if the politicians can be convinced (with campaign contributions) that labeling should be dismissed.

Another important requirement is that denatured foods cause only long-term degenerative or chronic diseases that will take years to manifest.  Milk from cows raised in filthy CAFOs is all right as long as the fecal bacteria can be killed by heating the milk; no one will get sick immediately after drinking it, and the destruction of critical enzymes and vitamins from the heating will affect only long-term health.

In obfuscating the attributes of denatured foods, it’s also important for the producers to make the foods as convenient as possible to prepare and use.  People don’t want their lives to be more complicated, so stressing convenience makes people more likely to snap up the immediate benefit while delaying or dismissing the effort it takes to become educated about the long-term implications.

Other tactics include claiming that any denatured foods that can’t be disguised are better than the natural foods they’re replacing.  (Kevin Brown’s book “Liberation Diet” ISBN: 978-1439207390 has a good explanation and examples of this tactic.)  Advertising and PR can really help sell denatured foods by claiming they have health benefits.  Even if people don’t buy the idea of being better than what nature provides, many will buy the idea that it’s just as good—and cheaper to boot.

As the foundation of our food supply falls into the control of fewer and fewer people, the choices available through grocery stores get reduced to only the denatured foods that yield the lowest cost and highest profits.  Retail chains can easily be convinced to dedicate their shelf space to products with the highest profit margins, the longest shelf life (further reducing costs), and the largest advertising budgets.  As one grocery chain after falls in line, almost everyone winds up eating the same things and suffering the same repercussions.

When everyone suffers from the same maladies, it doesn’t take long before they’re accepted as being unavoidable and the new norm.  I live near the Everglades, and I’ve read that the bird population has been reduced by 90% over the past century; but the reduction happened so slowly and steadily that everyone thinks the bird population there is fine.  On the West coast, where 96% of the redwood forests have been cut down and won’t grow back, the majority of what’s left remains outside park protection and available for logging, because few people miss the grandeur of bygone years.  The same phenomenon can be exploited here as well.  “Of course everyone knows someone who has died of cancer,” or “…has diabetes” or “…we all have gum disease.”  There’s comfort in having the same perceptions as the crowd.  It seems to validate what we think, even if those ideas were fed to us by advertising and manipulation.  It’s a rare person who can buck the trend.

Part of obfuscation is hiring “experts” to proclaim alternative explanations for all the degenerative ills that have arisen alongside the rise of denatured foods.  “It’s not our diet; it’s a lack of willpower, …the lack of exercise due to videogames, …” etc, etc.

Seeing Clearly and Acting Wisely

All of these tactics clutter the landscape of our perception, making it hard for us to discern what’s best for us.  There’s a common expression called “blowing smoke,” and we’re the recipients of a lot of it.  Unfortunately it takes some effort to see through the smoke to discern what’s real and what the good choices really are.  This is not an academic exercise like the case studies we saw in school.  Being sick with degenerative diseases can affect every aspect of our lives, as well as those who’d have to become our caretakers.  There are few things more important than learning to avoid or remove the underlying causes of degenerative diseases, and to maintain a solid foundation for health.   Our choices will influence how long we and our loved ones will live and affect the quality of our lives while we live, so it’s an effort worth making.  There is help available, in the form of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Liberation Wellness programs, such as 30 Days to Wellness.  We don’t have to be so blinded by smoke that we become examples of people acting “dumb.”

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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Root Canals– the Stealthy Menace

Posted by John Chisholm on August 4, 2010

Almost every week or so it seems another study is published showing how oral infections can give rise to serious degenerative diseases throughout the body.  Managing oral health is more critical than we’ve been led to believe.  Unfortunately, a root canal procedure makes the job even harder to accomplish.

Oral Infection
Oral infection can be detected after it has caused gum disease or dental caries (cavities).  It usually starts when certain strains of bacteria form a sticky mat of colorless plaque on the margins of teeth and gums; if unchecked the plaque bacteria use these toeholds to set up housekeeping and infect the gums and form acidy calcified plaque.  The acid eats a pathway through enamel for the bacteria to infect the interior of teeth, resulting in a cavity.  Sometimes the plaque bacteria that infect the gums cause cell death to the gum tissue and to periodontal ligaments down along the outside of a tooth’s root, leading to a gum pocket.  Bacteria can thrive in the anaerobic environment of a pocket, and a pathway into the tooth can be formed directly into the root below the crown of  enamel.

In any case, once an infection is inside a tooth, it can work its way down the canal within the tooth’s root.  In the root canal there are a tiny artery, vein and nerves, and the infection can either kill the tooth’s nerve or spread the infection to the jawbone (or both).  The conventional treatment when an infection is this far advanced is to perform a root canal procedure.  This practice treats the tooth like an isolated construction project that needs structural repair, without really addressing what caused the condition or what else may be affected by it.

Causes of Oral Infection
What caused the condition is not some bad strain of bacteria that must be eradicated.  Instead it was the abnormal surge of only a couple dozen strains of bacteria among the more than 300 strains of digestive bacteria that have been identified (by their DNA) in a healthy person’s mouth.  This bacterial population explosion and imbalance is caused by the conventional American diet that’s mostly manufactured from a limited base of field corn #2, GMO-soy, wheat, and cottonseed derivatives (or else is comprised of products from animals that are fed unnatural diets of the same crops, usually in the form of by-products from other food industries’ waste).  Because that’s almost all that the giant food conglomerates make available to us, we don’t eat anything like our ancient ancestors did from time immemorial.

It’s noteworthy that the remains of our ancient ancestors shows that they did not have tooth decay, and (although no gum tissue survived from thousands of years ago) presumably did not have the associated gum disease either.  Our ancient ancestors also almost never contracted the modern-day, chronic, degenerative diseases that are ubiquitous today, such as heart disease and many cancers.  They often suffered from infectious plagues and injuries more than modern people, but were able to ward off chronic degenerative diseases without difficulty.  Their diet of nutrient dense foods supplemented by fermented or sprouted unrefined plants and coarse grains kept their oral bacteria in balance and their oral health intact.

Oral Infection and Chronic Disease
Modern people, on the other hand, suffer from an epidemic of oral infection, and recent research shows a large correlation between oral infection and maladies throughout the body.  Most studies focus on the links between gum disease and bodily illness, but the same infectious bacteria also infect the teeth, including teeth that are candidates for the root canal procedure.   People with oral infection have twice the chance of dying by heart attack, three times the chance of a stroke, and double the risk of pancreatic cancer.  Oral infection is strongly associated with diabetes, low-birth-weight in mothers’ babies, and arthritis.

Recent research suggests that oral infection affects other organs throughout the body when the blood vessels spread bacteria, the toxins produced by them, and inflammation agents that are chronically battling the oral infection.  When the conventional root-canal “solution” is applied to a badly infected tooth, the “repaired” tooth becomes a permanent host to the infectious agents.

Root Canal Procedure
A root canal procedure grinds out any infection in the crown of the tooth, and then files out the dead nerves and blood vessels from the root’s main canal.  A disinfecting agent is put into the empty root, and then the root is filled up with a specialized rubber sealant.  An artificial crown on top completes the procedure.  If a tooth’s root branches out into sub-branches, then each sub-branch must be filed clean, disinfected and sealed with rubber as well.

The assumptions behind the procedure are that all the infected tissue within the tooth can be removed, that the remaining parts of the tooth can be sterilized of bacteria, and that the rubber sealant can effectively keep any more bacteria from re-inhabiting the repaired tooth.  The reality is that some infection always remains in a root-canal-treated tooth.  And the sealing isn’t foolproof either.

Endodontists (the dentists who perform root canals) already know how difficult it is to remove all the infected tissue from all the little side branches of a tooth’s root.  But even if they could succeed 100%, they still can’t entirely sterilize the tooth.  That’s because teeth have miles of hollow tubules into which bacteria can and do hide.  Electron microscopes reveal that the structure of dentin (over 90% of the structure of a tooth) isn’t really solid but is composed of hollow dentinal tubules that radiate out from the root and are made to carry nutrient dense fluid from the blood vessels in the tooth’s root throughout the structure of the tooth.  Even if all the bacteria in the root are killed during sterilization, no known disinfecting agent can penetrate all those tubules.  The agent coming closest is calcium hydroxide, and it would require a month of exposure to reach maximum effectiveness.  (Its use is only common in Sweden.  In the USA, only one or two visits is spent for the entire procedure.)

Once the disinfecting is considered adequate, the hollow root is filled with the rubber sealant, effectively isolating the bacteria in the tubules from any blood vessel that could transport immune system cells to combat the bacteria.  In an anaerobic environment, the bacteria survive just fine, and their toxins can pass through the cementum, which forms the outer coating of the tooth (at the outer edges of the tubules).  Blood vessels in the gums pick up the toxins and transport it.  Meanwhile, after months or years, the rubber sealant starts to shrink imperceptibly, but just enough to allow some bacteria to escape as well.

Problems With Root Canals
About 25% to 30% of the people who receive root canal treatments show no ill effects from the permanently housed infection within the treated tooth.  Their immune system is so robust that it can handle the toxins and bacteria that escape.  But when their body undergoes a stress, such as an injury, illness such as influenza, or even childbirth, their immune system can be overwhelmed and the infection in the tooth can contribute to chronic disease elsewhere.  The other 70% of the people usually suffer some ongoing problems from the constant release of infectious agents and toxins.

Dr. Weston Price, at one time an early practitioner of root canal treatments, conducted experiments with root-canal-treated teeth.  He removed teeth (that supposedly had been cured by root-canal-treatments) from patients who suffered a variety of chronic diseases, including heart disease and arthritis, and found that their chronic illness improved significantly, sometimes completely resolving itself.  He also implanted the treated teeth under the skin of animals (mostly rabbits, but many other mammal species as well), and the animals developed the same degenerative diseases that were suffered by the human who originally grew the tooth.  He duplicated the experiment thousands of times with the same result.  He also implanted untreated, healthy teeth (pulled for orthodontic reasons) and those animals did not develop any chronic disease.  The determining factor was definitely the presence or absence of a root-canal tooth.

Avoiding Oral Infection and Root Canals
The take-home lesson for us is to do all we can to prevent even considering a root canal procedure.  The foundation of this effort is shifting our diet away from the cheap, nutrient-poor, chemical-laden, conventional diet and toward a traditional diet that gives greater vitality and immunity.  The traditional diet yields ten times the level of fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2 (which are hard to come by in a conventional diet) and four times the water-soluble vitamins (whose absorption and utility are enhanced by the fat-soluble vitamins).  The traditional diet also either excludes or uses natural analogs for any and all refined and denatured foods, such as sugar, white flour, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and pasteurized milk.  The commonly held principles of traditional diets were documented by Weston A. Price in the 1930’s, and are lucidly explained for current day by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Diet.

Because it’s so hard to eat 100% as our traditional ancestors did, despite our best efforts, we’re bound to experience some of the imbalance in oral bacterial populations that seems to be the hallmark of modern humans.  We need to apply some localized oral help to keep the overpopulated strains from setting up house in our gum and teeth tissues and becoming pathogenic.  Even though ancient humans didn’t need to, we need to brush and floss to keep the hyperactive bacterial colonies in a disorganized and benign state.  But not with toothpaste.  The glycerin that turns toothpaste into a paste also coats the teeth with a film that prevents the natural cycle of tooth remineralization, which is vital for oral health.  The fluoride in toothpaste is a toxin that exacerbates gum disease; SLS is an industrial degreaser that irritates gum tissues.

Keeping in mind that the gums absorb what’s in the mouth, it makes more sense to avoid the artificial chemicals in toothpaste and to brush with what’s really helpful as well as naturally occurring.  It would be great if your tooth-brushing mixture contained vitamin C, because it’s such a critical nutrient for the growth and healing of connective tissue, and the gums are almost entirely connective tissue.  Some naturally occurring bioflavonoids will also help the vitamin C be absorbed and act longer.  Some particularly helpful herbs for oral health are dried cranberry and tea tree leaf powder (not the steam distilled oil which can be too intense for some people).  These two herbs have the remarkable property of countering the stickiness property of plaque bacteria; very useful if you eat any crackers, bread, rice, pasta or other carbohydrates, which cause plaque bacteria to become hyperactive and quickly consolidate into sticky plaque and then calculus.

There are some good herbal antimicrobials that are gentle on sensitive gum tissues, such as peppermint, cinnamon, as well as the cranberry and tea tree leaf.  For countering the acid of plaque and calculus, baking soda is quite effective, while being gentle and non-abrasive.  Myrrh is an excellent traditional soother for inflamed gums.  For cleaning the teeth, baking soda and sea salt are an excellent, traditional mixture; just be sure that the particles of sea salt are pulverized quite small enough to dissolve rapidly so that there are no sharp crystals to scratch the enamel.  If a high quality sea salt is used (such as French grey sea salt, Celtic Sea Salt, etc) then the dissolved salt mimics the mineral content of bodily fluids and facilitates the movement of the other good ingredients through cell walls.

All of these herbs, minerals and vitamins can be purchased individually to make up your own tooth brushing mixture.  You can also find a ready-made mixture of a toothpaste replacement with these ingredients called Good-Gums for sale at Liberation Wellness.

A good way to reduce plaque development is to dissolve a pinch of Good-Gums or your home-made dentifrice mixture when you floss.  The action of flossing moves the dissolved solution into the gumline, where the ingredients can give the most help.  Proper diet, proper oral care habits and the proper dentifrice can go a long way to keep oral infection (and the prospect of a root-canal procedure) at bay,

Pulled Root Canal Tooth

If You’ve Had a Root Canal
If you already have a tooth that has had a root canal treatment, then it becomes a bit more tricky.  If you have no obvious chronic health problem, then take extra care to keep in check the agents and toxins leaking from the infected tooth site.  Consider a daily routine of massaging the dissolved herbal mixture into the gums alongside the roots of the treated tooth.  Your tooth no longer has the blood vessels inside to transport immune system cells to the site of the low grade infection, so your alternative is to reinforce the immune system in the soft tissues that surround the tooth.

If you have a root-canal-treated tooth and also have a degenerative disease that began after the root-canal was performed, it may be worthwhile to consult a truly holistic dentist to discuss whether removal of the treated tooth may be in order.  This is a serious decision that may have profound implications for health, and the advice of a holistic professional who understands the dietary principles of Weston A. Price could be quite valuable.

Conclusion
Most dentists, most products and most advertising still treat oral health as if it only concerned the cosmetic appearance and structural integrity of the teeth.  In fact, the pathogens that compromise oral health put the entire body at risk, and root-canal-treated teeth give those pathogens a hideout from which to disperse their nasty infectious agents and irritants.  Caring for oral health isn’t like caring for our hair; it deserves to be central to our health regimen.

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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FLASH On Trash

Posted by John Chisholm on June 25, 2010

In the furniture industry, they have a derisive saying- that encapsulates a cheap but profitable category of the sofa and chair market.  “Flash on trash” means upholstered furniture made from a frame of woodwork scraps that are merely stapled together, then wrapped in low-grade foam and finally covered with attractive and showy fabric.  The upholstered piece looks good in the showroom, but it won’t hold up in day-to-day use.  The foam quickly degrades so that you can feel the framing pieces underneath as they soon start to loosen and wobble.  Instead of a good-looking piece of furniture being an outward reflection of internal strength and quality, it’s a masquerade.  It’s cheap to make, and when many people see it, they can’t tell the difference.

If the displacement of substance with appearance were limited to furniture, it would be a rip off but not a tragedy.  But when the ethos of phoniness subverts the life-sustaining processes we rely on, then it’s no longer just a case of economic trickery and deceit.  It becomes a matter of life or death: long term health versus chronic disease and early death.

Spraying toxic chemicals on plants-

and soil can make plants look almost like the ones that used to grow in healthy, rich soil, without having to spend all the time and energy that traditional farming used to require.  Eggs from egg-farm factories look very similar (from the outside) to the eggs laid by hens who roam sunlit pasture land.  The only differences are the negative impacts that the degraded food has on the person who ate it, and that the farming practices have on the land upon which we all ultimately depend.  By the time the negative results are noticed, the harm is done and the perpetrator has pocketed his ill gotten gains.

Yesteryear’s Idyllic Reality

Let’s take a closer look at one of the most ancient foods with an honored place in almost all cultures:

MILK.  Thousands of years before the industrial revolution and the invention of refrigeration, people raised cows, goats, sheep and buffalo (in the East, and these weren’t bison) for their milk, and turned the milk into cheese to provide essential nutrition.  Ancient Greece’s Homer describes cheese making and the Romans disseminated their advanced cheese making techniques throughout Europe and the Near East.  Cultures thrived on natural milk and their dairy products.  In the middle ages and the Renaissance, people developed many cheese varieties that are still popular, such as Cheddar, Parmegiana and Gouda.

In colonial America, the dairyman was a valued tradesman, and the dairy buildings were some of the best-designed, best-built, and most fastidiously maintained structures in their communities.  Over millennia, people learned how to care for cows and carefully handle their natural raw milk to provide a consistently healthful source of valuable nutrition for their community.  These natural dairy traditions were handed down and were still widely practiced into the early 20th century.  President Taft arranged for a cow to graze on the White House lawn between 1910 and 1913, providing his household daily with fresh raw milk and butter.  The idyllic image of contented cows grazing in a sunlit meadow while frisky calves nurse from their mothers is such an icon of health and nutrition that to this day graphic illustrations of such scenes often make their appearance on labels of modern-day cheese, milk and yogurt.

But how faithful are these images to the lives of dairy cows today?  Current practice has over 85% of America’s cows removed from the pasture and raised in confinement.  Calves are typically separated from their mothers within a day of their birth, and instead of real milk are fed a milk substitute, typically containing some powdered milk along with lard and either lime-treated corn flour or hydrolyzed fish protein.

As cows get weaned of their milk substitute, they are kept penned up in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) where they have no access to natural pasture land and are offered a feed made of byproducts from other industries, e.g., whole cottonseed from the fabric industry; distillers grains from the alcoholic spirit industry; blood meal from slaughterhouses; brewers grain from the beer industry; meat by-products, fish meal, feather meal, peanut skins, soybean hulls, tallow, thin slop or wheat bran.  All these byproducts are cheap, and none of them is what a cow would naturally eat.  To get cattle to eat this unnatural diet, only this food made available to them, it has just enough silage added to make the whole mixture barely palatable, and the silage is mixed in so thoroughly that a cow can’t pick out the silage and leave behind the foreign byproducts.  The silage isn’t necessarily composed of cut grasses that a cow would naturally eat either; up to three-fourths of the silage could be cheaper substitutes, especially corn plant silage, the plant scraps left over after corn has been harvested.  If you look at the feed that is used in CAFOs, it doesn’t remotely resemble the grasses that cows are meant to eat.

Current Conventional Reality

Ah, but there’s more to “flash on trash”

in the dairy industry than where the cows live and what they eat.  In order to lengthen the time that a cow lactates, factory dairy farms inject her with rBGH (the artificial recombinant bovine growth hormone), which in turn stimulates the cow to produce the hormone IGF-1, which is a cancer accelerator in adults and in non-infant children.  The cows are milked three times a day, instead of two.  All of the modern conventional dairy practices are aimed at producing ever larger volumes of milk at ever decreasing costs.  Factory dairies harvest over three times the amount of milk per cow each day than traditional cows used to give.  Because cows confined in CAFOs can’t walk away from their feces and urine, they are given daily doses of antibiotics to fend off the likelihood of infectious diseases.

Cows can’t sustain the dietary, pharmaceutical and quota pressures for very long; a typical dairy cow lasts only three years before it is shipped off to the slaughterhouse.  (By contrast, grazing cows typically give milk for over twelve years, and they live like cows the entire time.)  What factory farming does to cows affects their bodies, and that affects their milk.  The contrast between the milk fat content of factory cows and pasture-grazing cows is a good indicator.

Milk from factory farmed dairy cows has as little as one-fifth the amount of conjugated linoleic acid, a type of natural fat that is a potent cancer fighter.  Additionally, naturally raised milk contains the ideal balance of essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6), which when roughly equal lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, auto-immune disorders, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and dementia.  A gram of typical milk fat from pasture-grazing cows has 16.5 mg of omega-3 and 16.6 mg of omega-6.  When a cow’s diet is changed to one-third pasture grass and two-thirds feed, the amount of omega-3 drops by half, while the omega-6 almost triples, to be almost five times the amount of omega-3.  Cows in a CAFO that have no natural pasture grass in their diet at all have even much worse ratios.

Pasture-grazing cows absorb from living grass and natural sunlight much more of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E (plus beta-carotene), which are then stored in their milk fat.  These are also nutrients that are critical for humans and virtually unobtainable in adequate quantities from plant sources.  CAFO cows can’t produce the same high levels, and whatever levels they do produce is diluted further by being dispersed into the higher volume of liquid milk that is forced from them by factory dairies.

The milk from conventionally raised cows is so poor in comparison as to not be the same as milk raised in the traditional way by cows in natural sunlit pastures.  But what makes it even worse is what’s done to the milk after it has been harvested from the cows.

Shelf life is prime prerequisite for food products.  With a long shelf life, food products can be packaged, stored and moved like industrial commodities, and all the cost-reducing efficiencies developed on the factory floors and warehouses of other industries can be used by the food industry.  In order to increase the shelf life of milk, it is pasteurized, typically heated to a high temperature for a relatively short amount of time.  It increases shelf life by killing off harmful bacteria in the milk.

Why are there harmful bacteria in milk?

In factory farms, cows are packed in so tightly that they have to stand in their own feces, where pathogens can thrive.  Also, factory farm milk is so poor that it lacks the full complement of beneficial bacteria that crowd out and even actively destroy pathogenic bacteria, unlike the raw milk of pasture-raised cows which have built-in defenses against pathogens.  So the poorer quality factory milk can be stabilized by killing off bacteria, both the bad and the good.  In the process it also destroys enzymes and vitamins, denatures proteins, and lowers B12 and B6 levels.  Longer shelf life is achieved by further degrading the milk.

After pasteurization, the milk is then homogenized.  This has two benefits to the conventional milk industry, but causes detriment to those who drink it.  In the old days when milkmen delivered un-homogenized milk in glass bottles, consumers could compare the richness of milk from competing dairies by looking at how much cream rose to the top—bad news for the producers of poor milk.  Homogenization “solves” that by breaking up milk’s natural fat globules into tiny spheres about a micron in diameter so that they’ll stay suspended and not float to the top.  The process was sold as being more convenient than having to shake the bottle of natural milk, but it also makes all milk—the rich and the degraded– appear indistinguishably white.  As a further “benefit”, the dead bacteria from pasteurization that would otherwise have settled to the bottom of a bottle now stay suspended and unobserved in the white liquid.

Another unseen characteristic of homogenized milk is that the micron-sized spheres of creamy fat are now small enough to be absorbed directly by the tiny villi of our small intestines, and a form of fat that is not naturally occurring enters our arteries with unhealthy cardiovascular implications.  To resolve this problem, industrial milk producers remove a lot of the fat from milk, and ply us with low-fat dairy products.  What little was left of raw milk’s original fat-soluble vitamins (especially D and E) is further reduced by the reduction in fat (degraded by homogenization, admittedly).

So a perfectly healthful food that supplies critical nutrients is degraded to increase profits.

The degradation process causes new problems, which are resolved by a process that further degrades the food.  The new process introduces its own new set of problems which are resolved by an additional process that even further degrades the food.  Throughout this procedure, the distributors of this cheap and degraded food make sure that the processed milk continues to look a lot like real milk, and at the end of the day they claim that it is just as good.

It’s worth our while to support the small number of remaining farmers who raise dairy cows in sunlit pastures.  They’re the ones who give us truly nutritious milk, not the factory-dairy industry which can afford to hire celebrities in fake milk mustaches to tout a degraded beverage with only the outward appearance (the “flash”) of healthful and nutritious milk.  It’s one thing to sit on furniture that’s flash on trash, but what we put in our bodies should be real quality.

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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Posted in Butter, cancer, oral health, raw milk, Sally Fallon Morell, wapf, Weight Loss, wellness, weston price | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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