How Do We Get Cavities? Cavities are holes in the enamel of the teeth says this expert dentist in Lake Jackson. The term “dental caries” refers to cavities in the mouth. A hole in the enamel allows bacteria to get into the tooth pulp and eventually kill it.
That’s pretty straightforward, but the key question is what causes cavities? This is where the problem lies.
In modern dentistry, it is widely accepted that bacteria on the teeth are the primary cause of cavities. There is no conclusive proof of this theory since it was adopted by vote decades ago.
However, other theories with strong evidence have been disregarded, including the idea that tooth decay is primarily caused by poor diet, not acid or bacteria.
During his travels around the globe, Dr. Weston Price studied cultures that had either low or high rates of dental caries and developed his nutrition theory. In his research, he focused mainly on primitive people who were not afforded convenience foods as these people were thought to have the healthiest teeth and their health was the best. After closely observing their diet and dental hygiene, he discovered something remarkable:
There were almost no cavities in people who ate a traditional diet consisting of whole foods and fat-soluble vitamins and minerals. The good news is that people eating this type of diet had healthy, strong teeth regardless of their dental hygiene!
Despite good dental hygiene, cultures exposed to modern convenience foods such as jams, jellies, pastries, white bread, and sugary fruits had far worse teeth.
He tested the nutritional content of foods and conducted studies to prove that poor nutrition caused cavities. A group of children was studied by Dr. Price who subsisted mostly on a diet of highly sweetened coffee and white bread. They also ate doughnuts fried in vegetable oil and pancakes made of white flour and eaten with syrup. The decayed teeth of these children were evidence that they were lacking fat-soluble vitamins and minerals necessary for strong teeth!
The purpose of Dr. Price’s program was to nourish the children’s bodies in order to aid in remineralizing their teeth, healing cavities, and preventing future cavities. His hypothesis would be based on this evidence. A nutrient-rich diet was fed to these malnourished children six days a week for five months for the purpose of the study.
An excerpt from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, an important book that changed the way we think about health.
Dr. Price details the cavity-reversing menu in a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets: In this one meal, these children were provided with these foods.
We began the meal with about four ounces of tomato juice or orange juice and a teaspoonful of an especially high-vitamin butter mix made up of equal parts of natural cod liver oil and high-vitamin butter.
