Good Morning! It’s been a while. Work has taken more of my time and energy than I expected when I started writing these posts last year, but I intend to get back to writing these articles more regularly. This week’s topic is one that has made a tremendous impact on my life this year, and I’m excited to share it with you.
Have you ever wondered what people did before toothbrushes and toothpaste? It wasn’t until after WW2 that regularly brushing teeth was adopted by the masses, yet humans have had excellent oral health for much longer than that.
Today we brush more than ever before, go to the dentist more than ever before, and pay more for our oral health than ever before. In spite of all this treatment, we still struggle with cavities, have payment plans for our teenagers’ orthodontists, and are not generally healthier than our ancestors.
In the early 1900s, a dentist named Dr. Weston Price sought to find out the cause of our society’s dental degeneration. He went to the ends of the earth to observe what the more primitive (but more physically healthy) peoples of the world were doing differently. His search turned up a clear and obvious source of our pains: we abandoned ancestral nutritional wisdom.
Dr. Price witnessed and studied the effects of what happened when people began to abandon what their tribe or group had eaten for hundreds to thousands of years and began to follow a more “modern” diet consisting largely of vegetable oils, white flour, white sugar, polished rice, and canned vegetables.
Is it possible that the issues we face are not caused by choosing the wrong toothpaste or not flossing enough? Grab some coffee and scroll down to see how nutrition impacts both our dental and overall health!
We’re Lacking Nutrients, Not Floss
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the state of our molars had started to become a crisis across the western world. Dentists struggled to keep up as the number of teeth showing signs of decay was skyrocketing, and new treatments, including toothbrushing, using fluoride, and toothpaste, began to take root.
This was a boon for dentists but a malaise for society. Something had changed because so many modern people were impacted. Also, that which impacts oral health is likely to also disrupt other facets of our health.
One dentist, Dr. Weston Price, sought to understand the root cause of our society’s dental decline. His goal was to find groups of people with excellent dental health and observe what they did differently from his patients whose dental health was going downhill.
Unfortunately, he had great difficulty actually finding these groups of people in America. The epidemic of cavities was afflicting nearly everyone!
He then turned to more primitive peoples across the world and found these people to be in excellent dental and overall physical health.
Dr. Price’s scientific quest took him to places such as the Swiss Alps, the Scottish Isles, the islands of Polynesia, the Serengeti of Central Africa, the Andean Mountains of Peru, the Candian Tundra, and the Outback of Australia.
Everywhere he went, he found that groups of people who practiced their traditional diet were healthy, had minimal tooth decay, and displayed minimal susceptibility to disease.
Dr. Price also found that many of these areas had people who had begun to adopt more “modern” diets consisting largely of white flour, sugar, polished rice, vegetable oils, and canned goods. The modern diet seemed to follow anywhere the quickly-growing tentacles of global trade reached.
Dr. Price was able to study the differences between the groups of people he found. These people had the same ancestry, physical environment, and workloads. The major difference was in diet.
Throughout his travels, Dr. Price analyzed hundreds of thousands of teeth and took thousands of saliva and food samples to be analyzed back home in the lab.
Nearly universally, it was observed that the groups of people who still followed their native diets had close to no tooth decay, whereas the people (whites and natives living in the same region) who adopted the modern diet of the West had significant rates of tooth decay.
The Incredible Health of the Inuits
Inuit people have lived in Northern Canada / Alaska for thousands of years. They did not have toothbrushes, did not fluoridate their water, and did not go to a dentist every 6 months. The Inuits thrived on a diet consisting almost completely of fatty meat from their environment (fruits and vegetables were rarely available).
The Inuits also, apparently, never struggled with tooth decay.
In his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Price says that in various Inuit communities, he examined over 5000 teeth belonging to people on their native diet.
The incidence of tooth decay among this group was less than 0.1 percent. Today in America, over 25% of adult permanent teeth have exhibited decay.
However, this astounding statistic apparently does not do justice to the dental health of the Inuits. Apparently, an average adult male could carry 100 lbs for a considerable distance using his teeth.
You may be inclined to attribute this strength and vitality to good genetics. However, when put on a more modern nutritional program, the dental health of the Inuits suffered big-time.
Holy Cross, a Catholic mission, was set up on the Yukon River. It offered educational opportunities to Inuits, and a few dozen native students moved to take advantage of the opportunity.
These students also adopted the western diet of the missionaries, consisting largely of white flour products, white sugar, canned goods, and vegetable oils.
During his visit to the mission, Dr. Price examined the Inuit students who had moved from around the region and found their incidence of tooth decay to be 18.7%. That’s 187x higher than the Inuits examined on the traditional diet!
Blame the Food!
Inuits have thrived for millennia off of a diet largely consisting of salmon, caribou, other fish, ground nuts, cranberries, several plants preserved in seal oil, and even whales. The most common traditional Inuit dish is pieces of fish dipped in seal oil.
Salmon eggs were gathered to increase the fertility of women trying to conceive, pregnant women, and kids. Dr. Price’s laboratory analysis found these eggs to be among the most nutritious foods in the world.
It was common for Inuit women to give birth to over a dozen children, and they were said to have much milder pregnancies than modern women.
The vast majority of their diet consisted of animal products and was rich in saturated fat and cholesterol, yet before the modern era, heart disease in the group was nearly unheard of.
Their legendary health and vitality have confounded modern-day nutritionists who blame fats and cholesterol for health ailments like heart disease.
In the 1950s, as it became more profitable to sell trinkets and enter global trade, many groups of Inuits stopped subsisting on hunting, fishing, and gathering and began living more off of more modern “foods of commerce” (named because they kept long enough for trade) such as white flour, vegetable oils, white sugar, and canned goods.
Upon analysis of foods in the typical Native Inuit diet versus the displacing foods of commerce, Dr. Price found the former to have:
5.4x as much calcium
5x as much phosphorous
1.5x as much iron
7.9x as much magnesium
1.8x as much copper
49x as much iodine
At least 10x as many fat-soluble vitamins
Further studies after Dr. Price followed the shift of the Inuit people toward a more modernized diet. In addition to the decline in dental health, a significant spike in hypertension and other heart issues was observed in less than ten years.
Perhaps the primitive Inuits had more nutritional wisdom and intuition than our society does today.
You would probably instinctively agree with the statement that our modern diet is unhealthy because it’s a common target to bash. However, excess calories are not the most damaging aspect of our modern foods.
We often view food solely in terms of calories, but it takes more than energy to be healthy. Don’t let your calorie-rich food be poor in nutrients!
Dr. Price’s travels, observations, and studies back up the need to ensure that we are providing our bodies with a rich amount of nutrients that are accessible to our digestive systems.
Much ancestral nutritional wisdom and intuition has been lost in our rush of modernization, and the rise of poor dental health, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and other ailments are some of the consequences.
We touched on a few of the pearls of wisdom that you can find in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, but it is well worth your time to read the whole thing.
A proper diet that consists of whole (unprocessed) foods chock-full of vitamins that are easily accessible to our body is a tremendous life hack that will set you apart from the rest and help you to feel much better.
Looking for a guideline on how to beef up the nutrients in your diet? Check out the Weston Price Foundation for principles consistent with a traditional diet.
Remember, you are what you eat.