About ten months ago I had my first dentist visit in twenty years. My teeth are pretty healthy and no new cavities were found. I have one mercury “silver” filling that I want out. I inquired my dentist about her opinion this filling and she nearly laughed when I told her that I believe that this filling is one of the contributing causes to my Candida yeast and Anxiety/OCD disorder. She said it was a small filling, it was secure and it “looked” pretty good. She said it was not worth taking out but she would do it if I asked her.

I then went to my doctor and inquired about my mercury levels. The test showed that I had mercury in my blood but not in amounts that would be a cause for concern. My Whole blood levels were 9 µg/L and the safe levels are  < 8.0 µg/L  and for occupational limit in exposed workers < 15.0 µg/L  (Source)

So my level is just above the safe level.

So here are my thoughts about mercury:

If health professionals don’t take mercury amalgam poisoning seriously then you need to find another health professional that does.

Why?

1. Mercury is toxic even in small amounts. It is the most toxic, non radioactive substance in the world. It is more toxic then lead.
2. Mercury passes the blood brain barrier.
3. Mercury is attracted to lipids (fats) and the brain has the highest concentration of lipids of any organ.
4. Mercury vapour from dental fillings is highly toxic

Watch this startling video on how brushing your teeth can lead to toxic overexposure to mercury just by the dental amalgam vapours. Even drinking hot beverages and soups can leach more mercury into your body then in an undisturbed amalgam. Any kind of stimulation will disturb the mercury to release vapours. Mercury vapours are then released for a minimum 1.5 hrs.

I will be having my fillings removed within the next couple of weeks. I found a holistic dentist that will do this work and I meet him on Sunday. (An odd day for business, but it is the first day of the week) I will meet with him to see if I feel comfortable with him doing such work in my mouth.

I will also start taking supplements to chelate mercury. The supplements include Iodine, Selenium, Cilantro, Chlorella, High dose vitamin C to bowel tolerance. That is a start for now and as I find more info I will add to this list.

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I am so inspired with this testimonial by Ramiel Nagel and how he has healed dental cavities in his family. It is very similar to the one our family went through when we healed the teeth of my eldest daughter. Like us, the Ramiel also used the nutritional philosophies of Weston A. Price to promote healing.

The only way to heal is through strengthening the body with nutrition. Quick fixes to the dentist are just that – quick fixes. My philosophy is that if you mask a problem without healing the body it will show up in some other symptom. So overall you will just be medicating without true healing.

High Vitamin Diet To Cure Cavities

• A diet rich in fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K) from organ meats, eggs, and raw milk or cheese (raw or lightly cooked)

• Eating bone marrow and cartilage

• Adding a mineral rich bone broth made from fish, chicken, beef, lamb or pig

• Reduce phytic Acid in grains and nuts by soaking, fermenting and sprouting them

• And heal the gut and improve vitamin availability by eating fermented foods.

Getting enough vitamin D is crucial and will help prevent many illnesses, strengthening the immune system as well as strengthening bones and teeth. A good 30-45 minutes of outdoor activities daily is recommended to get enough of this essential vitamin. The 400iu that is the RDA is not enough for optimal health. Dr. Mercola, Dr. Russel Blaylock and the Weston A. Price Foundation recommend 4000-10,000 IU.

I am forever grateful to the great dentist Weston Price for doing his meticulous work in documenting the food and the health of the people throughout the world. More people are learning about his great work and seeing results in healing cavities.

I share these videos with you as well as the book written by Ramiel Nagel called Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities With Nutrition. Just click through the link to the Amazon.com page or click through the image. You can visit his website at http://www.curetoothdecay.com/

As always I welcome your thoughts and comments!

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My sensitive teeth are no longer sensitive. I am really happy about that. Who would have thought that using regular toothpaste would actually be the cause of this pain?

So I ditched my Sensodyne toothpaste about 1.5 months ago and started using my coconut oil recipe found in my original post. I never had any tooth pain when I quit cold turkey. However when I would accidentally and thoughtlessly pick up my daughters Weleda toothpaste and start brushing I would start having tooth pain again!

My only gripe about using my home made toothpaste is that my teeth are now getting stained and discoloured. I am a coffee/tea drinker and those beverages do stain the teeth.

Considering the amount of tooth whitening products on the market there is a great deal of interest in achieving pearly whites. I will start with just brushing with pure baking soda and water and go from there.

Here are some more natural tooth whitening strategies:

1. Pure baking soda and water
2. Eating strawberries
3. Lime juice and salt
4. Hydrogen Peroxide

I am a bit more hesitant to try the acid whitening techniques as they may cause more tooth pain.

One thing for sure, I will never go back to commercial toothpaste. Obsessing about pearly whites is a vanity issue and I won’t go there!

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I have thought for years that I would be stuck using Sensodyne toothpaste for my extremely sensitive teeth. Whenever I have tried to switch toothpastes to a natural toothpaste, my teeth would start hurting within 2 days. They would hurt so much that even breathing air through my mouth would cause extreme pain. I was also sensitive to hot and cold foods and even walking would cause my teeth to feel like they would fall out. Weird, I know. Lately even with the use of Sensodyne, my teeth were hurting when I was eating my lacto-fermented Sauerkraut. I was even considering blending my kraut in a blender and drinking it with a straw.

Learning about Weston A. Price and his work I understand that many traditional cultures did not use toothpaste or even brushed their teeth. They ate a nutrient rich diet high in seafoods, organ meats, mineral rich broths, healthy saturated fats and properly prepared grains (soaked, sprouted or sour leavened). These traditional cultures had near perfect teeth (free of dental decay and perfectly aligned teeth)  without the help of toothpaste or braces.

I was stumbled across a “toothsoap” video that explains how toothpaste can inhibit remineralization. I was taken aback by the discovery that the glycerin in toothpaste can inhibit remineralization of the teeth.

My children are not regular users of toothpaste either. My oldest has used natural toothpaste on and off in her young life. But my youngest hates toothpaste and just brushes with water. Both girls have no cavities or decay. So I set aside my Sensodyne toothpaste and created my own with Coconut Oil.

Coconut Oil Toothpaste

1 teaspoon of coconut oil

1/8th teaspoon baking soda

2 drops of stevia

3-5 drops of peppermint oil

Mix all ingredients together and store in a small jar.

I have been using this toothpaste for 2 weeks. The coconut oil makes your mouth feel moisturized and your teeth very polished.

I have no sensitive teeth and I can eat my sauerkraut without pain!

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade

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My daughter was only 1.5 years old when she started to get cavities in her two front teeth. We were vegetarian/vegan at the time. The cavities resulted from a high carb diet rich in soy and refined
grain products. I was pretty devastated at time because all my effort was going towards raising her in a healthy way. However she was definitely not thriving. Her weight was low, she was pale, her teeth had big gaps in them and now her teeth were starting to rot. She was high needs as well and cried all the time. I was wondering how a child could be so miserable when there was nothing to be miserable about.

Childhood Dental Caries Can Be Healed!

I started looking into the dental caries and discovered traditional foods. Traditional foods are a foods prepared the way our ancestors have prepared foods in just recent history before the commercialization and industrialization that we know so well today. Traditional foods are prepared in such a manner as to get the most nutrition out of a particular food.

For example:

• Grains, nuts and seeds are sprouted or soaked to make them more digestible and to release and neutralize phytates that inhibits mineral absorption.
• Foods are preserved by fermenting which aids in the healing of the digestive system (sauerkraut, pickles, fermented salsa).
• Organ meats are a prized food and cherished for the nutritional value.
• Animals are fed food that they thrive on and allowed to pasture and eat insects which allow for their meat to have more nutritional value.
• Eating of raw animal products (meat, milk, egg etc.) Pasteurization and cooking of our food has killed many beneficial enzymes and denaturing proteins.
• Also the removal of fats has drastically decreased our absorption of fat soluble vitamins such as Vitamins A, D, E and K which are essential for immune, brain, bone and eye health. Low fat diets are dangerous because of this very fact.

Traditional fats are saturated fats. They are heat stable and don’t go rancid very easily and therefore they are the preferred fats to use for cooking. They also make food taste delicious and more nutritious!

So we took the soy and refined grains out of our diet and replaced them with traditional foods. This is what
healed the cavities!

We did not even use toothpaste on our daughters teeth for the first 3 years of her life. No fluoride either! Just pure nutrition.

To your health and wellness,

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Last week I took the kids and myself to the dentist. The kids normally have a checkup every six months, but I was a bit nervous about this appointment. You see I also made an appointment for myself. I have not seen a dentist since I was 12 years old – that was 20 years ago! Everything went well and no cavities in any of us so far.

My eldest daughter Aliena has had some issues though. When she was a small baby she developed small black pits in her front teeth and white discolourization in some others. I was concerned because she also was classified as failure to thrive and was losing weight. We were vegan at the time (due to milk and egg allergic skin reactions in Aliena) and I had a vegetarian pregnancy.  I was very concerned about her growth.
At the time I thought that our diet was pretty good. I was seeing a dietician who was looking and analyzing our food logs. She saw no reason to be concerned and just wanted us to keep our fat intake high so my daughter could gain weight. But the majority of our calories did come from soy and grains.

If a dietician could not realize how deficient our diet was then how in the world would I??

From looking at Aliena’s teeth, I could tell that she was mineral deficient. We ate very little sugar so the only other cause could be diet. I soon discovered Weston A. Price foundation and realized that it was the high processed soy and grain diet that was the culprit for our dental problems. Soy, nuts, seeds and grains are high in phytic acid. We were eating organic cereal with soy milk for breakfast, white bread sandwiches with fake soy meats and veggies for lunch, rice or pasta for dinner and crackers, nuts, fruit and veggies for snacks.  I was feeding my family a high carbohydrate low fat diet. When you eat a high grain diet the phytic acid will combine with the vitamins and minerals in the intestines and block their absorption.

The more I read about the traditional foods and about Dr. Weston Price’s research the more I realized that we needed to change our vegan diet to higher fat and add meat. We are blessed to live in a rural area that has plenty of organic farmers. We are able to visit these farms and see the conditions and feed that the animals receive.  I am able to get organic grassfed beef, pasture raised chickens, and organic pork. We buy bulk meat from the farmers. This is bought by the side, quarter or by the animal. Buying meat this way is the cheapest way to get high quality local organic food. You do not have to pay shipping costs, distributer costs, grocery store mark ups.

How do you find a farmer to buy from? Farmer markets, health food store referrals, highway / farm signs, word of mouth, local classifieds, and local food websites.

Buying whole animals rather than just parts has many benefits. You get to have bones, organ meats and all the fat. The bones make delicious mineral rich stock, the organ meats like liver and heart are full of essential fatty acids, vitamins A and D, and minerals like iron, zinc and copper. The fats make the food taste delicious, slow digestion and aids in the absorption of the vitamins and minerals.

So we added these kinds of foods into our diet and traded up our white bread for sprouted grain bread. For my kids I soaked their oatmeal with a bit of whey.  The nuts and seeds get soaked and when possible sprouted (this is mostly sunflower seeds). The soaking and sprouting nuts and seeds neutralizes the phytic acid in them and makes them more nutritious and digestible.

We also eat plenty of full fat plain yogurt for the probiotics. Since starting probioitcs daughter’s allergies to milk and eggs disappeared. She started to gain weight and stopped being failure to thrive. To this day she is still small on the growth charts but is very healthy. 

Good dental health is a good indicator of your general health.  Foods in their whole natural state will have the highest nutritional value. Taking the time to prepare them is well worth the effort. It is a skill worth passing on to your children.

To your health and wellness,

Catherine Osthaus

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