Natural Moms Podcast #86

Rami Nagel, author of Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition joins us this week to talk about his book.

There is a lot of conflicting information available on the subject of tooth decay in children. Some parents are told that nutrition has little to do with dental caries, and others are discouraged from breastfeeding their babies at night. Parents have been shocked when the child who they thought they fed a healthy diet turns out to have extensive decay.

It can be very upsetting to a parent when their child has issues with tooth decay. They may be facing expensive, painful and traumatic surgery for their child. Is there a better way of dealing with tooth decay? Are dental procedures and surgery the only option for parents?

Rami documents in his book that a special diet has been effectively used to prevent and even arrest tooth decay in children. He outlines the special foods that children (and adults!) need to be eating in order to have excellent health, with plenty of the essential nutrients the body needs for healthy teeth – which translates into less or no tooth decay.

For more information, be sure to check out Rami’s book Cure Tooth Decay, which has been updated since I recorded this interview. Also take a look at Dr. Weston A Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Below is a transcription of the interview if you prefer to read.

Carrie: Your book is excellent. Probably a bit controversial – but it’s ne that I think is so needed because as a parent, we feel like we’re powerless when it comes to keeping our children’s teeth healthy.

I know that’s the way that I felt for a long time and I had a child that had extensive tooth decay. And I remember telling the Dentist, what’s different about this child? I raised him the exact same way as his older brother – same diet, same everything. Why does he have such bad teeth? And the answer that I Got was just the typical response that a mom gets from a Dentist.

So the point of your book is that we do have something to do with tooth decay. So tell us a little bit about your overall philosophy when it comes to nutrition and how we can prevent tooth decay.

Rami: I wanted to respond to the story that you said about your son. In some ways it’s kind of like this black box. Our bodies – something goes wrong and we don’t exactly know why, it doesn’t seem to make sense. There’s a little bit of truth that some things are out of our hands. But the rest of the story – the other 80, 90% of what is happening is actually under our control. So while it may not explain your circumstances, the information I provide in my book explains that.

My book doesn’t go into detail about the generational issue. So what happens is, with a mother and father – as we get older our bodies are losing nutrients, they’re losing their vitality because the vitality isn’t restored back from the environment – primarily from proper foods but also our exposure to toxic environments, toxic water… it can happen especially like a mother breastfeeds her child, and the diet is not ideal then after the first child, the second child the mother’s body and also the father’s body before conception doesn’t have as much nutrients, doesn’t have as much minerals. Doesn’t have quite the same physical vitality. As a result, the second child has just a little bit more inherited weaknesses. It can also happen that the lifestyle is different for the second child.

So those inherited weaknesses through the pregnancy and throughout the first 6 months or year, over time it adds up. And the diet that was fine for an older child is not good anymore for your younger child because they’re a little more weak. And it can all be corrected or repaired to some degree.

C: What was different about your book and what impressed me was how you talked about the findings of Weston A Price. And I’m a big fan of his book, and the Weston A Price Foundation. And I’ve written about it before quite a bit on my blog.

Just as you’re saying that it reminded me of the fact that when I was pregnant with my second child I was experimenting again with vegetarianism, which does not agree with my body. And I’m really not a big fan of vegetarianism period. I was hungry all the time… that’s how my body responds to that. I had a lot of issues with low blood sugar and things like that, and so what you’re saying is definitely bringing back things that I had forgotten about that time. I definitely agree with you.

You publish some of the pictures that Weston A Price has in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration that shows how people change and how their children change really fast when their diet becomes poor.

R: Thanks for the feedback because my partner and I were also vegetarianism before pregnancy and didn’t eat too much meat, and that’s exactly when we pinpointed as causing the cavities – within just a couple hours’ time, a pregnant mother – her body gets depleted if she’s not eating the right foods. So there’s a bigger picture that I mention in the book.

What Weston Price did was travel around the world in the 30′s. He was a Dentist, he examined traditional cultures – what happened when they switched to a modern diet. And every single time, in at least ten different countries all over the planet – different genetics, different people – every single time they switched to the modern diet and nothing else changed, their bodies became unfit for life. They started losing their teeth, they also started having the diseases that are common with our modern civilization. Diseases that had been unknown to them.

And tooth decay – relative to the other diseases like cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, tooth decay is a relatively minor disease and happens before the imbalance gets bigger.

So Weston Price documented how our modern diet makes us sick and he proved it in the laboratory by analyzing the nutrients of the food and found that on average, the native diets that promoted healthy people and immunity to tooth decay had 4 times more minerals, and ten times more fat soluble vitamins than our modern diet.

So, our teeth fall out and decay because we don’t have enough nutrients in our body. And our body – it’s like if you put a plant in soil that’s not strong, the plant will grow weak or wilted or the leaves will be discolored. The same way our bodies have a – some people are a little different, but overall we have some certain requirements, a certain amount of minerals. Our modern diet is a complete failure.

And in a bigger picture, although it’s more the topic of my next book which hopefully will be done in a couple of months called Healing Our Children – our society in general is a failure in terms of what we’ve done to the environment, what we’ve done to other countries and what we’ve done to yourself and to our children. The way we live causes the disease.

Modern dentistry believes in Louis Pasteur’s theory of disease. Louis Pasteur says that germs come from outside of us and infect us if our body’s weak. And then later added that we have these antibodies and defenses to germs and so forth. And the problem with that theory is that germs – you have no control over whether these germs infect you or not.

And modern dentistry follows Louis Pasteur’s theory saying that tooth decay is an infectious disease that you get from the mother… that’s where they say is the main source. And once you get it there’s not much you can do about it except try to keep the germs away from you.

C: Right. And what’s so interesting about Dr Price’s findings – it makes so much good sense. To think that you can separate the teeth from the rest of the body and what’s so obvious about the connection between nutrition and health – with the rest of the body, that makes so much sense.

Why should the teeth be any different than bone or muscle or anything else in our bodies? But that is what parents are told. They’re told that the best thing that they can do is to have good dental hygiene with their child. And that doesn’t pass the common sense test either. Because native people didn’t have toothbrushes and floss and dentistry and yet as you mentioned, when they ate their native diets, they had beautiful healthy teeth. Many of them had never ever used a toothbrush.

R: Many native groups – there are some groups that had some amount of decay but groups that were really following their ancient diet had no decay. They never brushed their teeth and if you just – like you said, think about the bigger picture, the creator of life did not design people to need toothbrushes.

I even mention in the book that there were two groups of people that Weston a Price mentioned that ate a lot of grains. One was the Gaelics of the coast of Scotland, and the other was the people, in the isolated Swiss Alps. And they both are close to a thousand calories a day of grains, yet they didn’t brush their teeth and had almost zero decay.

C: So for a parent who is listening to this and perhaps their child has some tooth decay, is it an automatic thing that they have to seek the help of a Dentist? What are your thoughts on that? Is there a way for them to reverse it or arrest it? Or are they going to be shackling their child to the dentist chair?

R: Some parents that I’ve talked with – the protocol is everything I put in my book that works best for children because it was designed after my daughter who is now 4 ½, and never – she has what would be called severe tooth decay but has never had a dental treatment and is not in any pain or discomfort, because her teeth can protect themselves.

So what a parent needs to do is buy my book – the reason I say that is because I put in a whole special section for parents to help them really get clear on what’s happening with the teeth. So you need that small investment, it’s really worth it because I can’t just explain – it would take me an hour to explain it all. That’s why I wrote the book so someone can have that easy explanation. The book’s available on my website, CureToothDecay.com.

So the first thing that I recommend parents do is just to accept it. Because it’s usually really a stressful experience because it’s our inner fear. Ok, now my child is going to get sick, they’re going to get teeth pulled out, they’re going to get infected, their health and their life might be at risk because of this… I’m a bad parent… so all these voices within us and it’s just really acknowledge there’s a problem. Acknowledge what’s happening. And usually in the moment, the parent finds that the child isn’t in any pain.

Then what a parent needs to do is follow the secret formula that Weston Price explained to us, it’s quite simple and outlined repeatedly in my book, especially in the new edition.

There are 3 special food categories that have the fat soluble vitamins and parents need to feed their children as much as those foods as the child will eat. And avoid all the modern foods industry commerce – the most common foods that parents eat that cause decay are flour products, it’s pretty well known and acknowledge that young children can’t digest grain products very well.

Give your child unpasteurized dairy products from cows eating grass, specifically the butter from cows eating rapidly growing grass. Organs from fish like fish eggs, clams, oysters, liver from grass feeding animals and bone marrow from grass feeding animals. That really is the special food, and you give them to your child as much as they’ll eat without causing them any discomfort.

C: You know it’s surprising too how young children have very open minds when it comes to food. Sometimes what we may not like or what we may think is disgusting, they will eat with abandon. I was sharing with some of my friends online that my dryer smells like cod liver oil right now because I can’t keep my two year old out of the bottle of fish oil that I keep in the refrigerator, she’s constantly getting into it, opening it up, pouring it into a glass and drinking it. Which I don’t mind! But then she goes and wipes it up with a towel and I wash the towel, and dry the towel and it makes the dryer smell bad. Just a side point.

But it makes me happy that she will take cod liver oil and most adults are disgusted by it. My 7 year old loves sardines and will eat them by the canful whenever I give them to him.

So sometimes it’s just a matter of finding what your child likes – if your child doesn’t like liver, then try something else like sardines or try something else. But they’ll surprise you sometimes, and their bodies will crave these foods and they will let you know what they need.

I think every mother has noticed that her toddler goes through a period where they’re constantly climbing up into the butter dish. I mean every mom I’ve spoken to has seen their toddler go through that when they’re about 18 months old. They will pick up the butter and just eat it straight off the stick. And to me, I always found that it was a sign that their bodies needed more fat at that time.

But it disturbs me some of the propaganda out there about the low fat craze, and people putting their child on a low fat diet, it’s such a bad idea for them. I think it’s showing in the pediatric dentistry, the fastest growing branch of medicine. I was just reading that the other day.

So obviously we’re not doing something. What we’re doing isn’t working. So I really encourage parents to get your book and read it.

R: Well said, what we’re doing doesn’t work. My daughter also loves butter and especially the yellow colored butter which – there’s an Anchor variety which is pretty good, KerryGold is ok. Or local grass fed butter, and the children know what they want to eat and you just let them eat as much of it as they want, pretty much. Like your daughter really wants cod liver oil! And my daughter sometimes she does.

C: Their needs change from day to day, sometimes parents get very worked up because their child that was eating well and heartily one week is all of a sudden not eating, and sometimes that’s just what their body’s going through. They’ve hit a growth plateau and don’t need as many calories. It’s as adults that have a problem because we always finish our plate whether we need it or not! But children are very in tune with what their bodies need and if your child is breastfed they are taking in the exact amount of calories that they need that feeding.

And I think that breastfed children especially as toddlers and young children do the exact same thing. They know how to listen to their stomaches and eat what they need and stop when they’re done. And we really shouldn’t try to force them to finish their plate or hold them back if they’re really wanting to eat a lot.

R: That’s true, there is. Sweets are definitely an exception to that rule.

C: Right right. Absolutely.

R: We have a mass cultural eating disorder where we drug ourselves and do it to our children and unfortunately the parents who are following these low fat programs and things like that, it’s not just the medical establishment that’s promoting these unhealthy practices, it’s also the parent who says, yeah I believe what you guys tell us, I believe you have the best interests of my child at stake.

And parents need to wake up to the fact that the government doesn’t have our children’s best interests at stake. As parents we’re the only ones who can be responsible for our children and can’t give that responsibility and should not give that responsibility to the government.

Now if you have some wise elder, trusted adviser, grandparent, so on – yeah you want to take their advice. But unfortunately corporations who are really controlling American medical associations, people who just want to make money off basically sick children, they have the opposite of our best interests at stake. I told my friend – just do the opposite of what they say. You’ll probably be in decent health.

C: I definitely call myself a rebel – have your baby at home, breastfeed until the baby is done, drink raw milk, live dangerously! That’s true.

Talking about following the money and people who have an interest in you being unhealthy… the people that control our food supply are also not thinking about our health. They’re thinking about the almighty dollar. And so now we have a situation where most people are eating mostly corn, and soy, and that’s not how our bodies were designed. Our bodies weren’t designed to eat large amounts of simple carbohydrates like corn and a food like soy which nobody should really eat!

R: Soy is definitely not a food although there is a big area where a lot more research could be done. Native people in Mexico – their staple is corn, and they’re very healthy people, but the kind of corn they’re eating and how they prepare it is not the genetically modified corn, grown on deficient soil we have in the U.S. There’s a lot of ignorance about our food. I really want someone to catalog all the healthy diets around the planet so we can make them more and more available. I don’t know how to prepare corn like these native peoples do.

C: Well I’m sure that the way that they grind it – it’s very coarse so that in itself would make a difference in how it’s accepted by the body, and of course it’s whole corn. When I think of corn ground up I think of something like grits. I’m a southerner and we eat grits! But that’s a very different food than a whole ground corn porridge or something like that… an entirely different food and it’s been striped of all its nutrition and you’ve just got this carbohydrate left.

A lot of what’s wrong with our diet is what we do to food. We mess it up by messing with it too much and not eating it in its natural state.

R: And with grains, a lot of them have to be prepared in really careful ways that we don’t do. Like I was reading in the Swiss Alps that they might ferment their bread for 2 to 4 weeks. Nobody I know of here is doing 2 to 4 weeks fermenting sourdough with fresh ground grain grown in really rich soil.

So we’re missing out on nutrients, so as a result our children suffer and some of them get lucky and don’t get sick, and some do. Their faces don’t develop properly and their teeth get crowded from nutritional deficiencies.

C: The good news is because of people like you, I think that more people are beginning to see this. It’s beginning to be obvious to people that we’re just not doing something right. We have more food and more money than our great Grandparents had but we’re getting sicker and sicker younger and younger.

So the more we talk about it and the more we write about it online and in books and things, the more people are going to start figuring it out. So it’s really good what you’ve done, put this together for parents because you mentioned this before. It really is a difficult thing emotionally when your child has tooth decay. You deal with a lot of shame and guilt about it and overcoming that is kind of the first thing to do.

R: Because a lot of these things happen because it’s kind of unconscious in a way, we just kind of accept – oh we can live in this lifestyle, this is how we grew up, so we have these unconscious patterns. When a crisis happens like tooth decay it kind of shatters the pattern we have. Forgive yourself for all the mistakes that you made when you didn’t know. Most moms – they go to the Dentists, they talk to all their friends, they do everything they can and all they’re getting is bad advice.

C: Thank you so much Rami for talking with me today and sharing this information. I think your book is great and you’ve actually released a new edition since the copy that I have.

See also: How to Treat Childhood Cavities with Nutrition