Weston Price diet; teeth and jaw development; the moral question of eating meat

This is a mostly positive and optimistic blog entry, not a negative and unpleasant one.

I've been reading Weston Price's website for a while now and would like to read his books as well. I will eventually look at the books either at the library or I will buy them. I want to figure out how much of these ideas are true and how much of it is 'kookiness.' That's a word I wouldn't normally use, and I don't even look at things that way, but I'm expressing this in writing and can't express my own observations as directly as I would like to. I just want to be cautious. What I really feel is cautiously optimistic.

I feel excited about what I've read on that website. It makes me feel hopeful about the future, about our ability to control our physical health.

I would say that I can't fix the bodies we have now, but I am able to prevent health problems in our children. Lots of health problems, not all of them, but many of them. Obesity and tooth decay are the big ones, along with diabetes, and perhaps autism and dementia. And if the things they say are true, then we might even be able to prevent chronic depression and fatigue. They also say they can prevent heart problems.

Tooth decay leads to dental fillings, and my experience has shown me that all implanted objects are toxic, although some people react more strongly to them than other people do. You should never put an object in your body that you can't remove on your own, for instance, dental fillings, pacemakers, and defibrillators. When you start having a bad reaction to the materials, you can't get it out, and have to go have surgery to remove it. (I've wanted to remove my plastic dental fillings because they cause breast pain and I'm worried about that. It hasn't gone away after six months. I am still thinking about how I can safely remove them.) Anyway, dental fillings cause so many health problems that I would like to prevent cavities so that dental fillings aren't ever needed.

Weston Price talked about things that I haven't ever heard before. I never heard anybody give an explanation for why I have a small jaw and why my teeth were out of place.

I had an overbite, and some of my canine teeth grew out the front of my gums in the wrong place. If I had my way, I would not have gotten braces, but I was too young to choose, and we didn't have the internet. Without the internet, people just do things unquestioningly without ever reading about them first. Now that we have the internet, lots of people still do things without question, but they have a much greater likelihood of just googling something and finding an alternative point of view.

Lots of people think that crooked teeth are just caused by bad genes. If one of your parents had crooked teeth, they think you are destined to have crooked teeth too. If your parent had a small jaw, you will too.

I haven't had the opportunity to test any of Weston Price's research over a large population of people. We would need to see if bad-teeth parents could bear good-teeth children by following the Weston Price diet. I would also add the Feingold Diet or some other type of 'chemical elimination' diet to avoid pesticides, preservatives, xenohormones, and other things that may be harmful.

Here is what Weston Price is all about. He says that crooked teeth, underdeveloped jaws, and some types of facial structures, like a long narrow face, are NOT caused by genes. He says that they are a deformity caused by prenatal malnutrition. Another article on that website talks about observations of wild deer that were exposed to pesticides, and they developed facial deformities also, which is why I am adding that we should avoid certain chemicals and pesticides.

There are other problems with teeth. I've known people who have these problems. Some people have such bad enamel on their teeth that their entire mouth is full of cavities, and they say their enamel is 'falling off' or 'crumbling.' In these people, they get cavities and fillings in almost every single tooth. I knew one person who said that her permanent teeth emerged without enamel, from the very beginning. I did research and read about that condition, and most of them interpreted it as being nothing but genetic. After reading Weston Price I wonder if it was preventable, not inevitable.

I found the Weston Price brochure at a little store down the street called Nature's Pantry. I've gone in there occasionally but not often. I picked up the brochure, thought it was interesting, and then stuck it into my box of mail and papers and forgot all about it. Then, a few months ago, I cleaned out that box of papers and found the brochure. So I then went to their website.

First, I'll mention quickly that adding fluoride to drinking water is one of the worst possible things that anybody can do: it destroys teeth, causes fluoridosis, and makes bones brittle, and worsens osteoporosis, and probably contributes to obesity and other health problems. But that's not the main idea Weston Price wrote about, although it's included.

Weston Price was what decided me against vegetarianism. I had been thinking for a while about long-term beliefs and practices, religion, diet and health. I was asking questions about whether it was okay to kill and eat animals - especially because I myself am the victim of a violent crime, and I know how it feels to endure years of physical and psychological violence, so I empathize even more with animals that are being hurt by humans. I wondered how I could say that it is wrong to physically assault and batter me, and other targeted individuals, and Iraqis, and anybody else who is the victim of 'war,' while at the same time, I eat meat that comes from animals that were kept in a small place for a long time in miserable conditions and then killed.

I don't have enough time to get into the philosophical explanation so I'll say it as simply as I can. You distinguish between non-human animals and yourself; other animals eat meat and we don't blame them for that; humans cooperate with other humans and gain the most by cooperation; humans are similar in some ways, and different in some ways, from non-human animals. It's too long to get into right now, since I have to go to work in a little while.

I had already taken a nutrition class years ago and had been warned about the difficulties of a pure vegan diet - that at least it was helpful to supplement the diet with eggs and milk. But I had been wondering about that subject again, while trying to explain just how and why it is wrong to psychotronically control people and attack them for years at a time. I had to think about it while wondering how the human race would cope with electronic mind control in the long run, what was going to happen, how people would protect themselves against it both physically and psychologically.

So I asked if it was hypocritical to value my own life, and protest against being attacked, while I myself favored killing and eating other animals. Again, I wish I had more time to get into this question. Somewhere you draw the line. I am a heterotrophic organism - I can't just eat pure minerals and sit in the sunlight to produce all that I need. I must eat something that was from a plant or other living organism, so I have to kill or at least damage SOMETHING. And surely plants don't like being ripped up and eaten either. And when I walk, I'm squashing a bacterium with every step that I take.

Well, to focus more on Weston Price, now. Here is what he did. He was a dentist who did some research, around 1950 or so if I recall. He traveled around the world and visited isolated primitive cultures that had not been modernized.

He looked at their teeth and their faces. They did not have the long, narrow faces and small jaws like I have and like many people have, people who end up getting tooth removals and braces. Instead, they had wide faces with plenty of room for their teeth. I hesitate to say they had 'none at all,' but instead I will say 'hardly any' facial deformities, malocclusions (a bite where the teeth don't meet together properly because the teeth are out of alignment), or cavities.

They were eating diets high in saturated animal fats, but had very few health problems - even though nowadays people believe saturated fat is very bad for you. They ate some meat raw, and even ate parts of the animal that we usually avoid, like glands and internal organs. They ate bone marrow, and boiled bones into a broth. They also ate insects and other invertebrates. They did NOT eat a 'low fat diet.' They also used grain differently than we do. They didn't make it into white flour and then bake it into bread. But that's more complicated and there was some variation among the cultures as to how they handled grains. Some of them sprouted the grains, or mashed them and made them into porridge. I'm still learning about how they did that and would like to try it sometime.

They also did not brush their teeth, and they did not use fluoride. Some of them had visible plaque buildup in their mouths, but it DID NOT correspond to lots of cavities. Visible plaque buildup does not necessarily CAUSE cavities - but it's complicated, and I've been experimenting and observing things myself to find out what happens. I can only say that dentists, and most people, will tell you: 'Plaque causes cavities.' It isn't that simple. But I hesitate to say anything more, because I'm still researching this and testing it. I just don't want everybody to stop brushing their teeth all of a sudden and then blame me when all of their teeth fall out, because Nicole said it was okay. You have to be eating the right kind of diet. I am observing which foods are worst for the teeth and thinking about why and how cavities form.

Think about your teeth, and it might just gross you out so badly that you can't bear to ever think of it again. A tooth is a bone, connected to the jawbone. The tooth grows out of the gum by poking a hole through the gum. This is an opening into the tissues of the gums where bacteria and food could enter, except that the gum is supposed to be tightly connected to the tooth. If you get braces, like I did, then your teeth have gotten moved around from their original positions, which stretches the gums out of place and causes gum recession. The gums are no longer bonded to the teeth as tightly as they should be. This is one reason why it's bad to move the teeth around, even if they're maloccluded. Every time I've gone to the dentist for the past few years, they've freaked out because my gums are receding from my teeth, and they don't want my teeth to get eroded at the roots. So far, that hasn't happened, and I'm wondering why not. Maybe it will eventually. (The most painful thing I endured at the dentist was an ultrasonic buzzer thing aimed at the exposed roots of my teeth, with the intent of removing tartar and killing bacteria. It was this high-pitched whistly thing that felt like it was directly triggering all of my pain receptors. Imagine holding an ice cube or ice cream directly against your teeth for several minutes. It's almost like that.)

Anyway, I am also interested in ... what word should I use? Morphogenesis? How bodies develop. Not just the development of babies in the womb, but the growth and development of the body during all of your life, and how it's affected by chemicals, nutrition, microbes, and electromagnetic fields. (They say that the Qi energy meridians really exist and they are the result of lots of weak electromagnetic fields overlapping each other - that's my very simplified explanation, which is probably wrong. But they're studying how the energy meridians participate in the development of the body.)

I'm excited to see that Weston Price believes facial deformities, jaw deformities, crowded crooked teeth, and brittle enamel, are preventable. I think unfortunately Weston Price is no longer alive, but people are still talking about his work. I would like to see a large-scale test of parents with awful teeth, small jaws, and narrow faces, giving birth to babies with healthy teeth and jaws, while on the Weston Price diet. I feel cautiously optimistic. Even if the results aren't as good as I might hope, they might still be an improvement. When I am ready to have children, I will use the diet.

One reason why I want to have children is that I can do at least a few things to prevent problems that I had in my own life. I can't fix or undo certain things, like my bad teeth, but I like the idea that maybe I can prevent that problem in my children.