Weston Price - That a Clean Tooth Does Not Decay and that Mouth Cleanliness Affords the Best Known Protection Against Dental Caries -

(IV) Tooth Decay is not a disease, but a symptom like many other degenerative processes.

This article was written by Weston Price.

While dental caries is recognized as the most universal affliction which accompanies civilization and is, as we have shown, a direct expression and effect of nutritional stress, it can now be shown to constitute or represent only one of many injurious effects of expressions of faulty nutrition. Rickets of childhood has been recognized as one of these.

Several affections or so-called diseases of modern civilization are progressively on the increase. Others are particularly destructive for certain groups. Others chiefly maim and produce deformities in various parts of the body, such as the face and dental arches.

Facial and dental irregularities have been chiefly ascribed to mixed racial physical characteristics. In my investigations of primitive racial stocks and of the effects produced by their displacing of part of their natural food with foods of modern civilization, it has been disclosed that the rigid conformity to physical type characteristics of these races has been lost in a single generation as an effect of nutrition on the developmental processes during prenatal and postnatal life.

For the face this may express itself as retarded growth of either the middle third or lower third or both. This directly affects the arrangement of the teeth in the dental arches as well as the interrelation of the dental arches. It occurred in as high a percentage of full bloods in the first generation after adopting the nutrition of modern civilization as in the mixed bloods. This deficiency was also found to have an expression in many other structures of the body.

One of the most serious defects results in abnormal pelvic development and consequent increase in difficulties involved in child-birth, jeopardizing either or both mother and child. This greatly increases mortality for both.

These injuries were not limited in their expression to abnormal or disturbed physical development, but were found to be associated with marked loss in ability to combat infections, both acute and chronic. Focal infections more readily metastasized, involving other organs and tissues of the body. For example, in twenty homes at the point of contact with modern civilization, ten bedridden cripples were found, chiefly involved with arthritis. Not one was found among the most primitive group.

It is common knowledge that primitive races are destroyed rapidly by tuberculosis when they make contact with modern civilization. This has been chiefly ascribed to an absence of an inherited defense. My studies of the primitives at the point of contact with modern civilizations have revealed that the individuals chiefly affected are those who show distinct evidence of nutritional disturbance in infancy and childhood, as indicated by a disturbed development of the facial structures.

Every on of twenty Eskimo and Indian boys and girls in the Government Hospital at Juneau, Alaska, showed marked irregularities. Every one of twenty Eskimo and Indian boys and girls in the Government Hospital at Juneau, Alaska, showed marked irregularities of the teeth and dental arches. The same nutritional injury that had made normal physical development impossible and prevented the development of a normal chemical laboratory for producing the immunity maintaining factors. Most of these individuals suffered also from active dental caries.

Tooth Decay is a Symptom of Disease

In my investigations now in progress I am finding this association to obtain in modernized communities. I am also finding that a very large percentage of the individuals referred for the study of the possible relationship between dental focal infections and chronic or acute systematic involvements in a very large percentage of individuals have evidence of physical injury which has resulted from a nutritional deficiency in childhood. This throws important new light on the clinical findings previously reported that over 95 percent of the cases of heart involvement beginning before ten years of ages suffered from rampant dental caries. Neither is necessarily the cause of the other; both are symptoms of a common nutritional cause, and neither is related to the presence or absence of oral cleanliness.

A new truth is a new sense, but new truths come only to prepared minds. We must think of life in terms of its building blocks, and these are partly static and partly dynamic.

Physical decadence, including dental caries, is in large part the absence of these dynamic vital forces. They have largely been overlooked because of the difficulties in their visualization and identification.

The arguments of the affirmative are typically those of this mechanistic or machine age.

Rami's Comments on Dr. Prices Tooth Decay Paradigm Shifting Article:

With our modern culture comes a modern disease. A disease in which our body suffers. We can remove and heal this suffering, by changing our health. In order to halt tooth cavities, we must change the way we live. In particular, how we relate to the environment with the foods that we eat.