This isn't finished yet, but I'm posting so that I feel pushed into a corner and get it written out--much for my own benefit, since putting everything in writing helps cement it in my mind and get me onto the implementation step. And I don't feel that I have any new ideas here, this is just really my way of combining the great ideas from other places that seem right for us into one list.
Okay, after a rather long break I’m back. First the news with my son and then a summary of the reading I’ve been doing on nutrition.
We saw 2 holistic dentists last week and I was stunned. The discoloration on my son’s teeth wasn’t decay, it was tartar. That never occurred to me. Apparently tartar is quite rare in young children, though I didn’t know that beforehand—tartar just really never occurred to me. It built up on his two bottom front teeth because the teeth are close together and are crooked—they form a ‘V’ shape toward his tongue so it’s hard to clean the bottom of the ‘V’ well. The short term solution is to buy a toothbrush that tapers at the end more and change the angle that I brush so that that area is cleaned better. But that doesn’t in any way address why the tartar is building up so quickly.
So, he’s got this really fast tartar build-up—the tartar is calcium depositing in the plaque (that’s how it was explained to me anyway), so the body is dumping calcium, which doesn’t necessarily imply too much calcium. I’ve looked into a couple possible reasons, but I think I had a breakthrough this weekend and figured it out.
I’ve been giving my son fairly high doses of cod liver oil for a while now to correct a vitamin A deficiency (an illness he had last Christmas made this obvious, and it makes sense based on my health history and his in-utero environment). I think _I_ actually caused the tartar to build up by supplementing vitamins A and D and thus creating a deficiency of K2 (Weston Price’s Activator X). Vitamin K2 is very important for calcium utilization, and his body wants to use the A & D I’ve been giving him, but it’s created a relative scarcity of K2 (because that’s also needed to utilize the A & D). And it seems to be lacking in autistic kids—my son’s not autistic, but he is suffering from mercury poisoning, and while I don’t think they’re synonymous, there are enough overlaps that I found that highly interesting.
Anyway, I could be wrong about vitamin K2 (the lack) being the cause of the tartar, and I think that much tartar, building up that quickly, puts Diego at risk of cavities unless I make some changes, and I don’t want to rely on just some additional K2 to balance the A & D. So I kept reading about the nutrition side and I’ve been reading and re-reading a few chapters in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (Price’s book). Price’s argument is that optimal health and good dental health need a generous supply of minerals, lots of fat-soluble vitamins, and a sufficient quantity of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. It seems like the ratio of protein, carbohydrates and fat is pretty flexible depending on the individual and the food sources around. The groups Price studied had roughly 4x the mineral consumption and 10x the fat-soluble vitamin consumption of Americans in the 1930s. The Depression clearly contributed to the low vitamin and mineral consumption of many of the time, but nowadays processed foods are so ubiquitous that I don’t feel I can assume that we are any better off now, and perhaps we’re even worse.
So, here’s what I’m going to aim for (it will be a gradual process, since I’ll need to develop some new recipes and cook _even more_ than I do now):
1—1 cup of stock per person per day (4 of us, so about 2 gallons/wk allowing for some to be spilled/thrown away)
2—less sugar
3—supplements: cod liver oil, Carlson Laboratories K2, and our usual stuff (for the mercury and detox issues we’ve got)
4—more pureed soups
5—lots of vegetables
6—a fermented food or drink with each meal
7—some grains, but really nutrient-dense choices
8--we eat meat, and will continue, so since it isn't a change, I didn't list it, and I don't have any thoughts about whether it's important on the dental health side of things, but for our overall health, I think it's good
The first thing I’ve found out is that the minerals in stock are very similar to those in milk. Stock doesn’t contain any chlorine or fat-soluble vitamins. It’s rich in calcium and phosphorus and also contains magnesium, sodium, potassium, sulfur and fluoride. Boron is also important to bone health and I need to read more, but I don’t think boron deficiency is much of a concern compared to the others (but I should read more to be sure). I’m not going to worry about chlorine, salt is mostly sodium chloride and we salt our food to taste so I think we’re covered there. I can’t find a solid statement anywhere on the actual mineral content of stock, probably because it can vary depending on how it’s made, nor can I find a quantitative statement comparing the bioavailability of the minerals in stock to those in milk. Stock is supposed to be very easily digested and the minerals are supposed to be very easily absorbed. I’m going to start with trying to get 1 cup of stock into each of the kids each day, and maybe I’ll need to go up to 1 ½ cups.
Between soup at lunchtime and stock as a cooking liquid for grains, I think I can use 2 gallons per week. I've also reduced it a couple times and used it as a sauce (take the stock and boil it down to 25% of the original volume, thank you JaneS for the idea) and used it as a sauce for veggies or meat, but I don't have any recipes yet to add some better flavor, so I haven't done much there.
We’ve also got a mineral supplement that the kids take, through our healthcare provider, from a company called Perque (we use a coffee grinder to make the Bone Guard into a powder).
As for the fat-soluble vitamins, the WAP article on vitamin K2 is available online in the Files section of the vitaminK yahoo group:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/VitaminK/
I found it fascinating (that’s an understatement--definitely worth joining the yahoo group just to get the article).
Sugar is a real drain on the body in so many ways, it just drains minerals and the calories displace nutrient-dense foods (I write this because this is my weakness, much more so than the kids, and I’ve been struggling with it for so long… but I’m going to keep working at it and make progress). So we’re going to limit processed sugar, of course, but also fruit. Not zero fruit, but a serving a day seems reasonable for now. I think this is actually probably my next biggest stumbling block, for my own health, I mean. I've got 30 years of bad habits, but on the plus side, I am highly motivated. Because feeling like this sucks.
For the pureed soups and fermented veggies, the idea behind both is to help absorption (thank you to the old threads!). I think, for us, we really need to address two sides of the coin--eating more nutrient-dense foods, and doing what we can to increase the nutrients that we actually absorb from those foods. This just feels like a good step to me, and thankfully my kids are usually very happy to eat soup, so I need to find some recipes to get me started (not sure of veggie combinations that would puree well). And the fermented veggies are good bacteria, also important (and it would be nice to get regular enough about this that we could ditch the probiotic supplement).
I'm also going to try the coconut milk yogurt that I read about in a couple other threads. I am going to try it first just using the probiotic supplement we have as a starter, and if the taste is weird (weirder than yogurt, I mean, since that's not a taste I am accustomed to), then I'll look into the non-dairy yogurt starters that I've seen. You see I have lots of ideas, and not enough implemented yet? Sigh...
Anyway, this is my plan so far. I'm not sure what I'm missing, and I really haven't done any reading on the tooth product side of things, focusing on the nutrition side seems the first big step that we need. Thoughts/criticism/advice/anything else would be great.
My son is 18mos old, and from the WAP perspective, tooth decay is not a surprise, my health went downhill in the middle of my pregnancy. But I don't want to just rely on diet, you know? Philosophy is all well and good, but I want this to work, so thank you for all the other ideas (products and such)--that stuff, I really don't know much about but need to learn soon.
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oil pulling! i've learned about this 2 months ago , did it for 2 days and then totally forgot until your post! i really have to begin again
