What comment do you have about OraMedics?

I spoke with Dr. Bob Nara many years ago when he wrote his book and had the violent split with organized dentistry. Most of his ideas were sound and certainly more health-oriented than those of establishment dentistry/medicine. Since I did not yet have the NH concept, I don't remember how well the OraMedics recommendations correlate with NH. As I remember, like Paul Keyes' approach with antibiotics, baking soda, salt, etc., the emphasis was on therapeutically eliminating the bacterial plaque as "causative agent". We HAVE found that gum disease can be controlled in about 90% of cases with METICULOUS mechanical cleaning of EVERY pocket and sulcus EVERY 24 hours to remove the sticky bacterial plaque, even when no other lifestyle changes are made (& or course, they usually aren't!).

In advanced cases, the pockets may be so deep that you're physically blocked from reaching them to do that daily cleaning (this is the rationale for recommendations of surgically recontouring the gum and bone tissue--giving you access to de-plaque).

Wow, recontouring gums and bone tissues.... that gives me the willies. Let's move to something less visual.... What comments do you have about calcium and phosphorous balances in the body? The ratio between the body's calcium and phosphorous?

The original research may have been from Drs. Weston Price or Melvin Page, or perhaps much earlier. "Healthy Bones," by Nancy Appleton, author of "Lick the Sugar Habit". is a good source for info on this subject. She states that "Calcium is best used by the body if it exists in a 2.5 to 1 ratio with the phosphorous. Therefore, even if there are 11 milligrams per deciliter in the blood, the body can only use 7.5 mg, or 2.5 times the 3 mg of phosphorous. If the phosphorous drops, so does the functioning calcium in the same ratio. Therefore, if phosphorous becomes depleted, calcium becomes depleted as well, whether it exists in the bloodstream or not." This stuff is now pretty well accepted even by the medical establishment and has interesting implications for protein balance as well as calcium metabolism, one of the most complicated metabolites in the body (it's involved in EVERYTHING!). Anyhow, it gets lots more complicated;

Apparently calcium and phosphorous are not the only minerals involved in balanced ratios in the body. Dr. Paul Eck, Analytical Research Labs, Phoenix, AZ, has published a neat "Mineral Wheel," a concise chart showing the relationships of 24 different elements to each other and their ratios and balances in the body. Fascinating stuff!

Are there any problems regarding calcium loss during fasting? Problems caused by loss of calcium from teeth during fasting?

I don't know & I doubt it. "Research" shows it doesn't happen, but I have only opinions.

I know a hygienist who experienced teeth problems. According to him, he started eating meat and the problems went away. Comment?

The Pig-out-on-pot-roast-cure? NH pundits would probably say the "success of this remedy is due to your body shutting down the detox process going on in your mouth in order to process the toxins produced from the dead animal rotting in your gut, the result being LESS health, more enervation, more susceptibility to more serious degenerative diseases."The mouth, including teeth and gums, is part of the rest of the body. My interpretation of NH theory is that all disease, including periodontal disease is the body's response to toxins (the reason one body responds with gum disease while another responds with arthritis, acne, colitis, headaches, is determined by genetic factors. Therefore, if you want to "treat" your perio disease, according to NH concepts you fast, get sufficient SLEEP (quite a bit of evidence shows that we only build or rebuild tissue during sleep -- like babies & puppies) rest, sunshine, sex, productive work, develop emotional poise, and take only pure air, clean water, and food of your biological adaptation.

Can teeth "heal" themselves?

I've seen gum disease and tooth decay stop and the carious lesions remineralize in time following a strict de-plaquing regime combined with dietary/lifestyle change. I've never seen the missing parts of a tooth rebuild. Methinkst cavities happen when the normal flow of fluid OUTWARD from the pulp to the surface of the teeth is stopped or reversed and stagnates or flows INWARD, bringing toxins, acids, bacteria, etc. INTO the tooth. This reverse of fluid flow has been shown to occur when folks chose to poison themselves with America's favorite drugs: sucrose, ethanol, nicotine and caffeine. It probably also occurs on a high animal-product, grease & salt diet, but I don't know.

When Eskimos started eating cooked food, didn't the condition of their teeth degenerate?

Dunno. I've read reports that the closer they lived to the trading post, where they could buy sugar and other junk, the fewer teeth they had, but those would also be the folks likely to thermally derange their food also.

In the M2M you talked about your meeting with Hygienist and dentist, Dr. Tom Stone. Would you review that experience for us?

Thanks to Don Weaver, a member of the Natural Hygiene M2M, I spent three and a half hours with his friend, Dr. Tom Stone. Dr. Tom's a San Francisco dentist and the healthiest human I've met who lives by NH -- and HAS lived the NH lifestyle for over 25 years! He thrives on an all-live diet, 60-75% fruit, LOTS of aerobic and other exercise, copious fun, and not much work -- even enjoyable, productive, beneficial work. He's an ALGAE fanatic, and he convinced me to give this seafood a try in '92 as a supplement for ALL the minerals that we're probably not getting due to soil depletion, etc. (I noticed no significant differences while eating the supplements and lost interest after depleting all those he provided.)

He monitors his daily salivary and urine Ph as a guide to fluctuations in health and has figured out how to work about two days a week and ski, windsurf, and mountain bike the other five. He's found long fasts are not healthful (he did fast for 140 of the 365 days of one year a couple decades ago-while continuing his normal activities!) and recommends it if you want to speed up the elimination of toxins, explaining, "Give your body time and energy to do it." In other words, eat only during one six-hour period each day and free the body to eliminate junk about 18+ hours/day. He also says it may take up to eleven years for some of us to rebuild our optimum health after beginning a NH lifestyle (no magic two-year point).

Dr. Stone VERY strongly recommends algae as a food (supplement) for EVERYONE. (No, Tom's not selling algae, or anything else I know of except highest quality dental restorative care). Why? Same reason everyone else gives for supplementing our food intake: depleted soil, higher stress, higher energy needs, deficient metabolism, polluted environment, poor quality foods, etc, etc. AND, algae's different. It isn't processed (except for freeze-dried, etc.) and it's natural and organic. Here's the concept: ALL minerals on the earth, including those formerly in our rich soil, eventually wash into the sea. The ocean's waters contain every mineral known and unknown. Therefore, it's a natural source for supplementation.

From about 1976 to 1989, every time my wife and I travelled to the ocean, we'd carry five 5-gallon glass bottles, carry them as far out into the ocean as possible, fill them with ocean water, haul them back to the car and home to Tahoe, then we'd boil them down to about a 25th of their volume, producing about a gallon of concentrated sea water from which we'd filter the sodium chloride salt. What remained was a 25x concentration saturated solution of all the minerals in the sea, thus all the minerals in the world. I found no benefit to this practice after 13 years, except great fun and exercise in gathering and transporting all that water. That experiment was on the advice of Dr. George Crane, MD, father of conservative senator Phil Crane and author of a long series of articles on health in various journals in the 40's through the 80's.

My present understanding is that drinking those minerals from the sea water does as much good, in the words of Dr. Stone, as eating dirt. They're inorganic minerals and animals don't seem to assimilate minerals in that form. Only plants can transform inorganic into the ORGANIC forms usable by animals. Conclusion: if you're an animal and you need minerals, hire a plant to transform them into stuff you can use. Hence, algae transform the minerals (and concentrates them a lot more effectively than I was doing by boiling all that water) AND, even if they never do any good, they're probably harmless and possibly nutritive. However, Dr. Stone says they're the answer to my questions about getting enough nutrients out of my food, improving digestion, assimilation, metabolism, building energy reserves, improving body temperature (solving the circulation/cold extremity problem), implementing excretion and detoxification, etc., etc., etc. (all by supplying known and unknown trace minerals that act as catalysts for all the body's processes). My conclusion: I quit all my array of megadose vitamins, etc. when starting NH about 1/90 and had no desire to begin supplements, AND I gave the algae a try.

Tom recommended 1-5 gm blue-green algae from Klamath Falls, OR, dulse. He eats seven other types that I'll find out about eventually. Dr. Tom Stone, 2827? Franklin Street, San Francisco, CA 94123, (415) 776-1900. Yes he does have a sheet on how he keeps healthy and how he recommends others do so. He's far more qualified to speak/write on Natural Hygiene issues than I am & I again urge you to interview HIM.

Dr. Bass gives fruit a limited role in an ideal NH diet, and I've read a lot about fruit contributing to dental problems. Comments?

I'm no longer so sure that "fruits can't hurtcha." Today's genetically engineered super-hi sugar fruits may not be much like the fruits our distant ancestors ate and our ability to handle them may be less than those of our distant ancestors.

Fruits contributing to dental problems? I'm still working on that one. We were taught in dental school that cavities are caused by the acids and toxins produced by bad bugs, the bacteria in dental plaque, the sticky stuff that would form on your teeth during the first 24 hours of non-brushing-flossing. I doubt it. Cavities are caused more from the INSIDE than the OUTSIDE & has more to do with that internal fluid flow discussed earlier.

Here's my current thinking: Cavities, like any other disease, are caused by enervation of the body caused by depletion and lack of repletion, as well as toxins, either from outside or within the body. One of the symptoms of an enervated body is stasis or reversal of many of the fluid "pumps" of the body. In MY area of specialty, that means the fluid flowing through the millions of dentinal tubules from the pulp on the inside of the tooth to the outside surface stops or even reverses (verified by scanning electron microscope studies). When the flow reverses, instead of cleansing the tooth by flushing stuff OUT, it's actually sucking garbage IN. The acids, toxins, bacteria, saliva and miscellaneous chemicals in the mouth migrate INWARD, overcoming the body's ability to dilute or counteract them. The reason cavities start in the grooves of the biting surface or the contact points between the teeth and in the groove where the teeth meet the gums is that these are the places that bacteria normally grow to dine on remnants of your food, etc.

The focus of "preventive dentistry" in the last few decades has been to disrupt those bacterial colonies, thus preventing the results of the toxins and acids they produce. That system "works", 'tho it's far from recognizing the true cause, the reversal of tubular flow caused by enervation, caused by toxemia, caused by non-healthful lifestyle and nutrient choice. Cavities you know about, at the gumline, MIGHT remineralize if your body were in optimum health. Cavities between the teeth and in the grooves and around and beneath the old filings might remineralize, but it's less likely.
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