Weston A. Price: A True Giant of His Day

The system of dentistry practiced in most 'developed' countries is largely based on lucratively treating effects rather than elucidating cause(s) of poor dental hygiene and dental health. For example, the training of dentists in the UK including its medical doctors or GPs (general practitioners) excludes nutritional and dietary components within their training and academic syllabi. Allied to the poor training regime of dentists, supermarkets sell foods heavily processed and laced with sugars both natural and artificial. Governments allow all manner of heavily processed foods to market and due to high costs of living, many folk cannot consume healthy foods because it is not stocked or too expensive to buy. Children nowadays regularly consume fruit drinks adulterated with high levels of sugar and this is before most of them are out of nappies - what could possibly go wrong!! Clearly, the information and messaging around diet, health and dietary hygiene are heavily slanted to profit before dental well-being.

That old adage, 'we are what we eat' is as true today as it was 150 years ago. I have often wondered how other peoples and cultures in far away places dealt with issues of dental hygiene and dental health? I came across a book by an old-skool dentist called Weston A Price (1870 - 1948) who shed much light on the relationship between diet, nutrition, culture and food systems through both time and space. His book is a fascinating journey to various cultures around the world in which he examined site-specific skulls, jaw structure, farming practices, culture, climate and its resultant effect on longevity of teeth, jaw formation and general health and well being.

Significantly, Weston A. Price was adept in taking both a systems-wide and atom-by-atom approach in elucidating the 'do's and 'do nots' of good dental hygiene. Long story short, he went one step further than most folks in this field by not only looking at the types of foods consumed in areas having peoples with good dental structure and formation, he also analysed the mineral content of the soils in which these foods were grown. In his local practice he noticed that peoples from one side of town had more teeth problems than those from the other side of town. Everyone more or less consumed the same foods grown in the same region yet the inhabitants of one side of town were much healthier and paid fewer visits to his practice. All things being equal, the only difference in nutrition between both sides of town lay in the composition of the soils. He elucidated the 'magic ingredients' inherent within different soil types that gifted good dental hygiene and well being.

The minerals of interest lie in their ability to 'scavenge' various ions from food and transfer them in elevated levels to the consumer. He marketed a food supplement called Vitamin K2 MK-7 which is still manufactured today by a company called EVO based in Merseyside NW England. I suspect these vitamins also catalyse a whole body response i.e. it might be possible that those with arthritis or any disease of skeletal tissue may find benefit in using these vitamins.

His book can be bought here: https://price-pottenger.org/price-pottenger-store/#store-books and:

He has a Foundation and website which helps to keep his good work flowing: https://www.westonaprice.org/

What I like about the work of Weston A Price was his robust and scientific approach to solving one of his lifelong riddles. He was also sceptical about the use of fluorides in diet. Unfortunately, one of the pillars of modern dentistry is to say that fluorides reduce tooth caries. In response, many municipalities, councils and even countries routinely add fluorides to drinking water and its use in dental products is prodigious to say the least. For years and years I have argued to many dentists both past and present that fluoride is a neurotoxin. The looks dentists gave me suggest I have stepped onto Earth from another planet or alternatively, I seriously messed around with their training and programming!!

Interestingly, major sources of fluorides for use in dentistry and drinking water include the tailings of nuclear waste process streams and other sources of phosphatic rock wastes. It is also interesting to note that I started looking at these issues in the 1990s using my Netscape browser. I was able to access many hues of opinion related to the use of fluorides in water and dentistry. If you try and find any information on the origin of fluorides used in the water industry or dentistry today, Google presents you with just one side of the story, official sources that repeat the mantra, fluoride-treated water helps to reduce tooth caries. One site that provides an alternative universe of ideas and actions against the use of fluorides in our drinking water systems and dental practices can be found here: https://fluoridealert.org/

I also downloaded additional information on the fluoride saga here: https://archive.org/details/NutritionAndPhysicalDegeneration

National Toxicology Programme

Enter stage left, the most recent scientific study on the use of fluorides that show evidence that fluorides impair our neurological development i.e. it truly is a neurotoxin. This work was carried out by the US government agency, the NTP. The NTP or National Toxicology Programme are tasked in evaluating all sorts of substances for their toxicological characteristics and they are a world leader in what they do. Ultimately, they provide scientific advice to the US government and myriad food, health and well-being agencies of America. The peer review process on this work took a number of years to complete because on the face of it, the US government has been adding fluorides to it's water supply for many years. Dentists view the use of fluoride as a tool against dental caries and there is a huge fluoride ecosystem within dentistry and the industry that supplies dentistry products. The backlash to this work was huge from all interested parties but the scientific evidence speaks volumes that (a) the source of most fluorides are from industrial wastes and (b) it is a neurotoxin and particularly harmful to the neurological development of children.