What do you think of when you hear the word cavities? A dentist’s office? A drill? Pain?

Thanks to Rami Nagel, I think of cures. Author of Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities With Nutrition, Rami has helped thousands of people learn the truth about what causes cavities. People who follow his program watch their teeth re-mineralize, their cavities heal, their gum disease vanish. The secret? (Here’s a hint: it’s not regular brushing and flossing.)

Put simply, it’s all about proper nutrition. Recently, Ann Marie at Cheeseslave ran a post on what causes cavities, also known as dental caries. Her post inspired me to track down Rami Nagel and invite him to write a guest post summarizing his research on how to prevent cavities and have healthier teeth and gums:

Nature designed your teeth to a shining white level of perfection. 5 Billion years of evolution, and hundreds of millions of years of successful survival of humans and our distant ancestors, without dentists, was based upon an intricate plan for success and health.

In other words, we were designed to have healthy teeth our entire life. Decayed and falling out teeth would lead to an inability to survive in the ancient world, and thus I conclude it isn’t inherent in the human design.

In recent times humans have been inflicted with a plague whose official name is “dental caries.” The plague effects approximately 90% of the population. It gets worse with age, about 28% of 2-5 year olds have dental cavities, and by the time people reach ages 20-39 the number climbs to 87%. The plague is not cured by chemicals, by detergents, and it is certainly not cured by dentists drilling holes in teeth.

The True Causes of Cavities

Dental greats Weston Price and Melvin Page illuminated the cause of cavities. Dr. Price found primitive people around the world who had minute levels of tooth cavities–and in some cases none at all. When these people switched to a modern diet, tooth decay became rampant. The modern diet consisted of mainly of white flour, concentrated sugars in the forms of syrup, jams, honey or white sugar. It also had meat in tins, vegetable oils, and canned vegetables.

Dentist Melvin Page went into further detail of how modern foods affect our bodies, he found that cavities occur as a result of imbalances in our calcium and phosphorus metabolism. When the calcium and phosphorus ratios in our blood go out of balance, we get tooth cavities, or gum disease. Correcting the levels, primarily through a change in diet, resolved the problem.

Most recently dentist Ralph Steinman, together with John Leonora, found that whether we have healthy teeth or not is regulated by our glandular health – particularly the hypothalamus in the brain and the parotid glands in the jaw. These glands control whether we have active decay or healthy teeth (no decay) based upon the fluid flow in the microscopic channels within the teeth.

How to Heal and Prevent Cavities

We can combine the wisdom of these three dentists together, along with trial and error to create a program that can be as high as 95% effective in halting and even reversing tooth decay. I have received many reports from ecstatic people who have made their cavities hard again and who have healed tooth infections by following some or all of the guidelines below.

The premise is simple: we need to eat how our bodies were designed to eat.

We need to be like our ancestors at the dawn of farming, who prepared their foods carefully to preserve the taste and nutrients of the foods.

The three most important changes you can make are these:

Avoid processed foods. Processed grains, the breakfast cereals, the bagels and the pasta cause blood sugar fluctuations. Over time our glands become tired monitoring the blood sugar, and we get cavities. Monitor your sweet intake. Yes, honey, maple syrup, fruit, are all natural sweets. But many people don’t realize that many types of fruit have been hybridized to make them sweeter. If you have tooth problems, you cannot be eating fruit all day. Particularly tasty sweet fruits, like bananas, dates, and blueberries, are very high in sugar. Eat more Activator X. Dr. Price found an important factor in tooth mineralization, that is related to fertility, which he called activator X. Activator X occurs primarily in butter when the cows eat rapidly growing green grass. Many people account that by adding a high quality grass fed raw milk to their diet, their cavities have stopped, and some can even see new tooth structure building. The power of raw milk or butter to stop cavities comes from the fertility factor present during certain times of the year. I suggest eating 1 tablespoon or more of high quality butter per day. Without this substance, the body does not have activating “messages” to the hormonal system to build healthy teeth and bones. In India, ghee from a cow or buffalo is considered a sacred food for pregnancy, breastfeeding and growing children. It is precisely this activator X component that assures bright white healthy teeth.

There’s significantly more I could discuss (I did write an entire book on the subject, after all), but let me leave you with a summary. If you want the healthiest teeth possible, eat:

whole foods freshly prepared,

yellow butter,

organs and glands like bone marrow and liver,

mineral rich bone broths,

raw dairy, and

a variety of sea foods.

Tooth decay with age is NOT normal.

We have replaced whole nourishing vitamin-dense foods with modern, convenient, chemically-laden and factory-made foods that lack vitamins. Without food-based sources of fat-soluble and water soluble vitamins, our bodies decay over time. Our road map for perfect health becomes corrupted, and our teeth decay. Our bodies crumble because what we are eating does not support good health.