Your skeleton grows towards a potential you inherit, but responds at least in part to the use you make of it in childhood. You can as a result influence dramatically how your child’s face will develop — in particular the jaws and teeth. Looking after them should then be plain sailing.
Almost all of the growth of a child’s head is really enlargement of his face from an insignificant moulding to an imposing facade that is only completed late in his teens. During this growth his face spreads sideways too, but only so far as his use of it demands. If his diet requires a lot of vigorous chewing his jaws will grow stronger to cope with this. Its muscles will be bulkier and take up more space on the side of his skull, making the upper part of his face much wider. The general effect of this is to broaden his jaw strikingly also, which alters the pattern for the whole of his face; so the upper half — his nose, sinuses and upper teeth — broadens as well.
This creates much more space for his teeth, whose programme of growth is much more closely determined by inheritance. Not only does chewing fibrous food keep them clean and their gums and cement strong, but it ensures space for them to erupt properly. The huge numbers of orthodontic extractions and operations for earache (Leaflet P53) performed on chidren reared since 1950 reflects the very soft diet they grew up on.
The same generation suffered appalling caries — tooth decay — the result of acid erosion of your tooth enamel. These acids are digested from sugar by bacteria which need a sticky plaque of sugar and flour, plastered on your teeth, in which to grow. This condition only occurs significantly on residues of refined food; chewing fibrous food scrubs off wholefood residues before plaque has a chance to form.
Fluoride (Leaflet F13) hardens enamel that has already been softened by caries, but makes no other contribution to health. There is no justification for regarding it as an essential nutrient. On the contrary, it is known to be poisonous at doses little above what you now consume, and would not meet the criteria normally laid down to determine the safety of a drug. Already a large proportion of school-children have white mottling of their teeth which is probably caused by accidental over-consumption of fluorides, from food as well as from water. Despite its toxicity, there is no Government laboratory prepared to check fluoride levels in people who may have too much. Detained justification of all these assertions is set out fully in Waldbott’s book ‘Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma\" and explained in Leaflet F13. Promotion of fluoride as a health benefit can only be rationally explained as a means to justify an official policy of dumping it through the water supply. This rids the aluminium and steel industries of a highly toxic and troublesome effluent which cannot safely be disposed of otherwise.
What to do
1. Eat the diet for health (Pamphlet F1, Leaflet F01) and rear your children on it right from weaning Leaflet M08). This not only ensures full development of their jaws and faces but keeps all you gums strong, and is self-cleaning. Most teeth fall out because of weak gums, not caries.
2. If you wish to use sweeteners keep to one type of sugar all day, and change it daily. Ordinary sugar (sucrose) can be rotated like this with malt (maltose), honey or dates (fructose), and grape-sugar or raisins (glucose) through a four-day cycle. This inhibits plaque development because no bacterium can digest more than one kind of sugar; your habit starves out the bacterium that grows on each type, almost as soon as it has begun to grow. This tactic only works in combination with thorough cleansing to remove all the day’s residues, every day.
3. Brush your teeth regularly, at least once per day. Plaque must be undisturbed for longer if the tooth decay process is to get established. discard your brush once the bristles are splayed out — do not damage it by attempting to reach places it was not designed for. If you have troublesome cracks or narrow gaps use more appropriate material — dental floss, tooth-picks, or the ’water-pic’ (an intermittent high pressure water jet; address in Leaflet S20).
4. Find a dentist sincerely interested in prevention and get checked by him regularly, three times yearly. Take the children along right from infancy and make an outing of it. Their values are based on examples you set. Teach them how to brush their own teeth as soon as possible, finishing off the job for them until they can do it properly. Arrange their meals to finish with something crisp like fruit, rather than sticky pudding or biscuits. Pay special attention to the midday lunch-box (Leaflet M10).
5. Be suspicious if a dentist always needs X-rays to see anything wrong with your teeth — caries starts on the surface and an experienced dentist can usually spot it without.
6. Avoid giving fluoridated toothpaste to children too young to spit out all the washings. It is not intended for consumption, and contains far too much fluoride for safety. If your child is allergic (Leaflet P12), hyperactive (Leaflet P75), or whimpers at the least exertion, stop fluoride in any form. Never give tablets.
7. Migraine (Leaflet P68) or other severe headaches (Leaflet P27) can arise from cramped jaw development. You need the help of a dentist experienced in Dental Kinesiology (address Leaflet S20) if the muscles just inside your upper back teeth are tender, or your jaw joint grates and clicks.
8. Good dental hygiene is based first and foremost on a healthy diet, which positively promotes the health not only of your teeth and gums but of the rest of your body as well. Diet alone can prevent 95% of dental caries and gum disease. Second comes regular and efficient cleaning, which can prevent most caries and gingivitis but may also damage your gums; it contributes nothing else to your health however. Fluoride is at best a poor third, has never been shown to prevent more than 30-50% of caries in any trial, does your gums no good, and may harm the rest of you.
9. If by the time you have read all this you already have damaged teeth or gums, go on to read Leaflet P88.