Skip to main content

Should your Teeth and Heart Follow Two Different Diets?

There's a lot of conflicting dietary advice around, but conventional wisdom contradicts itself on diet for a healthy heart v. diet for healthy teeth. The commonly recommended heart-healthy diet is low-fat, little meat, lots of whole grains, and fruits and vegetables. That doesn't quite square with "Foods and Drinks Best for Your Teeth" from that pillar of medical dogma, WebMD.com:

The best food choices for the health of your mouth include cheeses, chicken or other meats, nuts, and milk. These foods are thought to protect tooth enamel by providing the calcium and phosphorus needed to remineralize teeth (a natural process by which minerals are redeposited in tooth enamel after being removed by acids).

Other food choices include firm/crunchy fruits (for example, apples and pears) and vegetables. These foods have a high water content, which dilutes the effects of the sugars they contain, and stimulate the flow of saliva (which helps protect against decay by washing away food particles and buffering acid). Acidic foods, such as citrus fruits, tomatoes, and lemons, should be eaten as part of a larger meal to minimize the acid from them.

Take away the apples, pears and milk, or limit them greatly, and you have a low-carb diet. They add,

The more often you eat and snack, the more frequently you are exposing your teeth to the cycle of decay.

What--no little meals throughout the day? Well, if you're eating just chicken, other meat, cheese, nuts, and crunchy vegetables (i.e., no potatoes), you probably won't need to constantly snack because with little starch and sugar, you shouldn't have roller coaster blood sugar levels and frequent appetite throughout the day. Further,

Poor food choices include candy -- such as lollipops, hard candies, and mints -- cookies, cakes, pies, breads, muffins, potato chips, pretzels, french fries, bananas, raisins, and other dried fruits. These foods contain large amounts of sugar and/or can stick to teeth, providing a fuel source for bacteria.

So those heart-healthy whole grains aren't so good for your teeth. For benefit of those who don't cook, starch is sticky. Fat isn't. Fatty food (without starch or sugar) doesn't even get stuck in your braces. But starch (which turns into glucose on digestion) not only sticks to your teeth and braces, it sticks to certain proteins in your body in a process called glycation (see AGE or advanced glycation end products). In laymen's terms, it gums up the works of different cells and eventually causes serious health problems including heart disease.

Starch and sugar provide a fuel source for bacteria not only in your mouth, but throughout your body. There's a school of thought that infection contributes to or causes heart disease.

Conventional wisdom tells us that whole grains and a starch-based diet are good for your heart, but bad for your teeth. On the other hand, cheese is good for your teeth, but too fatty for your heart. There's low-fat cheese out there, along with a thousand other low-fat products, but have foods that are good for both hearts and teeth been around for only a few generations since someone created them in a lab?

Humans and our ancestors have had two and a half million years to adapt to a diet of mostly protein and fat  along with plenty of cholesterol, but with little starch and sugar. To be sure, we didn't evolve perfectly and our paleo ancestors didn't enjoy perfect health. But it's an extraordinary claim to say that the heart--an organ that has to work pretty much perfectly at all times--isn't adapted to the diet we evolved on, and yet our teeth are very well adapted to such a diet, even though you can get cavities or lose some teeth and, even without dental care, go on living. If anything, it seems to me that vital organs with no backup (the heart, brain, liver and pancreas) would be the best adapted to our evolutionary diet. That low-carb and ketogenic diets are so therapeutic for patients with heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and diabetes points in this direction.

Except in some special cases, there's no heart diet, GI diet, dental health diet, and so on. There are just good health diets.

Comments

Anonymous said…
That's a really useful point to make, Lori! Great post :)

Carole
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Carole.

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh.  Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good.  I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds.  Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...