Pain, Pain, Go Away!

For the past two and a half weeks, my dog and I have been on a mostly lacto-paleo diet to heal our cavities . It's a high-nutrient, high-fat, low-sugar diet that emulates what my northern European ancestors ate before the advent of farming. We've been eating meat, eggs, non-starchy vegetables (think salad ingredients), fish, olive oil, coconut oil, and a few nuts. That's the paleo part. We've also been eating cheese, sour cream, goat milk, cream and butter (the lacto part). We don't eat any grains or beans. However, I do eat a few chocolate candies a day, low-carb ice cream and a Zevia soda now and then. I also use a little bit of vinegar and xanthan gum, which aren't strictly paleo. I need a vice besides overdue library books. Positive results so far: We enjoy this food-especially Molly. She jumps for joy when I feed her. I'm down a pound and Molly feels a little trimmer on our high-fat, high-nutrient, low-carb diet. Take that, Dr. Oz ! My third-day hair lo...

Note: I'm reposting this with some edits. When I first wrote this article, I was under the impression that my dog had a tiny hole in her tooth that had healed (see photo). What looked like a pinhole may have been some crud on her tooth. I've also made another change in my diet. -Ed. A week ago, I went on a cavity-healing diet and put my dog, Molly, on the same diet a few days later when I noticed she had a cavity in her lower-right canine. As described in the highly researched book Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel, the experiments of Weston A. Price showed children's cavities healed when they were fed one highly nutritious meal a day of tomato or orange juice with cod liver oil or high-vitamin butter, meat/bone marrow/vegetable stew, cooked fruit, milk, and rolls made from freshly ground wheat. (Note that this experiment and others like it were done in the 1920s and 1930s when meat and milk were from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals, wheat was very different in its genet...

Saturday I started a new diet to heal my cavities. It involves eating mostly foods high in vitamins A, D and K (fat-soluble vitamins) and calcium and phosphorus. I'm eating zero grains, but still eating a few chocolate candies (as in, three or so dark chocolate kisses per day) at work. To that end, on Saturday I bought a quart each of half-and-half and cream, two dozen eggs, liver, several tins of sardines on sale, and a bunch of salad ingredients. It's Monday and I'm already down to eight eggs and I've gone through half the cream and half-and-half. (I still have three-fourths of a pie dish of low-carb flan I made tonight with the dairy and eggs, and I fed a few of the eggs to my dog.) There's liver thawing in the refrigerator for tomorrow night and a can of sardines in my lunch (I already ate one can of sardines Saturday when I wanted a quick, easy snack). In other words, it's been incredibly easy to eat this food. I also changed my toothpaste to Xyliwhite(TM)...

Over the past several years, teeth whitening services and teeth whitening toothpastes have flooded the market. Could our collective crummy diet have something to do with our need for that? Can your diet--beyond just avoiding sugar--even heal cavities? Research from the 1920s and 1930s says yes. Who knew? Two days ago, I had a dental cleaning. The dentist said I had some brown areas on my upper front teeth and a groove on a lower one that needed fillings. It was late in the day, so he said they'd take x-rays and look at them later. I can see the spots and groove he was talking about; in fact, they've been there for a few years without growing or causing any pain. In the past year since radically changing my diet to low-carb and taking a bunch of vitamins and minerals every day, my teeth look a lot better. (They used to have a brown tinge and darker brown areas where the teeth touched. I'm not sure my old dentist believed me when I said I brushed twice a day and flossed every...

"You let me in your house with a hammer." -"Candy Shop" by Andrew Bird Low-carb proponent Gary Taubes appeared on the Dr. Oz Show March 7. In one entertaining segment, Dr. Oz spent a day eating a low-carb diet and complained of the greasiness of the sausage, feeling tired, constipation and bad breath. That's a drag, but when I stopped drinking Coke in 2007, I felt even worse: stomach ache, headache, tiredness, and mental fog. Should I have gone back to drinking Coke? If you quit a bad alcohol habit and start seeing snakes, do you need a drink? If my legs hurt from working out Monday night for the first time in two months (which they do), maybe I should resume my exercise hiatus indefinitely. I respect Dr. Oz for having Gary Taubes on his show and letting him share his ideas. I'd respect Oz even more if he looked into low-carb diets more carefully. What he didn't seem to consider regarding his one-day low-carb diet was that he spent a day...

What happens when you go two months without exercising? Conventional wisdom says you gain weight (unless you restrict calories). Does it work out that way in real life? Around January 10 this year, I strained my neck and stopped lifting weights to let it heal and avoid injuring it further. Although it was completely healed after three weeks, I didn't do any resistance training for two months (and I stopped doing cardio workouts over a year ago). It was pure laziness. (As for the cardio, I decided last year it was just a waste of valuable dance time .) How did this affect my health and fitness? At January 10, my weight was 118 pounds. Today, March 7, it was...118 pounds. My pants (all tailored, no elastic waists) fit just as they did in January. No, I'm not the type who can eat anything without gaining weight: last year at this time, I was in the middle of losing 20 pounds , going from a high-carb, low-fat diet to a low-carb, high-fat diet. This bears out the research I've...