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...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...

Collagen-filled Low Carb Burritos

Low-carb, grain-free Mexican food is hard to find, but it's easy to make your own at home. This recipe has an authentic ingredient: carne de lengua, or beef tongue. Don't be put off: beef tongue is tender, delicious, and full of collagen. Look for it directly from farmers in your area. To cook it, cut it in 1" to 1-1/2" slices and pressure cook for one hour. Enjoy the delicious broth as a bonus. Ingredients 1 slice cooked beef tongue, peeled and cut into small cubes 1 egg wrap (I use these  from Egglife) 1/4 cup cooked black or pinto beans Chili pepper Oregano Garlic (powdered or minced) Cumin Guacamole (with no emulsifiers) Salsa Shredded cheddar cheese Sour cream or homemade cream cheese  with no emulsifiers  Put the egg wrap on a plate and put the beef and beans down the middle of it. Sprinkle with the herbs and spices. Wrap, turn over and microwave for 1-2 minutes. Spoon salsa over the burrito and sprinkle with cheese. Add guacamole and sour cream or homemade crea...

15% Off Starter Culture

Starter culture for the wonderful cream cheese I made is 15% off for the next two weeks (through June 18, 2025). The shop (BacillusBulgaricus.com) also offers rennet and starter for other cheeses, yogurt, kefir, kombucha, sour cream, fermented vegetables, and more. They ship to 118 countries across six continents. The coupon code is LORI_sekd3tkb at bacillusbulgaricus.com .  Photo from Pexels .

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...