I’ve been grain and sugar free for about a year and a half. I tried going brushless recently for several weeks and started K2 supplementation several days into the experiment. In general I was surprised at how well it worked; no nasty taste or gum pain. But the plaque didn’t miraculously disappear as soon as I started the K2, and I still get some plaque buildup that seems to come and go.

To anyone who’s doing this, can I get some more details on your experiences? Do you still wake up with fuzzy teeth, for instance? Are your spouses complaining about your morning breath?

I've been doing this for easily 6 months now, and my gums have never felt better. No sensitivity to cold/hot/touch. The translucent areas on my teeth are becoming more opaque, my teeth are noticeably whiter — you can tell compared to a place where the dentist put in some matching "white" filling material at the gum line.

My mom, who started this before me went to the dentist, and insisted on not getting a cleaning with paste, only baking soda. After the checkup, the dentist told her her teeth had improved and that if she kept it up he would have to go out of business. Then she told him what she'd been doing, and he was very skeptical. But even he'd just remarked on the improvement!

Since then, I have gotten my fiancé, daughter, brother and sister in law all brushing with soap. Important, though — it should be soap that does not contain glycerin.

It has now been over a year since the first revelation that things were improving dramatically, and now the transformation is quite dramatic. Not only do my teeth & gums feel fine, they feel fantastic and strong.

I really appreciate all the work you're doing. I started reading your blog and Stephan's and Hyperlypid a few months ago. There are still many entries that I have not read.
Similar story here. Calculus, caries, bleeding gums in my late 20s, lost a tooth during a pregnancy because the carie was under the gumline. You would think I don't brush at all.
Besides other health problems that appeared as I put on weight after my two pregnancies I had serious periodontitis, with the typical treatment that came too late, as after the scaling my gums receded a lot and it's very visible at the front. For 7 years my dentist told me I had very deep pockets and then told me that in five years I'm going to lose my front teeth. Imagine that. He gave me a referral to a hygienist in December 2006 but with Christmas and the long waiting list I was seen only in March after I had to insist to change my appointment from May to March. Antibiotics, intensive and repeated root scaling everywhere, lots of money spent, etc. After a year, in the autumn of 2008, situation ok, but told to have cleaning done 3-4 times a year. Since last August started low carb/no grain mainly to lose weight and had a cleaning around January. I should schedule an appointment soon, but maybe I should start with the K2 supplementation as you say two weeks before. At this stage I try to keep what I have, because I'm only 41, for Grok's sake. I was and still am angry with my dentist for not sending me earlier to the hygienist and more so for not having a clue about nutrition and dental health.

I read somewhere that the glycerin from toothpaste interferes with the remineralisation process, it sticks to the tooth's surface. What do you all think?

It seems you've just about conquered dentistry, but there is another frontier.

I remember reading about it a couple of years ago at lewrockwell.com, couldn't find it in their archives, but I did find this one:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30337386/

Now that would be some serious agitatin'.

Dave

Sorry that I somehow let this great story slip by. Hard to keep up, but, this is great news and mirrors my experience completely.

I too have had pretty severe periodontitis that required laser surgery (LANAP – Laser Assisted New Attachment Procedure) and deep scaling/root planing two years ago which reduced my deepest pockets significantly (from 10-12mm to 5-7mm) and I believe adding Vitamin D and fish oil helped greatly in this end. Like you however, even with meticulous oral hygiene and professional cleanings every 3 months, I would develop significant calculus buildup, especially around the inside of my lower front teeth. Within 3 weeks after a cleaning I could see visible buildup again. Even on a no-grain nearly no-carb diet with supplemental Vitamin D3 and fish oil! It was maddening. My dentist told me that it was just a quirk of my personal biochemistry as to why I would build up calculus so quickly – and that he could tell that my hygiene was very good. Nonetheless he wanted me to start Periostat (doxycycline hyclate) medication.

The day before my last cleaning 2 months ago I started the Thorne Vitamin K2 drops (2 per day) after reading about them here and added 16-20 hour intermittent fasts 1-2x week to my regimen. I'm due for a cleaning again in 3 weeks and I still have NO calculus that I can detect. Two months and no calculus – that's huge for me. I filled the Periostat script but never took any. Starting a medication with a known side-effect of photosensitivity right at the beginnning of spring seemed unwise. Grok probably didn't eat doxycycline either so I'm not going to unless I have no other choice. I'm looking forward to giving my hygienist and dentist a real suprise. The Vitamin K2 works. Big time. And if I hadn't read about it here then I would've never known.

The point of this rambling message is that what you are doing here with this blog can and is making a real positive difference in peoples' lives. It seems like it must be a lot of work. Thanks so much for doing it.

As a side note and curiosity, I did my first fast during my last cleaning. I was at about 19 hours when the cleaning started and I noticed the cleaning was a lot less uncomfortable than usual. I've read how IF can lower inflammation and maybe that has something to do with it. I'm going to try it again next time around.

Price didn't study every culture under the sun. There are many cultures around the world that consume rice as a staple and "manage" to express a healthy phenotype. Corn, wheat, and potatoes too. The Swiss and Gaelics were not unique in this respect. You should read McCarrison's work on nutrition in India for some examples.

Another fun example (though I cannot find a free copy at the moment) is to compare the phentotype expression of the Pima Indians based on whether they're north or south of the Rio Grande. The ones in the USA get Federal "food assistance" and get processed breakfast cereals, Coca-Cola, white sugar, etc. and get what you'd expect. The ones south of the border eat a tradition diet (70-80% carbs, 8-12% fat, and 12-18% protein) of mostly corn and beans and are very healthy.

As just one more example, if you have a copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories lying around, check out p.110 on the Zulu. Like the Pima they got less than 20% of their calories from fat, but only the sugar-eaters in the city expressed poor health. Unprocessed grains can still raise a population of warriors of such strength and fierceness that the very word "Zulu" is synonymous with that stereotype today.

Lastly, as anecdotal evidence, I eat oatmeal, rice and the occasional sourdough leavened bread. My teeth are fine, even though I do not brush them. I even healed up five open calories just by dropping the sugar entirely, without dropping unprocessed starchy carbs.

Not sure to what "cost" of avoiding grains you refer to. I find it easy to eat meat and vegetables and avoid grains. I don't see many if any restaurants serving the type of fermented grain foods eaten by the groups studied by Price. You can even eat virtually grain-free at fast food joints (just throw away the bun), in industrialized nations.

I don't "demonize" grains, I simply report the health effects. The facts speak for themselves. If someone can't or won't live without grains I am happy to tell them how to prepare them for the best possible results, but I think "outreach" also includes giving the facts.

"That's amazing, but it seems to be a diminishing return to seek that level of health when you can get "95%" of the way there and still have your oatmeal, sourdough bread, brown or white rice, etc. if you choose to."

Not clear why you include white rice in your list. I'd like to see the evidence that you can regularly eat nutritionally significant amounts of white rice and get 95% of the health benefits of paleolithic eating. I would agree that you can occasionally eat it without ill effect, but daily use in nutritionally significant quantities will almost certainly wreak havoc. Certainly it wasn't among the foods Dr. Price approved. In China it is known to promote diabetes and now common for physicians to forbid it to their diabetic patients, despite the cultural attachment. They give the straight recommendation to avoid it; its up to the patient then to accept or reject.

I have the same philosophy. When you water things down, you don't do a service, because people will assume you are telling them what's best. If I say its best to avoid grains, then the recipient of the info knows not to expect the best results unless s/he avoids grains. If s/he decides not to go there, then we can talk about half-way measures.

In this connection I think of how long it took the Kellogg's company to convince Americans to eat corn flakes. When they first came out with the stuff, people rejected it because they were accustomed to hot breakfasts, usually based on meat and eggs. Yet they managed to change people's idea of breakfast. If you can convince people to eat cornflakes, or replace butter with margarine, you surely can convince them replace grains with meat.

In my practice I actually find people more receptive to "cut out grains" than to "eat only these and these types of grain products" which are not commonly available. They can get reasonable quality meat many places for reasonable cost, but high quality sourdough bread is hard to find, expensive, and many people don't like it.