The image of a kid on a bike losing his teeth while riding no-hands and showing off to  his mother is a humorous one and not that far from the reality of what really happens to our health when we aren’t watching where we’re going or paying attention to what we’re putting in our mouths.

Indeed the trouble generally starts when we open our mouths and put something in it that has no business being there. In the 21st century, that something is as often as not one of the following: milk products, flour products or sugar.

When we’re born, we have no teeth. At that time, our diet is composed strictly of mother’s milk. We are weaned as our teeth come in normally. The presence of teeth in the baby’s mouth is a signal to get the baby onto more solid foods (not milk). Teeth hurt a woman’s breasts when her infant is chowing down on her nipples and babies have no idea they are causing pain.

Mother’s milk is live food. The cells of which it is composed are living and thus not decomposing. They don’t die until they hit the stomach and are mixed with stomach acid. Baby formulas and other forms of milk are all dead cells and start to decompose in the baby’s mouth and esophagus. This is the first baby step on the way to a life of bad breath.

Our bodies evolved to eat mostly life food. The structure of our gums isn’t designed to accommodate or store the flotsam and jetsam of past meals. Live food retains its life in our mouths long enough for the action of our tongues and saliva to move it from the nooks and crannies between our teeth and between the cheeks and gums towards our throats where we eventually swallow the material. By then the pieces are so small we don’t even notice.

Dead (cooked) food by contrast begins the decomposition process before we swallow. The cells are all dead before we even put them in our mouths. Once in our mouths the temperature of the food is either raised or lowered to body temperature or near body temperature before we swallow. If we don’t wait long enough for the temperature to adjust, we burn or chill our esophagus that is not equipped to handle wide variances of temperature.

The food particles that remain in our mouths after swallowing are also dead and therefore a more serious problem than live food. Our body temperature increases the rate of decomposition.

Food particles in your mouth are not just nameless stuff. It matters what those food particles are. Dairy products are slimy and their protein is casein, a very sticky substance that is used industrially to make powerful adhesives. In your mouth, casein sticks to everything. Since your soft tissues – gums, cheeks and most of your tongue are smooth and covered with saliva, natural flow soon directs the muck to your throat where you swallow it.

Your teeth and the top surface of your tongue are a completely different story. Teeth are inert and the outer surfaces are more stone like than living tissue. As such, they don’t exude saliva. Thus, teeth cannot rinse themselves when things stick to them. As a result, dairy residues tend to collect at the gumline where there’s a ridge and indent at the junction of tooth and gum – a little V shaped groove that surrounds each and every tooth in your head.

After your meal, when you have a drink of fresh water, you wash away most but not all of the dairy particles. Between the time you stopped chewing and the time you drank the water, your saliva has been working to dilute the casein. In a young healthy mouth, this works. As we get older the process becomes less efficient as our bodies become more and more polluted with toxins and decaying material. The dairy particles stuck to your teeth and gums ferment and become resident in your mouth particularly if your teeth are not brushed, flossed and rinsed with waterpik or similar device.

Flour products present a slightly different problem in that once it has settled, flour products become a kind of cement. In your mouth the flour settles into the tooth/gumline groove and hardens quite rapidly. If you don’t manage to scrape it off while brushing your teeth, it loses moisture and becomes stone-like. Dentists call it plaque. By itself, this is a big problem. Mixed with dairy products you can imagine it’s an order of magnitude worse.

Plaque of course is composed of more than just flour products but flour products do seem to be at least partially foundational to the plaque problem. Combined with dairy products the mixture becomes a recipe for tooth decay, gum disease and eventual tooth loss to extraction and even just falling right out of your head. Some people allow their teeth to rot right to the gumline and beyond.

Under a microscope, plaque has the physical characteristics of cinders – lots of sharp edges that over time cause injury – bleeding at the gumline and over time the problem creeps under the gumline where its sharp pointy nature causes the gums to bleed, become infected and inflamed. Pockets which are spaces between tooth roots and gums where there should be no spaces become super-highways for all sorts of disease throughout the body. Once this process starts, your immunological system has been breached. 

Once these pockets are part of the geography of your mouth assaults by bacteria and viruses become continuous until the breach is repaired. Most people find the pockets impossible to heal. If the pockets aren't closed, a process of deterioration begins that adds additional burdens to your immune system. With respect to your teeth, that process of deterioration continues until you’ve lost your teeth. Out of sight, this problem erodes bodily energy and makes every health battle that much harder to win. Heart disease is famously associated with gum disease.

Oral infection due to gumline plaque is known as gingivitis. Our bodies regard gingivitis as so serious that our bodies essentially sacrifice our teeth so the gums can heal. At the end of the process, the victim is usually toothless but still alive.

The addition of sugar to the mix is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The harmful bacteria in our mouths live by converting their food into simple sugars for energy. It turns out that at a micro level, bacteria and people eat the same stuff. Unfortunately, the bacteria if not curtailed are in a position to keep on chowing down and eat us. Putting simple sugar in a mouth populated by bacterial infection accelerates the infection process by supplying the best food possible for the bacteria. As a result, gingivitis becomes entrenched and increasingly difficult to treat.

To add insult to injury, we tend to consume a lot of meat including fish. In our mouths, meat particles decompose very rapidly and if not removed by regular brushing and mouth washing, the putrification from meat particles can cause aggressive deterioration of the gums – especially if particles become lodged below the gumline between tooth roots and the gum in those pockets. At that point, the rot becomes established in a protected environment. It grows until it becomes an abscess and, if still untreated, becomes a tumour. This is an extremely painful process but some people are so afraid of dentists they delay dental checkups until small problems have become surgical trauma cases.

The tongue plays a role in this too. Our tongues are composed entirely of muscle and connective tissue covered with a pink skin known as mucosa. The tops of our tongues are covered with filiform papillae – a hair like growth:

“In healthy people, the individual hairs are shed before they get too long, and the natural red color of the underlying tongue tissue shows through giving the top surface of the tongue a velvety pink appearance. 

In some disease conditions (mostly fever causing diseases), the hair does not shed easily and forms a white, or sometimes even a black "coat" on the dorsal surface of the tongue. 

The filiform papillae are naturally white, but are often stained brown or black by foods or by dry mouth.  When the filiform papillae grow too long, they remain on the dorsum of the tongue like a thick mat. This condition is known as "white hairy tongue" or "black hairy tongue".  A white or black coating on the tongue is NOT necessarily associated with any particular disease condition.” However they are a definite sign of a compromised immune system, a body over-burdened by toxins infection and inflammation." www.doctorspiller.com

This overgrowth of "hair" can be partially removed by scraping the surface of the tongue with a tongue scraper but the only way to properly restore the healthy pinkness of your tongue and your health is to undergo systematic health restoration that includes scheduled regular fasting.  Filiform papillae aren’t associated with the sense of taste and they aren’t taste buds. While a coated tongue cannot be considered a communicable disease, gingivitis most definitely is. In addition to being a sign of health deterioration, a coated tongue does harbour the bacteria associated with gingivitis and a wide variety of other forms of infectious bacteria. Oral disease is most commonly spread by kissing and swapping toothbrushes. For people who have intact, healthy immune systems, kissing represents little or no threat. But for those with compromised immune systems, the threat is real. From this is should be apparent that you can track your health on a daily basis when you brush your teeth. Simply stick your tongue out and look at it in the mirror. A coated tongue is a warning to improve your diet. That means bump up the raw vegetable and fruit content and reduce the dead food content until the condition is corrected. If the tongue coating does  not go away in days, your problems are systemic and it will take a lot of work and fresh food to correct. A tongue that remains coated over a period of months or longer may be indications of, but by no means limited to, the following:

1. Poor diet
2. Poor oral hygiene
3. constipation
4. systemic blockages
5. diabetes mellitus
6. cancer

Alcohol and chewing tobacco are irritants that contribute to oral health decline – especially tobacco products. Tobacco has no business being in your mouth. That said, these products are addictive and will be discussed in a later chapter.

 Note, www.doctorspiller.com is a pretty good website for learning indepth about oral health with lots of labelled photographs.