Weston Price – That a Clean Tooth Does Not Decay and that Mouth Cleanliness Affords the Best Known Protection Against Dental Caries
Sunday, December 12th, 2010This article is posted here for “preservation” and archival reasons, sometimes you come across information online that you want to make sure others read, but the internet world is ever-changing, something maybe available today and gone tomorrow, thus I sometimes re-post articles like the one below here but take NO CREDIT for any of them.
Here is the article:
Weston Price – That a Clean Tooth Does Not Decay and that Mouth Cleanliness Affords the Best Known Protection Against Dental Caries.
Dental Cosmos Page 871 1934: by Weston A Price, DDS:
Oral cleanliness is not the best known means for the control of dental caries because:
(I) Since primitive man has had high immunity to dental caries he becomes our control in the great experiment of civilizations.
It is essential there fore, that we study the controlling factors of his environment, of which he is the product, and use these as our yardstick for studying modern civilization.
For this I have studied remnants of several primitive racial stocks where their physical isolation had sheltered them from the influences of our modern civilization, and by studying them and their foods and their methods of living, certain underlying factors are found to be common to all these primitive groups, even though they were living in different countries and on very different foods. This permits us to critically analyze modern civilizations at their points of contact with the primitives and, by studying them and their problems with the standards of immune primitives, not the factors which are contributing to dental caries.
By studying the children in four isolated valley in Switzerland; Loetschental, Visperterminen, Grachen, and Ayer in the Swiss Alps, I found the incidence of dental caries to be only 4.6 percent of the teeth studied. Here oral prophylaxis and modern equipment for practicing it were largely unknown. At St. Moritz, however, at approximately the same altitude, which is highly modernized community with excellent training in oral prophylaxis, the incidence of caries was 29.8 per cent of teeth studied.
At Vissoie and Zinal, which were partially modernized, 22 percent of the teeth examined had been attacked by dental caries. At Herisau, in the plains country of Switzerland, also a highly modernized community with splendid instruction and equipment for mouth cleanliness, the incidence of cares was 24.7 per cent of the teeth examined.