(We went to the aquarium last week for a homeschooling field trip. My son also won his Constitution Bowl contest for the Constitution Day celebration in Bountiful. I have a lot more pictures about that coming up, including some of David Barton. Stay tuned.)

Here is the link to the powerpoint presentation Sally Fallon made on proper diets for healthy babies and children that I blogged about recently. So go to that page, scroll down, and click on “Healthy Pregnancy and Children.”

I love the idea on slide #17 of the presentation:

The body is like
a house or temple, (Hey, we as Latter-day Saints believe that!)
built of bricks and mortar
BRICKS = Minerals
MORTAR = Fat-Soluble Activators A and D

So you can be taking in tons of vitamins and minerals with green smoothies and salads, but if you don’t have the right fats, with the fat soluble vitamins A and D, the vitamins and minerals are not going to stick! You are not going to have strong bones and teeth! So that’s why Mary Poppins was right! Children, and adults, need cod liver oil, because it is the right fat that has vitamins A and D. The Word of Wisdom is more about just avoiding tobacco and alcohol. It’s about taking in what’s really good for our bodies and avoiding empty calorie foods. Even if you are vegetarian you can have problems. Vegetarianism seems like the natural way to go, but did you know that sets you up for tooth decay? Is it natural to have tooth decay? Dentist Weston Price found out that it isn’t.  See the story below of my friend for an example.

This is the recipe for bright and beautiful children. Dr. Price gives lots of pictures of bright and beautiful children. These are children with round heads, full palates with enough room for all their teeth, no cavities or crooked teeth, and broad faces. He says modern children tend to have narrow faces, crooked teeth, and tooth decay. This recipe promises to give health like the primitive people that Dr. Weston Price studied in the 1930s all over the world.  I recently studied Weston Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration where he tells this story. It fascinates me to know that these primitive people Dr. Price studied had no tooth decay, degenerative disease, obesity, impacted wisdom teeth, asthma, and all of the other modern illnesses we have. What is going on here? We have incredible blessings of technology and information, but as a whole we are literally starving for health.

I have been interested in health and nutrition since I was a junior in high school and read Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. For several years I was vegetarian, partly because of what I learned from reading that book. Then I read Diane Hopkins, of lovetolearn.net  and happyhomeschooling.com, tell her story of how she decided that vegetarianism was not healthy in the long run. She cited Dr. Price’s book that I mentioned above and her own experience, which was that the babies she conceived when she was vegetarian and sometimes vegan had horrible teeth.

Diane’s story correlates with the story of one of my friends, Caralee. She was vegetarian for a long time before she learned of Dr. Price’s teachings. This is her story:

“In a nutshell, I had perfect teeth (as a vegetarian) until after my third child, when my teeth
began to decay, to shortly after, when I had my fourth and fifth children
(born 13 mos. apart), I went from no cavities to 11 or 12, two of which
needed root canals!  I hadn’t even had refined sugar, grains or chemicals in
my diet for years!  I have been very health-conscious since I was 15 years
old, but I was vegetarian, even vegan at times for twelve years.

“Changing my diet (and I changed my diet to properly prepared whole foods, adding in
whole, raw, pastured milk and eggs and some high-quality meat) made a big
difference for me, but what was really the kicker was the cod liver oil and
high vitamin butter oil, 1/2 teaspoon three times a day.  I did that on and
off for a couple of years (I was REALLY scared to go back to the dentist)
but when I knew it was time for my sixth child to be conceived, I decided I
better go have any dental work done that needed to be taken care of.  I went
back, shaking in my boots, but to my delight, the dentist found that
secondary dentin had filled in, covering my roots so I no longer needed root
canals!  Yea!  Also, my teeth were healing, and my dentist made comments
like, wow- your teeth have great structural integrity.  He couldn’t believe
that I hadn’t been to a dentist in over two years with the diagnosis I had
had before.  Since then, I have had teeth that had deep cavities heal all
the way through to the enamel, inside out, only leaving a stain where the
cavity used to be.

I have watched my children that needed baby pulpotomies
have secondary dentin grow back in as little as six weeks, making it
unnecessary to have the baby root canal done!  My three youngest that have
been raised on cod liver oil and raw milk have beautiful teeth with great
palates (ample room for their teeth to come in), whereas my older three
vegetarian babies all have dental issues (yes, I feel terrible).  The teeth
will heal, and the younger the individual, the faster and more responsive
they are, but we all can heal if given the right tools.”

The right tools are given in the powerpoint by Sally above. Helpful websites are also http://westonaprice.org, http://healthyhomeeconomist.com (home of a Weston A. Price chapter leader in Florida, Sarah Pope. She is also the author of the article on traditional home remedies that I refer to on this site in my discussion forum on being Dr. Mom. She has video tutorials on how to do the practical home cooking applying Dr. Price’s principles) and http://thenourishingcook.com which has a goal of blogging about all of the recipes in Sally Fallon’s cookbook Nourishing Traditions.