A few months after switching to the macrobiotic diet, a dentist told me my teeth and gums looked great.
I was astounded.
Although I’d had excellent oral hygiene all my life, over the past several years, I’d grown accustomed to being chastised by dentists even though I was doing everything right.
As a kid, I had never shirked brushing. Unlike my sister, who mastered the art of merely wetting the toothbrush to fool our parents into thinking she’d brushed, I had brushed every day. In my mid-twenties, I’d added flossing to my routine, like I was supposed to. And a few years ago, I had dutifully begun using an electric toothbrush at a dental hygienist’s suggestion.
For the first twenty-five years of my life, dentists had always liked me and I’d never had cavities. But then something had started to change—dentists began talking to me about gum disease, even chiding me as though I wasn’t taking good care of my teeth.
My gums were swollen, red, and receding, they said. Did I brush twice a day and floss once? Was I brushing and flossing properly?
Each time, I protested that yes, I did all that. But the dental assistants would show me the proper techniques again anyway, sometimes with what clearly felt like judgment. It was vexing to hear bad news every time I went to the dentist, especially because my husband Ron, who rarely flossed, was consistently told that his teeth looked “great.” Over the years I had become resigned to my misfortune. By now, in my mid-thirties, trips to the dentist always gave me a touch of dread.
Nowadays I had bigger health problems to worry about. I’d developed ulcerative colitis and was experimenting with different diets, and in the middle of that turmoil, we’d moved to Portland. My dentist appointment was at a new clinic I’d never been to before.
Still, I’d expected this new dentist to react to my teeth in the same way the old ones had. When he instead proclaimed that my teeth looked “great,” I reacted with gleeful astonishment, as though he’d just handed me a bunch of money.
“What?” I said, sitting up in the chair, my mouth open in excitement. “Really?!”
He smiled. “You have a little gum recession on a few teeth, but your gums look generally healthy.”
The gum recession had been there for years. Once your gums recede, they don’t grow back. But it had stopped getting worse!
“It must be my diet,” I breathed, sitting back.
It was the only explanation. For months, I’d been eating no sugar, meat, dairy, or gluten. I was on an anti-inflammatory diet, and lo and behold, my gums were not inflamed.
I reflected on this to the dentist. He didn’t seem surprised.
In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes the decline of Americans’ teeth in the industrial age:
It was no secret that the health of Americans’ teeth was in steep decline. As the nation had become wealthier, people had started buying larger amounts of sugary, processed foods. When the government started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials said poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.
I’m fuzzy on which exact foods are good and bad for your teeth and gums. The American Dental Association has guidelines favoring meat- and dairy-filled products, but at the same time, gum inflammation has autoimmune components (another autoimmune condition! I had so many), and animal products tend to be inflammatory.
But whatever the larger patterns, it’s clear that both diet and gut inflammation, or lack thereof, can have a dramatic effect on our gums. In the years that followed the dentist’s happy pronouncement, I would experience this again and again. When a dietary change would cause my gut to become irritated, other parts of my digestive tract would be affected too, including my gums. Once, when I developed a duodenal ulcer, the dentist reported that my gums were inflamed and had even developed sores. Everything is connected.
And whatever the advice on gum-health diet for the general population, the bottom line seemed to be that my mouth clearly liked this new vegan diet. My colon liked it, and it turned out the rest of me liked it, too. Although my energy was still low and I often needed hours of rest, I was in little pain and felt better than I had since diagnosis several months earlier.
And my gums had stopped receding.
The dentist cheerfully sent me home, saying he would just keep an eye on my gum recession over the next couple years. I couldn’t wait to brag to Ron about my restored status: I was once again a straight-A dental patient.
