The link between nutrition and oral health

Healthy eating: what to eat, and most importantly, what not to eat?

Initially, I wanted to know mainly why certain foods damage teeth, while other foods undermine or strengthen them.

For a decade, I delved into numerous scientific articles with the following questions as my guide:

• What exactly do which proteins and which fats do for the body?
• What role do sugars and carbohydrates play in our diet?
• Why are vitamins and minerals so important anyway, and what exactly do they do?

We eat primarily to stay healthy because the body needs food, but what should we eat to stay healthy, and why exactly?

So what food keeps the mitochondria – and thus our bodies – happy? The answer to that is actually very simple: lots of vegetables, some fruit every day, not too much meat or fish, and otherwise products like nuts, olives, cheese, eggs, pickles, avocado, yogurt, hummus and beans are also very healthy.

Another main thing I want to do in this chapter is to point out the dangers of unhealthy food.

Foods that are merely “tasty,” and no more than that, are often unhealthy and fall into that category. You could also call it “psychological eating,” the things we eat or drink to make us feel better, such as sweets or alcohol.

So treats like licorice, chocolate, chips, cakes, croquettes, fries and cola may not be out of the question as far as I am concerned, but I would be very moderate with them. They are food products that have overshot the mark – healthy and energetic survival. Also, don’t give these things to children just to get them to stop whining. I see the consequences in my practice: overweight children with too many cavities, in crooked teeth, with errant wisdom teeth that later have to be extracted by the oral surgeon.

Unfortunately, we often don’t see the effects of poor nutrition until the longer term. Unhealthy food is an assassin that takes a long time to kill its prey. Diabetes, obesity, allergies, difficulty concentrating, skin problems, or getting sick too often are the consequences of that oh-so-pleasant insidious killer.

To stay healthy, the body needs food that provides energy, food that can serve as a base for building materials, and further trace elements and vitamins. I would like to emphasize here that the best products come from nature. Synthetic products often lack just that sophistication that nature does give us, due to the great diversity woven into plant and animal products.

It is not yet given to man to make a potato, no matter how simple it may look. A potato alone – if from healthy soil – contains vitamins, trace elements, fuels and proteins that we cannot imitate. Fruits and vegetables contain another variety of substances that are indispensable to our bodies. Often it is the combination of substances, minerals, vitamins, proteins, acids and light, which, for example, a leaf of lettuce offers us, in which nature is as yet unsurpassed.

Natural products are essential in my opinion. Not only are the measurable substances important, recent studies also show that plant cells emit light, by eating green vegetables that light is also absorbed by our cells.

It is our metabolism that provides our body with energy as well as building materials. Many cells live for only a few days (sometimes only hours or minutes) and need energy to reproduce themselves. In addition, in order to reproduce, those cells must have building materials such as amino acids, fats and proteins. With the latter two, proteins and fats, the mitochondria get along best, that is, they extract the most energy from them. With one molecule of fat or protein, a mitochondrion can make 38 energy units, while carbohydrates and sugars provide only 6 energy units.

Hans Beekmans

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