Is there an ideal number of times to brush one's teeth?

Today a leading Houston dental practice management company announced that it will begin offering patients the opportunity to secure and store stem cells contained in teeth through its affiliated GMS Dental Centers of Excellence. After studying National Institutes of Health research that discovered potent stem cells in teeth and after reviewing hundreds of follow-up studies at universities around the world, all five GMS Dental Centers of Excellence in the Greater Houston area are now offering stem cell storage to patients. Partnering with StemSave™, Inc., a provider of convenient and affordable stem cell cryopreservation, GMS affiliated dental centers will enable their patients in the Houston area to benefit from emerging advances in personalized and regenerative medical treatments. Medical research shows potential for a patient's own stem cells to be made into treatments for a wide range of diseases, including Parkinson's disease, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis and multiple sclerosis. (PRWeb May 19, 2008)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/dental/stem_cell/prweb955644.htm

Several years ago I suddenly had a mercifully brief encounter with TMJ. If you have had it, you already know how it is to suddenly have to limit your food intake to whatever will fit between your teeth.

We all need Vitamin C. It is an essential vitamin. Long before you get the disease Scurvy, from not having enough Vitamin C, your body can begin to "break down" in a variety of other ways. Dentists can often detect signs of Vitamin C deficiency while examining your teeth because they will bleed more than a person with a better diet.

Smokers have also been found to "use up" their Vitamin C more quickly. This means that they have a great dietary need of Vitamin C. Of course, not smoking is also a handy thing to do as well.

A new, but small, study shows additional hope that Vitamin C may help the body fight cancer.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal states "Early clinical studies showed that high-dose vitamin C, given by intravenous and oral routes, may improve symptoms and prolong life in patients with terminal cancer." CMAJ • March 28, 2006; 174 (7). doi:10.1503/cmaj.050346.

The paper also indicates that oral doses did not appear to have any effect. Of course, they also didn't report if chemical assays like the ORAC assay were performed on the oral Vitamin C supplements to prove they were chemically effective. It is difficult to study Vitamin C if it's not there.

It is also likely that the human body, in this special needs scenario, is not designed to absorb that much Vitamin C from food or supplements. The IV gets around this and may be able to maintain higher levels in the blood for longer periods of time. Of course, we should all continue to get sufficient dietary Vitamin C on a daily basis. This report is about a special application of Vitamin C.

This is very promising news and a further indication of how important Vitamin C is, as a nutrient, as well as how correct Dr Linus Pauling was when he described the importance of Vitamin C. Sadly the two time Nobel Prize winner was ridiculed in his life over his Vitamin C pronouncements because he was talking about nutrition. Gee, who’s the crackpot now?

It’s great to see studies like this in a sea of otherwise moronic reports from the media reporting on the dangers of nutrition. Reports written by generalists who lack sufficient background in nutrition and fail to report the various studies in their proper context. One recent study suggested that Calcium and Vitamin D had no benefit for women and bone density loss. The data of the study also reported that most of the women also mentioned that they were not taking their supplements with any regularity. In any other study this would be called non-compliance, but about 99% of the reporters didn’t pick up on that. I guess they didn’t have any nutritionally-oriented advertisers to slant their bias back to center.

This comes from a book called "Strength From Eating" by Bernarr MacFadden. Originally published in 1901, it's not in print and I had to hunt for a copy of the manuscript. The language usage is clearly of an old style, but I'm amazed at how some of the information in seems so "modern" in how it debunks many of the bad diets of the past decades and really shows what major research is now showing: basic dietary principals of whole foods and limited intakes of red meat can provide a significant health benefit.

Anyway, here's a chapter on white bread. I hope you enjoy it.

White bread, the American “stuff of life," is the greatest humbug ever foisted upon a civilized people. “Stuff of life," indeed! Why, it is more like a staff of death. It is composed largely of the starchy part of the wheat. It is greatly deficient in the constituents essential in feeding the muscles, brain and bones. A large part of these valuable food elements have been removed, with the bran and shorts. But. astounding as it may seem to a reasoning human being, this article of food is consumed from one end of the country to the other, and everywhere is looked upon as " the staff of life."

“What, in heaven's name, are our public schools for? There is, absolutely, no excuse for such depraved ignorance. All scientific investigators agree as to the inferiority of white flour as a food. The teeth fall out, the bones soften and the muscles never develop if it is depended upon to furnish nourishment for the body.

“The gluten of cereal foods is their nitrogenized element, the element on which depends their life-sustaining value, and this element is, in the white and foolishly fashionable flour, almost entirely removed, while the starch, the inferior element, is left behind and constitutes the entire bulk and inferior nutriment of such flours. To use flour from which the gluten has been removed, is almost criminal."–Dr. Cutter of Harvard University in the American Medical Weekly.

No wonder some children never grow, and are always sick and weak! When fed on such a starvation diet as this nothing else could be expected.

The use of this one article of diet has caused thousands to suffer with digestive troubles. It is especially favorable to constipation, and is frequently the sole cause of this annoying trouble.

A grain of wheat contains the elements necessary to feed the body, in almost perfect proportions, and if foods were made of whole- wheat flour the body would be perfectly nourished in every part.

Every man who knows anything of foods and their properties is fully aware of these facts, and why medical men everywhere ignore them in advising their patients is beyond the comprehension of the writer.

Not long ago, an experiment was made with dogs. Some were fed on white bread, others on Graham or entire wheat bread, and still others were given nothing to eat. The dogs that were allowed no food lived about as long as those fed on white bread, while those fed on the entire wheat bread thrived, and were apparently able to maintain life until the end of its natural term. This proves beyond question that whoever is striving to subsist on white bread is starving a part of his body with al- most as much certainty as if he were eating nothing at all, and that he will actually die about as soon as if fasting.

It is generally admitted by authorities that the outside covering of the wheat grain which is removed in the refining process of making flour contains, in addition to its valuable nitrogenous elements (muscle builders), a large amount of waste matter which is of great value, not only in adding bulk to the food, but in assisting the peristaltic action of the bowels. Most persons suffering from constipation find that the trouble immediately disappears when entire wheat bread is substituted for white bread.

The most ignorant athlete usually has intelligence enough to know that white bread is an inferior food, that it will not furnish the elements in proper proportion to feed the body, and any one who has trained or who has followed an occupation requiring great muscular activity, and has had an opportunity to test white flour as a food in comparison with whole or entire wheat, will also immediately indorse this conclusion.

"Superfine flour is distinctly a modern invention. The ancients used unbolted meal altogether, the present disease-producing devices known as bolting machines being then not in use. Indeed, many nations at the present day, as the Germans, Scandinavians, and, in fact, most nations with the exception of the French, English, and American nations, still adhere substantially to the ancient custom in this regard. No doubt the hardihood of the native German peasant is in great part justly attributable to the highly nourishing qualities of his ' Black bread.' "–J. H. Kellogg, M.D.

I will never forget the first time in my life that occasion occurred to prove to my own satisfaction by actual personal tests the great inferiority of white-flour bread as a food. When quite young I concluded that life on a farm would strengthen my then greatly weakened body, and I visited a farming section in one of the Western States, and secured a “job" as a farm hand, or rather farmer's boy, as I was not considered equal in strength to be a full-fledged " hand."

Now, in this particular section the previous generation had been mostly “raised " on corn bread and bacon, and they felt somewhat above such a rough fare, so the ignoramuses substituted white for the corn bread. I had a little knowledge of food values, even at that early age, and if milk had not been plentifully supplied, am satisfied that I could not have subsisted on the food furnished. But during this particular time I had the opportunity, far from pleasant, I can assure the reader, of seeing and feeling my muscular strength increase and decrease, as influenced by the diet. As I came there for the particular purpose of acquiring strength, I had naturally formed a habit of al- most daily testing my strength in various ways. About once or twice each week, at the noon meal, they would have baked beans and corn bread, and within an hour after such a meal, following several days wherein white bread was the principal article of diet, I would actually be a third stronger. Not only was I greatly increased in strength, as I found by actual tests, but my energies seemed to vastly increase. While compelled to subsist mostly on the white-bread diet I dragged through my work–felt listless and half ill all the time. But one meal that contained Nature's true nourishment transformed me into a new being.

Of course, where fresh meats are furnished with white bread, its deficiency is not so greatly noticed, as the meats, to a certain extent, supply the elements that the white bread lacks.

But the most astonishing and incontrovertible proof of the terrible deficiency of white bread as a food was startlingly illustrated by those very people in that section. A poorer lot of men, physically, I never saw before nor since. They had no stamina, vigor, or beauty of body. And the women! Why, at 25 they would begin to fade; at 30 they were old. Before 30 a majority of them had to be supplied with false teeth.

And why?

They were practically living an ideal life, in pure air, with plenty of exercise, and the natural conditions were in every way such that they should have produced the highest types of manhood and womanhood, physically.

The cause of their utter physical ugliness, weakness and general inferiority was unquestionably due largely to the diet of white bread, and at this present moment I believe that white bread, in many parts of this country, is actually starving people to death wholesale. They are eating plentifully, but the tissues necessary to the performance of the vital functions are being slowly starved.

Remember that muscular power is not used solely for locomotion and movements that require the use of hands, arms, and upper parts of the outer muscular system. It is required in every digestive and vital action of the body. The heart is a muscular organ. The stomach is surrounded by muscles that help in the process of digestion. Muscular power is necessary even to turn your eyes; therefore when you starve your muscles by a white-bread diet, every organ or function of the entire body suffers in consequence and it would also be well not to forget that the same food elements which nourish the muscles also constitute the principal part of all the important digestive juices.

The chemical analyses of all foods differ so much that it is difficult to form conclusions accurately in every detail. In order for my readers to see clearly the difference in the analysis of whole wheat and the ordinary white flour, I quote from Dr. Holbrook who gives Blythe's authority for table of analyses showing the difference. It would be well to call the attention to the great difference in the muscle- making elements contained in different kinds of wheat and in wheat grown in different parts of the country. This varies from about ten to twenty-one per cent. I have taken for granted that the whole-wheat flour, which has been here analyzed and compared with the white flour, has been made from the same kind of wheat.

This exerpt comes from a book called "Eat and Grow Younger." It was written in 1956. This section is about protein and begins with a story about the author's experience doing a nutrition talk. This could have been written yesterday. I'm amazed at how close this experience is to ones I frequently have. To have the issue of protein in the diet be an issue of contention to someone in the audience is little different than wehn I show people how the need for micronutrients in the diet is validated by standard biochemistry textbooks. Food, high in protein, or any other building block of life, is still just food. It's amazing how many people I run into who aren't able to get that…

YOUR neighbors, your in-laws, your friends—none of them may care whether or not you stay young and vigorous. But protein does!"Common sense is very uncommon," said Horace Greeley. And I agree. Especially common sense about important things. Protein, for instance. Here is a food element as vital to human life as oxygen. Yet how many persons have more than a nodding acquaintance with the word?

Many people are as mixed up about protein as was a member of an audience in a Midwestern city where I lectured not long ago. I had worked hard to put over the urgently needed protein message to them, for if ever there was a group of persons who looked as though they needed to know more about the "elixir of youth," it was those tired, haggard, old-looking people who sat before me that night. And yet I was positive that very few of them had reached any more than their middle fifties. They were still young in years, but even their spirits seemed to have wrinkles.
After I had concluded my lecture and stepped down from the platform, a man approached me—a man as worn and weary-looking as any of the others, despite his well-tailored suit and prosperous appearance.

Protein is stored by nature only in living tissue, and in places where it is essential for development of new life—in the embryo of eggs, in milk needed to nourish the young and in the seeds of plants.
Here is a little chart to help you remember where to look for protein foods:

But, as a rule, you cannot look to your doctor to help you stay young. He is a repair man, not a rejuvenator. Your determined campaign to retain the wonderful feeling of youth which seems to be slipping away should begin with your next meal—a meal built around protein.

This exerpt comes from a book called "Eat and Grow Younger." It was written in 1956. This section is about protien and begins with a story about the author's experience doing a nutrition talk. This could have been written yesterday. I'm amazed at how close this experience is to ones I frequently have.

YOUR neighbors, your in-laws, your friends—none of them may care whether or not you stay young and vigorous. But protein does!
"Common sense is very uncommon," said Horace Greeley. And I agree. Especially common sense about important things. Protein, for instance. Here is a food element as vital to human life as oxygen. Yet how many persons have more than a nodding acquaintance with the word?

Many people are as mixed up about protein as was a member of an audience in a Midwestern city where I lectured not long ago. I had worked hard to put over the urgently needed protein message to them, for if ever there was a group of persons who looked as though they needed to know more about the "elixir of youth," it was those tired, haggard, old-looking people who sat before me that night. And yet I was positive that very few of them had reached any more than their middle fifties. They were still young in years, but even their spirits seemed to have wrinkles.
After I had concluded my lecture and stepped down from the platform, a man approached me—a man as worn and weary-looking as any of the others, despite his well-tailored suit and prosperous appearance.
"I thought you were against drugs," he blurted out, "but you're now talking for protein!"
Here was a man of apparently better than average intelligence, yet he could not visualize anything as vital to human life as protein, unless it were a drug.
Despite my repeated stressing throughout the lecture that protein is a food element, this man couldn't get his mind out of the drugstore. Yet, after my first astonishment at his distortion of my message, I began to look at the subject from his viewpoint.
Every few days when he picks up his newspaper or tunes in his radio, he is likely to hear the latest word on "miracle drugs"—drugs that are going to permit mankind to live indefinitely, to bestow eternal youth on a pitifully eager human race.
My skeptical listener undoubtedly reasoned that in divulg- ing the secret of how to stay young, I should have been talking about one of these "drugs." Naturally the build-up he had been getting via press and radio didn't correspond to my message: that the "miracle substance of youth" could be found right in his own kitchen.
However, it's not the public's fault that "common sense is so uncommon" about a subject as close to the heart of everyone as that of staying young and fit. Even the medical scientists who should be leading the public down the road away from premature aging and debilitating illnesses are themselves often vague about the sensible way to keep premature old age from the door.
Why this inexcusable indifference on the part of so many physicians toward nutrition? Isn't it about time that a too-long-delayed merger should take place between medical practice and nutritional science?
And yet, even certain nutritionists and health teachers aren't without their share of blame for pushing protein far into the background in their lectures and books on "how to defer old age." Perhaps there isn't enough so-called "drama" about commonplace items such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese, milk and seed cereals. As a public that has cut its eyeteeth on high-pressure advertising, we've been conditioned to value only the "unusual," the "sensational," the "super-colossal."   Hence  something like  everyday  protein   foods, without a big glamour build-up, are all too likely to be "poor copy."
For instance, nutrition-conscious readers have been exposed within recent months to books and newspaper articles sound¬ing the clarion call of the "five wonder foods"—brewer's yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, skim milk and blackstrap molasses. I don't deny that some of these are of value in the diet. But, actually, there is only one wonder food in human nutrition, and that is protein. Here I am speaking of the complete proteins (high proteins) such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese, milk and seed cereals. On any of these complete proteins, particularly the animal proteins, you can live well and vigorously without ever touching another type of food—and still look forward to the taste joys of mealtime.
But just try subsisting for even so short a period as several days on nothing except the much publicized "five wonder foods," and you'll soon come to regard mealtime as a burden¬some task rather than a pleasure!
One of the tragic results of these periodical waves of food faddism is that, while their followers may get enough vitamins and calories to sustain life in their zealous bodies, inevitably they cut their daily intake of protein (minerals, too) to a dangerously low level.
During the writing of this book, I was asked one evening by an unmarried business woman in her mid-thirties what was "the latest on nutrition." Knowing a little of her personal history, and also judging from her appearance—sallow skin, dull expression, stooped shoulders, weary manner of speech— I was confident that she was both anemic and a food faddist.
Taking a shot in the dark, by way of a reply to her question, I said: "Have you heard about blackstrap molasses?"
"Oh, yes," came the eager response. "I use it every day . . . well . . . at least I try to put it in custards and things. But it tastes so horrible, very often I can't eat them."
"And what do you have for breakfast?" I asked.
"A cup of coffee—if I'm not too rushed."
"And for lunch?" I persisted.
"Usually I only take time for a sandwich and a coke."
"But then you eat a good dinner?" I prompted.
She became flustered. "Yes . . . well, no … that is, I do if I'm invited out. But usually I'm too tired to get myself anything but a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea. Sometimes I boil an egg." Then she brightened up. "But I always have blackstrap molasses and brewer's yeast in the cupboard. And afterwards I try to take a spoonful of each …"
It never occurred to this poor anemic food faddist that she was being "conscientious" about two so-called wonder foods, while at the same time she was woefully negligent of every rule in good nutrition.
First, she ate no breakfast; second, she expected to fuel her body at lunchtime with protein-deficient rations like a sandwich and a soft drink; and last, she ended her day with another meal that denied greatly needed protein to her tired, jittery, rapidly aging body. Yet she felt she was doing her duty by her body merely because she swallowed a spoonful of brewer's yeast and blackstrap molasses!
Perhaps you aren't so sadly misinformed as this woman with her food fads. Maybe you know all about protein, and it isn't news to you that food proteins work far more wonders for the human body than any faddist food or "miracle drug" ever can.
Protein is the safeguard of your youthfulness and good health. It is a preventer of disease, besides being one of the best medicines for numerous human ills. And here is what I consider the real nutrition miracle: All the while that pro¬tein is safeguarding your youth and good health, preventing disease or curing you of an existing ailment, it is also nourish¬ing your body with highly palatable, good-tasting food.
Nutrition teaches us that all foods are divided into four main classes: proteins, carbohydrates (sugars and starches), fats and water. Thus we establish that protein is a food, not a drug.
Protein is the basic raw material of all life, either plant or animal. The word protein is derived from the Greek verb meaning "I come first."
Protein is stored by nature only in living tissue, and in places where it is essential for development of new life—in the embryo of eggs, in milk needed to nourish the young and in the seeds of plants.
Here is a little chart to help you remember where to look for protein foods:

Protein is the chief building material of your body. Eigh¬teen per cent of your total body weight is pure protein. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, then approximately 27 pounds of you are pure protein that needs constant repairing, replacing and rebuilding—with more protein, of course.
If you were to analyze a single cell taken from any part of your body—a hair in your head, the tissue in your heart, the lining of your intestines, the muscles in your legs— you would find this tiny cell composed chiefly of protein. And, like the parts of any constantly operated, non-resting machine, your body cells are continually wearing out, need¬ing repairs or replacements. So what are you going to do? Patch up your protein body cells with carbohydrates? Just try patching a rubber tire on your car with flour-and-water paste, and see how far you'll get!
Protein should be the featured food in your diet at all times.
The perpetual-motion human machine must have abundant protein every day in order to repair, replace and renew worn-out cells in every part of your body.
When you don't supply enough high-protein foods in your daily diet to make certain that these vitally needed cell re¬pairs and replacements can go on without interruption, you're inviting old age to take over.
In the laboratories, nutritional scientists and biochemists have proved that a diet poor in proteins hastens aging in the human body.
I could cite you case after case of elderly persons, weakened by tea-and-toast diets to the point of imminent death, who have been restored to life and usefulness by gradually con¬verting their meals to high-protein foods. Their weakened bodies gained new vigor, and their minds become keen and alert once more.
Nobody who has witnessed these recoveries, as I have, could ever deny that protein foods are truly nutritional wonders.
A grievous error has been committed for many years by some medical men who ban high-protein foods such as red meats and cheese as "too heavy" for older digestions. Through this ignorance of the vital part protein plays in preserving youthfulness and maintaining life, such men have "pre¬scribed" invalidism and premature death for many an older person who otherwise could have enjoyed many more years of an active, useful life. Protein foods are the main factor in prolonging youth for the past-forty group, and in maintaining physical vigor and mental alertness in the aged.
Several things start happening to your body cells as the calendar years begin slipping past the forty mark. Biologists tell us that "aging is a matter of changes in your tissue cells." First, the tissue cells in older bodies are less elastic, less resilient, less able to recover quickly from fatigue and injury than the cells in younger bodies. Second, the active cells in the older body (especially those in your glands and muscles) gradually grow fewer.
Bearing in mind what I've already told you about the great restorative powers o£ protein on body cells (as evidenced by the case histories of those protein-starved elderly patients miraculously restored to life and usefulness), isn't it sheer logic that the more years you carry, the more repair material you need each day? And what is that "repair material" except food protein}
The more enlightened o£ our physicians today recognize how wrong it is to eliminate high-protein foods from the diet of the average patient. Yet there still remain the diehard doctors who cling to the out-of-date theory that certain ail¬ments such as arthritis, high blood pressure, certain kidney diseases, hardening of the arteries and diabetes mean "cutting down on," if not eliminating entirely, meat in the patient's diet.
There is the case of a thirty-nine-year-old woman, well known to me, who developed rheumatoid arthritis several years ago. Weighing all of a scant 105 pounds, she had dieted strenuously for years to keep from getting fat; she had existed mostly on tea and dry toast. Since becoming arthritic, her physician had kept her on a no-meat diet, his reasoning being that meat was "bad" for her condition.
About the time I started writing this book, word reached me that she had collapsed from weakness and severe nutri¬tional anemia and had been rushed to the hospital. This came as no surprise to me, for I had anticipated some such climax to her case in view o£ her "no-meat" diet. For days, while she remained in the hospital, she was given injections of various concentrated nutriments in an effort to overcome the anemia, and to give her strength enough to sit in a chair.
I don't need to tell you that this woman, although only thirty-nine years old, looked a good twenty years older on the day she was taken to the hospital. A flagrant case of in¬duced premature aging—induced by both her own senseless dieting and her doctor's ignorance.
Like most stories, this one has a sequel. Thanks to the com¬mon sense of the young doctor now in charge of her case, this woman is taking mineral capsules containing iron in order to build up her blood hemoglobin. Also, he has ordered her to eat three high-protein meals a day. When last I had word of her, she had recovered sufficient use o£ her swollen arthritic hands to do some sewing—and to wash the Venetian blinds in her home—all this in only three short months from the time she was carried to the hospital, a victim of extreme nutritional exhaustion.
But, as a rule, you cannot look to your doctor to help you stay young. He is a repair man, not a rejuvenator. Your determined campaign to retain the wonderful feeling of youth which seems to be slipping away should begin with your next meal—a meal built around protein.