Gum Disease and Fasting

[The Coronet]

hey everyone,
I could really do with your advice here! Ive just been told that I have chronic gum disease and require an operation to get it under control. The dentist showed me in the x ray how my bones have started to dissolve because of the disease and he said in 6 year i could start loosing my teeth if I dont do anything about it!

At the moment I have very little money not too mention very little faith in any conventional treatment, so Im a little freaking out! I have read a lot on this forum about people fasting and I was wondering If any of the fasters had any experience with fasting and dental issues?

Specifically my questions are...would fasting cure the problem? and if so should i do a plain water fast or would a juice fast be ok? and finally how long for?!


Im a big eater and the idea of fasting doesnt fill me with joy but if it does the trick all do it for sure!

Thank you so much for your time and to Steve Pavlina for providing this forum

[Lucas]

All I can come up with is..."would it really hurt you to try?"

In my reading on fasting I came across a story where each time a gentleman had a tooth abscess, he fasted and the bad tooth fell out on its own.

Theres no reason not to try this method. It doesnt cost you anything, in fact it will probably save you money on groceries, lol.

[The Coronet]

Hey Lucas,
Thats exactly what im worried about...that it would hurt to try and I dont just mean hunger pain. The thing is that I have fasted for 47 hours before..Im not sure if it did me that much good other then make me feel proud I could go that long..(i know its not so long but it was for me!) I am assuming to get rid of gum disease i would have to go a long long time..something maybe like two weeks and honestly it scares me!

I have hormone troubles, maybe fasting would fix them, but maybe it would upset them and also mess with my metabolism. There seems to be a lot of mixed views about how safe it is do fast for anything longer than 3 days. I know for me to see it through I need to feel convinced that its going to work! It would be fantastic to hear from someone that has had specific experience of fasting and the effect on their teeth!

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by The Coronet

Hey Lucas,
Thats exactly what im worried about...that it would hurt to try and I dont just mean hunger pain. The thing is that I have fasted for 47 hours before..Im not sure if it did me that much good other then make me feel proud I could go that long..(i know its not so long but it was for me!) I am assuming to get rid of gum disease i would have to go a long long time..something maybe like two weeks and honestly it scares me!

I have hormone troubles, maybe fasting would fix them, but maybe it would upset them and also mess with my metabolism. There seems to be a lot of mixed views about how safe it is do fast for anything longer than 3 days. I know for me to see it through I need to feel convinced that its going to work! It would be fantastic to hear from someone that has had specific experience of fasting and the effect on their teeth!

Well, I am on the 15th day of a 30 day water fast and my mouth feels great, and my teeth are clean. My gums are pinker and healthy. My tongue feels a little strange, but thats part of detoxifying.

In my opinion the fear over this kind of thing stems from the medical community. Our medicine says to put a bandage upon it and not consider the source of disease and illness. We treat symptoms and not root out causes. Diet is commonly something that doctors will advise people to change, but how often do people do it? A diet reset while the body purifies itself seems to me to be one of the best natural ways of healing.

I am not even half done with my fast either.

[The Coronet]

Wow thats very impressive and encouraging, well done for having such will power! Well I have just read the whole of the massive 30 day fast post on here (10 Pages..read the links and watched the vlogs!) and the one thing thats seems to be a common theme is that after while you will loose muscle mass.

I was wondering would drink a little of an organic protein shake with some vitamins supplements each day prevent this also whilst giving you the advantage of a prehapes a more gentle detoxification process?

[Heuristic Kirby]

The Coronet,
take Oak Bark internally and rub the powder all over your gums etc before retiring.

[The Coronet]

Heuristic Kirby thanks so much for the tip :-) Ive not heard of that before, i look forward to trying it!

Ive decided to just manifest healthy gums..let the universe show me how to fix it, and youve given me this suggestion..so im excited about :-)

Thanks again

[votoshka]

Look up tooth soap...I have read a few testimonials on it, and people have reported actually healing cavities and other dental disorders while using it.

I have decided to try it myself (but haven't received it yet, as it has to come from the US), so I can't say if it's the answer you're looking for, but it can't hurt to try!

[The Coronet]

Thanks Votoshka!
That sounds very interesting indeed. Ill google it and see what I find. Is there only one company that does it?

Thank again :-)

[username1]

Originally Posted by The Coronet

I was wondering would drink a little of an organic protein shake with some vitamins supplements each day prevent this also whilst giving you the advantage of a perhaps a more gentle detoxification process?

This isn't really an answer so much as an addendum to the question. I've seen the following notion repeated in a few places on the web:

"It was theorized that protein loss during fasting was harmful and that a fast should be supplemented with protein. Fasting with protein became known as the Opti-fast. Fasters took nothing but water and a protein drink. Sadly, several people died. Protein digestion during the fasting state created an overload of urea and the blood become acidic. In this condition, the organs become more damaged instead of healing."

But I've not seen references to any evidence or documentation to support the claim. Optifast is still going as a medically supervised program, and their shakes are not really pure protein:

# Protein (g) 14
# Carbohydrate (g) 20
# Fat (g) 3

So the warning seems not to really be against Optifast [or at least its modern incarnation], but against a pure protein (very low calorie?) diet. Which begs some mention of Atkins.

Fwiw, I'm at the end of day 3 of my first water fast. Had a cup of green tea each day to hopefully prod the fat burning into gear sooner. I stopped taking my usual arsenal of vitamins/supplements. Not really difficult so far, other than an occasional mild headache and feeling tired if I neglect to drink enough water. I plan to break this fast with a trip to the local juice bar, not with a steak or protein shake.

[Excellent Lodestar]

I wouldn't mess with gum disease. If there is bone loss you need to take action right away and not let up. Fasting helps the immune system, but we are talking about ANAEROBIC bacteria below the gum line(read:you can't kill it by standard brushing and flossing) you need to access the periodontal pockets with special protocols.

Periodontal Disease Treatment Guide

Gum Disease? Avoid Gum Surgery Kit - Save your teeth!

Good luck

[ginkgo]

Many have read my page on fasting and you need to also if you want to fast since there are dangers. Here is my other page on it with a personal experience with tooth and gum problem and fasting. You can learn from Weston Price mistakes. He suggests eating meat and he killed his son.

He gave his son a root canal and they did not have antibiotics and his son died. If he would have known about fasting, he could have saved his son's life. But how could he know about it? The bible only has 74 references to fastng.

But fasting releases a swarm of hungry killer T cells. Now if you put some people in front of some lions that just ate, then what would they do. They would do nothing. Now put some people in front of some hungry lions and they will eat them. So fasting causes all the resources that you put into stuffing your face with food and eats all this bacteria and nasty stuff.

So you need to do the water fast with pure water so you cannot make any choices since you will choose the wrong stuff. Now let us get this clear. Your body did not cause this gum disease and all your physical problems. You did. So by fasting you let your body clean up the misatkes you made.

It is like Hell's Kitchen. Chef Ramsey comes into save a failing restaurant that is during everything wrong. He is the expert at making the best restaurants. He starts to tell them what they are doing wrong and they start to call him nuts and think that his advice is stupid. So your body is the leading expert in the world on healing itself. You are the one making it sick.

So when fasting on water you give all your control over to your body. Also see first page of my fasting page. How long do you fast for? That is simple. Until you are done. So my advice is find a fasting doctor (see site above) and let him tell you what to do and fast for as long as he says. This one guy could walk on water, heal the sick and bring the dead back to life and yet he fasted for 40 days but I forgot his name.

More specifically your dental and gum problems were caused by you eating. So the cure for them is to stop eating.

[Excellent Lodestar]

Originally Posted by ginkgo

blah blah blah.
More specifically your dental and gum problems were caused by you eating. So the cure for them is to stop eating.

Really? You need to take a break from Fuhrman's website and research periodontal disease.
Fasting will allow anaerobic bacteria to suddenly come out and play? Oral surgeons and periodontists everywhere would love to here this nonsense...then again, maybe not.

[MightySunTzu]

Hi Coronet,

I am sorry to hear about your serious gum condition. I hope whatever course you decide to take works out great for you.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

Specifically my questions are...would fasting cure the problem?

To be truthful, i don't recall reading anything in the literature specific to this area. But speaking generally, it sounds like the very kind of thing a fast would help greatly with. A fasting body kills bacteria, eliminates toxins and heals tissue. It doesn't care where the tissue is.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

and if so should i do a plain water fast or would a juice fast be ok? and finally how long for?!

Fresh, live juice fasts are nice. Highly nutritious, highly assimilable, low digestive demands, and the detox is so gradual as to allow you to continue very nicely with your normal daily activities. Once my body is completely detoxified and healed, i would enjoy doing many of these. But... in terms of detoxing and healing, Water-only fasting is the gold standard, 3 times more effective (3x faster results) than juice fasting.

How long? If it is me in your situation, serious about taking my best holistic shot at eliminating the gum disease, i will plan on a water-only fast to the return of genuine hunger. This is likely to be about 30 days or so. Even if it didn't completely heal your gum disease, there are 1000 other benefits your body will receive, including the elimination of all or most of your bodily toxins, amazing healing in parts of you that you didn't even know needed it, purified blood, and the optimization of the functioning of all your organs. If fasting to completion is too daunting an endeavor, then i would recommend going as long as you are able. You might find that after the first 2-3 days once ketosis takes over and your body is preferentially burning it's own fat stores as fuel, hunger will all but cease and it will be easier than you imagined. For me it is mostly about patience.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

Im a big eater and the idea of fasting doesnt fill me with joy but if it does the trick all do it for sure!

Show me one person in the universe who doesn't enjoy eating. The hardest part of fasting for me is having to sacrifice for many days the tantalizing foods i love, especially in the area of getting started. But if you measure that cost against the immense benefits, it becomes a lot easier to make the decision to fast and patiently await the day you will once again be able to enjoy these foods... and in all likelihood enjoy them far more than ever before. As well you may be delighted to find that fasting brings about certain joys of it's own such as a sense of peace that you have never known.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

I have hormone troubles, maybe fasting would fix them, but maybe it would upset them

A fast is amazing in it's ability to bring our bodily functions into balance and hormones are no exception.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

... and also mess with my metabolism.

In a fast our body is conserving as much energy as possible, allowing itself to cleanse and heal in a way that the unfasting body can never dream of. As such, a fast is said to temporarily reduce our metabolism by about 10% after 7 days and by about 20% after 21 days. Once the fast is broken, the metabolism is said to be back to normal after about 6 weeks.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

There seems to be a lot of mixed views about how safe it is do fast for anything longer than 3 days.

I'm sure the masters who have fasted tens of thousands of people to completion get a good chuckle out of this.

Originally Posted by Lucas

In my opinion the fear over this kind of thing stems from the medical community. Our medicine says to put a bandage upon it and not consider the source of disease and illness. We treat symptoms and not root out causes.

I completely agree. There is not a lot of money in fasting, but tsunami's of it in drugs and surgeries.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

Well I have just read the whole of the massive 30 day fast post on here (10 Pages..read the links and watched the vlogs!)

I'm curious which 30 day fast post you are referring to as there are multiple. The one i did is called "Beautiful Fast" and is here: Beautiful Fast
I am actually 7.5 days into the sequel.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

... and the one thing thats seems to be a common theme is that after while you will loose muscle mass.

Interesting that you derived this from your readings when you will burn 8-10x as much actual fat as muscle and the muscle you burn will be the very worst of it, the most diseased (including tumors), weak, or damaged. As well, believe me when i tell you that any muscle you lose in a fast will come back on very easily in a vastly detoxified, exceedingly healthy, super charged body.

Originally Posted by The Coronet

I was wondering would drink a little of an organic protein shake with some vitamins supplements each day prevent this also whilst giving you the advantage of a prehapes a more gentle detoxification process?

A water-only fast is natures perfect remedy for allowing the body to detox and heal itself. Perfection is not improved upon by altering it. In a water only fast, the body transitions into a state where it pulls everthing it needs from within including an ample supply of nutritional reserves... which includes all the vitamins and minerals we need and obviously the fat stores to provide the primary fuel supply for the duration. A water fast, by design is amazingly protein sparing. Read the following if you wish...

"The Physiological Changes of Fasting

Many of the most dramatic changes that occur in the body during fasting take place on the first three days of the fast.....

[Entire middle section of about 1.5 paragraphs removed in the need to reduce space. See link for remainder if desired.]

By the third day ketone production is sufficient to provide nearly all the energy the body needs and the body's protein begins to be strongly conserved. The body still needs a tiny amount of glucose for some functions, however, so a very small amount of protein, 18-24 grams, is still catabolized to supply it - from 1/2 to 1 ounce of muscle tissue per day. Over a 30 day water fast a person generally loses a maximum of 1-2 pounds of muscle mass."

from The Health Benefits of Water Fasting by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Protein shakes and vitamin supplements would very much detract from the power of the water-only fast and if it is super low calorie like 600 (which i believe these programs call for), this will backfire and the body will ironically end up burning more muscle with the supplement than without it. Ketosis as in a water-only fast spares muscle. Very low calorie diets do not.

Originally Posted by Excellent Lodestar

I wouldn't mess with gum disease. If there is bone loss you need to take action right away and not let up.

I wholeheartedly agree Lodestar. This is undoubtedly a serious matter. The path towards healing it is what is in contention. You may feel oral surgery is the only option, but others believe that a holistic approach, especially fasting is another. Keep in mind that oral surgeons are not trained to recommend fasts, nor would they make any money in doing so. Surgery is where the big bucks are. I'm not saying there is never a time for surgery, but in almost every instance, i would try a long fast first.

Originally Posted by Excellent Lodestar

Fasting helps the immune system, but we are talking about ANAEROBIC bacteria below the gum line(read:you can't kill it by standard brushing and flossing) you need to access the periodontal pockets with special protocols.

Fasting does immeasurably more than only help the immune system. Hundreds of billions of intestinal bacteria, both bad and good are wiped clean within about 10 days of water-only fasting (along with any parasites)... allowing the individual with a nutritious diet to rebuild the ratio in its optimal proportion. I have no doubt the fasting body will reach these gum line bacteria and kill them... that's the easy part. The greater challenge is healing the badly recessed damaged gums. Healing is what a fasting body does best, but it may or may not be able to regenerate all of the deteriorated tissue.

Originally Posted by ginkgo

But fasting releases a swarm of hungry killer T cells. Now if you put some people in front of some lions that just ate, then what would they do. They would do nothing. Now put some people in front of some hungry lions and they will eat them. So fasting causes all the resources that you put into stuffing your face with food and eats all this bacteria and nasty stuff.

I agree with Ginkgo on this point. A very decent analogy.

[Excellent Lodestar]

Originally Posted by MightySunTzu

You may feel oral surgery is the only option, but others believe that a holistic approach, especially fasting is another. Keep in mind that oral surgeons are not trained to recommend fasts, nor would they make any money in doing so.

Whoa--I NEVER said I support surgery. I don't.I've had oral surgery--all four quadrants---and my periodontal disease quietly progressed anyway.
I provided links that allow an individual to take action(without expensive dental visits)

I "believe" in fasting. I just wrapped up a quick 7 day fast myself. Fasting is great for so many things--no disagreement here. However, periodontal disease is a different animal--that's all I'm saying. It's an infection of a different kind. You could have the strongest immune system in the world, but because the anaerobic periodontal bacteria are "protected" in pockets, the white blood cells (if they can get in) die off because they cant escape the pockets(no blood flow without oxygen)
It would be like fasting to cure a broken wrist. The fasting, while helpful, isn't going to "set the arm" so real healing can take place. once the bones are set....then everything falls into line.
The solution is simply to ACCESS those deep pockets with special inexpensive at home applicators with simple antibacterial solutions such as hydrogen peroxide or iodine. when the bacteria are exposed to oxygen, they are killed instantly. The problem,of course, has been GETTING to those 7+mm deep pockets. Previously only deep cleaning from a hygienist could even access those depths, but now there is an at home solution that has worked for me and many others and doesn't cost $400 a pop...Gum Disease? Avoid Gum Surgery Kit - Save your teeth!
just trying to spare someone the hassles I went through

Good Luck

[MightySunTzu]

Hey Excellent Lodestar,

My sincere apologies, i completely drew the wrong conclusions from what you said and assumed the links were going to point to oral surgery... so i haven't even opened them yet. What you are saying sounds fantastic. Peace.

[Zaphod]

Originally Posted by The Coronet

hey everyone,
I could really do with your advice here! Ive just been told that I have chronic gum disease and require an operation to get it under control. The dentist showed me in the x ray how my bones have started to dissolve because of the disease and he said in 6 year i could start loosing my teeth if I dont do anything about it!

At the moment I have very little money not too mention very little faith in any conventional treatment, so Im a little freaking out! I have read a lot on this forum about people fasting and I was wondering If any of the fasters had any experience with fasting and dental issues?

Specifically my questions are...would fasting cure the problem? and if so should i do a plain water fast or would a juice fast be ok? and finally how long for?!


Im a big eater and the idea of fasting doesnt fill me with joy but if it does the trick all do it for sure!

Thank you so much for your time and to Steve Pavlina for providing this forum

Look into xylitol mints or chewing gum. There are a lot of studies that support its benefits, and it is purportedly very powerful. A dentist, Dr. Ellie, is a huge proponent of it; she says she uses it regularly and has not gone in for a regular cleaning for like 20 years or something. Read this post of hers. Coenzyme Q-10 is also supposed to be good for gums: Severe Periodontal Disease

You may also want to look into listerine or other mouthwashes, and take really good mechanical care of your mouth.

[Cochonette]

You don't need bacteria-killing mouthwashes as they are harmful to healthly gum tissue as well.

How are they harmful? I use mouthwash.

[100wattjames]

There's a lot of good information in this thread... thanks for the link to the cleaning kit Lodestar, I'll be thinking that over for myself.

Here's a few things I've learned:
1. my dad's had a low level dental infection he was trying to cure for maybe two years. During that time, he went on a 55 day vegetable juice fast, and then later, a 20 day barley grass juice fast that transitioned into a 10 day water fast. The whole time he was applying hydrogen peroxide in (what I assume was) the normal recommended way.

It never quite managed to get rid of the problem... he did have a lot of other health benefits from it of course, including his glasses prescription changing for the better oddly enough. Unfortunately, he did have to go in and get things taken care of surgically... within two weeks of doing that, his tinitis started clearing up, so it seems like his dental issues were holding his entire body back from healing.

One warning, fasting isn't my strong point yet but my dad's definitely done a ton of reading. What I've learned from him at least, is that a fruit juice fast would be a lot riskier than a mostly vegetable juice fast. (I swear I remember hearing a story of one of the wholistic authors losing a tooth on an orange juice fast when he was experimenting in his youth). I could be completely making that up though. Does anyone here with more experience and knowledge know if that's even true?

I've also learned that it's a holistic journey, and one thirty day fast will likely not be enough to cure a problem that was born over 30 years of bad habits. The key is definitely going to revolve just as much around finding the best way for you to eat when you're /not/ fasting. That's partly why I like raw food fasts... you can actually live on 100% raw without a whole lot of trouble, so you're not just cleansing, you're learning new ways of living and eating that you can maintain even after you start integrating some of your more normal foods back in.

[ginkgo]

Do you smoke cigarettes?

Fasting does not make problems worse but better. Read this webpage to see what 23 MDs say about fasting. You would be lucky to find the advice from one MD on this forum.

There is no guarantee but fasting has helped lots of dental problems but you should do it with water and nothing else due to your condition.