Cavities can be healed (easier while young than old), teeth can be remineralized, and what we eat has a direct effect on our health (I already knew that part of course, but never read it this way before). Even though we can all look around and see how far we've come as a society in so many ways, this book shows how there are some ways in which we have degressed. He concluded that the modern Western diet, and, in particular, sugar, flour, and processed vegetable oils are responsible for these diseases and that Western methods of commercially preparing and storing foods stripped away vitamins and minerals necessary to prevent disease. He observed that various diseases endemic to Western industrial societies of the 1920s and 1930s were rarely present in the indigenous populations he visited, but that as these groups abandoned their ancestral diet and adopted Western diets, they showed increases in typical Western diseases.

Within one generation of eating "modern foods" - dental health markedly deteriorated, as did general health. As modern diet encroached on their traditional diets their health and vigor decreased with each generation.NUTRITION AND PHYSICAL DEGENERATION is the basic foundation for the Traditional Foods Movement and also the Paleo Movement. Then you start checking the effects on the dental health on the primitive tribes of the contact with modern diets, and it becomes apparent that tooth decay is one of those effects. You see, in mind-boggling photos, how healthy, disease-free primitives look; the ones who have been subsisting on their own diets for millenia have beautifully formed faces, palates, jaws and teeth that are totally devoid of caries. He was an American dentist, and he travelled around the world with his wife, looking at people’s teeth and recording what he found.

Side by side were groups that maintained their traditional diets with those that adopted the modern commercial diet of the 1930's.

Since they have accumulated so much accumulated wisdom that is passing with them, it has seemed important that the elements in the modern contacts that are so destructive to them should be discovered and removed. soil improvement, humane animal husbandry, nontoxic farming and gardening, pollutant-free housing, holistic medical therapies, nontoxic dentistry, and, above all, proper food choices and preparation techniques that promote optimal health generation after generation.