The following is a guest blog post from a professional friend of ours, Dr. Al Danenberg. Dr. Al is a wonderful resource because he is a dentist who specializes in the treatment of gum disease AND has awakened to the foundational impact that diet has on our oral health. You can learn more from Dr. Al by visiting his site, DrDanenberg.com dental scaling machine. With that, we’ll turn it over to Dr. Al… I recently had a patient who had bleeding gums, but it wasn’t caused by dental plaque or poor oral hygiene. It was the result of unhealthy food choices and an unhealthy gut, which led to a compromised immune system, which led to a breakdown in his mouth. After changing his nutrition, he was able to resolve his bleeding and sore gums. I am in a unique position. I am a periodontist who has been in practice for 40 years, but two years ago I had a paradigm shift. I learned about ancestral nutrition. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Today, I incorporate cutting edge periodontal treatment using the PerioLase® laser along with the health benefits of ancestral nutrition. I have changed my personal health through ancestral nutrition, and I teach ancestral nutrition to all my periodontal patients to enhance their healing, to create a healthy gut microbiome, and to improve their overall health. Human skeletal remains have been discovered as far back as 400,000 years ago. Dental remains from approximately 20,000 years ago have demonstrated that our primal ancestors hardly ever had gum disease or dental decay dental implant machine. How could that be? They had no toothbrushes, no floss, no fluoride, and no dental cleanings every 6 months. Then how could they have healthy mouths? The answer is they ate nutrient-dense foods and had healthy gut bacteria! Here are 19 pearls for you to consider for a healthier mouth and a healthier body: Foods to avoid: 1. Grains can initiate inflammation and a leaky gut, through which undigested foods and bad bacteria can leak into the bloodstream. Not good! This creates a cascade of events that can cause various chronic diseases and obesity. Our guts never evolved to digest grains completely, and they need to be eliminated from our diets. 2. Unnatural sugars contribute to unhealthy bacteria and chronic diseases as grains do. All added sugars like fructose, agave, and high fructose corn syrup should be avoided. 3. Polyunsaturated vegetable oils (like canola oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, and safflower oil) are unstable and break down easily as a result of commercial processing and normal cooking. Ingestion of these fats damages metabolic processes causing harm to individual cells dental instruments. Also, chemically altered trans fats and partially hydrogenated fats are toxic to the body. All of these need to be avoided. 4. Legumes have anti-nutrients that irritate the intestinal lining and prevent the proper absorption of many minerals. Legumes are not essential for health and only offer a low level of nutrients per gram. These include beans, soy, peanuts, and lentils. They should be avoided.