We recently received an email from a young woman who expressed a lot of frustration with cavities.
She had read most of our site and done so much research on diets for reversing tooth decay. She had read our articles, “How to find the healthiest diet for YOU” and “How to reverse tooth decay with diet”, and she still had great questions.
So, in an effort to share more helpful strategies that you can implement immediately in your daily life, we’re creating a new series to discuss the role of diet in helping us live free from tooth decay and gum disease.
In this first article of the series, let’s explore one relatively simple diet-based action you can start today that will have a profound impact on your long-term oral and whole body health.
It’s all about optimizing our genetic expression
Thanks to the field of epigenetics, we now know that living a healthy, vital life is more about our environment and day-to-day habits than any predetermination by our genetics.
In other words, our daily choices and habits turn off or on various genes within our bodies. Eat foods that nourish us, turn on genes that express health and vitality. Habituate stress, turn on genes for inflammation, fat storage, and disease.
While this is a simplified explanation, really the takeaway is that we’re in control. We have the ability to make choices that express our genetic potential toward greater and greater levels of health and vitality. Pretty sobering, isn’t it?
So, this series is going to put forth several action items we can integrate into our daily lives to help move the needle towards more health and vitality (and better ability to stop tooth decay). And the first action is…
Eat a savory breakfast
Regardless of your dietary preferences and your opinions on which diet is the healthiest for humans, making your first meal of the day savory instead of sweet gets you started on a healthier path.
Kind of like the healthy habit of making your bed in the morning, having a savory breakfast sets your intent for making healthy food choices for the day.
After all, once the ‘sugar bugs’ in our bodies get a taste of something sweet, one thing is for sure… They will make it really loud and clear that they want more sugary foods, and the battle to resist sweet foods throughout the day will be your norm.
We’ve written pretty extensively on how sugar undermines our oral (and whole body) health.
In the article, ‘What causes tooth decay (and how to stop it)’, we explore how sugar helps disrupt our body’s natural mechanism to cleanse our teeth from the inside out. And in the article, ‘How teeth decay, the perfect storm between pH, sugar, and microbes’, we dive into how sugar causes problems directly in the mouth, too.
So, instead of wrestling with your sugar demon all day, start the day with a savory meal that has a healthy balance of protein, carbs and fats. (Here’s a link to the next article in this series, which emphasizes the importance of increasing our intake of healthy fats.)
Here are just a few of the many benefits of starting with a savory breakfast:
- Increased energy throughout the day
- Greater mental focus and clarity
- Improved mood
Starting to sound enticing?????
Incidentally, if you want to take a deeper dive on this subject of how to stop tooth decay and remineralize your teeth, we invite you to download our FREE eBook, How to Stop Tooth Decay and Remineralize Your Teeth. This free guidebook is loaded with simple-to-apply actions to help anyone who is looking to live a cavity-free life.
How to break the SAD breakfast routine…
Cold cereal, bagel, toast and jam, oatmeal, pancakes. All SAD (Standard American Diet).
Full disclosure here: we both grew up eating cold cereal for breakfast. From our view, cold, commercially-processed cereal in commercially-produced milk nears the epitome of the wrong way to start a day.
We all get it.
If we want different results than what’s normal, we have to make different choices.
In this case, breaking the sweet breakfast norm is critically important for shifting from whatever version of SAD you habituate to a diet for health and vitality.
So, how can someone start to make the shift to savory breakfasts?
Two actions here; one inner and one outer…
Step 1: Reframe your meals
First, try changing your view of the meals throughout your day. Rather than having the labels of ‘breakfast, lunch and dinner’, try giving them generic labels like ‘meal 1, meal 2, and meal 3’.
We first came across this ‘reframing’ of meals from our professional friends Dallas and Melissa Hartwig in their excellent book, It Starts with Food. These folks are the geniuses behind the Whole30 movement (which OraWellness products are proud to be a part of).
This inner shift of awareness helps us shake up our cultural programming of what foods we ‘should and shouldn’t’ have for a given meal.
For example, when I think of what ‘breakfast’ is from the view of the culture in which I was raised, my mind goes to cold cereal or (on a special day) french toast or pancakes.
And lunch? Well lunch is a sandwich of course.
You get the point.
So, rather than having to buck the mental associations we have from our childhood with the terms ‘breakfast, lunch and dinner’, try just viewing the meals of the day as what they are: meals 1, 2, and 3, or morning, midday and evening meals.
In this way, we can step out of our internalized cultural norms and won’t feel strange eating a savory first meal.
Step 2: Have a cup of soup for breakfast (err, meal 1 :))
Ok, what do we ideally want in a first meal of the day?
We want to feel nourished.
We want to feel full throughout the morning without being weighed down by a heavy meal.
We want something simple.
We want breakfast to be easy and quick!
And, between getting ready for work (or getting the kids ready for school) or whatever your morning energy pull is, maybe ‘easy and quick’ should have been mentioned first in that list.
Voila. Leftover soup to the rescue.
It’s savory. It’s nourishing. It’s quick. It even fulfills our desire to have a cup of something warm in the morning to warm our belly (without the caffeine or sugar).
Why soup?
Whenever possible, we like to have examples from history to provide us some empirical evidence that the solution we propose has merit.
In this case, we once again turn to Dr. Weston Price and the work he did with healing tooth decay in many children. In one particular experiment, the children were fed a rich stew once daily along with Dr. Price’s now-famous vitamin combination of high vitamin butter oil and cod liver oil, a glass of raw milk, and biscuits made from freshly ground wheat.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
“So how do you have soup for meal 1?”
I’m sure you’ve realized this…
It takes less than double the time to prepare twice the size of meal.
In other words, if we’re going to make a meal for 4 people, we could make that same meal for 6-8 people with the addition of just a little more prep work.
So here’s the game plan to make it super quick and easy for you to have soup for breakfast…
Once a week, make soup stock.
If you’re in a pinch or time is seriously limited for you at the moment, you can buy stock, but it’s never going to be as inexpensive, delicious, or nutritious as homemade stock. Do what works for your life.
Our preferred base is bones from animals raised locally and on pasture. We also always stock the bones when we bake a turkey. In many ways, bone broth is just so great for both oral and whole body health. However, if you choose to eat a plant-based diet, make a rich vegetable stock from scratch.
With just a little prep work and some time in a crock pot, you’ll have 6-8 cups of the base to make a week’s worth of your savory ‘meal 1’.
Then one option is to make the stock into a big pot of soup and ladle it into containers to freeze and use throughout the week.
Our preferred option is to freeze the stock in quart containers and make the soup fresh.
Then while making dinner, you can toss the extra veggies, seasonings, meats, beans, whatever into a pot on the back of the stove, add a quart of stock, and you have savory breakfast ready for the next few mornings.
One of the easiest ways to enrich the soup du jour is to put any leftovers from yesterday into the soup. You know, when you’ve already eaten the leftover and there’s still a little leftover? Rather than trying to find the enthusiasm to enjoy the double leftover, chop it up and add it to the soup.
Making some Mexican food? Prep a little extra and make a spicy soup.
Doing Italian? Make a minestrone.
One of our family’s favorites is from Vietnam, called Pho (pronounced ‘fuh’) which we make with sautéed beef and veggies in a warming, herb-rich stock base with fresh ginger and turmeric.
You can serve this nourishing meal with rice noodles if you eat some grains. Recently, we’ve been really enjoying making Pho with ‘zoodles’ made from spiralizing zucchini. While zoodles are a little more time consuming to make, it’s a fun way to enjoy noodles without the grains.
So, try starting your day with a savory cup of soup.
The combination of nutrition, simplicity, and starting the day with a warm, nourished belly could make all the difference in your long-term path to optimal oral health and whole being wellness.
What about you? What have you learned about avoiding sweet breakfasts? Have you found other strategies helpful? Please share them in the comments so we can all continue to learn from one another!
For the next article in this series on diet and cavity prevention, check out, “Why eating healthy fats is our #1 diet hack to heal cavities“.
Helpful, Related Resources:
How to stop tooth decay and remineralize your teeth [Free eBook]
Why eating healthy fats is our #1 diet hack to heal cavities [article 2 in this series on diet and cavity prevention]
How to find the healthiest diet for YOU [article]
What causes tooth decay (and how to stop it)? [article]
How teeth decay – the perfect storm between sugar, pH, and oral microbes [article]
Other resources:
Whole30.com [great diet based resource]
My favourite savory breakfast is pastured eggs, steam fried in butter served over fermented vegetables, all topped with rewarmed brown lentils.
So excited for this series!! We eat pretty healthy and have been changing our dental care but I still have cavities! Can’t wait to try to implement all of your ideas to avoid future cavities! Thank you!
Absolutely love this idea.
I’ve been experimenting with so many different diets over the past ten years and this one is the most effective and nutritionally sound idea yet.
I’m looking forward to more info in the next article.
How about your thoughts on eating vegan as opposed to animal fats etc.
Thanks and keep up this great work.
Tara
I have had a mild cold now for a couple of days and that homemade chicken soup from Costco looked that the right choice for breakfast. Feeling better already in just a couple of hours. Thanks for the tip. Never really thought about eating soup for breakfast .
When I was a teenager, I visited Vietnam with my parents (they were born there, but came to the US in ’75 as refugees after the fall of Saigon). In all the towns, pho shops were bustling for breakfast! Plenty of savory “meal 1” options. I loved it, and I didn’t miss my frosted mini wheats. It’s somehow so nourishing spiritually to eat like my grandparents and great-grandparents did too.
I like the tip about serving salty savory foods to kids. My kids always say yes to bacon. Sometimes I let them enjoy the cereal too, but we primarily have eggs in the mornings.
Thanks for sharing this information about What to eat to never have another cavity in your life
Good post!
I am a Dentist and I can read your in a good path in these lines above
It´s about balance, one of the key factors is, as you´ve mentioned: sugar, which is ingested by bacteria afterwards, expel different kinf of acids on our teeth
Keep up with the good work
Greetings from Caracas, Venezuela
This is a great article. There are so many good results from changing your diet besides helping to stop tooth decay (more energy, more focus and better attitude as mentioned in your article!!) as well as balanced nutrition and overall health! Thanks for sharing and increasing knowledge!
I’ve never thought of having soup for Meal 1 AKA breakfast. I will say Meal 1 has always been something I struggle with. I usually eat the sad meal of cold cereal because it’s easy. I’m looking forward to changing up my meal 1 to be more happy 🙂
Meal 1 -Soup…Brilliant.. specially as we head into autumn in Oz thumbs up
When I wanted to get my children out of the habit of eating breakfast cereals and into savoury foods like eggs – which was a leap too far for them at the time – I went to salty food for a week, like sausages and fish fingers. It did the trick with their taste buds as then they were happy to have eggs,
Great idea Frances!!!
Thank you for sharing!
I appreciated the info on this page 🙂
Would like to call your attention to an “incorrect” word in this sentence on this page under step 2:
We want to feel full through the morning with being weighed down from a heavy meal.
Thank you Jane!
I’ll go edit my typo now 🙂
When cooking breakfast for my large family, I utilize the crock pot and overnight casseroles. It’s faster than boxed cereal in the morning, especially when people need to eat at different times. We discovered that our kids behave much better with a savory morning meal.
Thanks for sharing your story and experience with us Rachael! Great idea to crock pot casseroles!
Love the idea of using the crock pot to prepare overnight for the first meal of the day! Never thought of doing that before, except for oatmeal. Thanks!
This is just the article I need to confine my family away from traditional hi sugar breakfast and other meals. Thanks.
I appreciate your articles as a reminder and an encouragement to eat healthy and avoid tooth decay and other illnesses. I wish I knew this stuff when I was younger I would have avoided a whole lot of tooth misery and now that I do know better I still need a good nudge to make good choices and you really help with that . Thank you and God bless you and may you have beautiful health. Lynne Mikkelsen
Omelettes and green smoothies are also a great savoury meal 1.
Have you heard of Bright Line Eating? You’d love that way of eating too. Been eating that way for almost a year and you’re right, having savory for breakfast makes a huge difference.
Thanks for sharing this idea J!
We will check it out.
I wish I knew then ( as a little kid even—). what I know now! Even as a child, I was having trouble with blood sugar issues—even though I was never diagnosed with diabetes. My parents were so terribly addicted to sugar (cookies, cakes, candy, ice cream) and I guess no one knew back then that grains and starchy foods were sugar! As a kid, I craved a savory breakfast, but all there was was cereal. I have a young client who is a dentist. I am blown away by how she believes fluoride is great, diet doesn’t really matter—and I don’t even dare ask her what she thinks of mercury fillings. She is still young and healthy. Like me, she probably won’t learn about how backwards everything is until she is dealing with illness!
Aloha Kate,
Thanks for sharing your story with us. Yep, it sure does seem that ‘youth is wasted on the young’. In the case of the young dentist, she has to work through all the programming she received in schooling. Thankfully, there are plenty in the field willing to stand up and say, ‘There’s another way’.
I make a soup every morning out of chicken or bone broth, stir in an egg while it boils, add bok choy or kale and cauliflower rice. I also add a tablespoon of tumeric. It’s WARMING and delicious.
That sounds AWESOME Joanne!
Thanks so much for sharing this idea.
I love the idea of soup for breakfast.I have been following a keto diet for 15 months now and usually have only 2 meals a day …No sugar,few carbs ,lots of salads and green veggies , meat,eggs,etc.
Not only have I lost weight I have more energy.My daughter who lives in Japan made a soup which has an egg swirled into it at the end of cooking and it was delicious.Her family is returning to live in Australia soon and I know her husband always has soup for breakfast.He never has sweets either.
I was at my dental cleaning recently. The hygienist told me that turmeric stains teeth badly, so is better taken in capsules. It is a great anti inflammatory, but high in oxalates.
Thanks for the soup idea, I love it ! I have started eating a savory breakfast in November and like you say in the article I realized that changing what “breakfast” means for me has really helped. So the way I do it is to eat the left over veggies from the night before and some potatoes (mashed or not) that I will reheat with onions and butter and usually with some eggs cooked in different ways. I add cheese or sometimes meat, all depends on what is available. I try to always have cooked potatoes in the house because I love them and can eat them in many different ways and they save me for breakfast! Now that it’s been 5 months of this change I can say my body feels better with this kind of breakfast.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Johanne.
What you describe here is exactly what we suggest, to use what you have into a savory, quick first meal of the day.
So glad it’s helping!!
I love this post, and am so glad you are promoting this kind of diet. I am a chapter leader in the WAPF, and have been eating the way you propose for nearly 20 years now, starting after I had some progressing health problems that did not respond to the usual dietary and medical advice. It worked wonders! But, as a caveat, it (most sadly) did not work to prevent more cavities in my teeth. There is a reason for that. I did not begin a WAP diet until I was in my forties. Born in the 1950s, I had numerous cavities and fillings in my teeth as a child and young adult. Unfortunately, as we get older, those fillings wear out, they contribute to cracks in our teeth, which then become cavities, etc, etc. So I still wrestle with cavities and fillings. If one really wants to never have another cavity again, it is best to start this diet as young as possible, and to hope, in fact, that your parents were eating it years before you were born! But, nonetheless, it’s a dietary plan worth implementing at any time, as it will help enormously with our health no matter when you start it.
Ditto Joyce.
We’ve been eating well for decades too. But, like you, already had so much damage done in our early years (from poor diets of our own, parent’s poor diets, lots of dentistry, and poor oral hygiene education). The good news is even though we already have so much collateral damage, we can always make wiser choices in our own lives. And (hopefully) our choices rub off onto the next generations so we can begin to turn around this crazy trend in our modern culture. We strongly support the WAPF movement and have been a part of their activity for the past decade.
Keep on the path Joyce! Together we can help so many people navigate this path back to greater oral and whole body wellness!
It sounds like you have a leaky filling or a root canal, the latter need to be removed. Sorry to say. I had the same thing on my decades of WAP before I got the root canals removed. Try a FLIR camera (…find a house contractor and borrow). You’ll see the hot spots on your jaw. I am slightly older than you are and my teeth bounced back after a similar childhood et al. Good luck!