Is It Your Turn Yet?

“Is It Your Turn Yet?”
March 2010
A Nutrition Based Life

As those in our practice know, we identify ourselves as a “Nutrition Based” Dental Practice. Nutrition and Biochemistry has always been my passion, primarily because my dad contracted and had an early death from diabetes. Dentistry is obvious because dental caries is a disease of refined sugar. With very few exceptions, if one has a diet very low in refined sugar, one does not have cavities.

Two very inspirational people have driven home to me how it is not just the teeth and diabetes that is negatively effected by excess consumption of sugar. These two individuals, one a staff person and the other a patient, were each diagnosed with cancer. Both are alive now, many years later, and leading (to most outside observers), a very normal life and have an expectancy to live a long life. The patient, a middle aged man, decided he did not want to go through all the chemo, etc. so he researched for himself and worked with a health food store in Greenville to establish a protocol that might starve cancer cells and reduce or eliminate them from his organ.

I have always been intrigued with this amazingly daring and self assured man on how he lives his life to keep the cancer at bay. He was very kind to summarize his regimen for me. The basics are, as we expect, healthy living including daily exercise, recognition of stress, organic eating, and limited splurging. The one dramatic comment he made in his summary was, “I eat almost no refined sugar because cancer cells love sugar.”

My employee, after undergoing therapy, came to the same conclusion independently, reading the research and has very little refined sugar in her diet.

Cancer in Central Maine seems all too prevalent and early research that I did in dental school revealed that everyone has cancer going on in their body everyday of their life, but it is the body’s ability to shut off the cancer cells that is critical.

These two unique individuals are alive today and hopefully, with diligence, will beat the ravages of cancer. The burning question is whether they are just plain lucky, as many physicians may respond, or is it their lifestyle and regulation of refined sugar that is keeping them with us today?

It is an individually answered question and if one of us is stricken with the disease, it is an immediate decision as to what route to take and whether a nearly optimum diet would be part of our decision. But, as part of my dental research pointed out - everyday we have active cancer in our bodies. Maybe it’s just not cavities that we are preventing by avoiding the sugared soda aisle.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Written by: Dr. Daniel L. Steinke