Receding Gums, Thinning Bones: The Shared Disease Your Dentist Doesn’t See

An Essay on the Systemic Origins of Gum Recession, Jaw Bone Loss, and What Dentistry Refuses to Acknowledge

A reader recently described a situation that millions of people will recognise. He has had receding gums and jaw bone loss for over a decade. He flosses. He uses interdental picks. He brushes. He water flosses. He uses mouthwash. He does everything his dentist has ever told him to do. None of it has slowed the recession down.

He is also 55, and has been diagnosed with osteopenia — thinning bones throughout his skeleton.

His dentist treats these as two separate problems. His doctor treats the osteopenia as a third, unrelated concern. Nobody has connected the receding gums, the disappearing jaw bone, and the thinning skeleton as expressions of the same underlying process. And nobody has explained why a decade of meticulous oral hygiene has accomplished nothing.

The reason it hasn’t worked is that it was never going to work. Mechanical cleaning of the tooth surface does not address the mechanism driving gum recession and bone loss. That mechanism is systemic, metabolic, and nutritional. It originates not in the mouth but in the gut, the endocrine system, and the chronic deficiency of specific fat-soluble nutrients that govern where calcium goes in the body — and where it doesn’t.

The evidence for this has existed for decades. Some of it was actively suppressed.

A Note on Nutrient Language

This essay references vitamin K2, vitamin D3, and vitamin A by their conventional names because the research it draws on uses that vocabulary. Readers familiar with my earlier essay Do Vitamins Exist? will notice a tension. That essay questions whether isolated compounds exist as discrete entities in living tissue, and argues that whole foods work through mechanisms — matrix effects, energetic properties, cofactor webs — that isolation destroys.

The two positions are compatible. The argument here is not “buy K2 supplements.” It is that traditional whole-food diets sustained mineralisation and modern diets don’t. Weston Price documented populations with zero dental disease eating grass-fed butterfat, organ meats, fermented foods, and fish eggs. He called the protective factor “activator X.” Decades later, researchers labelled it vitamin K2. The label is convenient. Whether it accurately describes a discrete molecule present in living butter or whether it names one thread in a matrix we don’t fully understand is the open question explored in the earlier essay.

When this essay says the body lacks K2, read it as: the body lacks whatever it is in traditional foods that modern diets no longer provide. The foods are the point, not the molecules.

Do Vitamins Exist?

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The pH Threshold

Dentist Mark Breiner, in Whole-Body Dentistry, identifies a finding that reframes the entire conversation about gum recession. Oral pH should sit at approximately 6.5 to 7. When it drops below 5.5, the body begins demineralising bone and enamel to restore the calcium balance it needs in the blood.¹

This is not a local process. The body does not distinguish between the calcium in your jaw bone and the calcium in your hip or spine. When blood pH requires correction, the body pulls calcium from wherever it can get it. The jaw bone is one of the first targets — it is metabolically active, constantly remodelling, and rich in the mineral reserves the body draws on. The result is periodontal disease: the bone supporting the teeth dissolves, the gums lose their foundation, and they recede.

Breiner is direct about the implications. Most dentists view periodontal disease as caused by bacteria in the mouth. But the presence of periodontal disease reflects a more profound systemic problem. He identifies five defects common to all degenerative diseases and argues that periodontal disease should be viewed as the harbinger of possible future bone problems, such as osteopenia.²

Read that again. The dentist is saying that your receding gums are a warning that your skeleton is next.

For the man writing in at 55 with both receding gums and osteopenia, this connection has already been confirmed in his own body. The jaw bone loss and the skeletal bone loss are not coincidences. They share a cause: chronic demineralisation driven by pH imbalance and nutritional deficiency.

The conventional dental response — brush more, floss better, come in for deeper cleanings — does not touch pH. It does not address the mineral metabolism. A toothbrush cannot remineralise a jaw bone that is being dissolved from within.

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The Invisible Toothbrush

The deeper mechanism was documented by dentist Ralph Steinman at Loma Linda University, beginning in 1958. Steinman’s work, conducted over forty years in collaboration with endocrinologist John Leonora, constitutes one of the most important — and least known — bodies of dental research in modern history.

Steinman discovered that teeth are not inert structures sitting passively in the mouth. They have an active internal fluid system. Using fluorescent dye markers in rats, he tracked a constant microscopic flow of fluid that originates near the intestinal area, flows upward through the tooth pulp, and emerges outward through the enamel.³ Dye injected into a rat’s stomach appeared in the tooth’s inner pulp chamber within six minutes and was visible in the enamel within an hour.⁴

This dentinal fluid performs three functions: it delivers minerals and nutrients for continuous tooth repair, it flushes toxins from the tooth interior, and it repels microbial biofilm on the tooth surface. Steinman called it the tooth’s “invisible toothbrush.” In a healthy system, the fluid flows outward like sap in a tree, creating a pressurised barrier that actively prevents decay and gum disease.⁵

The critical finding came next. Steinman and Leonora traced the control mechanism for this fluid to the hypothalamic-parotid gland endocrine axis. The hypothalamus — a gland in the centre of the brain — communicates with the parotid gland (the largest salivary gland, located near the jaw) via a hormone-releasing factor. When the parotid gland is stimulated, it releases a hormone that maintains the outward dentinal fluid flow. When this hormonal signal is disrupted, the flow reverses.⁶

A reversed flow is catastrophic. Instead of pushing protective fluid outward, the tooth begins drawing bacteria, acids, and debris inward from the mouth — like a straw. The pulp becomes inflamed. The tooth loses its capacity for self-repair. Decay begins from the inside. And the gum tissue, no longer supported by a functioning mineralisation system, degenerates.⁷

Steinman identified several factors that reverse dentinal fluid flow. The primary one is dietary sugar and refined carbohydrates. Sugar raises insulin levels, which suppresses hypothalamic function, which disrupts the parotid hormone signal, which reverses the dentinal fluid. The process is immediate: daily high blood sugar levels suppress dentinal flow continuously. And the process is reversible: reduction of dietary sugar to normal blood sugar levels restores the endocrine axis response.⁸

This finding inverts the standard dental narrative. Conventional dentistry says sugar causes decay because bacteria on the tooth surface ferment it into acid that erodes enamel. Steinman showed that sugar causes decay because it disrupts an endocrine signalling pathway in the brain, shutting down the tooth’s internal defence system. The sugar does not need to touch the tooth at all. In experiments, sugar injected under the skin or delivered directly to the stomach by tube produced the same reversal of dentinal fluid flow.⁹

Other factors compound the disruption. Processed foods, chemical additives, and deficiencies in dietary nutrients also reverse the dentinal flux. Stress, with its production of cortisol, hinders the hormonal cascade. Hormonal shifts — low thyroid activity, pregnancy, the teenage years — affect dentinal flow and make teeth susceptible to decay. Lack of exercise and lymph stagnation impair the hypothalamic-parotid endocrine axis. Medications, oral care chemicals, antibiotics, and fluoride systemically suppress the hypothalamus and reverse parotid activity.⁹ᵃ

Steinman also found that the process is reversible. In conversation with Hal Huggins, Steinman confirmed that simply changing the diet restores dentinal fluid flow. The “flow-in” foods — the ones that reverse the protective outward current — are almost entirely refined foods.⁹ᵇ

The implications for gum recession are direct. Each tooth contains approximately three miles of microscopic dentinal tubules, filled with a fluid estimated to be similar to cerebrospinal fluid.⁹ᶜ When this entire fluid system is compromised, the mineralisation process that sustains tooth structure, gum attachment, and jaw bone density fails simultaneously. The periodontal ligament — millions of taut fibres connecting the tooth to the jaw bone — degenerates when the nutrient supply it depends on is cut off. The gum tissue, which sits atop the bone, has nothing left to cling to.

The local hygiene regimen — brushing, flossing, water flossing, mouthwash — addresses the surface. The disease is underneath.

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What the Researchers Were Told

Steinman and Leonora published their findings across hundreds of studies over four decades. The research was conducted at Loma Linda University, a respected institution. The methodology was rigorous — fluorescent dye tracking, controlled dietary interventions, endocrine measurements.

The dental establishment’s response was not engagement. It was silence.

In the 1940s, at a meeting of the International Association of Dental Research, the cause of cavities had been settled by vote. The acidogenic theory — bacteria ferment sugars into acid, acid erodes enamel — was declared the official explanation. Competing theories, including Dr. Albert Schatz’s proteolysis-chelation theory (which implicated diet, trace elements, and hormonal balance), were discarded.¹⁰

This vote occurred despite contradictory evidence. It occurred before Steinman’s work had even begun. And it created an institutional framework in which any research pointing to systemic, dietary, or endocrine causes of dental disease was automatically outside the accepted paradigm.

The consequences extended to clinical recommendations. The non-specific plaque hypothesis that followed from the acidogenic theory held that all plaque was harmful, and that the more plaque present, the more disease would follow. From this, the entire modern hygiene regime was constructed: stringent plaque control through brushing with a stiff toothbrush and daily flossing, with professional cleanings twice a year. The profession believed that if they could completely clean the teeth and gums, they could eliminate cavities and gum disease.¹⁰ᵃ

Some researchers were not convinced. Their studies showed that flossing was not effective. Lawrence documents that this research was suppressed and not told to the public because it opposed the current dental plaque theory.¹⁰ᵇ The Cochrane Database, which conducts systematic reviews of clinical evidence, has evaluated flossing for the management of periodontal disease and found the evidence for its effectiveness notably weak.¹⁰ᶜ

Holistic dentist Stephen Lawrence documents what happened to the researchers who pursued the systemic theory. Almost seventy years ago, dental researchers found the next piece of the cavity puzzle but were told to keep it quiet and not report it to the public. The reason was straightforward: their findings opposed the current dental plaque theory.¹¹

Steinman’s work continued regardless. By the time he published Dentinal Fluid Transport through Loma Linda University Press in 2004, the evidence was extensive and unambiguous. The dental profession had no published refutation of his mechanism. It simply did not incorporate it.

Lawrence frames this clearly: researchers were trying to understand why the treatments of emphasising tooth brushing, flossing, and fluoride treatments were continuing to fail and were minimally effective. What they found was that the primary cause of all cavities is not found on the teeth but in the body.¹²

The reader who wrote in — brushing, flossing, picking, water flossing, and using mouthwash for a decade while watching his gums recede — is living proof of what the suppressed research predicted. The surface-level approach fails because the disease is not on the surface.

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One Disease, Two Locations

The connection between jaw bone loss and skeletal bone loss is not speculative. It follows directly from the shared mechanism.

When oral pH drops below 5.5, the body pulls calcium from bone to buffer the blood. The jaw bone is accessible and metabolically active, so it goes first. But the same process is stripping calcium from the spine, the hips, and the long bones. Periodontal disease and osteopenia are the same demineralisation process observed at two different sites.

Breiner states this explicitly: demineralisation of enamel begins the process of tooth decay. Demineralisation of bone can lead to osteopenia and, ultimately, osteoporosis. And the demineralisation of the jaw bone can lead to periodontal disease.¹³ He is describing a single metabolic cascade with three visible consequences — decaying teeth, receding gums, and thinning bones — all driven by the same underlying failure.

The holistic dental literature reinforces this from a different angle. Betty Jo Arnett, in Wholeistic Dentistry, notes that when holistic dentists assess receding gums, they look first at bite alignment, diabetes status, and whether the patient has osteoporosis or osteopenia. The reasoning: the patient may be losing bone around their teeth as the body pulls minerals from bone to balance the pH of the blood.¹⁴

Conventional dentistry rarely makes this assessment. When a relatively young person presents with gum recession, the standard explanation is that the patient brushes too hard. Arnett notes that holistic dentists rarely reach that conclusion.¹⁵

The practical consequence is that millions of people with receding gums are walking around with an unrecognised early warning of skeletal bone loss — and their dentists are telling them to use a softer toothbrush.

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The Missing Nutrient

If demineralisation is the disease, the question becomes: what restores proper mineralisation?

The answer was documented in the 1930s by a dentist from Ontario named Weston A. Price.

Price spent a decade travelling to remote populations around the world — Swiss mountain villages, Outer Hebrides fishing communities, Amazonian tribes, Australian Aboriginal groups, Polynesian islanders. Everywhere he went, he found communities of people who, following traditional diets and without toothbrushes, had virtually no dental disease. Their teeth were straight, their jaws were wide, and their bones were strong.¹⁶

When these same populations adopted modern diets — white flour, white sugar, vegetable fats, canned goods — the pattern of decline was immediate and predictable. First came dental decay. Then narrowed jaws. Then susceptibility to chronic disease. The change occurred within a single generation, in children born to parents who had switched diets.¹⁷

Price performed chemical analyses on thousands of food samples. He found that traditional diets provided at least four times more minerals and water-soluble vitamins than the standard American diet of the 1930s. More critically, they provided at least ten times more fat-soluble vitamins.¹⁸

Among the fat-soluble factors Price identified was one he could not fully characterise with the technology available to him. He called it “activator X.” It appeared concentrated in the butterfat of grass-fed animals, in fish eggs, and in organ meats. It had a remarkable capacity to promote mineral deposition in teeth and bones, and to prevent the demineralisation that produces decay and bone loss.¹⁹

For decades, the identity of activator X remained unknown. In 2007, researcher Chris Masterjohn established that it was vitamin K2 — specifically, the menaquinone form of vitamin K.²⁰

Kate Rheaume-Bleue, in Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox, assembles the modern evidence. Vitamin K2 activates two proteins that govern calcium metabolism: osteocalcin (which deposits calcium into bones and teeth) and matrix gla protein, or MGP (which prevents calcium from depositing in soft tissues like arteries). Without adequate K2, osteocalcin remains inactive, calcium supplementation fails to reach bones, and the mineral ends up calcifying arteries instead.²¹

This is the Calcium Paradox: osteoporosis (too little calcium in bones) and atherosclerosis (too much calcium in arteries) occurring simultaneously in the same person. They are not two diseases. They are one disease — a failure of calcium trafficking caused by vitamin K2 deficiency.²²

The bone-building process depends on this activation. Osteoblasts (the bone-forming cells) produce osteocalcin, but the protein is useless until K2-dependent carboxylase activates it. In growing children, activated osteocalcin drives bone lengthening and strengthening — up to ninety percent of maximum lifetime bone density is acquired by age eighteen in girls and twenty in boys. Teenagers consistently show higher levels of undercarboxylated (inactive) osteocalcin, suggesting widespread K2 insufficiency during the very period when bone building is most critical.²²ᵃ

On the other side of the equation, K2 has been shown to inhibit osteoclasts — the cells that break down bone — by inducing their programmed cell death. Without adequate K2, the balance tips toward resorption: bone is broken down faster than it is built, and the result is the progressive thinning we call osteopenia and osteoporosis.²²ᵇ

The implications for our reader are immediate. His receding gums, his jaw bone loss, and his osteopenia are consistent with a chronic deficiency in the fat-soluble vitamins that govern mineralisation — K2 chief among them, working in concert with vitamins D3 and A. His body has been pulling calcium from his jaw and skeleton for years, not because he lacks calcium intake, but because he lacks the nutrients required to direct calcium to where it is needed.

No amount of brushing addresses this.

Rheaume-Bleue documents that K2 deficiency is widespread in modern populations. The primary dietary sources — grass-fed butterfat, organ meats, fermented foods like natto, fish eggs — are precisely the foods that have disappeared from industrialised diets. The very foods Price identified as essential to traditional populations with zero dental disease are the foods modern populations no longer consume.²³

The additional fat-soluble vitamins are equally critical. Vitamin D3 increases the body’s absorption of calcium but has no effect on what happens to it after absorption — that role belongs to K2. Vitamin A, working alongside D3, is necessary for the production of osteocalcin, the bone-mineralising protein that K2 then activates. Without all three working together, the mineralisation system cannot function.²⁴

Steinman’s research intersects here precisely. He found that the addition of specific minerals — copper, iron, and manganese — to a sugar-producing diet almost abolished the decay rate. Phosphorus alone reduced the decay rate by eighty-six percent and prevented the atrophy of the parotid gland associated with sugar ingestion.²⁵ The endocrine system that governs dentinal fluid flow is itself dependent on adequate mineral and fat-soluble vitamin status. The mechanism is unified: nutritional deficiency disrupts the endocrine axis, reverses dentinal fluid, impairs mineralisation, and drives both dental and skeletal bone loss.

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Why Dentistry Doesn’t See It

The question that persists is not whether this evidence exists — it does, across decades of published research — but why conventional dentistry continues to operate as though it doesn’t.

Part of the answer is structural. The acidogenic theory was locked in by vote in the 1940s. Dental education is built on it. The entire clinical model — scrape the plaque, fill the cavity, crown the tooth, extract when necessary — follows from the assumption that bacteria and acid are the primary causes of dental disease.

Part of the answer is economic. Ramiel Nagel, in Cure Tooth Decay, states the obvious: drilling, filling, and billing is the model of conventional dentistry, and it is also a business model. The more teeth that are drilled and filled, the more money is made. There is not much incentive in this system for curing and preventing cavities because without the drilling and filling business model it becomes more of a challenge to turn dentistry into a profitable career.²⁶

Robert Nara, a dentist who spent decades advocating for preventive dental medicine, put it more bluntly: if dentists were doing a medically sound job, if they genuinely wanted to become doctors rather than repairmen, and if they were effective, they would be systematically working themselves out of an income.²⁷

Nara’s experience illustrates the institutional resistance. When he began promoting prevention and oral hygiene education to the public — through pamphlets, radio programmes, and civic presentations — the dental associations brought charges against him for unethical conduct. State licensing investigators visited his office posing as patients, attempting to manufacture violations. His offence was not malpractice. His offence was telling people they could prevent dental disease.²⁸

The numbers confirm the failure of the current model. According to a study published in The Lancet, periodontal disease affects up to ninety percent of the world’s population.²⁹ According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nine out of ten Americans have tooth decay.³⁰ Moderate periodontal disease is found in forty percent of children over twelve.³¹

These are not the statistics of a profession that has identified the correct cause and is treating it effectively. These are the statistics of a profession that has been treating the wrong thing for decades — and profiting from the failure.

The pharmaceutical dimension adds another layer. Breiner documents the rise of bisphosphonate drugs (Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel) prescribed for osteopenia and osteoporosis — the very conditions that share a mechanism with periodontal disease. These drugs work by inhibiting osteoclasts (the bone-resorbing cells), which reduces the demand for osteoblasts (the bone-building cells). They effectively fossilise the bone, making it harder but interfering with the natural cycle of resorption and regeneration.³²

The consequence: a growing number of cases of jaw bone necrosis — death of the jaw bone — in patients taking bisphosphonates. Open wounds that will not heal. Pain unresponsive to treatment. Some dentists are now refusing to perform extractions, implants, or gum surgery on patients taking these drugs.³³

The bitter irony is difficult to overstate. A patient develops receding gums and jaw bone loss from a systemic nutritional deficiency. The dentist does not identify the cause and prescribes deeper cleanings. The bone loss progresses to the skeleton. The doctor diagnoses osteopenia and prescribes a bisphosphonate drug. The drug causes necrosis of the jaw bone. The patient now has worse jaw bone disease than they started with, caused by the treatment for a condition that shared its origin with the gum disease that was never properly diagnosed.

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The Osteoporosis “Epidemic”

The diagnosis of osteopenia itself deserves scrutiny. Breiner raises a question that ought to be asked more often: when did low bone density become such a widespread problem?

Osteoporosis has always existed, but it was rare, particularly in people under eighty. In 1982, pharmaceutical companies began promoting hormone replacement therapy as a way to prevent osteoporosis. Through massive advertising and promotional campaigns, fear of this seemingly new disease and of hip fracture was created.³⁴

The diagnostic standard amplified the fear. Bone mineral density (BMD) is measured by DXA machines and expressed as a T-score — a comparison of your bone density to that of a healthy young Caucasian woman in her twenties or thirties. Loss of bone density is normal with age. By using a young reference population as the benchmark, large numbers of middle-aged and older people will inevitably test poorly.³⁵

The T-score also tells us nothing about bone strength — only density. The internal architecture of bone (the trabeculae, analogous to steel bracing inside a building) cannot be measured by DXA. A person with lower density but strong internal architecture may be at less fracture risk than someone with higher density but compromised architecture.³⁶

Breiner notes that the risk of hip fracture for a woman under sixty-five is just one percent. Most hip fractures occur in people over eighty who are in poor general health and taking multiple drugs.³⁷

None of this means bone loss should be ignored. It means the response matters. Taking a drug that fossilises bone and causes jaw necrosis addresses the measurement while making the underlying condition worse. Restoring the nutritional factors that govern where calcium goes in the body — K2, D3, A, and the minerals that support the endocrine axis — addresses the mechanism.

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Back to the Beginning

Consider again the man who wrote in. Receding gums and jaw bone loss for more than a decade. A full mechanical hygiene regimen — floss, picks, brush, water flosser, mouthwash — that has not slowed the progression. Osteopenia at fifty-five.

His dentist has been treating his mouth. His doctor has been treating his bones. Neither has recognised that they are looking at the same disease from different angles.

The mechanism has been documented. Steinman and Leonora published the endocrine pathway governing tooth and gum health over four decades of research at Loma Linda University. Breiner identified the pH threshold at which the body begins stripping calcium from both jaw bone and skeleton. Price documented the protective role of fat-soluble vitamins in populations with zero dental disease. Rheaume-Bleue identified vitamin K2 as the missing factor governing calcium’s destination in the body.

This man has been doing everything he was told to do. The problem is that everything he was told to do was the wrong thing. Not wrong in the sense of harmful — brushing your teeth is fine — but wrong in the sense of irrelevant to the actual disease process. He has been polishing the surface of a building whose foundation is crumbling.

The research explaining why has been available since the 1960s. The nutritional framework has been available since the 1930s. The molecular identification of the key missing nutrient was confirmed in 2007.

He was never told.

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References

¹ Breiner, M.A. Whole-Body Dentistry: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Impact of Dentistry on Total Health. Quantum Health Press, 2012, Chapter on Oral pH Imbalance.

² Breiner, Chapter on Oral pH Imbalance.

³ Artemis, N. Holistic Dental Care: The Complete Guide to Healthy Teeth and Gums. North Atlantic Books, 2013, Chapter 1: Mind Your Mouth.

⁴ Artemis, Chapter 1.

⁵ Artemis, Chapter 1.

⁶ Nagel, R. Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition. Golden Child Publishing, 2010, Chapters on Dentinal Fluid Transport.

⁷ Artemis, Chapter 1: The Hypothalamic-Parotid Gland Endocrine Axis.

⁸ Artemis, Chapter 1.

⁹ Meinig, G. Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publishing, 1994, Chapter on Dentinal Fluid.

⁹ᵃ Artemis, Chapter 1.

⁹ᵇ Huggins, H.A. Why Raise Ugly Kids? Arlington House, 1981, pp. 145-46; also cited in Artemis, Chapter 2.

⁹ᶜ Nagel, Chapters on tooth anatomy and dentinal fluid transport.

¹⁰ Nagel, Chapter on the history of the acidogenic theory.

¹⁰ᵃ Lawrence, S.A. Holistic Dental Care: Your Mind, Body, and Spirit Guide. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, Chapter 1: Dental Healthcare 101.

¹⁰ᵇ Lawrence, Chapter 1.

¹⁰ᶜ Sambunjak, D. et al. “Flossing for the Management of Periodontal Diseases and Dental Caries in Adults.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2011 (12): CD008829; cited in Lawrence, Notes.

¹¹ Lawrence, Chapter 1.

¹² Lawrence, Chapter 1.

¹³ Breiner, Chapter on Oral pH Imbalance.

¹⁴ Arnett, B.J. Wholeistic Dentistry: Balancing Conventional Dental Care. Beaver’s Pond Press, 2011, pp. 107-108.

¹⁵ Arnett, pp. 107-108.

¹⁶ Rheaume-Bleue, K. Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox. Harper Collins, 2012, Chapter 2; see also Price, W.A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 8th Edition, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

¹⁷ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter 2.

¹⁸ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter 2.

¹⁹ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter 2.

²⁰ Masterjohn, C. “On the Trail of the Elusive X-Factor: A Sixty-Two-Year-Old Mystery Finally Solved.” Wise Traditions, 2007, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 14-32.

²¹ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapters 1 and 3.

²² Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter 1.

²²ᵃ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter on Vitamin K2 for Strong Bones.

²²ᵇ Kameda, T. et al. “Vitamin K2 Inhibits Osteoclastic Bone Resorption by Inducing Osteoclast Apoptosis.” Biochem Biophys Res Commun, 1996 Mar 27, 220(3): 515-19; cited in Rheaume-Bleue.

²³ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter 4.

²⁴ Rheaume-Bleue, Chapters 5 and 7.

²⁵ Steinman, R.R. and Leonora, J. “Effect of Selected Dietary Additives on the Incidence of Dental Caries in the Rat.” Journal of Dental Research 54, May 1975, pp. 570-77; also cited in Artemis, Chapter 2.

²⁶ Nagel, Chapter on the business model of conventional dentistry.

²⁷ Nara, R.O. and Mariner, S.A. Money by the Mouthful. Oramedia, 1979.

²⁸ Nara, Chapter on Oramedics and the dental profession’s response.

²⁹ The Lancet, cited in Fife, B. Oil Pulling Therapy. Piccadilly Books, 2008, Chapter 2.

³⁰ U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cited in Fife, Chapter 2.

³¹ Fife, Chapter 2.

³² Breiner, Chapter 21: Jaw Bone and Other Bone Problems.

³³ Breiner, Chapter 21.

³⁴ Breiner, Chapter 21.

³⁵ Breiner, Chapter 21.

³⁶ Breiner, Chapter 21; also Rheaume-Bleue, Chapter on Bone Density Scanning.

³⁷ Breiner, Chapter 21.