How Baby-Fed Weaning Can Help Promote Good Oral- and Physical Health
in Your Child
Story at-a-glance
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Modern Westernized infant and early childhood feeding
regimens differ dramatically from ancestral-type feeding
regimens
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92 percent or more of all Westernized people have some
degree of malocclusion, such as crowding of the teeth,
narrowing of the jaws, or both. This has ramifications for
breathing and sleeping, which in turn can contribute to
attention deficit disorder
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By using baby-led weaning, you can instill in your child a
desire for healthy food choices, reduce risk of later
obesity and other associated health risks, and promote the
natural development of your child’s oral cavity, which could
be helpful in preventing sleep problems.
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Baby-led weaning includes premasticating regular whole foods
in lieu of serving processed baby foods. This can be done
either by pre-chewing the food before serving it to your
baby, or using a mesh feeder
By Dr. Mercola
A topic rarely discussed, yet phenomenally important, relates
to the food children and babies are fed, and they way in which
they are weaned. This can have a profound impact on your child’s
future dental- and physical health.
Dr. Kevin Boyd is an attending dentist at Lurie Children’s
(formerly Children’s Memorial) Hospital, the leading pediatric
institution in Chicago area. Incidentally, this is where I did
some training as a resident. It’s a phenomenal training hospital
associated with Northwestern University.
He’s also trained in nutritional biochemistry, and serves on
a board with Joy Moeller who is the leader in the United States
for
oral myofunctional therapy.
Dr. Boyd’s interest in diet, health and dental health began
during a stint in an experimental Peace Corps volunteer program
in Honduras, where kids suffered terrible dental decay.
“[S]ugar cane is the abundant crop there. The kids
start eating it at birth, and their front teeth rot out,”
he says.
He eventually obtained a master’s degree in nutritional
biochemistry and did his research in the area of unhealthy
eating as it affects bodyweight and susceptibility to diabetes
and tooth decay. After that, he entered dental school.
Weight Gain and Cavities Have the Identical Root Cause
As Dr. Boyd explains, the foods that cause weight gain are
the same foods that cause tooth decay—primarily simple
carbohydrates. This realization led him to investigate ultimate
causes versus approximate causes, meaning the evolutionary
significance of diet and tooth decay. He’s now pursuing a Ph.D.
in anthropology and evolutionary medicine, looking at historical
patterns of Westernization of the food supply and how it
impacted internal- and oral disease.
“To suggest that this epidemic of tooth decay is
because of poor brushing is not sound from an evolutionary
perspective,” he says. “It’s not evidence-based.
It’s important to brush. But plaque – the stuff that forms
on the teeth after you eat – from food residue is not
intrinsically acid-producing. It doesn’t produce gum
disease. It doesn’t produce tooth decay unless it becomes
activated.”
What activates it are simple carbohydrates – starches and
sugars – that are not conjugated to its native fiber. All sugars
in nature, such as the fructose in fruits, are conjugated to
fiber, which actually provides mechanical cleansing of teeth.
“I think brushing is important, but not activating
plaque with simple sugars is more important,” he says.
Introducing alkalinity in the form of baking soda can also
help decrease the acid level in your mouth at the tooth- and gum
surface, which can help prevent plaque formation. I can
personally attest to the effectiveness of brushing and flossing
with baking soda.
This is something I learned from
Dr. Tim Rainey, who is a pioneer in biological dentistry.
Despite eating healthy for well over a decade I was still having
problems with persistent plaque formation.
I noticed a significant change after introducing fermented
vegetables (which provide me with tens of trillions of
beneficial bacteria or probiotics each day) but what really made
the difference was adding baking soda irrigation to my daily
regimen. I follow this with
coconut oil pulling as it puts a protective coat back on the
teeth that the baking soda irrigation tends to remove.
The Vital Importance of Baby-Led Weaning
The Ph.D. dissertation Dr. Boyd hopes to pursue would compare
modern Westernized infant and early childhood feeding regimens
with what he calls ‘ancestral-type infant and early childhood
feeding regimens.’ Fossil records show that up until the last
300 years or so, babies were more or less exclusively breastfed
for the first six months of life. Interestingly enough, this can
actually be determined from fossilized teeth.
“You can tell when a baby stops breastfeeding in a
30,000-year-old tooth. We can analyze it,” Dr. Boyd
explains. “There’s something called the natal line. That
shows when the baby just came into the world and stopped
feeding off of the placenta. And then we can tell when they
are starting to wean and completely weaned just by looking
at teeth and bones.”
The reason you’ve likely never heard of this from your doctor
or dentist is because it’s not taught in dental- or medical
schools. Anthropologists, however, have known this for decades.
“Dental schools need to have evolutionary biologists
on their teaching staff. They just do,” he says.
“My whole mission – I’m dedicating the rest of my career to
this – is to integrate this into dental education in
dentistry. I call it evolutionary oral medicine or Darwinian
dentistry.”
An ancestral-type infant and early childhood feeding regimen
is defined by six months of exclusive breastfeeding, after which
the child undergoes a period of weaning. This weaning period
includes breastfeeding on demand, combined with the gradual
introduction of regular foods, via a process now referred to as
“baby-led weaning.” This type of feeding schedule is what the
human genome was adapted to.
Modern-day baby-led weaning has been popularized by one of
Dr. Boyd’s anthropology colleagues, Gill Rapley in England, and
includes premasticating regular whole foods in lieu of serving
processed baby foods. Dr. Boyd explains:
“It’s called kiss feeding. Modern-day
hunter-gatherers (there’s not many of them left, but some
aboriginal cultures still do these practices) will pre-chew
the food like a bird does and spit it into the child’s
mouth. It sounds gross, but it’s actually not. It’s quite
wonderful.
...Usually, by seven-, eight-, and certainly
nine-months-old – even though a child didn’t have that many,
if any, teeth – they were chewing with their gums everything
that anyone in the tribe was chewing. Certainly by a year
old, there was no difference in what a child ate. That would
continue into the third year of life. Children are typically
breastfed on demand while weaning on to firm, regular foods
into the third year of life and sometimes beyond. That’s
consistent throughout the human history.”
This natural process actually trains the child’s tongue to
position itself upward and forward, and to lateralize toward the
sides of the jaws. When your tongue pushes upwards and forward,
it expands the palate in the middle, which allows your palate
and jaw to settle into the anatomically correct positions.
As a result of this ancestral-type of feeding, which allows
the oral cavity to develop naturally and properly, our ancestors
were not plagued with crooked teeth and poorly aligned jaws. The
anthropological evidence shows that such problems really didn’t
arise until about 350 years ago. At present, an estimated 92
percent or more of all Westernized people have some degree of
malocclusion, such as crowding of the teeth, narrowing of the
jaws, or both. (This is where Joy Moeller’s
oral myofunctional training comes in—her protocol helps
correct the oral defects and misalignments created by modern
feeding.)
This has ramifications for breathing and sleeping, which in
turn can lead to what we’ve now dubbed “attention deficit
disorder.”
“We now know that snoring children and children that
don’t get a good-quality –good REM sleep – are far more
susceptible to having behavioral and brain dysfunction like
ADD,” Dr. Boyd says. “Giving a stimulant to a child
for ADD is not the right thing to do for a child who needs
better sleep. Sometimes just changing the architecture of
their jaws early in life (I’m not saying that’s the only
thing), getting them myofunctional training, and getting
them to chew harder, fresher, more nutritious foods can
preclude all kinds of problems that we’re throwing drugs at
right now.”
How Breastfeeding Promotes Proper Oral Development
When a child is fed the way he was genetically designed to be
fed, it stimulates the structure of the mouth and facial bones
to develop in an optimal way. This begins with exclusive
breastfeeding, ideally for the first six months. However, if you
cannot breastfeed, for whatever reason, there are alternatives
that can mimic the stimulus created by breastfeeding, which will
promote proper formation of your child’s oral cavity.
According to Dr. Boyd, baby bottles are NOT the way to go if
you cannot breastfeed. Instead, feeding your child from a cup is
much better. Not a lidded sippy cup, however, but an unlidded
cup with a small cutout.
“Panera Bread’s little kid cups can be easily
modified. I tell parents to go to Panera Bread and ask for
their little cups. You can just cut out a little mouth piece
on it. You just cut a little loop in it, a little arc.”
Dr. Boyd Supplying an Image/Illustration?
This may surprise many, but baby bottles actually do not
mimic the natural suction a baby exerts on the breast. Baby
bottles were created under the mistaken belief that babies
deform the mother’s nipple, elongating it all the way back to
the soft palate. This is why baby bottle nipples are designed
the way they are. It was also assumed that babies massage the
milk via a peristaltic wave motion, pressing the nipple up
against the roof of the mouth. Alas, all of these assumptions
have been solidly disproven by Dr. Donna Geddes.
“You can go on a website called Bumpology, and hit
Ultrasound Breastfeeding. Donna put an ultrasound probe
underneath the mother’s breast while she was breastfeeding
and totally disproved the assumption that babies elongated
nipple back to the gag reflex and massage it against the
mid-palatal suture. That isn’t what happens,” Dr. Boyd
says.
Instead, what really happens is that a vacuum is created when
the middle of the baby’s tongue comes down, which helps express
milk from the breast. Next, the forward part of the baby’s
tongue pushes the mother’s nipple inside, right behind the two
front teeth. This motion explains why ancestral feeding widens
the jaw, and pushes both the upper and lower jaws forward. It
also pushes the cheekbones in the mid-face forward.
“It’s like a piston that pushes out on the mid-face.
There’s an incisive suture that goes all the way up to your
nose that pushes the whole mid-face forward,” he
explains.
How to Do Baby-Led Weaning
First of all, babies should not be given any solid food,
including pureed baby food, until they are able to sit up on
their own. This typically occurs around six months, which
coincides with when our ancestors stopped exclusive
breastfeeding. Dr. Boyd also advises parents to wait to
introduce solid foods until your baby can grasp them. This is
because the ability to firmly grasp something in their hand
coincides with the development of the gag reflex, which is
nature’s way of making sure your baby will not choke on the
food. (Naturally, you still must observe and supervise
your baby while she’s eating on her own.)
That said, even before your baby can sit up on her own, you
should let her lick, smell, see and touch real food in order to
get used to it.
“Because they’re born with a visceral suck-swallow,
they think Gerber baby food puree is thick milk, and they’re
going to try to suck it. And that’s where the deviant
tongue-swallowing pattern starts,” Dr. Boyd says.
“They’re not being allowed to transition from a visceral,
hardwired suck-swallow to a more mature, lateralizing
chew-swallow. That’s what baby-led weaning along with
breastfeeding do. It teaches the tongue how to transition
from an infantile, immature suck-swallow to a mature
chew-swallow.
Then, by six- to seven-months-old, in that first
month, you can chop fresh foods up. Let your baby pick them
up and make a mess on their tray. Let them hold the food to
their mouth. Let them pick up things that are big, you know,
carrots. They can gnaw on it.”
For those who want to incorporate “kiss feeding,” you can
either premasticate, meaning pre-chew, the food before giving it
to your baby, or you can buy what’s called a “mesh feeder”—a net
bag into which you place chopped up fresh foods, which then
turns into a puree as your baby chews on the mesh bag. This way,
your baby gets the benefit of the challenge to his jaws. This
also provides the proper tongue training. Once pureed, you can
empty the contents out onto a plate and allow your baby to feed
himself with his hands.
“Gradually, making the foods a little more course, a
little less chopped, until really, certainly by 10, 11, to
12 months for sure, a child should be eating everything that
the adults are eating,” Dr. Boyd says.
Five Recommendations to Optimize Your Baby’s Oral Health
The top five recommendations issued by Dr. Boyd to promote
oral health in your child are:
- Find a pediatric dentist by age one,
and get checkups at least twice to three times per year
- Establish healthy eating habits, based
on whole foods and no- or low sugar. If your child does not
eat sugar, his teeth will not decay, even if he does not
brush religiously. During infancy, make sure to only feed
your child breast milk during the night. If they get any
other type of commercial carbohydrate (most infant formulas
are actually loaded with sugar), breast milk can become
toxic to the teeth.
“If it’s just breast milk, lactoferrin kills the
bacteria that cause tooth decay,” Dr. Boyd
explains. “As soon as you can get your children to
where they don’t have to breastfeed through the night,
they’re less risky of getting decay. But as long as it’s
just breast milk, don’t worry about it.”
- Brush teeth three times a day. Ideally,
you’ll want to start massaging your child’s gums before his
teeth erupt, using either your finger, a Q-tip, or a square
of gauze.
When your child starts to show teeth around six or seven
months, you can start brushing them with a baby toothbrush.
The night time brushing is the most important one. The
morning and midday brushing you can let your child do on her
own. “If they can hold the toothbrush, they’re going to do
enough,” Dr. Boyd says.
Children typically will not need to floss until the age
of about three or four years old, when the spaces between
the teeth begin to tighten
- Drink pure water as the primary beverage,
and
- If drinking juice, eat a whole piece of fruit
along with it (so if drinking four ounces of orange
juice, eat eight slices of orange). This way, your child
gets the fiber of the fruit, which slows down absorption,
and helps to mechanically clean his teeth. Then rinse the
mouth with water afterward. Personally I would advise
against drinking any juice. Just provide your child with
fresh fruit
Work with Genetic Adaptation Rather Than Against It...
It’s quite clear that following a feeding program that
includes breastfeeding (or using cup feeding in lieu of bottle
feeding) and baby-led weaning can have a tremendously beneficial
impact on your child’s future development; from allowing natural
tongue-, jaw- and facial development to occur, to promoting
better dental health, to avoiding common problems like snoring,
mouth-breathing and sleeping problems that can contribute to
behavioral- and learning disabilities.
All it takes are minor modifications, such as ditching the
baby bottle for a modified lidless feeding cup, and using “kiss
feeding” or a mesh feeder instead of processed baby food.
To learn more about Dr. Boyd’s work, check out his website at
dentistry4children.net.
For more information about baby-led weaning, Dr. Boyd recommends
the book Baby-Led Weaning, by Gill Rapley and Tracey
Murkett. You can also learn more on
babyledweaning.com.1
© Copyright 1997-2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2099/12/31/children-oral-health.aspx
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