A dental paradigm
The segmentation of education with little attention on prevention, means the medical and dental profession get little training in the relevance of wider nutrition, beyond reducing sugar intake.
Despite low vitamin D being a widespread global issue, and other nutritional insufficiencies increasingly commonplace, dentists will talk to patients about argued benefits of flouride, and danger of sugar and sweets, but will as a generality rarely raise the question of vitamin D or wider fat soluble vitamin status, or advise on wider diet.
Work in the 1920s and 30s demonstrated fat soluble vitamin D, A, and K2 then suggested by Weston Price to be factor X, are essential to tooth formation during pregnancy, in early childhood, and important to decay risk reduction throughout the life course.
Fat soluble vitamin K2 is likely central to bone metabolism including through the osteocalcin pathway, so logically also dental health, although research into vitamin K2 and dental health is limited.
Limited but detailed studies in the 1920s, including work by Mrs Mellanby (see below), suggest vitamin A is important to dental including enamel formation during pregnancy. Effects of deficiency during formation include “atrophy and metaplasia of the enamel organ and atrophy of odnotoblasts, accompanied by atypical formation of dentine” (Link) However excess vitamin A can inhibit bone repair, so logically excess may also negatively impact dental health. (Link)
Other dietary factors, including likely iodine, and wider mineral sufficiency, are also essential to bone growth, as well as likely control of oral bacteria. When iodine is administered a significant amount is directed to the oral area including salivary glands. Those with iodine deficiencies generally exhibit lower than average growth, and may show signs of sub-optimal skeletal formation, as well as impaired dental formation. (Link) “iodine deficiency in the diet of animals entailed abnormalities in the growth patterns, destructive alterations in the bones and bone marrow, a decrease in the content of hydroxyproline, hexosamines, and in the activity of phosphomonoesterase-I in animal bones, as well as disorders of phosphocalcium metabolism” (Link)