Reddit reviews The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide: A Quick Reference to Foods & Their Effect on pH Levels

If your teeth are bad and the enamel soft, it suggests that your diet was or is poor. Studies of remote indigenous people early last century showed that even though they'd never seen a toothbrush, decay was extremely rare and crowded teeth were unknown.

The dentist who conducted those studies, Dr Weston Price, concluded that vitamins A and D, as well as an unknown substance in butter (now identified as vitamin K2) were vital for the formation of bones and teeth, and successfully treated dental deterioration and decay with a healthy diet supplemented with cod-liver oil (contains vitamins A & D) and butter oil (contains vitamins A and K2). Check out Ramiel Nagel's book Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition or, if you can't spare funds for the book, he's got a series of 3 YouTube videos on the topic. He examines the work of Dr Price as well as two other dentists.

Another item to be aware of is the post-metabolisation acidity of foods. Too much acid-producing food in a meal causes your body to raid the bones and teeth for alkalising minerals to try and restore a more neutral pH that the body prefers. Check out The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide: A Quick Reference to Foods & Their Effect on pH Levels, or this brief online list. While we need essential nutrients from acidic foods like meat and mildly acidic ones like butter, it's best to ensure the alkaline-food portion of our diet is the bigger part.

Another item to address your enamel softness problem is to avoid fluoride as much as possible. Fluoride exchanges places with calcium quite readily, and is stripping away the very mineral your teeth need. Excessive exposure (dental/skeletal fluorosis) leads initially to white marks, then brown stains, and in extreme cases, pitting and visible structural deterioration. Fluoride-free toothpastes are available, many based on sodium bicarb/bicarbonate of soda. You can actually use bicarb on its own as a tooth-whitening agent. Before you go using abrasives or brushing extensively though, probably a good idea to boost teeth strength with a good diet for a while first. A variety of fresh produce with lots of leafy greens (chlorophyll contains magnesium, another alkalising mineral involved in bone/teeth formation), and be sure to take daily cod-liver oil and butter and/or cheese.

Remember, your teeth are a window to your bones.. they are like the tip of the iceberg that you can see. You can't put fillings in, or whiten your bones with dental cosmetics: proper nutrition is the easiest and most effective solution for bone health. Eliminating from your diet highly acidic foods such as white flour/bread, white rice, white sugar is an important first step, and has other benefits (like reducing diabetes & heart disease risk).

Regarding your old fillings, I'm afraid there's no easy advice if money is tight. On the financial advice front I can highly recommend George Clason's great little book The Richest Man in Babylon (PDF version here). If you currently drink sodas regularly, as so many people do, one idea to try is to carry an old fizzy drink bottle with you and fill it with water. On every occasion when you would have bought a sugary acidic fizzy drink, put those few coins aside, in a jar or box, forget about them, and drink the water instead. Check your hoard in six months and you might be surprised at its value. (If not sodas, look for other small savings you can make - and then be sure to save the money instead of "dipping into" it!) If you can save enough for the filling replacements, in the interest of your health, have any mercury-amalgam fillings removed very carefully, and replaced with non-amalgam fillings. You'll want to find a holistic dentist, who will remove the amalgam using a dental dam and a proper ventilation system to protect both you and him from the additional toxic mercury vapour that will be released (in addition to the normal continuous de-gassing) when your fillings are disturbed. The filling replacements might take time to save for, but as a first priority you net to stop the rot, and that comes from fixing your diet for the better. Convenience and fast foods have a cost that is far greater than indicated on the cheap price tag.