Weston A Price is really the go-to for the early research in nutrition and dentistry. His book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was making the rounds back when Nourishing Traditions became popular. Price, conclusively in my mind, showed that the moment the modern western was introduced into cultures who ate traditional foods, the next generation had terrible teeth, jaws that were too small for all their teeth, etc. Pretty great, if terrible findings, stuff. The typical western diet is a shit show, imo
It’s a 100 year old book that is still required reading if you want to understand the subject of the article because Price visited existing healthy cultures around the world that had few cavities. He concluded that the shift from a nutrient dense diet to a nutrient poor diet (white flour and sugar) was the cause of cavities.
On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han:
> In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke
Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.
One doesn't have to ditch all "western food". Just being sensible with it is good enough:
- ditch plant fat for animal fat
- avoid excessive sugar
- eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.)
- stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables
Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing.
You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all.
Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.
My grandmother chewed betel leaves with a small amount of tobacco, betel nuts, lime (calcium hydroxide aka chuna/chun), multiple times a day all her life. Her other diet consisted of tea just as many times per day, and for actual food a diet of rice, fish, and vegetables. For the majority of her life I don't think she actually had access to fluoridated toothpaste and probably used neem twigs or even charcoal at times to brush her teeth. Her teeth were gross, tinted red and brown. She lived to 93 and I never heard of her ever getting cavities or fillings or going to a dentist. In the place where she lived the only reason you go to a "dentist" is to have teeth removed.
Basically what I'm saying is that diet and genetics are a huge factor.
Interesting. My Indian grandparents and g-grandparents appeared to have most or all of their teeth, and were a long lived bunch (all but one into their 90s). I can’t say conclusively all but I never noticed any gaps or problems, which is the kind of thing kids notice. The g-grandparents would all have been born in the 19th century.
My Australian grandmother had all her teeth pulled out when she was 12 and wore artificial teeth for the next 75 years.
It is obvious that if she didn't visit dentists regularly, no one detected cavities, and teeth are just need to be pulled because of abscess from bacteria at the end.
“Ötzi, a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities.” [1]
2) Sailor Steven Callahan, after 72 days adrift in the Atlantic ocean, where he subsisted on fish and birds, after being rescued:
"When I wake up in the morning, I look into the mirror. My God! Who's that? The face I see is straight out of Robinson Crusoe. Long, stringy bleached hair, hollow eyes, drawn brown skin, shaggy beard. Michelle Monternot gives me a toothbrush. It feels strange in my mouth. What's even stranger is that my teeth are not crusty and slimy but are remarkably clean. I wonder what my dentist would say about that." [2]
Yours was the first sensible comment I came across.
While it's true the availability of fermentable carbohydrates in modern diets has contributed to the prevalence of dental caries, etc, it is mostly collective cultural amnesia to believe our ancestors had perfect teeth.
The concept of "tooth worms" existed for thousands of years prior to the advent of medical science. I'm on mobile, but I also recall reading about ancient remains (possibly pre-humans) with drilled cavities, woven metal bracings, and many other types of dental protheses.
My personal experience from dabbling in low-carb diets is that dental plaque goes away almost completely in a relatively short amount of time.
Admittedly such a diet shift does a lot to upset your microbes, what once flourished with abundant carbohydrates is suddenly starving and maladapted. May be that eventually something else would come along that is better optimized to the new environment.
In Man in search of meaning Viktor Frankl mentions in passing how his gums and teeth are healthier than ever, although he mostly ate minimum amounts of bread.
When your diet is mostly meat based, and some foraged greens and rare fruit, it is not the ideal environment to feed the process that creates cavities. Also, I'd imagine tooth extraction predates a lot of modern history, which may skew results, but that is just a guess on my part.
Although this wouldn't apply to ancient humans, I have heard the hypothesis that many people in olden times didn't have as many problems with cavities because many people drank well water. And well water has naturally occurring fluoride.
There's strong evidence. Fluoridation as public health policy modernly was partly driven by evidence from Colorado Springs, where naturally higher than typical fluoride levels caused better than average dental outcomes.
To respond to a sibling comment: the relative levels have been looked at, in detail, and existing policy reflects what we've learned from that. Scaremongering over it influences real negative health outcomes, particularly amongst those with the most limited access to comprehensive dental care. Flouridation ain't quite as big as say sanitation, or antibiotics, but it's still up there on the list of biggest public health wins ever. By all means investigate it critically, but perhaps in a way more sophisticated than "have they looked at it in more depth than me spending 10 seconds googling?" imo.
According to this, naturally occuring fluoride in well water is around 0.05ppm and tap water that has been treated can have 0.7 or more. Quite a big difference. Probably enough to be worth looking into.
I grew up in the US on unfiltered well-water. Not sure what the fluoride content was because the water was never tested. However, I always had dental problems as a child.
However, when I left my childhood home to attend university (and moved into the city afterwards), I haven't had a problem since. Then again, this is just one anecdote.
The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945–1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and the dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities.
Main building of Vipeholm hospital, now a secondary school
The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.
That’s how ethics goes. It’s fine to give someone something if you don’t know what it’s going to do. Makes it kinda difficult to disprove/ confirm a common belief that something is bad for your health.
This made me think of the Popular But Possibly Factoidal Article (TM) that goes around every now and then about fighter plane armor. Militaries tried reinforcing the parts of the planes that were damaged after missions. But it didn't help survival rates much. Then Smart Man asked what would happen if they reinforced only the parts of the planes that were NOT damaged, hypothesizing that the planes that didn't make it were being damaged there. And it worked, according to Popular Article!
So the fact that we don't find too many fossils with tooth decay means that it could have been a huge problem. And this is the origin of the joke: you don't have to brush all your teeth, just the ones you find on early hominid fossils.
It's not just sugar - any carbohydrate which a bacterium can easily metabolize to sugar (i.e. most of them) is a hazard. Grains, tubers, etc. are all dangerous from a dental perspective and have only been consumed in calorically significant quantities after the advent of agriculture.
Anecdotally, I don't consume a whole lot of refined sugar but any time I do, I can feel the plaque building up almost immediately. But at least in terms of apples and grapes this isn't the case, nor does it appear to be so with complex carbs including bread and potatoes. Additionally I've noticed most candies and soda tend to leave residual taste in my mouth for hours. So I'm partial to pointing the finger specifically to refined sugar.
Abundance of sugar in modern diets maybe to blame.
"Intake of added sugar, particularly from beverages, has been associated with weight gain, and higher risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Natural and added sugars are metabolized the same way in our bodies. But for most people, consuming natural sugars in foods such as fruit is not linked to negative health effects, since the amount of sugar tends to be modest and is "packaged" with fiber and other healthful nutrients. On the other hand, our bodies do not need, or benefit from, eating added sugar. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/are-certain-types-of-sug...
Like to add to this conversation that scientists have found ways to prevent cavities but these are not made available to us. For example, genetically modified streptococcus.
Novamin is not available for sale in the US (though you can get it off ebay) and supposedly it is a toothpaste additive which can directly deposit onto teeth.
there are endless stories of ancient civilizations and palaeolithic humans dying young from dental abscess, 10 seconds on google defeats this weird spin
I used to get a small cavity every 2 or 3 years. My dentist recommended I switch over to a stannous-fluoride base toothpaste about 10 years ago and not a cavity since and my cleanings got much easier for the dentist. There is definitely some genetics to it too. I had a gf who was religious about her teeth routine, still had a small cavity almost every time and eventually a couple of crowns. She wouldn't lay off the sweets though. Never saw anyone who liked sweets as much as her.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve eaten a lot of junk in my life (standard North American trash diet), and have never had a cavity or any serious dental issue in my life. I also get a cleaning every 6 months at the dentist. I’d be shocked if the likelihood of developing a cavity didn’t have a large genetic component.
if you're mid-30s you probably had an extra enamel coating applied to your teeth at some point that may be doing some pretty awesome work protecting your molars
Calorie density? Teeth may have been 'designed' for low-caloric-density foods. The art of civilization is increasing that density, so we have time to do other things (civilized things)
I wonder if human-like apes brush or floss? Do they drink naturally-occurring fluorinated water from wells? And I’d love to have some insights on their cavities and pulled teeth statistics.
[+] [-] taurusnoises|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregwebs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han:
> In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke
Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.
[+] [-] ComradePhil|3 years ago|reply
- ditch plant fat for animal fat
- avoid excessive sugar
- eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.)
- stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables
Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing.
You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all.
Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.
[+] [-] victorclf|3 years ago|reply
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...
[+] [-] sabujp|3 years ago|reply
Basically what I'm saying is that diet and genetics are a huge factor.
[+] [-] gumby|3 years ago|reply
My Australian grandmother had all her teeth pulled out when she was 12 and wore artificial teeth for the next 75 years.
[+] [-] riku_iki|3 years ago|reply
It is obvious that if she didn't visit dentists regularly, no one detected cavities, and teeth are just need to be pulled because of abscess from bacteria at the end.
[+] [-] lettergram|3 years ago|reply
Alternative view, cavities were common and the teeth were removed / fell out.
[+] [-] axlee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leobg|3 years ago|reply
1) Ötzi had cavities and gum disease.
“Ötzi, a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities.” [1]
2) Sailor Steven Callahan, after 72 days adrift in the Atlantic ocean, where he subsisted on fish and birds, after being rescued:
"When I wake up in the morning, I look into the mirror. My God! Who's that? The face I see is straight out of Robinson Crusoe. Long, stringy bleached hair, hollow eyes, drawn brown skin, shaggy beard. Michelle Monternot gives me a toothbrush. It feels strange in my mouth. What's even stranger is that my teeth are not crusty and slimy but are remarkably clean. I wonder what my dentist would say about that." [2]
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-iceman-h....
[2] https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&hl=en&id=ebUKAQAA...
[+] [-] washadjeffmad|3 years ago|reply
While it's true the availability of fermentable carbohydrates in modern diets has contributed to the prevalence of dental caries, etc, it is mostly collective cultural amnesia to believe our ancestors had perfect teeth.
The concept of "tooth worms" existed for thousands of years prior to the advent of medical science. I'm on mobile, but I also recall reading about ancient remains (possibly pre-humans) with drilled cavities, woven metal bracings, and many other types of dental protheses.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
Admittedly such a diet shift does a lot to upset your microbes, what once flourished with abundant carbohydrates is suddenly starving and maladapted. May be that eventually something else would come along that is better optimized to the new environment.
[+] [-] mejutoco|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0des|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mostertoaster|3 years ago|reply
I bet if you look at ancient people in tropical areas they had less teeth as well as less need for them.
[+] [-] jjeaff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|3 years ago|reply
To respond to a sibling comment: the relative levels have been looked at, in detail, and existing policy reflects what we've learned from that. Scaremongering over it influences real negative health outcomes, particularly amongst those with the most limited access to comprehensive dental care. Flouridation ain't quite as big as say sanitation, or antibiotics, but it's still up there on the list of biggest public health wins ever. By all means investigate it critically, but perhaps in a way more sophisticated than "have they looked at it in more depth than me spending 10 seconds googling?" imo.
[+] [-] qiskit|3 years ago|reply
Do tribal people around the world living traditionally have cavities or not? What is the quality of their teeth?
[+] [-] olah_1|3 years ago|reply
https://fluoridealert.org/content/fresh_foods/
[+] [-] hirvi74|3 years ago|reply
However, when I left my childhood home to attend university (and moved into the city afterwards), I haven't had a problem since. Then again, this is just one anecdote.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennethh|3 years ago|reply
Main building of Vipeholm hospital, now a secondary school The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments#:~:text....
[+] [-] jazzabeanie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrootabega|3 years ago|reply
So the fact that we don't find too many fossils with tooth decay means that it could have been a huge problem. And this is the origin of the joke: you don't have to brush all your teeth, just the ones you find on early hominid fossils.
[+] [-] spixy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FactoryReboot|3 years ago|reply
Sugar.
[+] [-] wyager|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnaftr361|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archhn|3 years ago|reply
Sugar drinks are a form of suicide for your teeth.
[+] [-] erie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transfire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twofornone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denimnerd42|3 years ago|reply
I’m mid 30s and have never had a cavity. I go to the dentist every 6months. I also have a huge sweet tooth.
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
Downvoters, have a link to an article discussing some studies: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-w...
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SalmoShalazar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dev-3892|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rdiddly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlitened|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orionblastar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mostertoaster|3 years ago|reply
Next question.
[+] [-] hitovst|3 years ago|reply