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.
- 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.
Also, even if you did follow indegenous preparation methods, the food industry may have changed the plant by artificial selection or genetic modification such that the indegenous preparation is not as effective, so you're better off ditching them anyway.
Vegetables have significant phytotoxin content without significant nutrient content, specially in forms bioavailable to us (eg. a lot of carotinoids in carrots, except we are terrible at converting that to Vitamin A... we need the retinol form, readily available in milk, eggs, fish, meat etc.).
Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten. They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins. We have domesticated some of the plants and learnt how to remove those toxins over thousands of years... but if you don't know how to do that effectively, you're better off not eating them.
I'd like to eat a lettuce salad with cucumber and spring onions (standard stuff where I live).
What kind of indegenous preparation technique do I need to use to make the lettuce safe to eat?
I believe that indigenous vegetarian diets, such as the traditional Indian vegetarian diet, before ghee was replaced by industrially produced seed oil, is one good option... as is foods like Sushi, where you combine fish/meat with grains.
I'd better go do some research on how to eat that salad or apple...really?
Just pkease go read the book How Not To Die.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...
Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions:
> [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness.
> Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish.
Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.
Here:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety
tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria.
I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc.
I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.
Basically what I'm saying is that diet and genetics are a huge factor.
My Australian grandmother had all her teeth pulled out when she was 12 and wore artificial teeth for the next 75 years.
The foundation of the NHS in 1948 made dental care affordable for all and in the first nine months four million cavities were filled and queues formed outside surgeries.
see: https://bda.org/museum/exhibitions-and-events/nhs70-celebrat...
The replacement plates can’t have been that comfortable either.
Alternative view, cavities were common and the teeth were removed / fell out.
It’s why she’s been able to keep her rates so low today, she has a huge backfill from our ancient ancestors’ teeth.
The question is, where are the half-decayed teeth that must statistically be present in skulls, because people die of unpredictable circumstances?
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...
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.
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.
I bet if you look at ancient people in tropical areas they had less teeth as well as less need for them.
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.
This typically happens with teeth when young children drink fluoridated water, and also drink formula, which has fluoride, mixed with municipal fluoridated water. Or if the well water of an area has too much fluoride.
Do tribal people around the world living traditionally have cavities or not? What is the quality of their teeth?
They wear jeans, though. So they might be accessing nearby cities and the Youtuber avoided to mention that for clicks.
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.
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....
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.
Sugar.
Even buying tea is tough, many are very sweet. Sadly the sugar lobby has been successful in blocking imports, setting price floors, and generally keeping sugar higher priced than corn syrup, which from what I can tell is worse for people's health.
Sugar drinks are a form of suicide for your teeth.
[1] e.g. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/dr.-collins-biomin-toothpa...
I’m mid 30s and have never had a cavity. I go to the dentist every 6months. I also have a huge sweet tooth.
Downvoters, have a link to an article discussing some studies: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-w...
I probally pushing my luck?
Have all my teeth. Three cavities. My gums don't bleed when flossing. When brushing I concentrate on the gums.
Use a Sonic toothbrush daily.
Have a neurotic habit of using tooth picks.
(I knew the dentist who developed the plastic tooth picks with floss. I couldn't stand family. Why? Because he was a rich dentist who set all his kids up for life, but couldn't pay his workers a decent wage. He did offer free dental though? His spoiled boy had a 50' racing racing sloop in high school. I am also jealous too.)
I don't like food in my teeth. I usually have a tooth pick within reach at all times.
I am not a fan of sweets though, but put a lot of sugar in my coffee.
Teeth, and gums, are very much prone to the placebo effect. Every study dentists do require a control group, and placebo controls.
Most were in my early teens (I had eight filled at once one time) so I was convinced it was the dentist racketeering and my parents wouldn't let me out of getting them filled. I should note my parents have a similar diet and a similar amount of major dental work. The handful of cavities I've had in adulthood have been major blows to my mental health.
There has been some research into oral probiotics like K12 and M18 but I’m curious how effective these really are.
my childhood dentist said at 18 that if I just regularly take care of my teeth I shouldn't have any issues the rest of my life.
https://www.science.org/content/article/monkeys-may-have-bet...
Things took more effort, and had slightly lower skill caps, but only slightly. Humans are still human - if things are too hard, they went elsewhere.
With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
Next question.
Seems pretty relevant, after all! In fact, the thesis of the article seems to be that the agricultural revolution led to many more cavities, due to the increased availability of sugars. Indeed, the article suggests that the prevalence of cavities is tied with the availability of sugar to the population within a specific region.
Most cats and dogs are eating carbohydrate rich mass produced pet food made by a very familiar privately owned chocolate company.
[1] https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5e20f576d0e9d12be5abc763/5e3...
[2] https://i.insider.com/56ce1de88a45651707ff60c9?width=1190
Although it may have just been acquired or rebranded at that time.
Wikipedia says it was Mondelez International this morning, but who knows if that information became out of date while I was typing it...
Same goes for eating berries, which are much closer to the ground.
Go back in time a bit, imagine 20k years ago, someone pulling a carrot, wiping it off, and eating it. Or even washing the dirt off, but unless cooked, or soap is used (a relatively new discovery), or a knife to remove the outside?
A little water isn't going to destroy all bacteria on a carrot.
Even today, I'll pick carrots, throw them in sink, wash them a bit and peel. Then eat raw.
Bacteria is everywhere, and we're eating the same thing bateria eats, eg that sugary carrot plant...
And...
* milk
* honey (literally bee spit sorta)
* cheese (pig stomach juices thrown in with milk for a few days)
By no means do we isolated ourselves baterialogically.
19 years ago I went to the dentist and he told me I needed to have a cavity filled. I skipped that. I didn't go back (or to any other dentist) until last year. Got the x-rays. No cavities.
Stuff works.
Oh and stop eating sugar.
I'm glad you found something that works for you, seriously, but I'd be careful over attributing. The most likely explanation would be never actually having had a cavity in the first place.
One of them was just wrong.
Seriously though... some dentists will fill any tiny crevice, others wait until there's more clearly a cavity. I'm not sure why the difference.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/features/can-tooth-enamel-...
