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.
Definitely not trolling. If you don't know how to prepare vegetables in indegenous culture that you got it from, you are better off not eating it.
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 remember reading the book “Fatu Hiva” by Thor Heyerdahl, about the island of the same name in the Pacific. He mentions the custom of the inhabitants of fermenting breadfruit in the ground for several years before eating it. One indigenous man is quoted as saying that he cannot digest food unless he has a portion of fermented breadfruit with it.
I haven’t tried it yet. I did start to ferment some breadfruit after reading the book. But that’s only been eight years ago - so not yet good to eat.
I have recently become interested in finding out more about this (and food/nutrition in general). I want to compile an overview of findings and reference studies. How did you learn about this? Do you recommend any scientific resources concerning the themes of your comment?
I started on this path when I was trying to nurish myself back to health over a decade ago when I suddenly got fat. I thought science was the way to go... but was robbed of that notion a couple of years into it when I discovered that the path to health was in the opposite direction of what the science tells us.
Turns out the food industry fully controls the science of food and nutrition. You can start by reading Unsavory Truth or Food Politics by Marion Nestle for better understanding of why that is the way it is.
Having said that, Marion Nestle doesn't really explore one side of it... which is that because of ethical reasons, we'll never have proper human experiments, thus nutrition science will always be limited and incomplete, which leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which the industry is happy to do for profits. This has been covered very well by the YouTube channel What I've Learned: https://youtu.be/xRAw7yeDO-c
The same channel has several other videos on food and nutrition, one of the most important ones imo being the one on seed oils: https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k
Nutrition and Physical Degenaration by Weston A. Price as described in this thread is one of the best works in support of indigenous foods.
The Hidden Life of Trees is a great book on plant intelligence.
Other than those resources, we have to piece these things together, take long term views... like should we trust a diet that kept a culture of people alive and well for 100s of years over several generations or do we trust studies with couple of dozen subjects done over a few weeks funded by the food industry?
First, I want to ask you to write up a 101/how-to for this diet (and include one for pescatarians like me). Cuz this is great.
Second, my friends and I (years and tears ago) got really into Price and the (recipe /cook) book based on his work, Nourishing Traditions. I recommend this work to anyone into the above. Was this book a part of you coming to these conclusions?
Food in general is a poison that is slowly killing you via the byproducts of metabolism.
Meat that is raw puts you at great risk for food-borne illness. Meat that is cooked is full of carcinogens and advanced glycation end products. Almost all meat readily available in the West has very high levels of hormones, bioaccumulated pesticides at higher levels than plants, etc.
> They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins.
The very next sentence.
Animals can run away or fight, so they don't have the need to develop other deterrents. I guess aside from a very few exceptions like Amazonian frogs, which would also not be recommended to eat without very special processing. Probably best to keep off the menu altogether, just like most seeds, stems, and leaves for the reasons described in the parent comment.
I believe you would have to extract the juice, turn it into a kind of lettuce milk by boiling and straining, and then ferment the result into cheese. Takes about 6 months. Best enjoyed paired with 5kg of raw beef and a litre of vodka.
You seem to be a glowing fan of carnivore diets, is that right? What do you think about the sustainability of this lifestyle? I’m pretty sure our planet can’t sustain 9 billion exclusively meat eating humans.
No, not a fan of the carnivore diet (except for short term use for medical purposes). Getting rid of grains puts us in very high risk, grains are essential because they are easy to store long-term... Even though they are plant seeds, the most toxic part of a plant, we have mastered indegenous preparation of grains... and while the food industry has tried to ruin it, it hasn't succeeded by much... mostly because grains are perfect, even for the food industry.
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.
Well indigenous use of grains and legumes involves fermentation (eg sourdough, fermented tofu, miso), which are mostly no longer done at scale. Bread that uses yeast instead of sourdough starter is often not fermented long enough to get rid of most FODMAPs (4h fermentation seems to be recommended, but this is reduced for cost reasons).
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.
Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice. Raw milk and dairy is a common source of food-borne illnesses. Pasteurisation is the main reason why consuming milk and dairy products at the scale we do doesn't cause thousands of deaths every year.
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.
> Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice.
Pasteurization is useful for commerce because it allows milk to be transported greater distances and stored for longer. But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.
There is some evidence that pasteurization lowers/changes the nutrient content of the milk, which is unsurprising given how many constituents are present in milk and the temperatures at which proteins denature [0].
> But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.
Categorically and emphatically: N o p e. Raw milk can be contaminated at the point of collection already.
It doesn't matter if milk is fresh. Pathogenic bacteria contaminating raw milk can grow just fine in your gut and make you sick, they don't need to grow in the milk during transportation. In fact, transporation, in this day and age, is by refrigerated truck so it's a more hostile environment for many pathogens than your digestive tract.
At larger scales there is simply a larger chance for contamination, but that is mainly because large dairies collect milk from multiple smaller producers, so their milk can be contaminated from multiple sources thus aggregating both the chance of contamination and the number of pathogens. But each individual small farmer can produce contaminated milk, no problem.
If you have one animal, its milk can be contaminated and you can get ill from drinking it.
If you want to drink raw milk, go ahead, but don't go into it making false assumptions about safety and don't spread misinformation that risks harming others' health on the internet, please.
Edit: also, the "Real Milk" folks are fanatical, swivel-eye loons who don't give a shit about anyone's safety and only care about promoting their agenda of drinking raw milk. For some incomprehensible reason. No, pasteurisation doesn't damage milk. This is just rank bollocks of the lowest degree.
If they cared about "evidence" and they were in for a scientific debate, as they like to pretend, they wouldn't be promoting their Campaign for Real Milk with as much zealotry as they do, because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case. All the "evidence" that I've seen are studies by their members, or studies of others that they have grossly misrepresented, or often not even a study but a poster at a convention etc. These are textbook quacks. Stay away.
Pasteurization is not a free lunch. You also destroy enzymes, vitamins, and all the beneficial bacteria. The enzymes help to digest the milk and the beneficial bacteria compete with pathogenic bacteria in the gut (the above links to peer-reviewed studies and is by a PhD in Nutritional Immunology).
Pasteurized milk prevents illness from contamination but it may not be as well tolerated by some people. Some children show greater skin-prick reactivity to treated milk over untreated milk [0][1], treated milk tends to have a lower threshold of provoking an allergic reaction [2], and heat treatment is shown to abolish the allergy-protective effects of milk [3]. Children who were exposed to raw milk tend to have better allergy tolerance as adults compared to those who consumed processed milk [3].
There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Edit:
> because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case
I would also add that the burden of proof and Precautionary Principle cuts both ways. Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies. The assumption that the nutritional quality of milk (in vivo) is unaffected by flash heating is what needs to be demonstrated.
> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive).
I know this is threadomancy, two weeks later, but - how the hell would you know that?
If a farmer in Ghana gets the shitters for a week after drinking raw milk, how would you know? If their kid gets meningitis caused by Listeria and needs to have a hand amputated, or a foot, how would you know?
You wouldn't. But the WHO and a bunch of other health agencies around the world collect data on this sort of thing. And the sad truth that emerges is that the majority of food poisoning happens in non-industrialised, developing countries.
Got that? In countries were people don't have a food industry, where raw milk and dairy is all the dairy they can consume, and where everything is fresh, as fresh as fresh can be, that's where most of the food-borne diseases happen.
You wanna know why? Because modern standards of hygiene work, bitches. That's why. And that includes pasteurisation which is basically a method to scrub milk clean of pathogens.
Sorry but that stuff about enzymes, vitamins and "beneficial bacteria" is on the level of "it's got electrolytes". If I dug a bit I'm sure I'd find the "PhD in Nutritional Immunology" is one of the swivel-eyed loons, or funded by them.
> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem
drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Yes, people around the world drink raw milk all the time. And they get food poisoning all the time. As the WHO link I posted above points out, raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. And a bunch of other pathogens besides, like Brucella, C. Burnetii, S. aureus, Salmonella etc.
Which, again, can contaminate fresh milk from healthy cows just fine.
Btw, you can consume raw milk that isn't fresh without trouble if it is clear of pathogenic bacteria. But you won't know that unless you can actually test its microbial load at the very least. It's not the freshness of the milk that matters, it's what's living inside it that can make you sick.
I don't understand why all this is so hard to understand. Again, atavism and return to nature. "If it's fresh, it's good".
Which brings me to your thought experiment: cows happily take a shit, step on it, smear it all over the grass and then eat the grass. Is that OK because it's fresh, what do you think?
P.S.
> Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies
Mnyeah, not really. Pasteurization kept being "standardized" well into the 1980's, when it was determined that C. burnetii (the most heat-tolerant of bacteria targeted by pasteurization) was not destroyed by heating milk to 61C for 30 minutes, as was until then standard practice targeted at Mycobacterium bovis, which was considered to be the most heat tolerant raw milk contaminant. As a result, modern practice of heating milk to 63C for 30 minutes or 72C for 15 seconds was established because it was found to destroy all individual cells of C. burnetii with good certainty. In fact there's a range of times and temperatures determined by experimentally verified heat death curves. All that is from 1986, in the International Dairy Federation Bulletin.
I wonder who told you that bit about "before biochemistry". The swivel-eye loons, I guess?
> But surely there would be a great difference between milk produced on an industrial farm vs a small village with a few dairy cows?
No.
Come on, think. Why would it make any difference if the milk is from a small or big farm? Why do you think "a small village" is a less hospitable environment for pathogens than "an industrial farm"? Who do you think has more means to test the microbial load of their milk and decontaminate milking machines, animal areas etc? The large company or the small farmer?
This is just one more time the naturalistic fallacy: it's natural, from a village, so it must be healthier!
Well, it isn't. I don't know if you pay attention to dairy news items in the press. I do and every once in a while I find a news item about a batch of French raw milk cheeses being recalled because it was contaminated by some dangerous pathogen. This happens to small-scale dairies with a tiny production converting a few hundred liters of milk from their own farm-raised animals a day.
Except, when it happens to French cheesemakers, because they know their shit, they perform routine tests on their products, and they won't let them reach the consumer and cause disease.
But if you trust the "Real Milk" clowns, who happily claim that raw milk is 100% risk free and it never causes any trouble, then you're just flying blind.
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.
Do you happen to have any idea if your g- and grandparents on the Indian side eat and or ate a lot of refined carbs like naan or white rice? Refined carbs being often called a modern thing and the cause of metabolic disease, but so far I've not really found that to be true.
Many accounts sat the in the UK in the early 20th century dentistry was still so expensive that some people chose to have all their teeth pulled to spare themselves a lifetime of pain. Having all your teeth removed was considered the perfect gift for a 21st birthday or a newly married bride. My mother-in-law had her teeth out under this practice.
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.
This would have been the early 1920s so the availability of dentistry out in the countryside would have been minimal. Instead of having a bunch of rotting and broken teeth (and the concomitant pain) it would h have been simpler to just get them all out.
The replacement plates can’t have been that comfortable either.
My English grandmother was the same, though I think it was closer to her 30s. My understanding is her dental hygiene was not the best (she grew up in WW2), and it was just “easier” to remove all of the teeth and use dentures.
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.
My grandma had all her teeth at 97 or so when she passed, and never saw a dentist, and I saw her use this tobacco toothpaste 3x per day for 25 years, until she died.
what is the statistical chance that half decayed teeth will be present in the population that dies unexpectedly and what is the chance that someone who died unexpectedly will have their fossilized remains dug up later?
“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.
Interesting, I would assume that prehistoric times required "perfect" teeth (and even overall geometry and jaw structure). You need a high quality grinding / cutting tool to rip meat easily.
This is absolute fiction presented as facts. If HN had a way to killfile a user this user would be first on my list. This type of misinformation has no place on HN.
Personally I thought this whole thread was a joke. Glad I’d be first on your list though, I’m hardly ever first at anything.
Also COVID is fake, the earth is flat, 9/11 was an inside job, and now that you’ve shown desire to killfile(?) a supreme member of the Illuminati, well I don’t know what will happen, but it will probably be semi irritating.
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.
Isn’t the natural occurring fluoride Calcium fluoride while what we put in tooth paste (and add to water) is sodium fluoride which in addition to helping with our teeth is technically poisonous in large doses which is why we spit out tooth paste and don’t give children fluoride tooth paste until they learn to spit?
You can have too much fluoride in your diet and from toothpaste that it causes white streaks on your teeth and potentially on your bones. It’s called fluorosis.
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.
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.
My mother grew up on well water and has never had a cavity in her life. My dad grew up mostly on city water before fluoridation. He has had terrible problems with his teeth.
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.
You're correct that any carbs can help form plaque, but humans have been getting significant numbers of calories from them since before we were H. sapiens.
This is only plausible for humans in tropical areas. It does not stand to reason for humans north of (conservatively), say, 40º. Even in humans in areas with calorically significant quantities of carbohydrates available, fossil records suggest they probably preferentially ate ruminants, same as anyone else.
Most of human evolution occurred below 40N, so even if that point were correct, it would at best be limited to the adaptive behaviors of a very small group of human ancestors.
However, there's plenty of evidence suggesting that there wasn't any such regionally adaptive behavior. The original find that suggested starchy plant consumption in H. erectus was analysis of the Dmanisi fossils at ~41N. Later work tying these sorts of results to typical European Neanderthal diets has been done for North Sea sites (~50N). Of course, Neanderthals never went much farther north than that due to the climate. As for AMHs, I've seen papers of sites near Smolensk (~55N) indicating moderate to heavy starchy plant use. That's not far from the glaciation line.
Moreover, there are fairly convincing arguments that a nearly pure-meat diet doesn't work in winter due to the general lack of fat (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.11.016 ). There are caveats and workarounds here, but this whole idea that high-latitude hominins had limited, homogeneous diets is on increasingly shaky ground.
They are only dangerous if you don't brush or floss. With respect to ancient cultures a little twig is a damn effective dental cleaner and about as good as a modern toothbrush.
People today who brush regularly still have way more rotted-out teeth than people who didn't eat significant quantities of carbohydrates. They are dangerous even if you brush.
Growing up, my dad often said that raw carrots are "nature's toothbrush" and he would encourage us to end any picnic lunch with carrot sticks, not with a sugary dessert. Can carrot sticks function like a little twig in terms of knocking undesirable food gunk off teeth?
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.
I think you mean tarter, not plaque. Plaque takes a while but you obviously will feel tarter only teeth at the end of any day if you've had sugary or carby foods. White bread starts breaking down into sugar as soon as it hits your mouth due to enzymes in saliva.
Are you sure? My wife is allergic to corn syrup, and we find it in EVERYTHING. 95%+ of spaghetti sauce, even in canned vegetables. It's surprising how sweet things are these days. Our standard for starting a new recipe is to cut the sugar by 1/2 to 1/3rd, that way you can taste the other ingredients.
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.
In my family its as clear as day. The boomers in the family grew up on soda and all have had dozens of cavities and currently sport gold teeth. Not the case for the older generation who grew up in the great depression off of water alone, or the children of the boomers who were raised better than a constant supply of 7 up as the only source of liquids.
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.
You can get products with the similar bioactive glass ingredient BioMin [1], though for whatever reason the version that also includes fluoride is not yet sold in the US.
there are endless stories of ancient civilizations and palaeolithic humans dying young from dental abscess, 10 seconds on google defeats this weird spin
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.
FWIW, my cleanings go a lot better if I visit every 4 months than every 6 months, so there's no way I'd consider 6 months. I could certainly have better oral hygiene, but visiting the dentist 3 times a year isn't terrible.
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.
My guess is that it's mainly the composition of your mouth's microbiome. Some bacteria really like creating acid that eats away at enamel. Some don't. Whichever happens to have a foothold in your mouth (which probably has a very inherited component) is probably the determining factor in tooth decay.
I'm 36, and I've had 32 cavities filled in my lifetime. I can't stand the procedure every time, and it's been heartbreaking for me not to be able to pinpoint why I've had so many cavities. I'm vegetarian, and I don't drink soda or alcohol. I brush regularly but should probably floss more. I do drink a lot of coffee and a lot of water. I completely avoid any candy and processed sugar (except for the occasional bit of something sweet in a restaurant dessert once or twice a year). I also eat a lot of acidic fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, lemons, limes, and pineapples.
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.
I've sometimes wondered if dental hygiene may actually be counterproductive by killing harmless or even beneficial bacteria and leaving a niche open for harmful ones.
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
why would someone in their mid 30s "probably had an extra enamel coating applied"? I've never heard of that. Of course, they give you “super fluoride” when you go in for cleanings, but that's not an extra coat of enamel. I'm pretty sure there is not such technique, when your adult teeth reach their full size that's pretty much all the enamel they'll ever have, dentists can't just apply another layer or we'd all be cavity free.
it's usually called a dental sealant and yes I did have that when my adult teeth came in. it's all chipped off by now but we'll see the next 10 years I guess.
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.
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.
I thought the current thinking was that ancient humans had a lot more chewing they had to do to eat their food, which as a child pressured the jaws into being larger, which gave you space as an adult for your wisdom teeth.
Also nobody mentions all the starchy stuff and the fruit our ancestors ate. It's just odd how people reinterpret the entire history of our species based on recent dietary fads.
Honestly our ancestors probably ate anything possible that was around. Probably a lot of half spoiled meat that you just ate if you came upon it and barely nutritious plant matter just to fill the belly. Surviving is insanely difficult, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, and you will take that rotting animal vs being hungry. I imagine cooking too didn't always happen. We take the logistics needed for cooking for granted, perhaps in ancient times it was easier to eat some raw/semispoiled flesh if you found it just to keep moving vs lingering around for too long in one area. Violence was also widespread then as it has been all through history, so being in a position where you can establish a camp for a few hours and advertise a cooking fire in the immediate area must have been quite a luxury.
Almost all of this is... Not accurate. It pains me to say it, but this reads like Hollywood fiction. Most groups of people weren't living under constant threat of starvation or violence. Groups that badly located, or that badly divided, didn't tend to last. Additionally, if you're living in high stress, births become less successful.
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.
Yeah, heat will kill all germs and break down most toxins given off by bacteria so if food isn't plentiful it would be hard to turn down a day or two old carcass just lying around. However I don't think eating half rotten RAW meat is a good idea at all. humans simple don't have the capability for that like wolves and to a much greater extend buzzards/vultures and would quite likely die from toxins given off by the bacteria.
If you read the article, you’ll see fruit is mentioned multiple times, including the frequency of its consumption. There is no mention of dietary fads.
I don't think an extra molar at age 16 is going to let you survive after all your other teeth have fallen out. I would guess the wisdom teeth are either waiting for your jaw to mature or are in the process of devolving to never erupt at all.
That's not really how evolution works. There's no reason that modern humans would ever lose wisdom teeth unless NOT having them led to some evident increase in ability to produce healthy children in abundance.
With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
The process of devolving to never erupt at all would have started long before modern dental care, driven by impaction complications or pressure to appear neotenous with a small jaw. I agree it won't continue.
>> He points to a study on a skull from a Homo rhodesiensis man who lived 350 000 years ago. He was closely related to our ancestors in Africa, says the zoologist. The skull was found in Zambia in 1921, and his teeth were not in good condition. More precisely, they were pretty rotten ... He probably didn’t pick between his teeth to remove food debris. Another theory is that he ate a lot of honey.
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.
Many fruits are quite sugary, and some people probably lived in areas where they could consume fruits regularly. Also, as another commenter stated, non-sugar carbohydrates can also pose risks.
The fruits we eat today are also highly selectively-bred to be very large and sweet. Take a look at a modern banana compared to a wild-type banana [1]. Same goes for watermelon [2].
Since the mid 90's I've been having trouble keeping up with which soft drink conglomerate or highly leveraged hedge fund owns Cadbury in any given week, and whether it's one of the bad ones that I'm supposed to be boycotting.
Wikipedia says it was Mondelez International this morning, but who knows if that information became out of date while I was typing it...
Betteridge's law applies. It's well understood that hominids experienced tooth decay throughout their evolution. Causes and contributors and rates over time may be up for debate, but the evidentially confirmed fact that our ancestors got cavities is settled.
It's also well understood that our sugar intake is probably 10x what it was before sugar was cheap and readily available and our cavity rate (at least if you aren't brushing) has increased proportionally. I don't think anyone really believes that cavemen never had cavities, just that it was much less common.
I think that is part of the issue with communicating bulk statistics like life expectancy. In reality the median or mean after 15 or after 30 is likely more useful as a measure.
Obviously child birth was risky but so was being a man running around hunting and fighting other men, I bet the chances were about the same. Neither of us have any sources though I'm willing to bet.
So apparently some think cavities (caries) are contagious via mouth fluid exchange in kissing... if so, then perhaps an ancestor became an unwitting host through some unknown mechanics. Perhaps poorly cooked jowls of some sort.
You have a source for that? It's my understanding that it is -very- hard to change another human's oral biome, the bacteria that are currently there have a huge advantage of out surviving foreign bacteria.
Could have been hand to mouth contact from any number of sources. Bacterial biofilms are pretty easy to transfer and as we recently learned from eating bats it only has to happen once.
People will, even today, grab fruit off of trees, wipe it on their shirt, and eat 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.
1 drop clove oil, 1/2 cup water. Swish regularly. It's an antiseptic.
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.
A cavity is a literal hole in your tooth. No amount of clove oil can fix that.
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.
Yes I had a dentist who told me all of a sudden "you need 3 crowns" and I was like "bwah?" . Just 6 months before I was notified he was happy I hadn't had a cavity the 6 years I'd been seeing him. Naturally I went to another dentist who told me my teeth were fine and to not go back to the other dentist for anything let alone crowns but he said that was just his opinion as he didn't know the dentist personally. So I switched over to him. He took the time to point out on xrays from people who had decay bad enough to get crowns and that my teeth were nothing like those.
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.
> The typical western diet is a shit show, imo
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.
The cause for losing teeth is very different from cavities.
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.
Stop eating vegetables? Tbf i can't figure out whether you're trolling or not.
Definitely not trolling. If you don't know how to prepare vegetables in indegenous culture that you got it from, you are better off not eating it.
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.
Indigenous preparation methods? Sounds interesting.
I remember reading the book “Fatu Hiva” by Thor Heyerdahl, about the island of the same name in the Pacific. He mentions the custom of the inhabitants of fermenting breadfruit in the ground for several years before eating it. One indigenous man is quoted as saying that he cannot digest food unless he has a portion of fermented breadfruit with it.
I haven’t tried it yet. I did start to ferment some breadfruit after reading the book. But that’s only been eight years ago - so not yet good to eat.
You should try it with lutefisk and century eggs! Sounds like a great combination.
Great idea. Remind me in 8 years, will you?
I have recently become interested in finding out more about this (and food/nutrition in general). I want to compile an overview of findings and reference studies. How did you learn about this? Do you recommend any scientific resources concerning the themes of your comment?
I started on this path when I was trying to nurish myself back to health over a decade ago when I suddenly got fat. I thought science was the way to go... but was robbed of that notion a couple of years into it when I discovered that the path to health was in the opposite direction of what the science tells us.
Turns out the food industry fully controls the science of food and nutrition. You can start by reading Unsavory Truth or Food Politics by Marion Nestle for better understanding of why that is the way it is.
Having said that, Marion Nestle doesn't really explore one side of it... which is that because of ethical reasons, we'll never have proper human experiments, thus nutrition science will always be limited and incomplete, which leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which the industry is happy to do for profits. This has been covered very well by the YouTube channel What I've Learned: https://youtu.be/xRAw7yeDO-c
The same channel has several other videos on food and nutrition, one of the most important ones imo being the one on seed oils: https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k
Nutrition and Physical Degenaration by Weston A. Price as described in this thread is one of the best works in support of indigenous foods.
The Hidden Life of Trees is a great book on plant intelligence.
Other than those resources, we have to piece these things together, take long term views... like should we trust a diet that kept a culture of people alive and well for 100s of years over several generations or do we trust studies with couple of dozen subjects done over a few weeks funded by the food industry?
First, I want to ask you to write up a 101/how-to for this diet (and include one for pescatarians like me). Cuz this is great.
Second, my friends and I (years and tears ago) got really into Price and the (recipe /cook) book based on his work, Nourishing Traditions. I recommend this work to anyone into the above. Was this book a part of you coming to these conclusions?
The “What I’ve learned” channel has been a big contributor to why I’m interested in learning more about nutrition. Thank you for the references!
Fruit definitely evolved to be eaten (this is how the seeds spread)
True. Fruits and berries.
Food in general is a poison that is slowly killing you via the byproducts of metabolism.
Meat that is raw puts you at great risk for food-borne illness. Meat that is cooked is full of carcinogens and advanced glycation end products. Almost all meat readily available in the West has very high levels of hormones, bioaccumulated pesticides at higher levels than plants, etc.
> Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten.
Hate to be the one to tell you, but animals are living beings too and don't want to be eaten either.
> They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins.
The very next sentence.
Animals can run away or fight, so they don't have the need to develop other deterrents. I guess aside from a very few exceptions like Amazonian frogs, which would also not be recommended to eat without very special processing. Probably best to keep off the menu altogether, just like most seeds, stems, and leaves for the reasons described in the parent comment.
Thank you for the word of warning.
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 you would have to extract the juice, turn it into a kind of lettuce milk by boiling and straining, and then ferment the result into cheese. Takes about 6 months. Best enjoyed paired with 5kg of raw beef and a litre of vodka.
Sounds great but I wanted to have a salad. Is there no way to make lettuce salad safe to eat?
It's just loaded with oxalate, eat it and be merry and don't mind the kidney stones and pseudo-gout.
Isn't oxalate the cause of 5G and so indirectly CORONA?
You seem to be a glowing fan of carnivore diets, is that right? What do you think about the sustainability of this lifestyle? I’m pretty sure our planet can’t sustain 9 billion exclusively meat eating humans.
No, not a fan of the carnivore diet (except for short term use for medical purposes). Getting rid of grains puts us in very high risk, grains are essential because they are easy to store long-term... Even though they are plant seeds, the most toxic part of a plant, we have mastered indegenous preparation of grains... and while the food industry has tried to ruin it, it hasn't succeeded by much... mostly because grains are perfect, even for the food industry.
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.
Well indigenous use of grains and legumes involves fermentation (eg sourdough, fermented tofu, miso), which are mostly no longer done at scale. Bread that uses yeast instead of sourdough starter is often not fermented long enough to get rid of most FODMAPs (4h fermentation seems to be recommended, but this is reduced for cost reasons).
Also can't tell if you're trolling bec a use just...what?
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.
Weston A Price is an infamous quack. I'm disappointed to see he mentioned positively here.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...
Be careful throwing around the word quack.
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.
Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice. Raw milk and dairy is a common source of food-borne illnesses. Pasteurisation is the main reason why consuming milk and dairy products at the scale we do doesn't cause thousands of deaths every year.
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.
> Yes, advising people to drink raw milk and avoid pasteurization is dangerous advice.
Pasteurization is useful for commerce because it allows milk to be transported greater distances and stored for longer. But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.
There is some evidence that pasteurization lowers/changes the nutrient content of the milk, which is unsurprising given how many constituents are present in milk and the temperatures at which proteins denature [0].
[0] https://www.realmilk.com/pasteurization-does-harm-real-milk/
> But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.
Categorically and emphatically: N o p e. Raw milk can be contaminated at the point of collection already.
It doesn't matter if milk is fresh. Pathogenic bacteria contaminating raw milk can grow just fine in your gut and make you sick, they don't need to grow in the milk during transportation. In fact, transporation, in this day and age, is by refrigerated truck so it's a more hostile environment for many pathogens than your digestive tract.
At larger scales there is simply a larger chance for contamination, but that is mainly because large dairies collect milk from multiple smaller producers, so their milk can be contaminated from multiple sources thus aggregating both the chance of contamination and the number of pathogens. But each individual small farmer can produce contaminated milk, no problem.
If you have one animal, its milk can be contaminated and you can get ill from drinking it.
If you want to drink raw milk, go ahead, but don't go into it making false assumptions about safety and don't spread misinformation that risks harming others' health on the internet, please.
Edit: also, the "Real Milk" folks are fanatical, swivel-eye loons who don't give a shit about anyone's safety and only care about promoting their agenda of drinking raw milk. For some incomprehensible reason. No, pasteurisation doesn't damage milk. This is just rank bollocks of the lowest degree.
If they cared about "evidence" and they were in for a scientific debate, as they like to pretend, they wouldn't be promoting their Campaign for Real Milk with as much zealotry as they do, because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case. All the "evidence" that I've seen are studies by their members, or studies of others that they have grossly misrepresented, or often not even a study but a poster at a convention etc. These are textbook quacks. Stay away.
Pasteurization is not a free lunch. You also destroy enzymes, vitamins, and all the beneficial bacteria. The enzymes help to digest the milk and the beneficial bacteria compete with pathogenic bacteria in the gut (the above links to peer-reviewed studies and is by a PhD in Nutritional Immunology).
Pasteurized milk prevents illness from contamination but it may not be as well tolerated by some people. Some children show greater skin-prick reactivity to treated milk over untreated milk [0][1], treated milk tends to have a lower threshold of provoking an allergic reaction [2], and heat treatment is shown to abolish the allergy-protective effects of milk [3]. Children who were exposed to raw milk tend to have better allergy tolerance as adults compared to those who consumed processed milk [3].
There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Edit:
> because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case
I would also add that the burden of proof and Precautionary Principle cuts both ways. Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies. The assumption that the nutritional quality of milk (in vivo) is unaffected by flash heating is what needs to be demonstrated.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30945370/
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3284399/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29025431/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30439365/
> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive).
I know this is threadomancy, two weeks later, but - how the hell would you know that?
If a farmer in Ghana gets the shitters for a week after drinking raw milk, how would you know? If their kid gets meningitis caused by Listeria and needs to have a hand amputated, or a foot, how would you know?
You wouldn't. But the WHO and a bunch of other health agencies around the world collect data on this sort of thing. And the sad truth that emerges is that the majority of food poisoning happens in non-industrialised, developing countries.
Got that? In countries were people don't have a food industry, where raw milk and dairy is all the dairy they can consume, and where everything is fresh, as fresh as fresh can be, that's where most of the food-borne diseases happen.
You wanna know why? Because modern standards of hygiene work, bitches. That's why. And that includes pasteurisation which is basically a method to scrub milk clean of pathogens.
Sorry but that stuff about enzymes, vitamins and "beneficial bacteria" is on the level of "it's got electrolytes". If I dug a bit I'm sure I'd find the "PhD in Nutritional Immunology" is one of the swivel-eyed loons, or funded by them.
> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Yes, people around the world drink raw milk all the time. And they get food poisoning all the time. As the WHO link I posted above points out, raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. And a bunch of other pathogens besides, like Brucella, C. Burnetii, S. aureus, Salmonella etc.
Which, again, can contaminate fresh milk from healthy cows just fine.
Btw, you can consume raw milk that isn't fresh without trouble if it is clear of pathogenic bacteria. But you won't know that unless you can actually test its microbial load at the very least. It's not the freshness of the milk that matters, it's what's living inside it that can make you sick.
I don't understand why all this is so hard to understand. Again, atavism and return to nature. "If it's fresh, it's good".
Which brings me to your thought experiment: cows happily take a shit, step on it, smear it all over the grass and then eat the grass. Is that OK because it's fresh, what do you think?
P.S.
> Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies
Mnyeah, not really. Pasteurization kept being "standardized" well into the 1980's, when it was determined that C. burnetii (the most heat-tolerant of bacteria targeted by pasteurization) was not destroyed by heating milk to 61C for 30 minutes, as was until then standard practice targeted at Mycobacterium bovis, which was considered to be the most heat tolerant raw milk contaminant. As a result, modern practice of heating milk to 63C for 30 minutes or 72C for 15 seconds was established because it was found to destroy all individual cells of C. burnetii with good certainty. In fact there's a range of times and temperatures determined by experimentally verified heat death curves. All that is from 1986, in the International Dairy Federation Bulletin.
I wonder who told you that bit about "before biochemistry". The swivel-eye loons, I guess?
But surely there would be a great difference between milk produced on an industrial farm vs a small village with a few dairy cows?
In the same vein I wouldn't eat raw beef from a supermarket but high quality beef can be enjoyed as steak tartare without worry, same with sashimi...
> But surely there would be a great difference between milk produced on an industrial farm vs a small village with a few dairy cows?
No.
Come on, think. Why would it make any difference if the milk is from a small or big farm? Why do you think "a small village" is a less hospitable environment for pathogens than "an industrial farm"? Who do you think has more means to test the microbial load of their milk and decontaminate milking machines, animal areas etc? The large company or the small farmer?
This is just one more time the naturalistic fallacy: it's natural, from a village, so it must be healthier!
Well, it isn't. I don't know if you pay attention to dairy news items in the press. I do and every once in a while I find a news item about a batch of French raw milk cheeses being recalled because it was contaminated by some dangerous pathogen. This happens to small-scale dairies with a tiny production converting a few hundred liters of milk from their own farm-raised animals a day.
Except, when it happens to French cheesemakers, because they know their shit, they perform routine tests on their products, and they won't let them reach the consumer and cause disease.
But if you trust the "Real Milk" clowns, who happily claim that raw milk is 100% risk free and it never causes any trouble, then you're just flying blind.
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.
Do you happen to have any idea if your g- and grandparents on the Indian side eat and or ate a lot of refined carbs like naan or white rice? Refined carbs being often called a modern thing and the cause of metabolic disease, but so far I've not really found that to be true.
Why pulled?
Many accounts sat the in the UK in the early 20th century dentistry was still so expensive that some people chose to have all their teeth pulled to spare themselves a lifetime of pain. Having all your teeth removed was considered the perfect gift for a 21st birthday or a newly married bride. My mother-in-law had her teeth out under this practice.
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...
This would have been the early 1920s so the availability of dentistry out in the countryside would have been minimal. Instead of having a bunch of rotting and broken teeth (and the concomitant pain) it would h have been simpler to just get them all out.
The replacement plates can’t have been that comfortable either.
My English grandmother was the same, though I think it was closer to her 30s. My understanding is her dental hygiene was not the best (she grew up in WW2), and it was just “easier” to remove all of the teeth and use dentures.
So, she still had all her teeth at 93?
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.
yes she had all her teeth when she died
Oh, this is super interesting.
My grandma had all her teeth at 97 or so when she passed, and never saw a dentist, and I saw her use this tobacco toothpaste 3x per day for 25 years, until she died.
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/stfactsheetcombined10-23-02-...
I assume she had a combination of good genes, frequent teeth cleaning right after meals, low sugar intake, and no soda/alcohol.
I have never had a cavity as of mid 30s, and I only started going to dentist at 23 or so. I don’t eat much, if any, sweets/junk food/soda.
Just curious, where did the linked image come from?
I'm imagining some sort of encyclopedia of tobacco toothpastes
I image searched for ipco on DuckDuckGo.
> We have very few teeth from this period in Africa. We don’t know if this is unusual or not,
Alternative view, cavities were common and the teeth were removed / fell out.
The question should be "where are the missing teeth?, and why?
Tooth Fairy has them, obviously.
Back in those days she practically got them for free!
It’s why she’s been able to keep her rates so low today, she has a huge backfill from our ancient ancestors’ teeth.
Wouldn't they be scattered? Pluck rotten tooth, toss...years later die and leave a big collection of bones, while the little tooth just erodes away?
Badly damaged teeth also tend to splinter and crack, leaving little from the original shape to recognize.
The question is, where are the half-decayed teeth that must statistically be present in skulls, because people die of unpredictable circumstances?
what is the statistical chance that half decayed teeth will be present in the population that dies unexpectedly and what is the chance that someone who died unexpectedly will have their fossilized remains dug up later?
Do modern skulls lose their teeth too? Do we find them in a little pile under the skull?
The epitome of survivorship bias
Related observations:
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...
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.
I figured it’s that they ate all the animal. They always boiled the bones and that strengthened their teeth.
I bet if you look at ancient people in tropical areas they had less teeth as well as less need for them.
Interesting, I would assume that prehistoric times required "perfect" teeth (and even overall geometry and jaw structure). You need a high quality grinding / cutting tool to rip meat easily.
This is absolute fiction presented as facts. If HN had a way to killfile a user this user would be first on my list. This type of misinformation has no place on HN.
I read that as a joke, even if not a very clever one.
Yes I can confirm it was a bad joke.
Personally I thought this whole thread was a joke. Glad I’d be first on your list though, I’m hardly ever first at anything.
Also COVID is fake, the earth is flat, 9/11 was an inside job, and now that you’ve shown desire to killfile(?) a supreme member of the Illuminati, well I don’t know what will happen, but it will probably be semi irritating.
You forgot the moon landing, filmed on a soundstage on Mars. ))
Are you okay? What an odd aggressive remark.
I think it was a joke...
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.
Isn’t the natural occurring fluoride Calcium fluoride while what we put in tooth paste (and add to water) is sodium fluoride which in addition to helping with our teeth is technically poisonous in large doses which is why we spit out tooth paste and don’t give children fluoride tooth paste until they learn to spit?
You can have too much fluoride in your diet and from toothpaste that it causes white streaks on your teeth and potentially on your bones. It’s called fluorosis.
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.
You won't die or anything but you might get a stomach ache.
Couldn't we test this hypothesis by checking the teeth of people living non-modern lifestyles?
Do tribal people around the world living traditionally have cavities or not? What is the quality of their teeth?
They seem to have good teeth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8
They wear jeans, though. So they might be accessing nearby cities and the Youtuber avoided to mention that for clicks.
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.
https://fluoridealert.org/content/fresh_foods/
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.
My mother grew up on well water and has never had a cavity in her life. My dad grew up mostly on city water before fluoridation. He has had terrible problems with his teeth.
It's not true that all well water has significant amounts of fluoride.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments#:~:text....
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...
That’s easy.
Sugar.
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.
You're correct that any carbs can help form plaque, but humans have been getting significant numbers of calories from them since before we were H. sapiens.
This is only plausible for humans in tropical areas. It does not stand to reason for humans north of (conservatively), say, 40º. Even in humans in areas with calorically significant quantities of carbohydrates available, fossil records suggest they probably preferentially ate ruminants, same as anyone else.
Most of human evolution occurred below 40N, so even if that point were correct, it would at best be limited to the adaptive behaviors of a very small group of human ancestors.
However, there's plenty of evidence suggesting that there wasn't any such regionally adaptive behavior. The original find that suggested starchy plant consumption in H. erectus was analysis of the Dmanisi fossils at ~41N. Later work tying these sorts of results to typical European Neanderthal diets has been done for North Sea sites (~50N). Of course, Neanderthals never went much farther north than that due to the climate. As for AMHs, I've seen papers of sites near Smolensk (~55N) indicating moderate to heavy starchy plant use. That's not far from the glaciation line.
Moreover, there are fairly convincing arguments that a nearly pure-meat diet doesn't work in winter due to the general lack of fat (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.11.016 ). There are caveats and workarounds here, but this whole idea that high-latitude hominins had limited, homogeneous diets is on increasingly shaky ground.
They are only dangerous if you don't brush or floss. With respect to ancient cultures a little twig is a damn effective dental cleaner and about as good as a modern toothbrush.
People today who brush regularly still have way more rotted-out teeth than people who didn't eat significant quantities of carbohydrates. They are dangerous even if you brush.
Growing up, my dad often said that raw carrots are "nature's toothbrush" and he would encourage us to end any picnic lunch with carrot sticks, not with a sugary dessert. Can carrot sticks function like a little twig in terms of knocking undesirable food gunk off teeth?
Can't confirm but this feels right. Chewing on carrot breaks loose any food that sticks to my teeth.
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.
I think you mean tarter, not plaque. Plaque takes a while but you obviously will feel tarter only teeth at the end of any day if you've had sugary or carby foods. White bread starts breaking down into sugar as soon as it hits your mouth due to enzymes in saliva.
Plaque accumulates on teeth within hours. After a few days, it becomes tartar.
Are you sure? My wife is allergic to corn syrup, and we find it in EVERYTHING. 95%+ of spaghetti sauce, even in canned vegetables. It's surprising how sweet things are these days. Our standard for starting a new recipe is to cut the sugar by 1/2 to 1/3rd, that way you can taste the other ingredients.
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.
In my family its as clear as day. The boomers in the family grew up on soda and all have had dozens of cavities and currently sport gold teeth. Not the case for the older generation who grew up in the great depression off of water alone, or the children of the boomers who were raised better than a constant supply of 7 up as the only source of liquids.
Yep, it's sugar. I cut it out of my diet as much as possible and stopped having tooth problems.
Sugar drinks are a form of suicide for your teeth.
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.
You can get products with the similar bioactive glass ingredient BioMin [1], though for whatever reason the version that also includes fluoride is not yet sold in the US.
[1] e.g. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/dr.-collins-biomin-toothpa...
Yes it is if you order it from overseas/Canada on Amazon :)
Cool. Got a link on that?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=genetically+modified+streptococcus...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine
Doesn't seem to say there's a functional human trial. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9040302B2/en suggests patent expires 2031.
there are endless stories of ancient civilizations and palaeolithic humans dying young from dental abscess, 10 seconds on google defeats this weird spin
genes probably.
I’m mid 30s and have never had a cavity. I go to the dentist every 6months. I also have a huge sweet tooth.
FWIW, dental health outcomes for visiting dentist yearly instead of every 6 months are apparently identical.
Downvoters, have a link to an article discussing some studies: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-w...
I haven't been to one in 25 years.
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.
If you go to a dentist now they will likely find those cavities have gone deep. I recommend that you do.
FWIW, my cleanings go a lot better if I visit every 4 months than every 6 months, so there's no way I'd consider 6 months. I could certainly have better oral hygiene, but visiting the dentist 3 times a year isn't terrible.
I have a permanent retainer that builds up a little placque even with regular flossing so it’s nice to get that cleaned.
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.
My guess is that it's mainly the composition of your mouth's microbiome. Some bacteria really like creating acid that eats away at enamel. Some don't. Whichever happens to have a foothold in your mouth (which probably has a very inherited component) is probably the determining factor in tooth decay.
I'm 36, and I've had 32 cavities filled in my lifetime. I can't stand the procedure every time, and it's been heartbreaking for me not to be able to pinpoint why I've had so many cavities. I'm vegetarian, and I don't drink soda or alcohol. I brush regularly but should probably floss more. I do drink a lot of coffee and a lot of water. I completely avoid any candy and processed sugar (except for the occasional bit of something sweet in a restaurant dessert once or twice a year). I also eat a lot of acidic fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, lemons, limes, and pineapples.
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.
This feels intuitively right, but you would think changes in diet can affect this too (if caries causing bacteria mainly feed on sugar).
There has been some research into oral probiotics like K12 and M18 but I’m curious how effective these really are.
I've sometimes wondered if dental hygiene may actually be counterproductive by killing harmless or even beneficial bacteria and leaving a niche open for harmful ones.
I think the biggest components is exactly what the dentist tells us: brushing and flossing.
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
why would someone in their mid 30s "probably had an extra enamel coating applied"? I've never heard of that. Of course, they give you “super fluoride” when you go in for cleanings, but that's not an extra coat of enamel. I'm pretty sure there is not such technique, when your adult teeth reach their full size that's pretty much all the enamel they'll ever have, dentists can't just apply another layer or we'd all be cavity free.
it's usually called a dental sealant and yes I did have that when my adult teeth came in. it's all chipped off by now but we'll see the next 10 years I guess.
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.amazon.com/Nutrition-Physical-Degeneration-Westo...
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)
Because brushing/flossing/scraping the teeth with a stick is a learned behavior that even today isn't fully learned by our species.
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.
They do at least floss:
https://www.science.org/content/article/monkeys-may-have-bet...
Calcium helps make strong bones and teeth. So milk drinkers had good teeth. Norway is northern Europe where they have the gene to digest milk.
Isn't the gene you're talking about related to lactose? You can still get calcium from milk, or make cheese which will naturally be lactose free.
The fact that we have "wisdom teeth" seems to indicate that ancient humans did, in fact, get cavities and lose teeth to them.
I thought the current thinking was that ancient humans had a lot more chewing they had to do to eat their food, which as a child pressured the jaws into being larger, which gave you space as an adult for your wisdom teeth.
Also nobody mentions all the starchy stuff and the fruit our ancestors ate. It's just odd how people reinterpret the entire history of our species based on recent dietary fads.
Honestly our ancestors probably ate anything possible that was around. Probably a lot of half spoiled meat that you just ate if you came upon it and barely nutritious plant matter just to fill the belly. Surviving is insanely difficult, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, and you will take that rotting animal vs being hungry. I imagine cooking too didn't always happen. We take the logistics needed for cooking for granted, perhaps in ancient times it was easier to eat some raw/semispoiled flesh if you found it just to keep moving vs lingering around for too long in one area. Violence was also widespread then as it has been all through history, so being in a position where you can establish a camp for a few hours and advertise a cooking fire in the immediate area must have been quite a luxury.
Almost all of this is... Not accurate. It pains me to say it, but this reads like Hollywood fiction. Most groups of people weren't living under constant threat of starvation or violence. Groups that badly located, or that badly divided, didn't tend to last. Additionally, if you're living in high stress, births become less successful.
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.
Yeah, heat will kill all germs and break down most toxins given off by bacteria so if food isn't plentiful it would be hard to turn down a day or two old carcass just lying around. However I don't think eating half rotten RAW meat is a good idea at all. humans simple don't have the capability for that like wolves and to a much greater extend buzzards/vultures and would quite likely die from toxins given off by the bacteria.
If you read the article, you’ll see fruit is mentioned multiple times, including the frequency of its consumption. There is no mention of dietary fads.
I don't think an extra molar at age 16 is going to let you survive after all your other teeth have fallen out. I would guess the wisdom teeth are either waiting for your jaw to mature or are in the process of devolving to never erupt at all.
That's not really how evolution works. There's no reason that modern humans would ever lose wisdom teeth unless NOT having them led to some evident increase in ability to produce healthy children in abundance.
With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
The process of devolving to never erupt at all would have started long before modern dental care, driven by impaction complications or pressure to appear neotenous with a small jaw. I agree it won't continue.
I have all my wisdom teeth and 3 of 4 are perfectly fine. the 4th is a little crooked but it's harmless. Plenty of people have all their wisdom teeth.
Our ancestors ate less sugar, especially as children.
Next question.
Perhaps due to only drinking water, and consuming the proper diet, in the region in which they were adapted.
They didn’t eat Cadbury cream eggs and drink extra large sodas.
True but irrelevant. Cavities begin showing up in the historical record several millennia before the advent of candy and soda.
>> He points to a study on a skull from a Homo rhodesiensis man who lived 350 000 years ago. He was closely related to our ancestors in Africa, says the zoologist. The skull was found in Zambia in 1921, and his teeth were not in good condition. More precisely, they were pretty rotten ... He probably didn’t pick between his teeth to remove food debris. Another theory is that he ate a lot of honey.
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.
If nothing else, dogs and cats get cavities and they're not eating a gallon of coke or a bucket of M&Ms...
>they're not eating a gallon of coke or a bucket of M&Ms
Most cats and dogs are eating carbohydrate rich mass produced pet food made by a very familiar privately owned chocolate company.
Most dogs and cats are on a super unnatural carb-heavy diet. (The same could be said about humans depending on your definition of "natural".)
Many fruits are quite sugary, and some people probably lived in areas where they could consume fruits regularly. Also, as another commenter stated, non-sugar carbohydrates can also pose risks.
The fruits we eat today are also highly selectively-bred to be very large and sweet. Take a look at a modern banana compared to a wild-type banana [1]. Same goes for watermelon [2].
[1] https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5e20f576d0e9d12be5abc763/5e3...
[2] https://i.insider.com/56ce1de88a45651707ff60c9?width=1190
Good point. What wild fruits are historically naturally quite sugary? I'm guessing berries (like strawberries/blueberries/raspberries) might be?
Do you have evidence or proof of this? /s
Cadbury, since 1824.
Although it may have just been acquired or rebranded at that time.
Since the mid 90's I've been having trouble keeping up with which soft drink conglomerate or highly leveraged hedge fund owns Cadbury in any given week, and whether it's one of the bad ones that I'm supposed to be boycotting.
Wikipedia says it was Mondelez International this morning, but who knows if that information became out of date while I was typing it...
Pretty sure my caveman ancestors cobbled together the first Jolly Ranchers, otherwise why would I think they're so delicious?
Just thinking about Jolly Ranchers makes me want to floss my teeth.
Only anecdotal
Alcohol.
they didn't eat mickey D and other crap. no high fructose corn syrup. no sodas.
Betteridge's law applies. It's well understood that hominids experienced tooth decay throughout their evolution. Causes and contributors and rates over time may be up for debate, but the evidentially confirmed fact that our ancestors got cavities is settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_decay#History
It's also well understood that our sugar intake is probably 10x what it was before sugar was cheap and readily available and our cavity rate (at least if you aren't brushing) has increased proportionally. I don't think anyone really believes that cavemen never had cavities, just that it was much less common.
> they had a life expectancy of like 20 years
This just meant that a LOT of kids died, not that most adults didn't live very long.
That is something apparently so obvious, but I was pretty surprised when I first read it. Honestly grew up thinking everyone died at 30 in the past.
I think that is part of the issue with communicating bulk statistics like life expectancy. In reality the median or mean after 15 or after 30 is likely more useful as a measure.
Yeah same, but if you made it to 18 your chances of making it to 50 or 60 were pretty good compared when you just popped outta ya mother.
The other weird thing is how skewed it was by sex. Men might have a life expectancy of 50 while for women it was 30.
Death during childbirth.
Obviously child birth was risky but so was being a man running around hunting and fighting other men, I bet the chances were about the same. Neither of us have any sources though I'm willing to bet.
Is this a rhetorical question?
Because back then bears ate beets. Then we got hooked on them and made beat sugar and now we eat beets. Bears still beat battle star galatica though.
So apparently some think cavities (caries) are contagious via mouth fluid exchange in kissing... if so, then perhaps an ancestor became an unwitting host through some unknown mechanics. Perhaps poorly cooked jowls of some sort.
You have a source for that? It's my understanding that it is -very- hard to change another human's oral biome, the bacteria that are currently there have a huge advantage of out surviving foreign bacteria.
Could have been hand to mouth contact from any number of sources. Bacterial biofilms are pretty easy to transfer and as we recently learned from eating bats it only has to happen once.
People will, even today, grab fruit off of trees, wipe it on their shirt, and eat 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.
1 drop clove oil, 1/2 cup water. Swish regularly. It's an antiseptic.
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.
A cavity is a literal hole in your tooth. No amount of clove oil can fix that.
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.
Often going to another dentist and getting a second opinion will "fix" your cavity, but give you a new one in a different tooth.
Either the first dentist thought you had a cavity when you had none, or the second one missed it.
One of them was just wrong.
Or he had a boat payment due.
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.
Yes I had a dentist who told me all of a sudden "you need 3 crowns" and I was like "bwah?" . Just 6 months before I was notified he was happy I hadn't had a cavity the 6 years I'd been seeing him. Naturally I went to another dentist who told me my teeth were fine and to not go back to the other dentist for anything let alone crowns but he said that was just his opinion as he didn't know the dentist personally. So I switched over to him. He took the time to point out on xrays from people who had decay bad enough to get crowns and that my teeth were nothing like those.
Antiseptic regrows enamel?
No. Saliva regrows enamel.
"The Verdict: You can do a lot to protect and strengthen your tooth enamel, but once it has eroded, it’s gone, baby, gone!" Says webmd.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/features/can-tooth-enamel-...
Webmd is an awful reference
Many results under webmd were the same. They know SEO unfortunately.
Sounds like a generalization of the SEO problem.
I’m failing to see how my comment was random. Yours seems more random.
This is unscientific nonsense. Clove oil isn’t going to repair a hole in your tooth.
Possibly the grandparent is confused because clove oil is a local anaesthetic traditionally used by dentists in South Asia.
I eat tons of olive oil and drink water while doing so, I’ve had plenty of cavities, what do you think about that ?
I mistook clove oil for olive oil too