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Comment by nopassrecover | Hacker News Reader

In Australia we have free health care but not dental. Dental is often an exceptional case in most healthcare plans as well. It would be nice to not have to worry about that any longer.

I'd be interested to know what proportion of dentistry is due to decay, particularly with the advent of chlorinated water. You'd possibly still need checkups for gum diseases.

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Did you mean flouridated instead of chlorinated water? I've never heard of chlorine affecting tooth decay; it's normally added to water supplies to control germs. Flouride on the other hand is routinely added expressly for this purpose, although whether it is either effective or wise to do so is the subject of many bitter and divisive debates in communities.

Yeah I did, thanks for picking that one up.

Denmark same thing and dental care here is expensive. It can easily put any medium income family back a 8K just to get a bridge done.

You can fly to Repuplic of Moldova, it will be cheaper even considering airplane tickets.

But not 8K for a high- or low-income family?

It's more likely that higher rates of tooth decay started when humans began grinding grains finely enough to make such things as refined flour, and refined sugars. The paleolithic diet did not include such things, which easily become food for bacteria that lives in the mouth and causes tooth decay.

Do you have any data on how many teeth they found per mouth in remains of paleolithic people?

There is a classic work of Weston A. Price "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" exactly on the topic, except that he studied the living people - tribes all over the world, who still do not eat processed foods etc.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/10/18/130654483/starchy...

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