Hacker News Reader

Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I also stopped brushing my teeth, I just wash them with water. The first month I had halitosis, but it gradually went away. I'm also more productive than ever because my coworkers have started to send me emails instead of having meetings!

View on HN

We are descended from at least 7000 generations of man, and 99.9% of these ancestors had never even heard of toothpaste.

How were their teeth at 40, if they even lived that long?

Instead of just assuming, you can see that a lot of fossil teeth tend to look shockingly good.

How are anybody's teeth at 40 if they haven't visited a dentist? Brushing is a cause of receding gums, gum infection, tooth loss, and deep pockets around the gums. Modern sticky flours and sugars also do a number on your teeth, giving bacteria a wonderful place to live.

That being said, if you don't brush your teeth, food will find places in your mouth to sit and rot. Brush your teeth for everyone around you, not for your teeth.

…or refined sugar, or living past 40.

Plenty of people lived past 40, people always include infant mortality in life expectancy statistics and it skews people's image of how long people who became adults lived.

Relatedly, I’ve had six teeth removed because my mouth is too small.

For me they made an excellent necklace (and an amusing way to disturb my sister), but in bygone generations they with the emergency backup replacement teeth because so many of your teeth fell out.

...and simple dental work dates back to before recorded history, suggesting that cavities have always been a problem, even if they were probably much rarer before the mass use of refined sugar.

Cavities are also found in other mammals; they're not even just a human problem. Something like 5% of dogs get cavities. If you have an older dog and get their teeth cleaned, some might need to be pulled.

I even saw something about cavities in dolphins... and, if I remember right, the thing about humans not getting cavities before the advent of the modern diet stems from a dentist who had some unorthodox theories about dental care that were unsupported by systematic research.

Oh, it's the Weston Price foundation people who make that claim...

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...

Dogs are a bad example to use to support your argument as they are domesticated animals who are fed processed dog food.

We are descended from at least 100000 generations of sapiens and 99.9% of these ancestors had never even heard of cooking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com