Why didn't our ancient ancestors get cavities?
sciencenorway.no
sciencenorway.no
On the other hand, from The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han:
> In the Eastern Han [roughly 25-220 AD] a celebration was held each autumn at the Old Man Star Shrine south of the capital. During this feast those who had reached the age of seventy were given imperial staffs and fed by hand with rice gruel (on the assumption that they had lost their teeth). The staff had a model of a dove perched on its top, because the dove was said to never choke
Sometimes there's no real reason to believe things were different in the past.
- ditch plant fat for animal fat
- avoid excessive sugar
- eat real food (no fake milk, meat etc.)
- stop eating vegetables, specially raw vegetables
Food is one of those things I take an ultra conservative stance on. The food industry has made eating literal poison (plant seeds, plant oils, spinach, brussel sprouts etc.) seem healthy with corrupt research and marketing.
You can't just take a food ingredient from one culture, throw away the indegenous preparation techniques and eat it completely different way and expect it to work. Take spinach for example. It comes from ancient Persia where it was added to a meat stew... you can't eat that raw. Spinach has high oxalate content... which gets reduced when you cook it for a long time. The remaining oxalate binds with high calcium in the meat stew and the resulting dish has no oxalate content at all.
Oxalates are one of the anti-nutrients, which are phytotoxins that plants use to avoid being eaten... Anti-nutrients in particular attack animals by affecting essential nutrient absorption. Indegenous preparation, which has evolved with the cultures, has ways to manage these toxins or counter them with some other ingredient which makes it edible. You can't do away with those preparation techniques.
Also, even if you did follow indegenous preparation methods, the food industry may have changed the plant by artificial selection or genetic modification such that the indegenous preparation is not as effective, so you're better off ditching them anyway.
Vegetables have significant phytotoxin content without significant nutrient content, specially in forms bioavailable to us (eg. a lot of carotinoids in carrots, except we are terrible at converting that to Vitamin A... we need the retinol form, readily available in milk, eggs, fish, meat etc.).
Plants are living beings and don't want to be eaten. They can't fight or flight so their defense is toxins. We have domesticated some of the plants and learnt how to remove those toxins over thousands of years... but if you don't know how to do that effectively, you're better off not eating them.
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?
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?
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.
Hate to be the one to tell you, but animals are living beings too and don't want to be eaten either.
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.
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.
I believe that indigenous vegetarian diets, such as the traditional Indian vegetarian diet, before ghee was replaced by industrially produced seed oil, is one good option... as is foods like Sushi, where you combine fish/meat with grains.
I'd 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'd better go do some research on how to eat that salad or apple...really?
Just pkease go read the book How Not To Die.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/sbm-weston-prices-appalling...
Among The “SkepDoc’s” oppositions to the Weston Price foundation’s website are these assertions:
> [That weston price offered] Advice not supported by good evidence, like using unrefined Celtic sea salt, cooking only in stainless steel, cast iron, glass, or good quality enamel, thinking positive thoughts, and practicing forgiveness.
> Dangerous advice: drinking raw milk and avoiding pasteurization. They even hold an annual raw milk symposium. They also recommend frequent consumption of raw meat, raw fish, and raw shellfish.
Dangerous? Unsupported? Once again someone arguing passionately for “science” but in actuality arguing for their world view, which in this case was shaped as a physician in the Navy.
Here:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety
tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria.
I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc.
I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.
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...
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.
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/
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.
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/
> 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?
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.
Basically what I'm saying is that diet and genetics are a huge factor.
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.
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.
I'm imagining some sort of encyclopedia of tobacco toothpastes
My Australian grandmother had all her teeth pulled out when she was 12 and wore artificial teeth for the next 75 years.
The foundation of the NHS in 1948 made dental care affordable for all and in the first nine months four million cavities were filled and queues formed outside surgeries.
see: https://bda.org/museum/exhibitions-and-events/nhs70-celebrat...
The replacement plates can’t have been that comfortable either.
Alternative view, cavities were common and the teeth were removed / fell out.
The question is, where are the half-decayed teeth that must statistically be present in skulls, because people die of unpredictable circumstances?
It’s why she’s been able to keep her rates so low today, she has a huge backfill from our ancient ancestors’ teeth.
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...
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.
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.
I bet if you look at ancient people in tropical areas they had less teeth as well as less need for them.
To respond to a sibling comment: the relative levels have been looked at, in detail, and existing policy reflects what we've learned from that. Scaremongering over it influences real negative health outcomes, particularly amongst those with the most limited access to comprehensive dental care. Flouridation ain't quite as big as say sanitation, or antibiotics, but it's still up there on the list of biggest public health wins ever. By all means investigate it critically, but perhaps in a way more sophisticated than "have they looked at it in more depth than me spending 10 seconds googling?" imo.
This typically happens with teeth when young children drink fluoridated water, and also drink formula, which has fluoride, mixed with municipal fluoridated water. Or if the well water of an area has too much fluoride.
Do tribal people around the world living traditionally have cavities or not? What is the quality of their teeth?
They wear jeans, though. So they might be accessing nearby cities and the Youtuber avoided to mention that for clicks.
However, when I left my childhood home to attend university (and moved into the city afterwards), I haven't had a problem since. Then again, this is just one anecdote.
Main building of Vipeholm hospital, now a secondary school The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments#:~:text....
So the fact that we don't find too many fossils with tooth decay means that it could have been a huge problem. And this is the origin of the joke: you don't have to brush all your teeth, just the ones you find on early hominid fossils.
Sugar.
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.
Even buying tea is tough, many are very sweet. Sadly the sugar lobby has been successful in blocking imports, setting price floors, and generally keeping sugar higher priced than corn syrup, which from what I can tell is worse for people's health.
Sugar drinks are a form of suicide for your teeth.
[1] e.g. https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/dr.-collins-biomin-toothpa...
I’m mid 30s and have never had a cavity. I go to the dentist every 6months. I also have a huge sweet tooth.
Downvoters, have a link to an article discussing some studies: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140926-how-often-must-w...
I probally pushing my luck?
Have all my teeth. Three cavities. My gums don't bleed when flossing. When brushing I concentrate on the gums.
Use a Sonic toothbrush daily.
Have a neurotic habit of using tooth picks.
(I knew the dentist who developed the plastic tooth picks with floss. I couldn't stand family. Why? Because he was a rich dentist who set all his kids up for life, but couldn't pay his workers a decent wage. He did offer free dental though? His spoiled boy had a 50' racing racing sloop in high school. I am also jealous too.)
I don't like food in my teeth. I usually have a tooth pick within reach at all times.
I am not a fan of sweets though, but put a lot of sugar in my coffee.
Teeth, and gums, are very much prone to the placebo effect. Every study dentists do require a control group, and placebo controls.
Most were in my early teens (I had eight filled at once one time) so I was convinced it was the dentist racketeering and my parents wouldn't let me out of getting them filled. I should note my parents have a similar diet and a similar amount of major dental work. The handful of cavities I've had in adulthood have been major blows to my mental health.
There has been some research into oral probiotics like K12 and M18 but I’m curious how effective these really are.
my childhood dentist said at 18 that if I just regularly take care of my teeth I shouldn't have any issues the rest of my life.
https://www.science.org/content/article/monkeys-may-have-bet...
With the advent of dental care, that seems unlikely to ever happen by evolution.
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.
Next question.
Although it may have just been acquired or rebranded at that time.
Wikipedia says it was Mondelez International this morning, but who knows if that information became out of date while I was typing it...
Seems pretty relevant, after all! In fact, the thesis of the article seems to be that the agricultural revolution led to many more cavities, due to the increased availability of sugars. Indeed, the article suggests that the prevalence of cavities is tied with the availability of sugar to the population within a specific region.
Most cats and dogs are eating carbohydrate rich mass produced pet food made by a very familiar privately owned chocolate company.
[1] https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5e20f576d0e9d12be5abc763/5e3...
[2] https://i.insider.com/56ce1de88a45651707ff60c9?width=1190
Same goes for eating berries, which are much closer to the ground.
Go back in time a bit, imagine 20k years ago, someone pulling a carrot, wiping it off, and eating it. Or even washing the dirt off, but unless cooked, or soap is used (a relatively new discovery), or a knife to remove the outside?
A little water isn't going to destroy all bacteria on a carrot.
Even today, I'll pick carrots, throw them in sink, wash them a bit and peel. Then eat raw.
Bacteria is everywhere, and we're eating the same thing bateria eats, eg that sugary carrot plant...
And...
* milk
* honey (literally bee spit sorta)
* cheese (pig stomach juices thrown in with milk for a few days)
By no means do we isolated ourselves baterialogically.
19 years ago I went to the dentist and he told me I needed to have a cavity filled. I skipped that. I didn't go back (or to any other dentist) until last year. Got the x-rays. No cavities.
Stuff works.
Oh and stop eating sugar.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/features/can-tooth-enamel-...
I'm glad you found something that works for you, seriously, but I'd be careful over attributing. The most likely explanation would be never actually having had a cavity in the first place.
One of them was just wrong.
Seriously though... some dentists will fill any tiny crevice, others wait until there's more clearly a cavity. I'm not sure why the difference.