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Comment by freiherr | Hacker News Reader

What I didn't hear often enough when listening about teeth health is how important is diet and lifestyle for the teeh health. While there was talk about brushing and regular dentist visits, the diet factor was mentioned briefly and half-heartedly that you shouldn't eat sugar. Which nobody listened to anyway (especially as a kid). How much more is there to it is well explained in Weston A. Price - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects [0] Just be wary of the foundation, they are quacky often. Just read the book.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544354.Nutrition_and_Phy...

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Weston Price (Dentist) travelled the world looking at indigenous people eating their traditional diet, and found they had very little tooth decay. Tooth decay starts up with the modern refined flour, refined sugar, diets. As well he found that they have very round wide mouths and not much teeth overcrowding that is so common today, and wide noses and nostrils, easy breathing through the nose. He put it down to nutrients in food, things like eating organ meats, around the time of Upton Sinclair, re-disovery of Vitamin C for scurvy and so on. e.g. https://elliottwall.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/westonpri...

More modern day dentist Dr John Mew suggests that wide, round dental arches with plenty of room for teeth comes from a lot of hard chewing; the tongue pressing up against the roof of the mouth to mash food also exerts an outward pressure which shapes children's mouths / faces to be wider, and that's missing with modern diets.

People elsewhere in this thread have brought up mouth breathing as a thing which dries the saliva and worsens tooth decay, that's affected by having narrow nostrils which are more difficult to breathe through, which could be affected by childhood nutrition and chewing?

Recommend reading "Breath" by James Nestor! Amongst other things, purees for babies...so many parents give their babies sugary pouches..Uh!

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