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This seems like an agenda-motivated post because even accepting your point as true, you ignored the actual subject of conversation and pivoted to the thing you wanted to talk about.

Imagine the following headline: Academics make stronger connections between sedentary lifestyles and heart disease. This is true. Imagine someone replied to that conversation with "I should go to the gym more often." You then butted in with "People 150 years ago didn't go to the gym, they just worked physically demanding jobs. Modern office jobs are the entry point for sedentary living. Therefor the solution is not going to the gym, it's becoming a construction worker."

You're not even wrong in that you are proposing something that's part of a solution, it's just bizarre to hijack someone mentioning dental hygiene into a hobbyhorse post about dietary sugar.

No: the comment I replied to mentioned flossing.

I told him that flossing is a band-aid solution that hides the real cause underneath: sugar, which destroys teeth.

Imagine someone says "I inject herion each day but since I take some pills I can handle it a bit better".

Is the solution here to take the pills? Or to stop the heroin injection?

Are you not able to see that?

This also DOES connect to the main thread: if you don't eat sugar -> your teeth aren't destroyed -> if your teeth aren't destroyed -> you don't get infection -> if you don't get infection -> no gum disease -> and if the study is true -> then no gum disease -> less chance of Alzheimer.

Therefore no sugar -> less chance of Alzheimer as per the study.

You are conflating two different dental problems, tooth decay and gum disease.

Sugar doesn't cause gum disease. Poor dental hygiene causes gum disease. Poor dental hygiene also causes tooth decay, but that doesn't make them the same thing. Tooth decay is caused by sugars, though it's mitigated by cleaning and fluoride. For tooth decay to infect the gums you'd have to be completely ignoring tooth hygiene. A dentist should have filled those cavities long, long before that point, or performed a root canal if you let it go that far.

Eliminating sugar won't change your chance of gum disease one way or the other. It's a bacterial infection that grows into plaques, and they have to be removed. People in the past developed gum disease long before sugars: Otzi the Iceman had gum disease.

The main modern cause of gum disease is smoking, though thankfully that is decreasing. Diabetes is also a cause of gum disease, and managing sugars reduces the chance of diabetes type 2. (Diabetes type 1 is an autoimmune disorder independent of your sugar consumption, though type 1 diabetics also have to manage their sugar consumption -- though certainly not eliminate it.)

The "sugar is evil" trope is just not helpful, and it's not applicable here. It does not cause gum disease and is not implicated in Alzheimer's by this study. People should consume less of it, but it's not the villain it's made out to be by Robert Lustig and company.

Well, Ötzi (* 5,000 BCE) had cavities. I think you’d need to go back to before the Neolithic Revolution. Shipwrecked sailor Steven Callahan also noted in his book “Adrift” that, after 73 days adrift at sea eating nothing but fish and sea birds, his teeth and gums were healthier than ever before. So there’s something to your argument.

Actually, people who ate real food 150 years ago had teeth that were massively worn down.

Cavities are permanent. The comment about "crossbread/gmo-ed" is another tell.

You obviously have not read Weston Price's book.

If you did you would never wrote a comment like that.

Cavities are not permanent and they heal, read the book.

You obviously "missed" the point where I explicitly wrote above that "if you keep eating the modern food they will never heal".

You are also conflating "worn down teeth" vs "cavities which cause infection". These are totaly different things. You can have heavily worn down teeth but ZERO infection.

Also you wrote: "The comment about "crossbread/gmo-ed" is another tell.".

Really? Is it? Do you not know that gluten strength was greatly increased already in the last ~150 years in wheat because it was bread to withstand higher wind speeds so that it can be grown in windy locations? And how do you make wheat sustain higher winds? By making it's "bones" stronger. And what are the "bones" of wheat? Gluten!

The gluten in modern wheat is much stronger than the gluten of the wheat people ate ~200 years.

So the wheat we eat is already much different than it was 200 years ago.

So much for the "crossbread/gmo tell" lol. Do some research first, it's not that hard.

Your theories are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

More seriously: you're trying to start an argument with somebody who has indepth research knowledge of plant breeding (PhD, Biophysics, also worked in UC Berkeley Plant and Microbial Department). You're citing a book with somebody who appears to have made significant contributions to dental research, and also was a quack whose theories are not accepted by the mainstream.

Its true that Weston Price's work is controversial, but stating that he is a quack and not accepted by the mainstream does not mean that he is wrong.

It was also mainstream at one time for doctors to not wash their hands while delivering babies.

right, but it's been nearly 100 years and nobody is confirming his theories in a quantitative way and updating the way we treat cavities. I guess we can just blame Big Teeth for that?

What credentialism!

I wrote it twice above already and you always "missed it": obviously we aren't confirming these theories since everyone eats carbs nowadays!

What does plant breeding have do to with teeth?

You truly are peak academic! Credentialism all the way!

Also: Weston Price's book has TONS of photos comparing teeth of people on an industrial diet and those eating modern garbage and the difference in teeth is night and day! Look them up!

Do you academics not consider real world evidence as evidence anymore?

Or do you people only consider p-value hacked studies to be "proof"?

> Cavities are not permanent and they heal, read the book.

That seems controversial here, but I've read in several places that cavities can stop (a bit like an infection can stop)

However the tissue "lost" to the active part of the cavity is gone, as in a little chunk of volume is lost.

> Actually, people who ate real food 150 years ago had teeth that were massively worn down.

I recall reading that cavefolk apparently had great teeth before agriculture was invented... stone-milling grains such as wheat into flour also introduces stone particles into it, and eating breads and other foods that include the flour will gradually degrade your teeth.

Modern steel-milled flours do not have this issue, but apparently the heat generated from the friction partially cooks the grain and reduces the nutritional content.

>they had perfect teeth health even in old age.

I think you mean had a perfect "tooth health" in old age. If they were anything like Washington, there was only one left.[0]

[0] https://www.history.com/news/did-george-washington-have-wood...

Do you really think he ate a traditional diet?

Read the book!