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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

If you go further back it lot does not get a lot worse, and further back at least some people would have had less tooth decay because of better diets.

A century ago is probably pretty close to the worst possible time: starchy diets, relatively cheap pure/refined sugar, but no modern dentistry.

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It took me too many unnecessarily drilled and filled teeth by overzealous dentists to realize this. I removed salt-sugar-fat junk food from the diet and care about my teeth. Absolutely nothing happened with them for one decade now. Again... bloody dentists, they abuse so much the fact that you trust them. They treat your teeth as a piece of sandstone until there is nothing to drill into anymore.

Unfortunately, here in the US, the elderly are often completely without any sort of dental coverage.

Which means they can’t afford to do anything besides watch the teeth rot out of their head when problems start showing up, leading to far worse and even more painful and expensive problems.

I've read that medieval populations had significant tooth wear due to stone mills depositing stone residue into flour.

Im not sure how this stacks against the time period youre referencing, if it was better or worse.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3094918/

One of the many articles studying dental health of pre-modern populations.

Yeah, it wasn't great. Human teeth aren't really suitable for a long-lived species that eats a lot of carbs.

Even as far back as ancient Egypt [1]. And they had dentistry too [2]! Any time in history where they milled grains into flour with stone, you can see this pattern. In fact, it can be used to differentiate certain agricultural vs non-agricultural populations in the archaeological record [3].

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19396207/

[2]https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.2...

[3]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16353225/

I've always found this guy's stuff fascinating.

https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/nutrition-greats/...

Lots of pics here.

https://www.ericdavisdental.com/facial-orthotropics-for-your...

> A century ago is probably pretty close to the worst possible time

Which may have attributed/motivated the later advancements that were made.

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