Fun fact. Stone-age level tech people or hunter gatherers have perfect teeth. Their teeth meet perfectly, they have no wisdom teeth issues for example (in fact they just have more normal teeth than civilised people)
The reason is that our jaws are actually too small for our teeth. Their jaws are the right size because the jaw grows to its correct size in response to chewing when you are a baby. We dont chew enough as babies.
If you want to avoid tooth infections, the #1 thing you can do is stop eating sugary food / drinking alcohol or sugar water; for a more complete caveman approach, cut back on other starchy foods like rice, bread, and pasta. The #2 thing you can do is occasionally visit the dentist for a checkup or whenever your teeth give you trouble. The #3 thing you can do is occasionally apply topical fluoride (it’s not clear what difference there is between drinking fluoridated water, brushing weekly, brushing daily, ...). Getting a nutritious diet is also probably important.
Our modern culture taboos anything less than brushing multiple times per day, but it’s not clear how reliable the evidence is supporting this as a blanket requirement (the studies I’ve seen had many other confounding variables, but admittedly I did not do an exhaustive literature review), and most of the tooth infections probably result from other causes.
There are people with perfect teeth who brush rarely, and people with frequent caries who brush religiously after every meal. On average, hunter–gatherers have better teeth than people in agricultural societies, including modern ones. They don’t have access to oral surgery, so when things go bad they can go very bad. But that’s not really related to brushing.
> Our modern culture taboos anything less than brushing multiple times per day, but it’s not clear how reliable the evidence is supporting this as a blanket requirement (the studies I’ve seen had many other confounding variables, but admittedly I did not do an exhaustive literature review), and most of the tooth infections probably result from other causes.
I've heard so much conflicting information on this... Off the top of my head:
* Brushing too often - such as three times a day - speeds up erosion
* Or, that only happens if you brush too hard
* Or, that brushing too hard doesn't affect the teeth, that that's just confusion with it affecting the gums
* Or, that it has nothing to do with duration or hardness, but rather, how soon after eating that you brush (something about the extra saliva for food causing a slight weakness that takes an hour or so to go back to normal)
* Or, that leaving food residue in the mouth for any duration - such as that hour in the last case - causes saliva and bacteria buildup that speeds up erosion
My dentist the other day said "oh you're right handed."
I said "how did you know?"
She said "because that makes it easier to brush the left side of your mouth. Which is why your gums are really eroded on that side, and perfect on the right side."
One of the most important things is to get the appropriate toothbrush, ie. one that says "soft". Not "hard" or even "medium", because while those feel like they would be more effective, they are much too harsh on the gums even the enamel, over time. They also force you to apply a lot of pressure if you want to clean between the teeth, adding to the damage.
A soft toothbrush using in small circular motions is best. And for the love of all that is holy, floss!
But the argument is kind of stupid. It would have made a little sense if she said something like "Cave men didn't ate candy bars" or something like that..
Another major aspect of jaw development is tongue posture. Resting the tongue on the roof of the mouth and breathing through your nose results in increased jaw development, e.g. a broader palate, thanks to the bone's natural response to give and grow under pressure.
I've been playing with this myself, thanks to discovering recently that I grew up with an undiagnosed mild to moderate tongue tie. I've changed my tongue position, and even as an adult have noticeably expanded my palate such that there is more room in my arch than their was before (as determined by modest gaps developing between my mid-molars).
In short it's been a big discovery for me this year, and the results are manifest in my life. Sad that this is not well understood by orthodontists and such everywhere.
Can you point me to more on this? A technical name for it, etc
I have bruxism at night. Generally, my jaw grinds down too much. Hard to stop, because I'm asleep.
I tried pushing my tongue up to the roof of my mouth, and it feels like the opposite of grinding. I'd like to research and see if there's any link. (I'm really out of options for reducing bruxism)
Are you pressing the tongue or just resting it up top?
The practice is called orthotropics. I can vouch for this user's experience myself, have had difficulty breathing for many years which led to poor teeth and a narrow palate. Once I received a palatal expander i realized how important it was to keep tongue pressure flat on the roof of the mouth. I practice regularly now and have seem improvements to teeth, breathing, and facing structure. It's a shame this stuff isn't taught more. You can find more details in this video: https://youtu.be/eh9OqEd5z1k
I understand your skepticism. But you should start with the orthotropics youtube channel. Obviously, not an unbiased source of information. But it's a start from which you can at least critically evaluate what they say.
Another thing to bear in mind is that scientific theories are obviously developed faster than they can be proven. And as long as what Orthotropics is not invasive you can try what they preach yourself and draw your own conclusions rather than wait for academic silos to try prove that the method works.
I am trying it on myself. The results are not magical, but I can feel them, I can breathe better. And at the end of the day that's what matters most
Yeah busterbaxter has it right, Orthotropics is the name.
I push hard on the roof of my mouth as often as I’m able and have it in mind, as firmly as I think I safely can (bone is sturdy but I imagine it is possible to over-stress it), because I’m trying to actively remodel my face and there was some doubt in the beginning whether that was possible at all as an adult.
As of now the results are clear, my jaw swings farther forward and up, before it was compressed back by the rearward position of my maxilla. The differences are not huge - measured in milimeters, but the difference in articulation can be felt and seen. I actually remember the day I was able to shift my jaw forward to a relaxed position while closing it. My face is now shorter/squarer and broader in appearance. Previously it was consistent with “long face syndrome”. Look up photos of that and you’ll see what I see now: a rearward maxilla, and a jaw forced to swing low to meet it.
Anyway, I’m still at it - my goal is to move my cheekbones to meet my brow. Currently they’re set back a bit, but progess is noticeable. Sounds crazy, I know, but it’a true. :P
Poor tongue posture can also cause obstructive sleep apnea where your tongue relaxes too much in your sleep and collapses, closing off your airway and causing you to "wake up" but not in a conscious way 5+ times per hour. The end result is that you wake up feeling extremely tired but do not remember feeling restless at all during the night.
My story is ridiculously similar to yours, thank you for mentioning this alternative to existing dental practices, which don't account for the orchestra that is the tongue, teeth and jaw etc.
Babies' milk-drinking actually also has an effect on jaw development, because of the pressure generated when suckling on the breast.
Think about the mechanics of breast vs bottle feeding: while superficially similar, one requires the child to draw milk out of a breast by generating suction, while the other allows them to mostly passively receive milk delivered via gravity.
> the other allows them to mostly passively receive milk delivered via gravity.
That's not how bottles work. You have to actively suck onto the nipple in order to get milk, and you can only get a small quantity per suck. Sure, you can get it in edgewise and bite down so it opens up and the milk runs, but that's not how babies drink.
Source: I used to drink from a bottle well into my teens, because I found it a convenient delivery device for chocolate milk in bed.
When you feed a baby, you tend to unscrew the bottle to remove the vacuum effect and make it easier. Some of them are even marked to indicate the intensity of the flow.
Source: experience feeding and buying baby's bottles.
edit: As a teen, you probably didn't have the same incentives, you didn't have other things to take care of in parallel, your jaw was more developed, and a tightly screwed bottle will hardly drop anything if you don't shake it, so you could lay down in any position you wished, and take as long as you wanted.
It's not about the vacuum effect in the bottle, it's about how the nipple is constructed. When you suck on the end, the "neck" closes because of the pressure and won't let more milk flow. I'm a bit hazy on the mechanics because it's been a while, but I'm very sure of the end result.
I imagine you can easily try it and report back if you have quick access to a bottle, maybe you can shed more light on this.
Babies don't suction milk out of the breast, rather they take the nipple and areola into the mouth and squeeze it between the tongue and palate to express milk.
Milk from bottles is by auction and it's usually easier than breastfeeding.
(Learned this from a lactation consultant for my daughter)
Having read more about the mechanism of suckling, it seems even more clearly important to the development of the jaw, because the baby uses their tongue to draw the milk out of the nipple, which requires applying pressure with the tongue from front to back against the palate. Bottle feeding requires simple general suction.
Thats usually not needed. Towards the end of the breastfeeding session when the baby has drained much of the milk, mothers will often massage the breast to push more milk towards the end. That can make milk squirt out, but it isn't the purpose. Really full breasts can definitely leak milk without any suckling, but most of the milk comes out as a result of the baby suckling.
? I've got 34 technically. Behind my wisdom teeth I have little buds of teeth which can never surface (not nearly the size of a full wisdom tooth/molar) Supernumerary I believe it's called. I happen to have a pretty long jaw, so still have my full set of wisdoms surfaced.
A more correct thing to say would maybe be they have less dental crowding than humans who are living in the modern world. There are many other oral maladies beyond dental crowding that people without access to modern dental care just have to live with.
That sounds like a caricature on cavemen civilisation. I’ve read sources that suggest some hunter gatherers were extremely violent and others weren’t. But, really, we just don’t know.
Even if there aren't any rival tribes around, worry about other creatures (lions, tigers, bears!) and unpredictable natural events (flooding &c.) could be a bit stressful.
The standard modern view on why stress is so bad for our health is that it builds up levels of cortisol and other stress hormones, which prepare us to act explosively in a fight or flight response, the doing of which uses up the stress hormones... a bit like a spring coiling up then releasing. But because in our modern lives we don't do the running away or fighting we don't use up the cortisol and it just simmers away in us.
I don't think it makes much sense to compare our modern concept of stress to very different times in the development of our society. Wild animals are in constant threat of being killed but I wouldn't think it makes sense to imagine them as stressed. They just live in the moment in a very different way to us.
Maybe 'stone-age' isn't far enough in the past to be different enough to modern life in that way. Even if that is the case, humans are very adaptable, the way a modern city dweller feels if they get attacked isn't necessarily the same way someone would feel who has experienced it many times.
I've had my own very small experience related to this. Just over a year ago I gave up my bricks and mortar home in the city and moved into a caravan. It was a wreck and I had to completely rebuild the interior and re-do the electrics and plumbing myself. I learned that my walls and windows provide no security - you could break into my home with your bare hands, with a hammer or axe it would be very easy. I carried a lot of fear in my head at first. In bed I'd be worrying that there'd be a gas explosion or fire because of something I'd done wrong. Once I found a couple of massive surly travellers eyeing up my solar panels, thinking I wasn't around. I had to go out and show that I was around and confident and not a target. I've met all kinds of people and not grown up sheltered at all but these two carried a real heavy, violent air - for a good week or two I was expecting them to turn up in the night to try to rob me, it was very hard to get that thought out of my head, and then to sleep in basically an unprotected tin can with plastic windows. Now I stay on a farm hundreds of miles away from any friends or family, there's no contract or notion of stability, if I fell out with the farmer I might have to leave immediately. I don't drive and at times haven't had enough money to pay to be towed somewhere else (work has been tricky... especially in winter when I'm trying to keep my laptop alive by solar, I've limited mobile data and it's 0-5C indoors), so a few cross words and I could basically be instantly homeless. Shops are an hour walk away, once I put a foot wrong on a track which nobody (not even locals) walks along and instantly sunk up to my waist in thick, sucking sinking mud and genuinely felt I might die there. LOL.
The point I'm ramblingly trying to get around to making is that after a while, it just wasn't sustainable to carry on feeling stressed and edgy. Or my tolerance went up, or something. Life just feels a lot more reactive than it used to, I want to say more real. Although I do have stresses and worries sometimes I don't walk around feeling permanently stressed or scared, actually I love it - it was the best move I ever made in my life, I feel a vitality which I didn't have before.
I've learned that the kind of stresses I have now are somehow easier to bear than the kind I used to have in my old life. I'd somehow rather fight off an intruder in the night than try to navigate a Kafka-esque phone menu system and be condescended to by a passive-agressive CSR. Cold is a feeling I can distract myself away from by writing some code or mending something, whereas receiving a bill with big red capital letters on it could negatively affect my state of mind for several days. When I'm standing over a pit emptying my reeking toilet I just compare it (favourably) to talking to a letting agent.
>after a while, it just wasn't sustainable to carry on feeling stressed and edgy. Or my tolerance went up, or something. Life just feels a lot more reactive than it used to, I want to say more real. Although I do have stresses and worries sometimes I don't walk around feeling permanently stressed or scared, actually I love it - it was the best move I ever made in my life, I feel a vitality which I didn't have before.
Thank you for writing this. I think the constant stress “field” we live in has to do less with real immediate threats and more with a lot of artificial but constant pressures, reminders and triggers.
I somehow don’t think worrying about being attacked by an animal which is not here right now is the same as a boss putting the screws in you on an hourly basis, the ad industry telling you you’re ugly 250 times a day, the constant reminder that getting sick equals bankruptcy and death, and the daily news feed reminding you that the world is going to hell and you’re the only one not having amazing fun.
not sure if this would cause a stress field similar to the one of living in capitalism, with the addition of a media machine existing solely on distress, amplifying fear, distraction and anxiety as a means to get business.
No way to check this hypothesis, fortunately or unfortunately.
However, the explanation is over-simplistic. Perhaps a bigger contributory factor is whether diet contains the nutritional factors require for proper teeth formation. The case for this factor was made convincingly a century ago [1].
testosterone levels can elongate jaw development later in life. On another note, I got rid of fluoride based toothpaste because the scientific evidence is bad, and switched to just coconut oil and eat pro-biotics. If my teeth hurt, I assume my body is robbing the calcium to neutralize something and I take calcium and try to eat better.
I don't mind placebo if it works for me. A guy said 'there is no good evidence' while i witnessed it with my own eyes. So who should i trust more, random Joe from internets or my own eyes? Cheers.
coconut oil was in one of my tissue culture protocols (sorry forgot which plant) so I thought, what the hell I'll try it as tooth paste. It has a known mild anti-bacteria effect and oil is hydrophobic. It coats your teeth well and stays there. There were other people from a google search that use it, it just worked for me. If its good enough for a petri dish then its good enough for me.
If David 'Avocado' Wolfe said that water is wet I would reflexively have to check the faucets.
'Chocolate is an octave of sun energy. In fact it's the energy of the center of the sun. It's a male energy that comes down off the sun and it.. actually, of all the plants, the cacao is right on line target the center of the sun, which we call in our body, the heart, and actually cacao is right up with the center of the sun, which is the center of the heart, which is called the sacred heart.'
they say a broken clock is right twice a day
if David Wolfe said Pi = 3.14, would you disagree? see your ad hominem argument is flawed.
Plus, if the guy is just being enlighten and not hurting anybody, linking to a few articles and research papers and writing what he thinks, who are you to judge? If I asked you just to try coconut oil on your tooth brush, would you specifically go out of your way not to try it just in spite?
That's because they're all part of an evil conspiracy, obviously ;)
People are weird about dentists. Almost no-one is claiming, say, that penicillin doesn't do anything, or that doctors only tell you to stop smoking to hurt you. But when it comes to dental standard advice, people go nuts.
Sure, if everyone knew they had perfect teeth. But most people rely on their dentist for that kind of information. Which makes you wonder if your assertion would actually turn out to be true.
Yeah so there's a vaccine that kills the bacteria that causes tooth decay, but you don't hear much about it That would definitely cause disruption in the dentist field if someone were to make it readily available
Do you know anything else about teeth? I have 2 baby teeth with no adult teeth to replace them, and I was also born without 4 back molars (one on each side, top and bottom). Consequently, now that my wisdom teeth are coming in, I seem to have lots of room and may not need to have them removed.
I highly recommend keeping your wisdom teeth if you have room for them. I have all four -- a full rack as my dentist says -- and they're nice to have; I chew pretty far back in my mouth so they get lots of use. Cleaning them hasn't been a problem so far. I'm 42 years old.
Like you, I also had a baby tooth that didn't fall out. It was anchored to the bone somehow. It interfered with the movement of my adult teeth as they came in and thus had to be removed in my teens. It was a pain to get out. It had to be broken into pieces and dug out, and since there was no adult tooth to replace it, they put in an implant, which has also worked just fine.
My baby teeth are anchored to the bone as well, but not very strongly. They discovered them when fitting me for braces and decided they would just leave them. They didn't put anchors on the babies and just told me to pray they wouldn't fall out and they haven't!
I will probably keep my wisdom teeth. They're not fully in yet but I like the idea of not pulling anything out of my face, you know?
The reason is that our jaws are actually too small for our teeth. Their jaws are the right size because the jaw grows to its correct size in response to chewing when you are a baby. We dont chew enough as babies.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204144653.h...