• psud@aussie.zone
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    13 hours ago

    The teeth thing is just because of our high sugar, high grain diet

    The first* people with bad dental health were Egyptians as they lived on bread (which packs your teeth and feeds the bacteria that ferment it and make acid) before that, and until the invention spread, people died of old age with all their teeth intact

    I eat very low carb - almost entirely meat due to allergies, and haven’t had a cavity since I started doing that, despite me nearly never brushing or flossing my teeth

    *There were also people who lived in the tropics and ate a lot of fruit, and those with sugar cane.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        brushing your teeth doesnt do much for bad breath. You want to clean the rest of your mouth to get rid of that, which is probably what they do.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      I thought Egyptians had bad teeth because their flour was ground with sandstone, leaving sand in their bread. They ground their teeth into nothing by eating sand.

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        7 minutes ago

        I feel like the sand thing was a guess by people who couldn’t pick why ancient Egyptians had worse teeth than everyone else in the ancient world

        If there’s sand in your food you notice and it feels bad. It’s not something that makes you go “oh well I’ll just keep chomping” and that would wear teeth down, not give them abscesses

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      12 hours ago

      Similar. I don’t eat low carbs, just almost no bread, and my teeth never get cavities

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        12 hours ago

        I note that birds, which evolved eating grains, don’t have teeth

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Birds originally did have teeth. Beaks are thought to have replaced teeth because they serve the same purpose but are much lighter, and more importantly because they develop faster than teeth. Birds considerably predate grasses (which are what grains are).

      • watersnipje@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 hours ago

        Those low life expectancies are typically due to high infant deaths. Once you are like 10 or so, the life expectancy is much higher, and more informative. The life expectancy at birth is in many cases a bit misleading.

        • HereIAm@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          That’s fair. It was just my understanding that one of the leading causes to death was that the teeth started to rot away. I clearly need to brush up on my human history a bit!