Funny enough, when you’re dirt poor with no access to anything, your teeth will last a lot longer. They didn’t have access to refined sugars in the middle ages. They had a starchy diet but that didn’t do as much damage as a high sugar diet.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and I have family photos of my grandparents and great grandparents from 100 years ago. They had amazing teeth into adulthood because they seldom ate any refined sugar.
Grain-based diets in particular can do some damage, but generally it’s a different form of dentistry required - tooth damage from grindstone dust in the flour wearing teeth down to eventually require extraction, or malnutrition causing gum damage and eventually affecting the teeth.
Diets with a healthy selection of plant and animal products, on the other hand, are generally just all-around better for your teeth than modern diets.
We live in a world where we constantly gorge ourselves with all kinds of food. We get bored and we just reach out to eat something.
I grew up poor but not so poor that we starved but what I do remember as a kid was that we had enough but nothing more. Mom always made us a giant pot of porridge every morning, then a huge lunch of something and then nothing for supper. If we felt like wanting a snack for something in the evening, there was nothing, you just drank some tea or drank water and you ignored your hunger. It was so normal to not eat past about 4pm that at one point I just stopped noticing. I do remember a few times finding bread and we’d eat toast … we were so short on food that instead of butter, we used lard instead.
I didn’t have the best diet when I was a kid. I ate and gorged on candy, chips and pop whenever I could but we did with so little that we seldom had the opportunity to eat these things. I gobbled up sugar things whenever I could find them. So by the time I was 20, I had all my teeth, decent gums and few cavities … one of the few side benefits of being poor and not eating enough.
Funny enough, when you’re dirt poor with no access to anything, your teeth will last a lot longer. They didn’t have access to refined sugars in the middle ages. They had a starchy diet but that didn’t do as much damage as a high sugar diet.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and I have family photos of my grandparents and great grandparents from 100 years ago. They had amazing teeth into adulthood because they seldom ate any refined sugar.
Grain-based diets in particular can do some damage, but generally it’s a different form of dentistry required - tooth damage from grindstone dust in the flour wearing teeth down to eventually require extraction, or malnutrition causing gum damage and eventually affecting the teeth.
Diets with a healthy selection of plant and animal products, on the other hand, are generally just all-around better for your teeth than modern diets.
Volume and amount of food also saves your teeth.
We live in a world where we constantly gorge ourselves with all kinds of food. We get bored and we just reach out to eat something.
I grew up poor but not so poor that we starved but what I do remember as a kid was that we had enough but nothing more. Mom always made us a giant pot of porridge every morning, then a huge lunch of something and then nothing for supper. If we felt like wanting a snack for something in the evening, there was nothing, you just drank some tea or drank water and you ignored your hunger. It was so normal to not eat past about 4pm that at one point I just stopped noticing. I do remember a few times finding bread and we’d eat toast … we were so short on food that instead of butter, we used lard instead.
I didn’t have the best diet when I was a kid. I ate and gorged on candy, chips and pop whenever I could but we did with so little that we seldom had the opportunity to eat these things. I gobbled up sugar things whenever I could find them. So by the time I was 20, I had all my teeth, decent gums and few cavities … one of the few side benefits of being poor and not eating enough.