this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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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.
You never brush your teeth? It's not only good for health dude
Brush your teeth bud. People can probably smell your breath from a mile away.
You'd think. But where does the bad smell come from?
My understanding is it's from overactive bacteria; I don't feed my mouth bacteria with food that makes them smell
At least my partner still kisses me
I do intermittent fasting.
My breath stinks quite a bit on days I don't eat. The bacteria develop very well on those days, since they're not being washed off as often. And that's before "keto breath" even comes into play.
Point is, your mouth bacteria are fine producing all sorts of "charming" smells even without food.
You probably do stink. The two of you are just used to it.
How do you think you can know when your breath is bad and I can't?
You didn't say what you feed your mouth bacteria aside from saying you only do so occasionally.
It's just a really well-known phenomenon. People thinking they don't stink because it's the smell they're used to. I'm just speculating, and there's of course a chance I'm wrong.
As for how I know I stink, i have a much keener nose than the average. I can tell when my hair stinks because it's been too long since my last shampoo, for instance, a thing most people can't even tell about others apparently. Even though it's the grossest smell ever.
But even then, most of the time I can't tell my breath stinks. It probably has to do with how close the mouth is to the nose. Mostly, I've associated sensations in my mouth with instances where I was told I stunk and work from there.
As for what I eat, oh yeah, I absolutely do eat carbs a normal amount. But I really don't think this should have much of an effect when I'm not eating. I have trouble imagining bacteria having a stock of food for when I don't eat.
Some people get off on eating ass
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.
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.
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
this is also common with older bread. Another reason why it's bad, it's probably both though.
Similar. I don't eat low carbs, just almost no bread, and my teeth never get cavities
Yeah but that can also be because of genetics. I eat bread everyday and still never had a cavity
I note that birds, which evolved eating grains, don't have teeth
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).
Now THAT'S intelligent design!
Teeth can need work from physical trauma, too. Getting hit in the head while hunting or fighting or just hiking might cause a cracked tooth, which can be deadly in the absence of dental care. Or just while eating, sometimes a stray rock or bone fragment or shell might cause an issue.
Lots of other species can regrow teeth in adulthood, even a handful of other mammals. All sorts of animals can have tooth problems in the wild, so I wouldn't assume that prehistoric humans were exempt from that general danger.
Sure. All sorts of things would kill you, and a dental injury would be a crap way to die. The ancient stuff is from preserved hunter gatherer skeletons.
We, fortunately, have excellent dental care available so people hardly ever die of a broken tooth, I know about my lack of cavities from a pair of several x-rays and a check up while replacing a filling from when I ate the common diet
Yeeeah but they also only lived to like 30.
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.
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!