A bloke was telling me how he was actually looking forward to a climate change related social collapse. I don’t think he’s thought things through and so I asked him what he would do for dentistry work if such a collapse happened? Get them pulled out with a pair of pliers? Tie a string to a door?
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Once upon a time a certain species was a hunter-gatherer and then, for the most part, became sedentary farmers. This happened at a time of brisk climate change, sea level rise, tsunamis all kinds of upsets. About 10,000 years ago. Becoming sedentary may well have been a response to these changes, that said previous periods of rapid climate change hadn’t pushed us to so radically change our way of being.
We switched from widely varied gathered (from the wild, from forest gardens or both) and hunted diets to eating a lot of grains. Wheat being an example.
Our physiognomies changed, we became and still are more frail than our ancestors, we got smaller, started to suffer from repetitive strain injuries and our teeth took a massive hit. Partly because micro-fragments of milling stone get mixed into the flour and partly because the grain crops are high in carbohydrates which are saccharides which are commonly known as sugars.
Prior to this change most hunter-gatherers had low rates of tooth decay ranging from zero to 14% of teeth that have been found and studied. But few things are homogeneous and some groups who based their diets on a lot of nuts and acorns had a 51% incidence of caries which is similar to the settled farmers. But in general this lifestyle shift increased dental disease from 0 - 14% of teeth studied to 51% . Not good for us as we had no real way of treating the diseases and caries apart from yanking the teeth out. Neanderthals had experimented with beeswax and suchlike to fill the holes but this dropped out of fashion.
So a mouth full of rotting teeth became pretty common and was and is the cause of a lot of pain and discomfort.
A consequence of the rapid climate change period of 10,000 years ago is toothache, caries and tooth loss today.
I been given a lot of, sometimes conflicting, advice from dentists. Once upon, a time it was brush 3 times a day but with no suggestion about how to do it, up down, horizontally, round and around ….. who knew?
Then: 3 times a day up and down.
Then: 3 times a day but only down for the upper set and only up for the lower set.
Now: 3 times a day only down for the upper set and only up for the lower set brushing both in a way that massages the gums rather than thinking of brushing the teeth. Accompanied with using a jet to wash in between the teeth.
It was a pleasure to listen to my new dentist because he started talking about the mouth microbiome. He explained that the whole thing is an ecosystem and sometimes it gets colonised by microbes that can cause caries and gum disease. The idea, he said, is not to destroy the ecosystem but to help it organise itself in such a way that the naughty microbes can’t get a foot in the door.
Very nice. Interesting too is that the various interconnected microbiomes that make up what passers-by call “that bloke over there”, me, in other words, are not fixed. The different types of microbes that form the microbiomes change over time, with diet, with illness and more. The neolithic change to grain farming also had an impact on our microbiomes, in general making them less diverse, which is not a good thing. So the microbes that make up my oral microbiome are not the same as for my ancestors 10,000 years ago. These days we eat a huge quantity of carbohydrates, corn and wheat being the principle ones, by necessity our microbiomes have had to adjust and it is debatable whether or not this has gone in a good direction. For the moment the answer is “no it hasn’t”.
Will the current round of accelerated climatic changes cause a change in our way of being and impact our health and oral health as with last period did all those years ago? Probably, but it could go two ways:
The anti microbiome path : we continue to increase the amount of processed and ultra-processed foods in our diets. There has been a notable decline in vitamin and mineral content of our fruit and veg varieties since the 1940’s and this continues with newer varieties. We continue to base our diets on grains rather than on veg, fruit and nuts. We continue to use mouthwash products, to over use antibiotics, both of which mess up all the bodies microbiomes.
The pro microbiome path : we start to change, and adapt them to be resilient to climatic changes, our agricultural systems and move towards perennial polycultures that are based on tree fruits, tubers, vegetables and a big diversity of food crops. We stop eating ultra-processed foods and ensure that processed foods are highly nutritious, such as lacto-fermented foods.
Diversity in = diversity inside that’s the way it goes and a healthy, diverse microbiome helps ward off disease, depression, obesity …….. the list gets bigger everyday.