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