Enjoy this “good read,” an excerpt from an article or other online source related to dentistry curated and shared with DentistryIQ readers.
“Our choppers are crowded, crooked and riddled with cavities. It hasn’t always been this way.”
So says an article called "Why we have so many problems with our teeth" by Peter S. Ungar, a dental anthropologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Arkansas, that was published in April 2020 in Scientific American. In it, Ungar explains his findings on the contradiction between what our teeth were designed to do and what they’re forced to do now, which has led to dental issues he says are “not normal”:
“Most other vertebrate creatures do not have the same dental problems that we do. They rarely have crooked teeth or cavities. Our fossil forebears did not have impacted wisdom teeth, and few appear to have had gum disease.”
The contradiction, he continues, “is new and is limited largely to industrial-age and contemporary populations. It is best explained by a mismatch between today’s diets and those for which our teeth and jaws evolved”—in other words, he says, a shift in the oral environment caused by the introduction of softer, more sugary foods than the ones our ancestors typically ate.
Learn more by accessing Why we have so many problems with our teeth, by Peter S. Ungar
