>Medical men contend "...that the tooth health of primitive people is due to
>their chewing a lot, and to their eating coarse foods. The advantage of
>that argument to the dentist, whose best efforts have failed to save a
>patient's teeth, is obvious. It gives him an out-that not all your care,
>even when supported by his skill and science, can preserve teeth in an age
>of soft foods that give no exercise to the teeth and no friction to the
>gums.


This is totally ridiculous.  No dentist that I can imagine would blame
tooth degeneration totally on processed foods.  But he shouldn't blame
himself either.  As much as most people want to find a reason why their
teeth are so bad besides their own neglect, the truth is that if a person
is conscientious, regardless of diet unless at some extreme, their teeth
will remain healthy.  All it takes is daily removal of plaque from all
surfaces, something I do easily and quickly everyday.  Oh, maybe not every
single bacterium is removed, but enough so no damage is done.  Dentists
don't blame tooth condition on diet for the most part but on oral hygiene.
And to infer that the real cause is some misunderstanding of the problem on
the part of dentists is ludicrous.  Stefensson is rightly unknown for the
most part by dentists!


>
>But it is deplorably hard to square anthropology with this comfortable
>excuse of the dentist. Among the best teeth of the mixed-diet world are
>those of a few South Sea Islanders who as yet largely keep to their native
>diets. Similar or better tooth condition was described, for instance from
>the Hawaiian Islands by the earliest visitors. But can you thik of a case
>less fortunate for the chewing-and-coarse-diet advocates? The animal food
>of thse people was mainly fish, and fish is soft to the teeth, whether
>boiled or raw. Among the chief vegetable elements was poi, a kind of soup
>or paste. Then they used sweet potatoes, and yams are not so very hard to
>chew either.


I would assume that, regardless of the fish and poi, I'm sure there was
lots of wild fruits and vegetables that were eaten.  And eating raw fish
while out fishing would have had a scrubbing action on the teeth, trying to
rip it apart.
>


When I was in dental school we each had a skull to work with and learn
from.  Our skulls were new, and were from Bangladesh.  All were adults,
many at least middle age.  The one remarkable thing about them all was that
there was no caries (decay).  It was so unusual to see such a thing that
our oral pathologist researched the backround of these people and their
diet.  He found that the great bulk of their diet was coarse unprocessed
grains and beans, like millet, rice, etc.  The rest of their diet consisted
of fairly course vegetables, fruits, very small amounts of meat.  The teeth
were very worn, probably because of a lot of grinding necessary, and maybe
because of sand or grit in the foods.  Most of these people died of
contagious diseases but may have had some nutritional deficiencies, I don't
know.  One thing is for certain...they didn't have good dental care.  And
yet no dental disease, neither caries or periodontal disease.  The lack of
sugar I'm sure is part of it, but it would be hard to deny that the
courseness of the food has a lot to do with it.

I can't emphasize enough that if a person is troubled by caries or
periodontal disease, if the plaque is properly removed every day, the
degeneration of the person's dentition will stop.
Paul Getty
Morehead City, NC
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