Paul Getty wrote on 9/4:

>For the most part, hunter-gatherers are cavity free if they are eating no
>modern processed food, even if they are eating alot of starch and sugar in
>natural forms.  This is because their diet has so much rough fibrous
>material that the plaque is removed while they are eating.  No plaque, no
>decay.

In FAT OF THE LAND (which I read per Ray's suggestion and which has an
interesting chapter on the lack of tooth decay among Eskimos and others)
Stefansson says:

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.

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.

It would be difficult to find a New New Yorker or Parisian who does not
chew more, and use coarser food, than the South Sea Islanders did on the
native diets which are said to have given them, in at least some cases,
better than 90% freedom from caries, a record no block on Park Avenue can
approach."

Stefansson also documents the superb condition of Eskimo teeth (100%
freedom from caries!), despite their having "filthy mouths", and makes an
exceptionally strong case that "...so far as an extensive correspondence
with authorities has yet been able to show, a complete absence of tooth
decay from entire populations has never existed in the past, and does not
exist now, except where meat is either exclusive or heavily predominant in
the diet."

FOTL is a revised version of NOT BY BREAD ALONE, which was printed some
years earlier. The chapter on dentition was one of two chapters that needed
the most attention because of being the most controversial.

As a dentist, it would be most interesting to hear your take on
Stefansson's discussion of this topic. Is there knowledge of Stefansson's
work among dentists?

Gary