Eat Paleo for Your Teeth

Nice chops, Grok.  Who's your orthodontist?

We know that eating a diet rich in meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts is good for your heart and athletic performance, but now it turns out it's good for your teeth as well.

Prehistoric humans didn't have toothbrushes. They didn't have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn't have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today. 

"Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. "[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up." 

In most "farming populations", most people eat a largely "vegetarian" (which is really "grainitarian") diet, as opposed to the meat-centric diet hunter-gatherers eat, because peasant farmers can't afford to eat meat, except for rare, special occasions.  The peasant farmers' grain-centric diet is high in simple carbohydrates, and low in protein and fat, as opposed to the high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diets of hunter-gatherers.  What do all those simple carbs do to the teeth?

Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.

Not all oral bacteria are bad. In fact, many of these microbes help us by protecting against more dangerous pathogens.

However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of "friendly" bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.

As we already know, the problems caused by high carbohydrate, grain-centric diets aren't limited to the teeth.

"You're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing," says Cooper. "It causes problems all over the place."

In addition to oral disease, those problems may include diabetes, obesity and even heart disease. 

This is yet another example of how "vegetarian" diets aren't nearly as healthy as they're cracked up to be.