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The diet of the modern world can be blamed for many dental problems.
Dentists, evolutionary biologists and food scientists recently congregated at a conference in North Carolina to make this determination. The conference, called “Evolution of Human Teeth and Jaws: Implications for Dentistry and Orthodontics,” concluded that soft and mushy foods are one of the causes of the problems.
The way in which the human diet has evolved since our ancestors existed has increased the risk for cavities and misaligned teeth.
As part of the study, the researchers compared the current diet to the to the human diet of yesteryear, when much more meat was consumed. The studies are applicable because of the way teeth can hold up and be preserved for a number of years.
The researchers focused on the Aboriginal and Kashmiri huntsmen from the 1950s because these groups of people still utilized a hunter-gatherer approach. The problem with the current diet is the wide array of soft foods that contain sugar. There are some that believe teeth are only necessary for speech and aesthetics and people can capably consume food without them, based on the modern diet.
Many of the dental problems that exist today were never seen before the introduction of sugar into our diet.
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