Holistic Dental Care by Nadine Artemis

Author:Nadine Artemis [Artemis, Nadine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-721-0
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Why Are We Down in the Mouth?

There are two schools of thought regarding the devolution of our mouths. One school holds that a genetic miscue in our DNA occurred in the last several hundred years that led to underdeveloped jaws and crowded teeth. The other school argues that “new” environmental factors are contributing to the prevalence of underformed mouths. Scientists in the field often think in terms of millennia, so an issue that’s two hundred to five hundred years old is considered new. Multidisciplinary research conducted over the last the few decades tends to support environmental causation—and a major contributor is, of course, our diet.

Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, an anthropologist at the University of Kent in Great Britain, was intrigued by this de-evolution in human anatomy. She examined eleven sets of ancient skulls and jaws from social groups on each continent. Half of the groups were farmers and half were hunter-gatherers. She noted that farmers had a starchier diet than the hunter-gatherers, and they had shorter and weaker jaws as well. She concluded that as humans transitioned from a hunter-gatherer diet to a domesticated agricultural diet, human jaws and palates shortened, leading to crowded teeth.1

In the 1920s Dr. Weston A. Price traveled abroad to study the environmental factors and lifestyles of families in non-Western indigenous societies. He noted that the people who were raised eating their culture’s traditional non-Western diet had nearly perfect dentition. When people from the same cultural groups were introduced to a Western diet, they began to develop tooth decay, and within two generations they started having children with malocclusions resulting from smaller jaws with narrow arches and palates.2

Malocclusion is more than a cosmetic issue; improperly positioned and crowded teeth lead to increased tooth decay, cracking, chipping, and inappropriate wear. A bite that is slightly imperfect can create problems in the head and neck, like temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder, teeth grinding, and headaches. When the upper jaw is narrow, the palate is compressed and forms a deep channel instead of being wide and shallow. The palate is also the roof of the mouth and the floor of the nasal cavity. If this space is compressed, we end up with pinched airways and nostrils that impede good airflow. Restricted nasal passageways force people to sleep with their mouths open to get sufficient air. The rate of sleep apnea, often characterized by snoring due to open-mouth breathing and an obstructed airway, continues to rise at an unprecedented pace. In the United States, as many as fifteen percent of adults have sleep apnea.3 Dr. Arthur Strauss, a dentist who specializes in sleep apnea, further validates this thinking by explaining that when the palate is broad, there is more room for teeth and breathing:

When you look at the percentage of people in civilized societies seeing orthodontists, and then when you add to it the lack of breast-feeding, which generally is a positive way of expanding the size of the palate, moving the jaw farther forward and having a larger mouth to hold the teeth, it’s not surprising that so many have sleep apnea in civilized society.

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