The Truth is in the Tooth: Braces, Cavities, and the Paleo Diet

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brush, floss, and forget: chances are, you only think about your teeth when they cause you trouble. But teeth have tales to tell, such as how old we are, how fast we grew, and how far we’ve traveled… But, most intriguingly, teeth can tell us both what we evolved to eat and what we actually have been eating. Paleo diet fans insist that our modern teeth troubles—all those pesky cavities—come from eating the wrong diet. If we only ate what our ancestors ate—meat, berries, and no grains—we’d be fine, they claim. But what do our teeth say? Tune in this episode to find out the toothy truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The teeth themselves are huge.
0:04.6	They have extremely thick enamel.
0:07.6	They're big and flat structures.
0:10.7	And they were initially thought to be designed basically to be used as a nutcracker.
0:17.3	Meet nutcracker man.
0:20.4	That's not who's talking.
0:21.9	He's Peter Ungar and his teeth are pretty normal.
0:24.8	But nutcracker man, he was from a species before humans and he lived millions of years
0:29.2	ago.
0:30.2	His teeth are massive and thick and they clearly were meant to crack apart meaty nuts, right?
0:35.0	Well, that's the question, isn't it?
0:37.1	This episode is all about teeth and what they can tell us about what we have eaten and
0:42.3	what we should eat.
0:43.7	We of course are gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science
0:47.3	in history.
0:48.3	I'm Cynthia Graber and I'm Nicola Twilly and this episode we're going to take you on
0:52.1	a dental detective adventure.
0:54.8	Clues can our ancestors' choppers tell us about what we humans evolved to eat, what
1:00.0	are teeth and why did animals evolve them in the first place and our our teeth still
1:04.2	evolving today?
1:05.4	And what's with cavities?
1:06.4	Did our ancient ancestors get those too?
	...

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