You Can't Have A Healthy Body Without A Healthy Mouth

The sugar we eat upsets the delicate balance in our mouths, too, creating the perfect conditions for destructive bacteria to thrive. If you’re like most Americans, chances are your diet is a combination of cooked, soft, and highly processed food, much of which is significantly modified from the way nature originally intended. While other species spend a significant part of their waking existence acquiring, chewing, and digesting natural food, we take a few steps to the refrigerator, grab what we want, and indulge. As a comparison, a chimpanzee typically spends about half of the day feeding and chewing his food. The invention of simple food preparation tools approximately 2.5 million years ago was a turning point in the evolution of human diets. These tools were used to cut meat and plants and remove marrow from the bones, and they were also used for pounding and tenderizing tough foods. At some point, 250,000–700,000 years ago, our ancestors added cooking to food preparation, which was another significant turning point. Cooking allowed for better digestion of certain proteins and carbohydrates, it removed harmful microbes and parasites from the food, it extended food storage time, and it made food easier to chew. Our prehistoric ancestors probably had to chew at least twice as much as a typical modern human. Aside from environmental and social factors, these changes in what people ate and how they prepared their food may have provided the additional calories and nutrients that allowed the brain to grow larger. But they were also related to the evolution of smaller faces and mouths.

The World Keeps On Turning

Up until 15,000 years ago, our ancestors lived as huntergatherers, and most of their food was obtained by foraging. Around 10,000–14,000 years ago, many human populations around the world, independently of each other, started experimenting with agriculture. There is a lot of evidence that foragers had stronger bones and teeth than the farmers who came after them. This agricultural revolution had a significant impact on our civilization, for good and bad. With control of the crop against natural droughts and floods humans could build a food surplus for the first time in history. But the agricultural revolution also had some unintended consequences. For example, about 9,000 years ago, farmers started selectively breeding a wild grass on the American continent known as teosinte for size and taste.29 Over the following few thousand years, that grass transformed into the crop we know as corn. We have also been selectively breeding livestock like cattle and sheep, changing their shape and size to please our palates. For example, in the case of corn and watermelon, we have more than tripled the percentage of sugar in these crops as compared to their natural variations. With the advent of farming around 12,000 years ago, we significantly changed our food supply in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Meanwhile, humans have not had any significant macroevolutionary changes in 60,000–200,000 years.

Are You Listening?

Our mouths and bodies have not kept up with the rapid changes in our diets, and this has affected our oral and physical health. Over the past 1,000 years, change has continued to speed up. From the introduction of sugarcane to the Industrial Revolution, food and culture have worked together to change our diets and habits for the worse. The migration to the cities also required food that could be easily stored and transported without spoilage for long distances. As such, tooth decay was a symbol of wealth and prosperity. Queen Elizabeth I was famous for her love of sugary foods and for her decayed, black teeth. They were busy evolving. Human evolution takes a very long time. But bacteria evolve quickly. It was about the same time that humans started farming, significantly increasing the amount of carbohydrates in their diets. We created a monster! Avoiding excess sugar and processed foods will go a long way toward supporting your biology. Today, it takes more than good eating to keep your mouth and body healthy.

The Human Touch

It seems the more we learn, the more we realize that there has been much greater wisdom in nature than we ever gave it credit for. Millions of years of evolution will inevitably create more elegant, balanced solutions than a few centuries of scientific inquiry ever could. So much of your story really is in your hands. For many people, it’s one of the most precious times of life, and women tend to work hard to take good care of themselves during this time. They eat well, avoid potentially dangerous foods or medicines, exercise, go to regular doctor or midwife appointments, and otherwise do all they can to ensure the health of their growing child. It’s one of many examples of a situation in which oral health is overlooked or underplayed. It might be the most important example of them all because it directly affects the health and safety of both mother and baby. We’ve known for over a century that you can’t have a healthy body without a healthy mouth. Now, we are learning that you may not be able to have a healthy pregnancy without a healthy mouth, either.1 Sometimes, an unhealthy mouth means you can’t even get pregnant in the first place. This is good advice for anyone, but especially if you know your oral health isn’t the best. Because unhealthy gums may cause infertility! Gum disease can lower sperm count and negatively impact sperm quality and motility.3 And the bacteria in the mouths of both parents can be transferred to their baby after birth. Maternal oral health affects both the mother and her developing baby foetus. Numerous studies report that poor oral health raises the mother’s risk for gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a dangerous pregnancy complication. And oral health extends to airway health. In fact, up to 46 percent of all pregnant women snore. And women who snore habitually are three times more likely to deliver developmentally delayed babies. Sleep apnea tends to worsen during pregnancy as well, from weight gain and the baby pushing against the diaphragm. You literally can’t breathe! Pregnancy is a tough time to care for one’s mouth.