The thing is we mostly eat a very different diet than in our evolutionary past (e.g. far more sugar and cereal crops) and also live much longer, both of these things are fairly good reasons to do things to maintain health that may not have been strictly necessary before. Further, we all want to lead lives rather than let fate have its way, so if we have some ailment we want to treat it in some way and continue living and looking/feeling good, whereas in the distant past a great many ailments we think of as a nuisance today (in the developed world at least) may have been the end of the line.
That said I totally agree with Feynman's general principle of questioning everything - so much received wisdom is wrong, to a mind numbing extent in my experience.
Agreed that if you get a cavity, you want to do something about it, and that diet changes are important (I've cut down the sugar and tried less successfully to cut out grains). But shorter lives don't seem to explain the better dental health I've read about: the traditional cultures had dramatically lower rates of caries than the westernized ones in these surveys that counted all ages; and one of the biggest contributors to the life-expectancy difference was infant mortality (maybe the biggest). Here's one dataset on lifespan: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespan-of-inuit.html
"I've cut down the sugar and tried less successfully to cut out grains"
Ditto. It's not easy is it. And even avoiding obvious sugar such as desserts, sugar in tea/coffee, etc. leaves a lot of hidden sugar added to many foods. I figure this is a large part of the observed poorer dental health, although I am vaguley aware of another hypothesis that links grains with poor health - something to do with immune response I think. Linus Pauling believed sugar was also the primamry factor in the rise of atherosclerosis rates - the digestion of sucrose yields glucose and fructose, that latter of which is converted into acetate in the liver which is a precursor for cholesterol synthesis. A 'traditional' diet would have contained only small amounts of sugars from e.g. berries - just enough for the amount of cholesterol required. It's one of those theories (and there were studies done) that seems to have become strangely ignored.
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Your chat is hilarious.
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That said I totally agree with Feynman's general principle of questioning everything - so much received wisdom is wrong, to a mind numbing extent in my experience.
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Ditto. It's not easy is it. And even avoiding obvious sugar such as desserts, sugar in tea/coffee, etc. leaves a lot of hidden sugar added to many foods. I figure this is a large part of the observed poorer dental health, although I am vaguley aware of another hypothesis that links grains with poor health - something to do with immune response I think. Linus Pauling believed sugar was also the primamry factor in the rise of atherosclerosis rates - the digestion of sucrose yields glucose and fructose, that latter of which is converted into acetate in the liver which is a precursor for cholesterol synthesis. A 'traditional' diet would have contained only small amounts of sugars from e.g. berries - just enough for the amount of cholesterol required. It's one of those theories (and there were studies done) that seems to have become strangely ignored.
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