Dr. Cynthia Wong

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Why Our Teeth Can't Fit in Our Mouths

The human body is far from perfect, but people may justifiably be perplexed as to why so many of us require orthodontic work and wisdom teeth extraction. Why would nature cause us to have such overcrowded and misaligned teeth? Well, the short answer is, it didn’t. A number of studies in recent years, including one published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and one in Plos One in 2015, found that an agricultural lifestyle has caused modern people to have underdeveloped jaw bones which aren’t big enough for our teeth.


The earlier study established that people in agricultural societies tend to have more malocclusions than non-agricultural people. This is widely believed to be because a diet of soft foods, such as grains, during childhood causes people to not develop as large jaws, but tooth size remains controlled by genetics. The second study found that people in agricultural societies not only have smaller jaws, but differently shaped ones from hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, and that the change occurred piecemeal throughout the world as different civilizations adopted agriculture. Agricultural peoples’ jaws are shorter in length and depth, resulting in overcrowding and incomplete eruptions.


So it seems that a dependence on orthodontics is the trade-off for reliable food.


Cynthia Wong, DMD, operates at 15614 S Harlem #B, Orland Park, Illinois, 60462. To contact her office, call 708-444-8341 or visit DrCynthiaWong.com and send a message.


 

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