subject: Practicing Poor Nutrition Habits Can Lead To Impacted Wisdom Teeth [print this page] If you are going to have your wisdom teeth removed, you are probably hoping that there will be no complications which can make your removal more tricky, and your recovery more painful. Impacted teeth can be one of the worst side effects, which can make your life downright miserable for a while after your surgery.
However, there may be a way for you to avoid this, according to recent findings. To begin with, wisdom teeth, also called the third molars, are the furthest back teeth, often erupt between the ages of about 16 and 25 years old, and are generally the last ones to come in.
In a large percentage of the population, these third molars either come in improperly or get 'stuck' behind other teeth, leading to infections and other dental problems. According to most dental sources, these 'impacted' third molars are considered 'normal' due to the human evolution towards a smaller jaw.
In the research of isolated cultures by a curious dentist, however, his findings prove that the last teeth in the back can become impacted, caused by nutrition instead of evolution. In the mid 1930's, an adventurous dentist set out to study some of the most isolated cultures on earth.
His travels sent him from beautiful Swiss mountain villages, to vast African plains, to the tundra of northern Canada. In each village, Dr. Weston Price took measurements and pictures of the faces and teeth of people who still ate exclusively as their ancestors had for generations.
Most had never, or almost never, eaten processed foods such as sugar or white flour. Shockingly he found that, in every case, people who had never eaten processed foods had healthy and functional third molars.
In order to make sure that this was not due to genetics, Dr. Price also did studies of the people from these villages who had migrated to the nearby cities and had begun eating processed foods. He consistently found that cultures in which there were no processed foods, the adults all had healthy, erupted, and functional third molars; those who did eat processed food had impaction complications in the same percentage as the other city dwellers.
The explanation that the cause of this is due to the evolution of the human jaw over many generations is refuted by Dr. Price's findings. This change occurred in only one single generation- and only upon the introduction of processed foods!
In order to further solidify this theory, he visited the Tongan Islands which had the perfect conditions to allow for studying this phenomenon. Before World War I, the island was almost completely isolated with virtually no processed foods.
After the war, however, the island was consistently visited by westerners who traded, among other products, sugar, and white flour in exchange for the valuable dried coconut called 'Copra'. However, the traders- along with their processed foods- disappeared when the market for copra dried up.
Interestingly, the elders of the island, who had no access to processed foods until adulthood, had upright functional wisdom teeth. The next generation, who had eaten processed foods as children, had high rates of third molar impaction, but the young adults who were born after the traders and their processed foods had left had functional erupted ones even when their parents did not.
Along with pictures and measurements of jawbone and facial width, Dr. Price's theory was confirmed; the eating of processed foods, not evolution, causes incomplete development of the jaw leading to impactions. Unfortunately, this 'politically incorrect' theory that poor nutrition is responsible for the modern problem of this dental malady is vehemently denied by the dental industry.
No matter what evidence, when an entire specialty of dentistry is devoted to making money by removing 'evolutionarily unnecessary' teeth and when entire swaths of the economy are dependent upon nutritionally bereft foods, teaching that these complications are not a necessary part of the human condition is simply not a popular stance. While it is probably too late to undo the damage which you have done to your own mouth, you can still try to save your children's mouths.
Lay off the sugar and processed foods, and try a more raw diet. You may save them lots of pain and recovery down the line!
