The jaw of a woman in her mid 40s from the Slavic Middle Ages (right) [first image] is completely free of caries. However, the teeth are strongly chewed. Caries with fistula formation (hole in the jaw) shows the teeth of a 40 to 44 year old woman from the early modern period (above) [second image]. Below massive tartar, which is caused by inorganic plaque deposits.
Eat naturally - live healthily. Great thing. But faith struggles rage for the right, possibly only true way. A look into the past will probably help - into those early times, when humans still lived as biological beings - in nature, from nature, with unadulterated food, produced regionally, fresh and of course free of industrial ingredients.
The idealization of the diet of the ancestors gave rise to the palaeodiät. It recommends Stone Age human food: meat, fish, eggs, nuts, fruit. Nothing cultivated, because Stone Age means before the invention of agriculture.
In fact, hunters and gatherers from the epoch before the Neolithic Revolution, which began about 12,000 years ago and turned life upside down, were better off. It seems paradoxical that food supply also became more delicate with sedentary life. In fact, farmers and ranchers had become more dependent on the weather. As long as this "normal" behaviour lasted, things went well and the population grew. But even a small deviation led directly to hunger.
A low meat diet
This is supported by the falling life expectancy: While the Stone Age people lived to be 30 years old on average, the sedentary ones managed to live to 20. They had more children, but they probably died very early. In addition to hunger, it was mainly infectious diseases that caused people to get hungry. The average body size also shrank.
But didn't the early farming communities eat "healthy wholemeal food"? Is their low meat diet supposed to have been detrimental? Indeed, they ate wholemeal, but was that healthy? The teeth, a durable and therefore for archaeologists enormously informative part of human skeleton finds, say otherwise.
The Berlin anthropologist Bettina Jungklaus does not deal with the Stone Age; her research focuses on the ancient Brandenburgers. The transition from protein- and carbohydrate-dominated food also plays an important role in her studies. Using skeletons, she investigated how people in the region where Berlin was founded 800 years ago fed themselves and what effects this had on their health. Bettina Jungklaus knows the early Templinians, Bernauer and Spandauer. From her teeth she can read whether the people were poor or rich, whether and in which phase of life they were starving. The place where the skeletons were found also tells us whether they lived in a rural or urban environment.
Fishing was the most popular source of food
The investigations began in the High Middle Ages (10th to 12th centuries) - for a reason that can be found in the cultural change brought about by Christianisation. Until around the year 1000 the Slavs burned their dead, under Christian influence they went over to earth burial. Therefore, skeletons and teeth, which are to be examined anthropologically, only exist from this time on.
In the late 7th century, the Slavs immigrated to today's Brandenburg region. The Jewish merchant Ibrahim ibn Ja'qub gives a small insight into the conditions at that time. In 973 he reports from a trip to the region that there is cheap grain and large horse wealth there. Bettina Jungklaus points out that rich grain harvests were rather rare. The crop yield was between two and 15 grains per seed. Thus the yields were "only sufficient for more than mere survival under favourable conditions". The technology was on a low level: oxen pulled hook ploughs that only scratched the soil. Other sources tell us that agriculture was not the preferred source of food for the Slavs anyway, but fishing.
Christianisation, which progressed with the conquest of the Mark Brandenburg by Albrecht the Bear (after 1150), changed the death rituals, but the German lords granted the Slavs over the centuries again and again their fishing privileges.
Stockpiling in the cities
For her nutrition studies Bettina Jungklaus used 112 teeth with 2303 teeth from Havelland with an agricultural lifestyle as well as from the early urban populations of Spandaus and Wusterhausen. One result says that "the caries burden of Slavic populations was surprisingly low, which is possibly connected with a high consumption of protein-containing foods such as meat, fish and dairy products". Caries does occur - in Havelland such damage was found on 44 percent of the teeth; 3.9 percent of all teeth were affected. In early urban Spandau, which probably had a "better" supply situation, 63.6 percent of individuals and 7.9 percent of their teeth were affected.
The bigger tooth problem was the degree of wear. All teeth were ground down, partly only stumps were left. A consequence of hard chewing work: hard food, a high proportion of hard fibres and many abrasive particles. In fact, millet, which had to be chewed with great difficulty, played a major role, but above all the processing of flour. On the one hand, hard husks were left behind, and on the other, stone particles got into the food between millstones during grinding. Probably the food was also burdened by the stove ash. Thus the millet porridge turned into an emery mass. The large photo above shows the teeth of a woman in her mid 40s without a trace of tooth decay, but with a strong tooth abrasion.
In the middle of the 12th century, German-speaking settlers moved in. They came mainly from the Rhineland and Flanders, founded villages and towns, brought new ways of life with them, expanded the arable land and thus the cultivation of grain. Now horses pulled more efficient, soil turning ploughs. Production increased and more people could be fed. The flour was ground more carefully, meat consumption decreased, and carbohydrates increased. In the cities, stockpiling was introduced.
In the countryside, people simply lived
For this time of the late Middle Ages (12th to 15th/16th century) Bettina Jungklaus had 584 teeth with 11,000 teeth at her disposal. They show increasing caries stress and allow a stronger social differentiation. Two examples shed light on the differences: those buried in the cemetery of the Templin Hospital belonged to the poor, the sick and the frail; 78 percent of their teeth were carious, 18.8 percent of their teeth showed such damage on average. The funerals at the Dominican monastery Strausberg were quite different - many of them were aristocrats, at least those close to the upper class. Of these, only 42.7 percent suffered from tooth decay, four percent of the teeth were affected. They lived more strongly from protein-containing, high-quality foods such as meat, fish and eggs. So did the wealthy of the city of Bernau, for whom, for example, less tooth abrasion was observed. That speaks for refined food, for example better entspelztes bread - the man bread from wheat, the people bread from coarse rye. On the other hand, the rich Bernauer, who probably also nibbled on sweet delicacies such as imported raisins, suffered much more frequently from caries.
In the countryside people lived quite simply, often from cereal porridge, at least poor in vegetables. In the long winters the mass disease scurvy caused by vitamin C deficiency developed. Up to half of the children showed the most severe deficiency symptoms.
The situation became really precarious in the early modern period (16th to 18th/19th century). In particular, the so-called Little Ice Age with poor harvests and the Thirty Years' War worsened the nutritional situation. The population shrank. Meat consumption declined, rising food prices plunged the poor into famine. The potato did not enter Prussian life as a poor food until 1738. The lower classes were forced to eat vegetarian, very one-sided food.
The less sugar, the better
Caries infestation was finally driven to almost one hundred percent by two modern inventions: industrial sugar production from beet in the 19th century and roller mills, which eliminated germs and bran and produced white flour that was low in vitamins and nutrients.
Dental hygiene was hardly known to our ancestors; there is evidence that people chewed on birch sticks and cleaned interdental spaces with shavings. The first bone cleaning sets were made around 1500, the first toothbrushes since 1728. These were not mass goods. And the Stone Age chewing gums made of birch pitch were used more to anaesthetise painful teeth than to care for them.
The question as to whether a vegetarian or meat-rich diet was better today plays a subordinate role in the condition of the teeth. It applies: The less sugar, the better. But above all: cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.
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