Hands up who only thinks about their teeth when something goes wrong? OK, that is just about everybody. Teeth are not the kind of thing we pay much attention to until they don’t work. Excepting, of course, if you are in the dating market and you are ashamed of how they look or something. Drilling down into your bite and smile. Our teeth are, primarily, functional, as in they are about the bite more than anything else. The importance of your smile has been flagged in recent years, in the main, by dentists seeking more business for their services. Bite and Smile are the two sides of dentistry.
Delving Into Bite & Smile Issues
Most of us just want our teeth to work properly and not cause us any distress. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case and why the bloody hell is this? Why can’t teeth do their allotted job for the life of us? Why do we have tooth decay, gum disease and lose our teeth? Why has our human biology let us down in this way? It is all so bloody annoying and painful too. I mean, the term tooth ache is so maddeningly inadequate when describing the level of pain an exposed nerve can generate inside our mouth. It is f****** agony!
Dentist Calls Out Sugar As The Culprit
I was seizing on this biological failure the other day, whilst in the fevered grip of another broken tooth with decay in my lower jaw. WTF did this keep happening to me? I had changed my ill begotten oral hygiene ways a long time ago. Then, I came upon an article quoting a top dentist in London telling the world why we all have such problems with our teeth and gums. He put the blame squarely at the feet of one thing – sugar. Yes, you say, we all know this. However, I don’t think that we truly grasp the full ramifications of it. This posh dentist went on to say that if you look at the archaeological records of prehistoric human skulls with intact teeth there is bugger all decay in these teeth. It is only after the introduction of refined sugars in the human diet that we witness a veritable explosion of tooth decay in humans.
Refined Sugars Us Primates Can’t Cope With
Drilling down into your bite and smile. You see, our teeth and oral health are not set up to cope with all this refined sugar. Manufacturers put it in everything they can because they know we like it. We are weak in the face of our addictions. Many of us are addicted to sweet things and snack on sugary drinks and foods constantly. The sugar does not directly cause decay it creates acidity and feeds the consequent bacteria, which results in infection, decay, dead pulp and severe pain. Our teeth are literally dying in our mouths from being poisoned by refined sugar in so much of what we eat.
Dentists are, at once, appalled by this reality and rubbing their hands together in glee at the constant demand for their pricey services.
Sugar Plantations & Slavery
So, we know about the dangers of too much sugar in our diets. Governments know this too; and why don’t they do something about it? The sugar trade put many European powers on the map. British, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and others enslaved millions of Indigenous peoples and Africans to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the Americas, and here in northern Australia too. They worked them to death and infected them with diseases costing the lives of tens of millions.
Sugar is very special in the history of colonisation – it was the top commodity for centuries. The sugar business remains influential.
Sweetened Alcoholic Drinks Fuelling Violence
Think about how much refined sugar is in the diets of modern human beings. Drilling down into your bite and smile. The alcohol industry is into refined sugar in a big way. Think about all that sweet bourbon and cola in cans being drunk across the globe. Consider all the trouble that alcohol abuse causes. All that domestic violence against women fuelled by alcohol consumption. A woman dies in Australia at the hands of a partner or former partner just about every other day. Alcohol is nearly always involved. It costs our communities and nation billions of dollars in damages to lives and the economy.
Sugar is not only bad for our oral health it is bad for our health, more generally. Poor diets, too much fast food, too many processed foods – they all contribute to Cancers, bowel and heart diseases.
Fat Kids With Rotten Teeth Will Die Young
Think about the fact that a lot of people drink too much alcohol. That results in violence, especially among the young. Most of the booze these young folk drink is sweetened. If alcoholic drinks weren’t sweet there would be less people drinking too much. It is not rocket science. Children and adults who eat too much and become obese are, often, eating sweet foods and drinks because they like the initial sugary high they get. Litres of Coke and Pepsi and Fanta bought cheaply at supermarkets and drunk instead of water.
Type 2 Diabetes is a scourge, along with gum disease, these bad boys, often, go hand in hand. They will prematurely end the lives of their sufferers in most cases.
Why Don’t We Do More About Sugar?
Drilling down into your bite and smile. Stuff that is part of the fabric of our lives, like refined sugar, is tough to come to terms with. Grandparents buying their grandkids lollies and boxes of chocolates. Innocent stupidity. The stuff is everywhere and we are all eating so many more highly processed foods. Getting it out of your diet takes more than just not eating the obvious culprits. Governments are persuaded by subtle corruption and the length of time sugar has been around and its former economic importance. It costs the lives of human beings, as tobacco still does, but we are addicted to the stuff. We are weak in its presence and when we consume it. It is another drug addiction. A pervasive poison in the lives of billions.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Bite & Smile: Delving Into Dental Care for an Informed Choice – his brand new book.
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