What happens if you stop brushing your teeth altogether?

shutterstock

As a dentist, I can simply tell you the most important reason: A Human diet bears almost no resemblance to the diet we evolved with AT ALL. Humans have not been evolving or subject to Natural Selection for millennia. 10,000 years ago, a group of humans could lure a herd of giant ruminants near a cliff, startle them into bolting over the cliff, and slaughter the animals at their leisure at the bottom. THAT’S not natural at all.

Yet the thing that has affected human dental disease the most is the rapid and sophisticated advancement in food growing, gathering and processing. Take the humble pie (see how I did that?). A pie is a tremendously unnatural foodstuff. You have the crust - a sweet, melt in your mouth mixture of grass seed powder (flour), sugar (an amazingly unnatural concentrated product), butter or oil (ditto), and the unfertilized eggs of a domesticated bird. In this sweet, sticky, pasty, flaky cooked (!) container, you place fruit (collected in a group, stored, and allowed to soften and concentrate their sugars), mixed with MORE powdered grass seed (flour) and MORE sugar. The human body was simply never evolved to handle this immensely caloric, starchy, sticky mess.

Guess who’s waiting to feast on the pasty mass that adheres to your teeth? Billions and billions of bacteria (called Streptococcus mutans) whose sole purpose in life is to digest the starch into sugar for their own use, and then produce tooth decaying acids inside this rotting, decaying mess of food paste, bacteria, and water (saliva) that is stuck to your teeth.

This is a photo of a patient of mine. He was 5 years old at the time, and the upper teeth were worse (photo taken in a mirror).

The takeaway here is that human teeth (and domesticated animal teeth) live in an environment that they did not evolve for. We as humans now employ unnatural selection (body attributes or personality, alcohol or situation, etc.) as mating cues, while our oral flora is happily evolving at a furious rate (up to 1 new generation every THIRTY MINUTES), and we eat food that we do not gather, is often plentiful and/or concentrated with starch and sugar.

SO, while brushing your teeth is not innately natural (like eating and surviving), it is an appropriate and partially effective preventative measure to take against the unnatural process of tooth decay. The most effective prevention for tooth decay would be a PURE hunter/gatherer diet. Exclusively. If you do that, unless you own honey bees on a pineapple and sugar cane plantation, you shouldn’t get decay even if you don’t brush.

FYI: Other unnatural heath problems that we face in modern society include Type II Diabetes, Gout, and getting shot/blown up by idiots.