This book is amazing. Two useful bits that really helped me were mastic gum and mouth tape. Both of them made it much easier for me to breath through my nose at night and avoid waking up with a dry mouth in the morning.
There are also some interesting bits on breathwork and the scientific aspects of it. I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
I was surprised at how quickly my rhr came down after I started cycling more even though I've never been very active in my life.
It also (I think!) helped with my sleep apnea/general sleep problems, and I've always assumed a good bit of that was literally just being better at breathing.
That's also why humans have maybe the weakest teeth among the mammals ... and a narrow mouth which caused us to lose certain teeth we no longer have nowadays.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
Guy sounds like a crockpot like half of Joe Rogan's guests these days, but isn't it obvious which foods make you chew or not? Compare yogurt to a bowl of vegetables.
It's hard to believe that we gained an overbite over a few thousand years. Evolution doesn't generally happen that fast, nor will it happen worldwide at the same time. And the idea that someone born today will develop an overbite vs edge-to-edge bite based on diet is generally not accepted by scientists, correct?
And trying to prove how ancient peoples pronounced words seems virtually impossible. It's one thing to find a change in writing, but it's another thing to assume you know how the given consonants were actually pronounced. Even today, there can be gigantic variation in pronunciation between dialects of the same language, including consonants.
So this finding seems extremely hypothetical at best, unless I'm missing something?
This is not about a genetic, evolutionary change from an underbite/edge-to-edge mastication back to overbite/up-down mastication. The theory is that this happens in individual humans based on their diet growing up: if you were to take a hunter gatherer child and raise them with a modern diet, they would have the modern overbite; and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
And while the exact cause may be debatable, as is the impact on language, the fact that this change happened over the last few thousand years is established fact, easily visible in human skeletons.
> and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
I.e. an edge-to-edge bite?
I understand this is the idea behind "mewing", but I thought there was no actual evidence for that, and that it is not the consensus scientific position? Or has something changed?
Not exactly your question, but it is well established that chewing/gnawing as a (young) child is directly proportional to jaw length (I guess you could say prognanthicism to some degree) - but specifically the amount of space available in the mouth for teeth. People who chewed/gnawed on ie a rug or something as a child are less likely to have crowding in their mouth and more likely to have eruption of wisdom teeth without an issue.
This makes sense - using your muscles in these ways especially during significant developmental stages changes the release of trophic factors which in turn change development.
Really it’s no different from how someone who uses their body differs from someone who is sedentary all the time but in this case the timing of the ‘intervention’ causes big downstream changes
Indeed. In fact, as a tongue-in-cheek example in real life, you can see the subtle facial structure difference between Asians (say, southern Han Chinese in Fujian) versus 3rd generation Chinese Americans from the same region (with no mixed ancestry). Diet, language, facial muscle behaviors (e.g. frowning), and surrounding beauty standards may have contributed to differences in the mandibular (and elsewhere) structure. Western diet tends to be a bit more chewy and meaty than, say, softer carb-heavy southern Chinese diet.
Hunter gatherer is not a monolithic term, and it is completly obvious that humans have adapted to inumerable diets in countless ecological nieches.
We have always been omnivores and semi nomadic
and in the vast majority of cases have utilised dramaticaly diffrent food sources, based on seasonal availibility, and chance oportunity.
Cant see any plausable reason to make the conection that is bieng made with language.
It’s not evolution, just look at your mouth breather friend as an example. Recessed jaw, poor intake of breath due to a constricted airway, sleep apnea, gerd, bruxism, cavities… it’s all related.
It reminds me of this weird theory about proto-Castillan. According to some scholars, the change from initial /f/ in Latin to /h/ in Spanish could have been caused by the bad teeth of the speakers of lore, a phenomenon ultimately due to the water quality in some areas.
I don't know anything about Spanish language changes, but a change needn't have the entire population afflicted in order to occur-just enough people for it to become fashionable. And as modern trends constantly demonstrate, fashionable trends can come from anywhere, no matter how small a section of of a population, nor how silly the trend seems to be to the population at large, even as the population at large is overtaken by the fashion.
Can someone help me find this amazing site that was once featured on HN that had basically a cut-out anatomical view of the human mouth and throat and then you could pick any sound to see how the body forms it with an animation in-sync with the audio (iirc)?
Nothing but the fact that agriculturally-based civilization has already claimed the land, cleared the forests, farmed the grasslands, and killed off the wild animals, so you'd spend your time starving to death and hiding from game wardens: but at least you'd get better sleep, maybe.
There are lots of places you can still hunt (or trap) and gather. The actual problem most people would face is (a) they're not very good at it and (b) it's extremely tedious.
You can still hunt and trap a little, sure, but I took the previous commenter to be suggesting that one could trade agricultural civilization for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and I can't see how a person could get enough calories to survive that way without egregiously violating bag limits. Maybe up in Alaska or the Yukon you could still get away with it, but here in Washington, a little quick math suggests that hunting all the deer and game birds you're allowed in a year would only keep you fed for 6-8 weeks.
“By means of some 90 models of Eskimo teeth, Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Harvard Dental School Museum, has proved that eating a strictly meat diet is the ideal way in which to keep the human mouth in a healthy condition, and that it is due to the fact that civilized people do not eat enough meat that they as a rule have decayed teeth.” - Harvard Crimson (1929) [1]*
The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now.
Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
*Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today
Someone's claim in a 1929 blog satisfies your epistemic standards?
Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis.
Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it.
"Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.
> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility.
In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.
And yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.
There's a sound you can make like an /f/ by pressing your lower row of teeth against your top lip and blowing. That one. (It sounds basically the same as /f/).
I can easily make it when pushing my lower jaw forward (to give myself an underbite). Pretty sure everybody else can too. The kids I met with an underbite (when I myself was a kid) had no trouble making that sound.
But is it comfortable to talk that way for hours? Can you shout and whisper and sing that way? If not, people would've gradually shifted to easier sounds.
Various breads, cheeses, and alcoholic drinks have been produced for thousands of years. Grains were domesticated well over 10,000 years ago, cheese has been produced for at least 7,000 years, and alcoholic drinks probably as long as grains have been farmed, if not longer. Likewise, humans have been curing and preserving meats and other food for thousands of years as well.
In the Levant and Europe, they ground up wheat to make flour and baked it into bread. You can eat raw wheat but it's a lot of work.
In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet.
In New Guinea they still harvest sago palms. They chop up the insides, extract the starch through several washing cycles, and make a sort of pancake out of it. The palm itself is inedible. Harvesting a palm takes several people all day. In the end they have a portable, storable, easily digestible food.
Around the Pacific, taro has to be cooked and mashed before eating. It's toxic if you don't cook it and discard the water. A lot of greens need to be cooked too due to calcium oxalate.
Once the inedible husks are removed from wheat grains, they can be eaten with minimal work, actually less work than when grounding them into floor.
Wheat grains (without husks) or any other cereal grains, can be eaten easily just by adding an appropriate amount of water (e.g. 4 times their weight) and boiling them, exactly like one would make cooked rice from rice grains.
Making flour and bread (initially unleavened, then leavened) has required considerably more work, not less work, but it has become the preferred way to eat wheat because it was considered much more tasty than boiled grains or porridge.
The varieties of wheat that were available before domestication had seeds from which it was difficult to remove the hulls, so milling them into coarse floor and boiling that into a porridge was actually easier than removing just the husks and boiling the whole grains.
Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
> Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
There are two concepts of "work required to eat [something]".
You might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into preparing the food.
Or you might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into digesting the food.
Bread from fine flour may be harder to make, but it's much easier to eat.
Humans have been processing foods for a long time. Milling, threshing, malting, fermentation are all traditional processing techniques which often make food easier and more nutritious to consume.
And while cultivated fruits and veggies are not pap-soft, they are significantly less fibrous than seeds, stalks, husks etc that you would get from foraged, unprocessed food. Especially our farmed leaves are much softer than grass, leaves etc, that animals eat.
Just a reminder that we are in the middle of a silent epidemic of small jaws [0] and that if you feed your kids hard food they will grow up to be healthier and more attractive.
On a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure.
This is an absurdly common request from small children.
If you don't do it, you may still find them eating around the crusts, for instance if you cut a sandwich in half, or even gnawing through a single point on the sandwich's crust and then leaving behind a crust-rind when they're done.
As a parent, you're then left with no other choice than to eat all of the grilled cheese rinds yourself, so you don't tend to push too hard on the childish habit.
Anything that requires hard chewing like nuts, raw vegetables and tough meats.
The first I ever heard of this topic was from reading the book "The Evolution of the Human Head" (2011) by Daniel E. Lieberman. It's an academic book, and parts are not exactly light reading targeted for the general public. I had read it when it first came out, seemingly well before it because such of point of discussion.
The problem with this topic is, if you try to look anything up on line you can quickly find yourself in the "manosphere" with its associated toxicity.
Not OP, but I remember as a kid being told to eat crispbread (freely available in schools, I assume in most of Scandinavia) because it was good for your teeth/jaw.
I guess one could also include chewy / starchy food; my Asian side family had similar saying but more towards chewing thing properly. (chew 100 times per food in mouth)
So things like crispbread, (raw) carrots, dried fruits/vegetables/meat/squid, etc
Mewing is something intended to address this, but evidence isn't there. Everyone wants a non-invasive solution rather than jaw expanders, braces, retainers etc.. so depending on where your bias, you might be against "Big-Ortho" and try this, or you could invest in proven orthodontics.
Dr Mew doesn't claim that orthodontics don't work, he points out they are expensive and lucrative, and he claims that if we maintain a "jaw healthy" diet from childhood, orthodontic problems will be much less prevalent in the population (this is a related but independent claim from the "mewing" regimen) He says that the evidence is found by comparing modern jaws/bites with historical skulls which show there has been a dramatic "20th century" emergence of orthodontic problems which would indicate a developmental issue rather than a genetic one.
I don't know if he is correct or not, but it's a claim that can be independently measured/verified. Instead of using and publishing such sound science, the orthodontia community is using "cancellation" against him which certainly matches the lucrative aspect, though doesn't provide direct evidence.
you sound angry, science is best conducted from a neutral POV
I've listened to his evidence, repeated it clearly here for you, and am aware of no counterevidence.
there is nothing wrong with calling his license revocation over this precise topic "cancellation"; cancellation is a more precise term than "full of shit" which could refer to constipation.
You don't seem curious to learn, the hallmark of HN's ethos.
I feel there are so many health issues plaguing our modern population.
-Bad conditions for eyes leads to growing amounts of glasses wearers, glasses make an active healthy lifestyle harder, early health development seems really important (playing physically as a kid) putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal.
-The types of food we eat, and our bad breathing habits (maybe from posture or air pollution), maybe even our tongue posture, leave us with poor jawlines, poor facial structure.
-Our disconnect from the natural world leaves us unwhole.
-The extreme of either sedentary lifestyles (office worker) or too repetitively physical (warehouse worker) breaks people down.
Its really sad, most people I see today seem really unhealthy. Fat or flabby, aching body, bad posture, stressed out. I fell into the trap too, had to loose 50 pounds recently. Cleaned up diet, working on posture, flexibility, strength, proper muscle activation, knowing ones body. And that is hard to do, maybe only possible because a WFH job lends towards healthy living. Most are not so fortunate. Also having no family or responsibility beside myself really helps. But neglecting such things are not sustainable for society.
We need a society where being healthy is easier, and better rewarded.
I am sorry if this rant is not acceptable to Hacker News, but I wish as a society our focus was "what makes us healthy". Literally that should be a primary principle in guiding our politics.
Compared to the rest of history, we are living in a special time, at least in developed countries. We have the means to be creating healthy, beautiful, smart, well rounded, well adjusted individuals. But I feel the opposite is happening, and it seems like the majority of people don't care
Your comment makes me feel mixed feelings.
First, I think generally speaking, we do live in a time and society where people can be and are healthier than ever before. I agree with you, that it should be a priority to further improve that situation.
Some of your points however (e.g. glasses, jawline, beatiful, well rounded) sound like you are confusing modern beauty standards with good health.
As someone who really enjoys wearing glasses, I am also a tiny bit offended by your view :) And kids seeing well with glasses vs not seeing sharp is an absolute no brainer to me... There are glasses for doing sports too.
The main driver of poor health today, imo is inequality. Being healthy is a privilege. While, generally speaking, illness does not care about your net worth, treatment options do. Eating healthy is expensive in terms of money and time. So are healthy hobbies, physio therapists and so on. Living a healthy lifestyle should not be better rewarded but more accessible.
Health is just a means to an end. Eating healthy and exercising comes at a cost.
There is no benefit I see for me in having different jaw lines or facial structure.
I don't need to live as long as possible. I just want to maximize the enjoyment while I am here. So I just do enough so I have the body to do my favorite hobbies.
Some hobbies also happen to be exercise and can be done nearly daily. Just do more of them and now there's a much lower 'cost' to exercise. Whether or not you find these types of hobbies enjoyable is another story.
> putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal
I'm not following on this one - is it because this may make them less physically active?
You should be asking what kind of vision problems they may have, that got them the glasses in the first place. For example, I have astigmatism, have crossed eyes without glasses, and +8 power correction. I had to have surgery when I was 3 years old just to be able to get glasses in the future. Not having glasses is a great way to make me miserable and unable to see or read anything.
Not wearing glasses is a poor solution, to say the least. I, personally, would much rather have myopia as an adult than be unable to see or read well for years as a kid.
There’s an interesting middle ground that’s being studied: “peripheral defocus” lenses. The idea, as I understand it, is to give sharp central vision, but to blur the peripheral vision in a way that encourages the eyes to grow appropriately.
I got plenty of both of those things as a child (grew up on a farm). I still needed glasses from the age of 9 to see far away things clearly. Some people get cursed with bad genes.
Anecdotally, I grew up playing outdoors on a farm, not much computer time until I was 11 or 12 or so, which is also around the time I had to get glasses with almost the same prescription strength as my father.
Either computers are quick to ruin eyesight or it was genetic.
In my case, I'm farsighted; and while screen time and lack of sunlight can make myopia worse, there's already a genetic tendency that is being aggravated.
Farsighted though is awfully convenient for staring at screens with a good prescription - at worst, my vision improves over time. :)
I'm glad you're getting healthier, but what are the odds that all of your theories have any basis in reality, after spending , I'm guessing, years or decades living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Like, do you really think your tongue position is affecting your facial and jaw structure? I'm guessing you believe in "mewing", and every before/after image I have seen has just been a joke.
Not me trying to pronounce those with an underbite just to be contrarian
I have an underbite and pronounce those sounds just fine, so I’m a little suspicious of the assertion.
I was able to!
For me "vee" was the hardest
[flagged]
breh
This is discussed at length in (Breath)[0] which also discusses other things about how it's caused issues with breathing.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48890486-breath
This book is amazing. Two useful bits that really helped me were mastic gum and mouth tape. Both of them made it much easier for me to breath through my nose at night and avoid waking up with a dry mouth in the morning.
There are also some interesting bits on breathwork and the scientific aspects of it. I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
> I was able to use those techniques to temporarily lower my heart rate to 45 BPM during meditation.
What's your normal resting heart rate? Mine hovers around 39-40, so getting to 45 isn't really an issue.
Are you an endurance athlete?
I was surprised at how quickly my rhr came down after I started cycling more even though I've never been very active in my life.
It also (I think!) helped with my sleep apnea/general sleep problems, and I've always assumed a good bit of that was literally just being better at breathing.
An average of 60-70 according to watch.
That's also why humans have maybe the weakest teeth among the mammals ... and a narrow mouth which caused us to lose certain teeth we no longer have nowadays.
In an interview with Joe Rogan, James Nestor suggested to encourage our kids to eat non soft food daily.
Does he give some examples of non soft foods?
Guy sounds like a crockpot like half of Joe Rogan's guests these days, but isn't it obvious which foods make you chew or not? Compare yogurt to a bowl of vegetables.
> Guy sounds like a crockpot
Ironic you can only make soft foods with those
Don't know. Carrots maybe?
Pumpernickel bread... tough slices of meat?
Bones are the historical example, IIRC.
Obviously there are downsides to letting small children chew on bones.
Great book. I’m still working on breathing because of it. Here’s a bookshop.org ebook link for it: https://bookshop.org/p/books/breath-the-new-science-of-a-los...
How reliable is this finding?
It's hard to believe that we gained an overbite over a few thousand years. Evolution doesn't generally happen that fast, nor will it happen worldwide at the same time. And the idea that someone born today will develop an overbite vs edge-to-edge bite based on diet is generally not accepted by scientists, correct?
And trying to prove how ancient peoples pronounced words seems virtually impossible. It's one thing to find a change in writing, but it's another thing to assume you know how the given consonants were actually pronounced. Even today, there can be gigantic variation in pronunciation between dialects of the same language, including consonants.
So this finding seems extremely hypothetical at best, unless I'm missing something?
This is not about a genetic, evolutionary change from an underbite/edge-to-edge mastication back to overbite/up-down mastication. The theory is that this happens in individual humans based on their diet growing up: if you were to take a hunter gatherer child and raise them with a modern diet, they would have the modern overbite; and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
And while the exact cause may be debatable, as is the impact on language, the fact that this change happened over the last few thousand years is established fact, easily visible in human skeletons.
> and conversely, if you raised your child with a hunter-gatherer diet, they would develop an underbite.
I.e. an edge-to-edge bite?
I understand this is the idea behind "mewing", but I thought there was no actual evidence for that, and that it is not the consensus scientific position? Or has something changed?
Not exactly your question, but it is well established that chewing/gnawing as a (young) child is directly proportional to jaw length (I guess you could say prognanthicism to some degree) - but specifically the amount of space available in the mouth for teeth. People who chewed/gnawed on ie a rug or something as a child are less likely to have crowding in their mouth and more likely to have eruption of wisdom teeth without an issue. This makes sense - using your muscles in these ways especially during significant developmental stages changes the release of trophic factors which in turn change development.
Really it’s no different from how someone who uses their body differs from someone who is sedentary all the time but in this case the timing of the ‘intervention’ causes big downstream changes
Indeed. In fact, as a tongue-in-cheek example in real life, you can see the subtle facial structure difference between Asians (say, southern Han Chinese in Fujian) versus 3rd generation Chinese Americans from the same region (with no mixed ancestry). Diet, language, facial muscle behaviors (e.g. frowning), and surrounding beauty standards may have contributed to differences in the mandibular (and elsewhere) structure. Western diet tends to be a bit more chewy and meaty than, say, softer carb-heavy southern Chinese diet.
Hunter gatherer is not a monolithic term, and it is completly obvious that humans have adapted to inumerable diets in countless ecological nieches. We have always been omnivores and semi nomadic and in the vast majority of cases have utilised dramaticaly diffrent food sources, based on seasonal availibility, and chance oportunity. Cant see any plausable reason to make the conection that is bieng made with language.
It's the opposite of evolution. The environment changed, the genetics didn't. It's not that the genes changed, it's precisely that they didn't.
It’s not evolution, just look at your mouth breather friend as an example. Recessed jaw, poor intake of breath due to a constricted airway, sleep apnea, gerd, bruxism, cavities… it’s all related.
[dead]
It reminds me of this weird theory about proto-Castillan. According to some scholars, the change from initial /f/ in Latin to /h/ in Spanish could have been caused by the bad teeth of the speakers of lore, a phenomenon ultimately due to the water quality in some areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_change_%22f_%E2%86%92...
Needless to say I've always found this hypothesis doesn't really hold water...
All speakers of old Spanish had bad teeth? And from all zones? Doesn’t make sense.
I don't know anything about Spanish language changes, but a change needn't have the entire population afflicted in order to occur-just enough people for it to become fashionable. And as modern trends constantly demonstrate, fashionable trends can come from anywhere, no matter how small a section of of a population, nor how silly the trend seems to be to the population at large, even as the population at large is overtaken by the fashion.
Well, considering that /f/ and /h/ fail to be distinct in at least one major variety of Chinese, and in Japanese...
why would we need an explanation for a historical change from /f/ to /h/?
Can someone help me find this amazing site that was once featured on HN that had basically a cut-out anatomical view of the human mouth and throat and then you could pick any sound to see how the body forms it with an animation in-sync with the audio (iirc)?
https://dood.al/pinktrombone/
That was wild
https://seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/
It also gave us sleep apnea.
Agriculture was without a doubt the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Na, the worst thing to ever happen to us was hyperbole.
Don't you still have the freedom to eat like a pre agriculture human now?
Just buy some meat and nuts? What exactly is different?
Nothing stopping you from reversing the trend and start hunting if your sleep apnea is so bad.
Nothing but the fact that agriculturally-based civilization has already claimed the land, cleared the forests, farmed the grasslands, and killed off the wild animals, so you'd spend your time starving to death and hiding from game wardens: but at least you'd get better sleep, maybe.
There are lots of places you can still hunt (or trap) and gather. The actual problem most people would face is (a) they're not very good at it and (b) it's extremely tedious.
You can still hunt and trap a little, sure, but I took the previous commenter to be suggesting that one could trade agricultural civilization for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and I can't see how a person could get enough calories to survive that way without egregiously violating bag limits. Maybe up in Alaska or the Yukon you could still get away with it, but here in Washington, a little quick math suggests that hunting all the deer and game birds you're allowed in a year would only keep you fed for 6-8 weeks.
Fishing is also an option to supplement.
Leaning on the biological and evolutionary conclusions of linguists... New talk-show "science" to replace the old talk-show "science".
“By means of some 90 models of Eskimo teeth, Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Harvard Dental School Museum, has proved that eating a strictly meat diet is the ideal way in which to keep the human mouth in a healthy condition, and that it is due to the fact that civilized people do not eat enough meat that they as a rule have decayed teeth.” - Harvard Crimson (1929) [1]*
The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now.
Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
*Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-p...
Someone's claim in a 1929 blog satisfies your epistemic standards?
Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis.
Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it.
"Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.
> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
This is correct.
Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility.
In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.
And yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.
'S'? What would an overbite even theoretically have to do with the ability to pronounce [s]?
Try pronouncing [s] with your teeth lined up (or worse, underbite)? It's pretty not the same.
What sounds can we only pronounce with underbites?
There's a sound you can make like an /f/ by pressing your lower row of teeth against your top lip and blowing. That one. (It sounds basically the same as /f/).
Interestingly, I find it perceptually closer to /θ/... would want to try recording though.
I can easily make it when pushing my lower jaw forward (to give myself an underbite). Pretty sure everybody else can too. The kids I met with an underbite (when I myself was a kid) had no trouble making that sound.
I really dont buy the premisse of this piece. I can easily make the same sounds with an underbite
But is it comfortable to talk that way for hours? Can you shout and whisper and sing that way? If not, people would've gradually shifted to easier sounds.
Speaking as someone with an underbite: yes. Easily.
_When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. _
What? When were foods processed thousands of years ago? Also Carrots and fruit are not "soft"
Various breads, cheeses, and alcoholic drinks have been produced for thousands of years. Grains were domesticated well over 10,000 years ago, cheese has been produced for at least 7,000 years, and alcoholic drinks probably as long as grains have been farmed, if not longer. Likewise, humans have been curing and preserving meats and other food for thousands of years as well.
"Processed" doesn't just mean Doritos.
In the Levant and Europe, they ground up wheat to make flour and baked it into bread. You can eat raw wheat but it's a lot of work.
In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet.
In New Guinea they still harvest sago palms. They chop up the insides, extract the starch through several washing cycles, and make a sort of pancake out of it. The palm itself is inedible. Harvesting a palm takes several people all day. In the end they have a portable, storable, easily digestible food.
Around the Pacific, taro has to be cooked and mashed before eating. It's toxic if you don't cook it and discard the water. A lot of greens need to be cooked too due to calcium oxalate.
Once the inedible husks are removed from wheat grains, they can be eaten with minimal work, actually less work than when grounding them into floor.
Wheat grains (without husks) or any other cereal grains, can be eaten easily just by adding an appropriate amount of water (e.g. 4 times their weight) and boiling them, exactly like one would make cooked rice from rice grains.
Making flour and bread (initially unleavened, then leavened) has required considerably more work, not less work, but it has become the preferred way to eat wheat because it was considered much more tasty than boiled grains or porridge.
The varieties of wheat that were available before domestication had seeds from which it was difficult to remove the hulls, so milling them into coarse floor and boiling that into a porridge was actually easier than removing just the husks and boiling the whole grains.
Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
> Even in this case, when some kind of flour has been used since the beginning, instead of whole grains, the evolution from coarse floor and porridge to fine floor and bread has increased the amount of work required for eating wheat.
There are two concepts of "work required to eat [something]".
You might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into preparing the food.
Or you might be talking about the amount of labor that goes into digesting the food.
Bread from fine flour may be harder to make, but it's much easier to eat.
Humans have been processing foods for a long time. Milling, threshing, malting, fermentation are all traditional processing techniques which often make food easier and more nutritious to consume.
And while cultivated fruits and veggies are not pap-soft, they are significantly less fibrous than seeds, stalks, husks etc that you would get from foraged, unprocessed food. Especially our farmed leaves are much softer than grass, leaves etc, that animals eat.
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Just a reminder that we are in the middle of a silent epidemic of small jaws [0] and that if you feed your kids hard food they will grow up to be healthier and more attractive.
[0]] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973408/
On a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXXIokuYGM
This is an absurdly common request from small children.
If you don't do it, you may still find them eating around the crusts, for instance if you cut a sandwich in half, or even gnawing through a single point on the sandwich's crust and then leaving behind a crust-rind when they're done.
As a parent, you're then left with no other choice than to eat all of the grilled cheese rinds yourself, so you don't tend to push too hard on the childish habit.
As a kid, I hated the crust. It tasted gross.
But that's because it was gross industrial bread to begin with, and the crust was just drier and unpleasant.
But I also remember eating sourdough with its chewy crust and loving that.
Cutting off crusts is very specific to bread that is bad to begin with, I think.
I grew up in the Wonder Bread days, and definitely remember people cutting off the crusts.
Rich vs poor. The rich can literally chop off food and throw it in the trash.
But the crust is nice, why would you throw it away just because you're rich?
What is hard food? Can you be more specific?
I am definitely interested in this.
Anything that requires hard chewing like nuts, raw vegetables and tough meats.
The first I ever heard of this topic was from reading the book "The Evolution of the Human Head" (2011) by Daniel E. Lieberman. It's an academic book, and parts are not exactly light reading targeted for the general public. I had read it when it first came out, seemingly well before it because such of point of discussion.
The problem with this topic is, if you try to look anything up on line you can quickly find yourself in the "manosphere" with its associated toxicity.
Not OP, but I remember as a kid being told to eat crispbread (freely available in schools, I assume in most of Scandinavia) because it was good for your teeth/jaw.
I guess one could also include chewy / starchy food; my Asian side family had similar saying but more towards chewing thing properly. (chew 100 times per food in mouth)
So things like crispbread, (raw) carrots, dried fruits/vegetables/meat/squid, etc
Some people chew on the bones of meat.
That's too hard. Chew on raw carrots.
I chew raw carrots regularly, and they also clean your mouth as well.
Does it go "crunch" in your mouth?
Even things like crackers may count, but generally hard foods include raw vegetables and certain fruit like apples and nuts.
...so mewing is real and it is not a coincidence that it's suddenly a thing now?
Mewing is something intended to address this, but evidence isn't there. Everyone wants a non-invasive solution rather than jaw expanders, braces, retainers etc.. so depending on where your bias, you might be against "Big-Ortho" and try this, or you could invest in proven orthodontics.
> proven
Dr Mew doesn't claim that orthodontics don't work, he points out they are expensive and lucrative, and he claims that if we maintain a "jaw healthy" diet from childhood, orthodontic problems will be much less prevalent in the population (this is a related but independent claim from the "mewing" regimen) He says that the evidence is found by comparing modern jaws/bites with historical skulls which show there has been a dramatic "20th century" emergence of orthodontic problems which would indicate a developmental issue rather than a genetic one.
I don't know if he is correct or not, but it's a claim that can be independently measured/verified. Instead of using and publishing such sound science, the orthodontia community is using "cancellation" against him which certainly matches the lucrative aspect, though doesn't provide direct evidence.
Well, can you link us to the best scientific evidence that he's not full of shit instead of just saying he's being "cancelled"?
Please no more blog posts or journal articles.
you sound angry, science is best conducted from a neutral POV
I've listened to his evidence, repeated it clearly here for you, and am aware of no counterevidence.
there is nothing wrong with calling his license revocation over this precise topic "cancellation"; cancellation is a more precise term than "full of shit" which could refer to constipation.
You don't seem curious to learn, the hallmark of HN's ethos.
I feel there are so many health issues plaguing our modern population.
-Bad conditions for eyes leads to growing amounts of glasses wearers, glasses make an active healthy lifestyle harder, early health development seems really important (playing physically as a kid) putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal.
-The types of food we eat, and our bad breathing habits (maybe from posture or air pollution), maybe even our tongue posture, leave us with poor jawlines, poor facial structure.
-Our disconnect from the natural world leaves us unwhole.
-The extreme of either sedentary lifestyles (office worker) or too repetitively physical (warehouse worker) breaks people down.
Its really sad, most people I see today seem really unhealthy. Fat or flabby, aching body, bad posture, stressed out. I fell into the trap too, had to loose 50 pounds recently. Cleaned up diet, working on posture, flexibility, strength, proper muscle activation, knowing ones body. And that is hard to do, maybe only possible because a WFH job lends towards healthy living. Most are not so fortunate. Also having no family or responsibility beside myself really helps. But neglecting such things are not sustainable for society.
We need a society where being healthy is easier, and better rewarded.
I am sorry if this rant is not acceptable to Hacker News, but I wish as a society our focus was "what makes us healthy". Literally that should be a primary principle in guiding our politics. Compared to the rest of history, we are living in a special time, at least in developed countries. We have the means to be creating healthy, beautiful, smart, well rounded, well adjusted individuals. But I feel the opposite is happening, and it seems like the majority of people don't care
Your comment makes me feel mixed feelings. First, I think generally speaking, we do live in a time and society where people can be and are healthier than ever before. I agree with you, that it should be a priority to further improve that situation. Some of your points however (e.g. glasses, jawline, beatiful, well rounded) sound like you are confusing modern beauty standards with good health. As someone who really enjoys wearing glasses, I am also a tiny bit offended by your view :) And kids seeing well with glasses vs not seeing sharp is an absolute no brainer to me... There are glasses for doing sports too. The main driver of poor health today, imo is inequality. Being healthy is a privilege. While, generally speaking, illness does not care about your net worth, treatment options do. Eating healthy is expensive in terms of money and time. So are healthy hobbies, physio therapists and so on. Living a healthy lifestyle should not be better rewarded but more accessible.
Health is just a means to an end. Eating healthy and exercising comes at a cost. There is no benefit I see for me in having different jaw lines or facial structure. I don't need to live as long as possible. I just want to maximize the enjoyment while I am here. So I just do enough so I have the body to do my favorite hobbies.
Some hobbies also happen to be exercise and can be done nearly daily. Just do more of them and now there's a much lower 'cost' to exercise. Whether or not you find these types of hobbies enjoyable is another story.
"Our disconnect from the natural world" makes us not die at 40 from a broken leg.
> putting glasses on kids seems a terrible thing, and worse, people act like this is normal
I'm not following on this one - is it because this may make them less physically active?
You should be asking what kind of vision problems they may have, that got them the glasses in the first place. For example, I have astigmatism, have crossed eyes without glasses, and +8 power correction. I had to have surgery when I was 3 years old just to be able to get glasses in the future. Not having glasses is a great way to make me miserable and unable to see or read anything.
The intent is to reduce the likelihood of these conditions developing by encouraging exposure to sunlight and far distances as a child.
Not wearing glasses is a poor solution, to say the least. I, personally, would much rather have myopia as an adult than be unable to see or read well for years as a kid.
There’s an interesting middle ground that’s being studied: “peripheral defocus” lenses. The idea, as I understand it, is to give sharp central vision, but to blur the peripheral vision in a way that encourages the eyes to grow appropriately.
I got plenty of both of those things as a child (grew up on a farm). I still needed glasses from the age of 9 to see far away things clearly. Some people get cursed with bad genes.
There are plenty of people who got exposure to sunlight and far distances as a child who need glasses anyway.
My dad grew up on a farm, and rarely spent much time inside, still needed strong glasses all his life to see.
Anecdotally, I grew up playing outdoors on a farm, not much computer time until I was 11 or 12 or so, which is also around the time I had to get glasses with almost the same prescription strength as my father.
Either computers are quick to ruin eyesight or it was genetic.
Hence GP's use of the word reduce instead of eliminate
In my case, I'm farsighted; and while screen time and lack of sunlight can make myopia worse, there's already a genetic tendency that is being aggravated.
Farsighted though is awfully convenient for staring at screens with a good prescription - at worst, my vision improves over time. :)
I'm glad you're getting healthier, but what are the odds that all of your theories have any basis in reality, after spending , I'm guessing, years or decades living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Like, do you really think your tongue position is affecting your facial and jaw structure? I'm guessing you believe in "mewing", and every before/after image I have seen has just been a joke.
I'm waiting for them to drop mouth-breather as some kind of slur.