Orally right
Able to survive fire and the grave, your teeth are unique, identifying you like a fingerprint. Like the rings of a tree, they’re also a time capsule of information about your diet and lifestyle, reveals Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg in her 2016 book What Teeth Reveal About Human Evolution. Your pearly whites may contribute to a great smile, the shape of your face and the pronunciation of speech, but their most important function is to tear apart and grind down food for further breakdown and digestion in the stomach.
This frontline role in the digestive process also makes your teeth vulnerable. “Teeth are the only parts of our skeleton that interact directly with our environments,” Guatelli-Steinberg states. “A less well-appreciated fact is that, as parts of our anatomy, teeth are affected indirectly by changes occurring elsewhere in our bodies.”
To help protect them — against food, drink, microbes and other things in our mouths — our teeth have a tough enamel layer, an inbuilt, natural crown as such, that covers and protects the softer dentine structure beneath. Built to last a lifetime and the hardest substance in the human body, tooth enamel is 96 per cent mineral, primarily hydroxyapatite, a crystalline calcium phosphate.
Yet, as a society, our teeth are in bad shape, with health experts.
