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I don't buy it--I suspect humans may well be able to have healthy teeth into their 50's and beyond, and without dentists.

Providing people eat those things they evolved to eat.

You could be right. I have frequently been wrong.

It does make me wonder what we were meant to eat.

Let's start by considering our jaw muscles. As mammals our size go, our jaw muscles are not impressive, but not weak.

Let us now consider our teeth. Incissors for biting off chunks, canines and bicuspids for tearing, molars for grinding. Just going by the teeth I would say that we are omnivores (critters who can eat durn near everything).

So, where did we go wrong?

I asked my dentist this question.

He singled-out sugar as being the biggest culprit.

Next comes bread--even bread without sugar (read the labels of store-bought bread, and you will see corn syrup listed among the ingredients; corn syrup is a cheap form of sugar; and in today's processed food, sugar or corn syrup is EVERYWHERE--check you canned or frozen vegetables labels, for example; you ever see that "extra sweet" corn in cans? I'll bet it's extra sweet because they put more sugar in the can!).

Even without sugar, bread forms a paste in the mouth which sticks to teeth.

The starch in the bread then breaks down to sugar, forming an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, whose acid secretions rot your teeth.

He told me plain meat and most vegetable do not cause teeth to rot.

As I recall, early European explorers to the Polynesian Islands found that native people did not suffer from tooth decay.

Later, when those navtives adopted a European diet, decay became rampant.

In one island--I think it in Tahiti--the favorite breakfast in the mid-twentieth century was toast soaking in a bowl of coffee, to which so much sugar had been added as to form a paste.

Needless to say, they no longer have perfect teeth.

I suspect the fossil record will show a close correlation between the advent of agriculture and an epidemic of tooth decay.