Weston-Price

[PaleoPhil]

Of course, even some wild animals get caries, and it's also well documented that the rate of caries and other dental problems increases dramatically with the advent of cereal-based diets, particularly industrially processed diets:

"By the age of 39, 86.7% of the United States population has had at least one tooth affected by decay." --Ramiel Nagel, sourcing data from the Centers for Disease Control, http://www.curetoothdecay.com/Tooth_Decay/prevalence_tooth_decay.htm

Generally, in most parts of the world, whenever cereal-based diets were first adopted as a staple food replacing the primarily animal-based diets of hunter-gatherers, there was a characteristic reduction in stature [4, 17–19], an increase in infant mortality [19, 20], a reduction in lifespan [19, 20], an increased incidence of infectious diseases [19–22], an increase in iron deficiency anemia [19, 20, 22], an increased incidence of osteomalacia, porotic hyperostosis and other bone mineral disorders [4, 19, 20, 22] and an increase in the number of dental caries and enamel defects [19, 20, 23].

--Loren Cordain, Phd, "Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword," http://www.direct-ms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf

19 Cohen MN: The significance of long-term changes in human diet and food economy; in Harris M,
Ross EB (eds): Food and Evolution. Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits. Philadelphia, Temple
University Press, 1987, pp 261–283.

20 Cassidy CM: Nutrition and health in agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers: A case study of two
prehistoric populations; in Jerome RF, Kandel RF, Pelto GH (eds): Nutritional Anthropology:
Contemporary Approaches to Diet and Culture. Pleasantville, Redgrave Publishing Company, 1980,
pp 117–145.

23 Turner CG: Dental anthropological indications of agriculture among the Jomon people of central
Japan. Am J Phys Anthropol 1979;51:619–636

The Xavante of Simoes Lopes

In 1966, Dr. Jerry D. Niswander published a paper titled "The Oral Status of the Xavantes of Simoes Lopes", describing the dental health and occlusion of 166 Brazilian hunter-gatherers from the Xavante tribe (free full text). This tribe was living predominantly according to tradition, although they had begun trading with the post at Simoes Lopes for some foods. They made little effort to clean their teeth. They were mostly but not entirely free of dental cavities:

"Approximately 33% of the Xavantes at Simoes Lopes were caries free. Neel et al. (1964) noted almost complete absence of dental caries in the Xavante village at Sao Domingos. The difference in the two villages may at least in part be accounted for by the fact that, for some five years, the Simoes Lopes Xavante have had access to sugar cane, whereas none was grown at Sao Domingos. It would appear that, although these Xavantes still enjoy relative freedom from dental caries, this advantage is disappearing after only six years of permanent contact with a post of the Indian Protective Service."

....

Rural Caucasians in Kentucky

It's always difficult to find examples of Caucasian populations living traditional lifestyles, because most Caucasian populations adopted the industrial lifestyle long ago. That's why I was grateful to find a study by Dr. Robert S. Corruccini, published in 1981, titled "Occlusal Variation in a Rural Kentucky Community" (ref).

This study examined a group of isolated Caucasians living in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky, USA. Corruccini arrived during a time of transition between traditional and modern foodways. ....

The older generation of this population has the best occlusion of any Caucasian population I've ever seen, rivaling some hunter-gatherer groups. This shows that Caucasians are not genetically doomed to malocclusion. The younger generation, living on more modern foods, shows very poor occlusion, among the worst I've seen. They also show narrowed arches, a characteristic feature of deteriorating occlusion. One generation is all it takes. Corruccini found that a higher malocclusion score was associated with softer, more industrial foods.

Here are the reasons I believe this group of Caucasians in Kentucky had good occlusion:
- A nutrient-rich, whole foods diet, presumably including organs.
- Prolonged breast feeding.
- No bottle-feeding or modern pacifiers.
- Tough foods on a regular basis.

--Stephan Guyenet, "PhD, Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part VIII," http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/11/malocclusion-disease-of-civilization_28.html

[TylerDurden]

My point was that human dental problems(re malocclusion etc.) on cooked diets of any kind(even WP's diet) are even greater than those which exist among wild animals on natural diets,

[PaleoPhil]

Of course, and there are even greater dental problems on cooked diets that include lots of industrially processed grains and sugars, as this new study and others confirm. This particular study doesn't directly address raw vs. cooked.