It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s kept up with the great debate about sugar and carbohydrates in our diet to learn that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had much healthier teeth than we do today as detailed in this story at NPR.

Prehistoric humans didn’t have toothbrushes. They didn’t have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn’t have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today.

“Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth,” says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. “[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up.”

And thousands of years later, we’re still waging, and often losing, our war against oral disease.

Our changing diets are largely to blame.

In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths.

Apparently, it was the widespread use of processed flour and sugar about a hundred years ago that really changed things – not the move to an agrarian culture thousands of years ago.

I wonder if, someday, sugar will be viewed in the same way that tobacco is today – something that, for many generations, wasn’t considered harmful until the weight of the evidence ultimately proved to be overwhelming.

Also see this 60 Minutes piece from a while back – Is Sugar Toxic?

I’ve been amazed at how restaurant portion sizes have grown over the years and based on this Bloomberg story by Cass R. Sunstein, I’m not the only one.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average U.S. restaurant meal is more than four times larger than it was in the 1950s. The average hamburger, once less than 4 ounces, is now more than 12 ounces. The average order of French fries, once less than 3 ounces, is now more than 6 ounces. There is a clear correlation between increases in portion sizes and increases in obesity.

That correlation helps explain why obesity has been more prevalent in the U.S. than in France. The French eat high- calorie food, but their portion sizes are smaller. In supermarkets and restaurants, and in portion sizes recommended in cookbooks, Americans are given significantly bigger servings. Even at McDonald’s, where we might expect identical sizes, servings of soda and French fries have been found to be larger in Philadelphia than in Paris.

Brian Wansink, a Cornell University professor of consumer behavior, helps to explain why portion sizes have such a large effect. He finds that much of our eating is mindless or automatic in that we tend to eat whatever is in front of us. If you are given a half-pound bag of M&M’s, chances are that you will eat about half as much as you will if you are given a one- pound bag. People who receive large bowls of ice cream eat a lot more than those who get small bowls.

In one of Wansink’s fiendish experiments, people were provided with a large bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and told to eat as much as they liked. Unbeknownst to them, the soup bowls were engineered to refill themselves (with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table). No matter how much soup the subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. The result? Soup consumption skyrocketed. Many people just kept eating until the experiment was ended.

Some this behavior is probably learned. From a very young age, children are taught to “clean your plate” (sometimes backed up by “there are starving people in China”). Nonetheless, carrying this practice over into adulthood can be a real problem for people who eat out a lot.

We don’t eat out much except when we travel (and that presents a few challenges), but I was simply amazed when they started putting nutritional information on menus – I couldn’t believe how many calories, carbs, salt, etc. restaurants are piling into their entrees.

What you see below was scanned from the pages of the local paper the other day as part of a report titled Obesity and its consequences spreading rapidly around the world. Unfortunately, the internet version of the story didn’t have the graphic, hence the blurry image.

Click to enlarge

That middle chart is pretty interesting – the U.K., Japan, and Saudi Arabia are the most sloth-like nations. You can kind of understand not getting out and doing much in the desert kingdom, but, not elsewhere.

I sometimes wonder what Charles Darwin would think if he came back from the dead.

From the Daily Chart feature at The Economist comes this graphic depicting just how different the U.S. healthcare system is from the rest of developed nations.

Paying more and getting less is something that we do very well here, though we probably have the world’s most successful health insurance and food manufacturing industries.

By the way, what’s up with Finland and Denmark?

Cardiologist Dr. William Davis, author of the Wheat Belly book and blog, was on CBS recently to talk about his favorite subject (as might be deduced from the title of his book and blog) – that wheat makes you fat. With only a few exceptions, my wife and I haven’t eaten wheat  for almost two years now and are much better off as a result since bread and the like contain some of the most dangerous carbohydrates available today as described below.

I thought that Paleo and low-carb diets largely excluded wheat because our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t the type to grow crops. If that’s true (which I think it is), then that doesn’t explain how the obesity epidemic is a only a very recent development. It’s pretty encouraging to hear that people are going from diabetic to non-diabetic simply by changing the way they eat.