Crooked teeth and poor jaw alignment were unknown to our distant ancestors.  When humans were hunter/gatherers people would not have survived without the ability to procure and eat their food.    Anthropologists tell us that these problems didn’t exist until probably 10,000 years ago when agriculture was developed and cooking food to make it easier to eat became commonplace.   They tell us this process of shrinking jaws was slow at first but the pace accelerated dramatically with the Industrial Revolution.  That change accelerated to warp speed with the adoption of the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) that most people consume.   Pitifully few people today have well developed faces.   

Orthodontists are taught that there is a combination of genetic mutations and environmental factors causing malocclusion. Daniel Lieberman, PhD, a Harvard anthropologist who authored The Evolution of the Human Head and Robert Corruccini, PhD Anthropologist at Southern Illinois University who authored How Anthropology Informs The Orthodontic Diagnosis would take exception. They attribute the shrinking jaw to environmental changes in what we eat and how we eat it.

Dr. Weston Price was a dentist from Cleveland who toured remote parts of the world in the 1920’s and 1930’s to study the few primitive populations left on Earth.   His book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, showed how faces and teeth changed dramatically in ONE generation when a population adopted a Western Diet.  That is certainly NOT  genetic mutation.

Francis Pottenger, M.D. followed Price and did experiments on cats giving one group raw meat and raw milk to eat and another group cooked meat and pasteurized milk. The group eating cooked meat and pasteurized milk were physically smaller and by the third generation many were unable to reproduce.

Daniel Lieberman (noted above) speculated that the process of vigorous chewing was essential to proper facial development.  Robert Corruccini found that genetically similar populations had very different facial/dental development which he correlated to lifestyle and diet.  This research should be common knowledge for all in dentistry to know, yet few dentists have heard of them or their work.

There are many other factors which are likely making these issues much worse. The books of Robert Lustig, M.D.; Arthur Firstenberg; Kate Rheaume-Bleue, N.D.; and Peter Attia, M.D. provide yet more information for the interested professional and layman to understand.   It is not an exaggeration to say that modern humans are indeed killing themselves with their lifestyle.