(Credit: tooth art / Pinterest)
By Fariha Fawziah
What’s so interesting about your teeth? Well, did you know that teeth can reveal a microscopic history of your health? Joanna Klein, a writer at the New York Times, researched and discovered a lack of vitamin D in an old tooth from a 24-year-old man buried in Quebec between the late 18th century and the early 19th century. Therefore, it was determined that he did not have a healthy lifestyle.
When the body doesn’t get enough vitamin D from the sun or food, teeth develop gaps or bubbles that can make up 85 percent of one individual tooth. This is how teeth can tell researchers about a person’s environmental conditions, food choices, and also the society they lived in.
A lack of vitamin D in someone causes a disease called rickets, which is physically characterized by “bowed”–or deformed–legs. Throughout history and up to the present day, there are people who suffer from this disease. Klein writes, “It’s estimated that more than a billion people worldwide don’t get enough vitamin D, and around the world rickets can still affect up to nine percent of the child population in some places. Knowing about the lifestyle factors that lead to rickets in particular communities worldwide may help put what’s happening today into historical context.”
There are other advantages to getting scientific data from teeth. In Klein’s interview with Lori D’Ortenzio (a paleopathologist who worked on the Quebec study), it was revealed that you can’t get the same information from a skeleton as you can from teeth alone. This connection between the biochemical contents of teeth and a nutritional disease like rickets is just one more captivating example of the brilliant potential of science to help us study and protect human health.
(Credit: Pinterest)
[For more info on this topic see: The New York Times – Science http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/science/teeth-vitamin-d-deficiency-archaeology.]