The picture says "enamel-mimicking" and the text says "protective coating that mimics the structure and function of natural enamel", so it looks like a protective layer, not true repair. I've been using a paste with novamin lately, it also creates a protective layer and is also marketed as "repair". I like it and feel some heat when it contacts with teeth, so the chemical reaction must be working. But the marketing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I don't know what this new hairpaste does, but Novamin promotes re-enamelization of teeth, which is where mineral ions like calcium bond themselves to the tooth and fill in small pits and fissures. It's not regrowing actual enamel, it's probably not going to fill in any pits you can see with the naked eye, but it's a real and beneficial effect. Actually any fluoride toothpaste also does this, but Novamin may be a bit more effective at it.
I had an impression that Novamin creates an artificial layer as strong as natural enamel, and fills tiny holes that are responsible for high sensitivity with this material that crystallizes with water contact. Then normal Ca+F mineralisation is orthogonal. Novamin itself contains Ca, can it really migrate from the crystals into the tooth tissue?
Never heard of Novamin but doesn't look promising?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7068624/
Conclusion Review shows that Novamin has significantly less clinical evidence to prove its effectiveness as a remineralization agent in treating both carious and non-carious lesion. Hence, better designed clinical trials should be carried out in the future before definitive recommendations can be made.
Inetersting, the paper explain how remineralisation works and the role of F and fluoroapatite. This reminds me the recent Veritasium video about why Teflon is so strong - F chemical bonds are the strongest.
For Novamin alone, I've seen and understood the claims of sensitivity protection with hydroxyl-carbonate apatite (HCA). The paper explains it in 4.3. The layer is temporary and protects from acids, conserving the teeth tissue below.
But F is essential and my paste has it together with Novamin. It seems they may work well together. But the paper also explains that F works with saliva rich in minerals to repair the enamel. So if Novamin creates a strong layer, it may block access of F + saliva to enamel (my speculation, as in 4.2 they say "A clean tooth surface is required to access the mineral-deficient spot.").
So maybe a classical Ca+F paste is better overnight when no acid exposure is expected, but Novamin is nice in the morning before breakfast.
> is nice in the morning before breakfast.
I typically brush after meals, not before, but however you do it is better than not doing so at all.
FWIW I think the theory is that you have some window before whatever on your teeth turns into hard plaque. So brushing in the morning helps remove any accumulation that happened overnight. I guess brushing after breakfast might be slightly more efficient in the sense that it will clean away/remove food remnants you've just eaten but not sure how much difference it makes in practice as long as you're brushing again later (e.g. before you go to sleep).
EDIT: Technically plaque forms faster but only hardens into "tartar" after about 24 hours or more.
EDIT2: There is another reason to avoid brushing you teeth immediately after a meal. Supposedly they're softer due to higher acidity or something along those lines. It's recommended to wait 30-60 minutes after a meal before brushing.
I use novamin but I can't feel a chemical reaction.
Have you noticed something more promising ? I am not sure, because I typically do not eat carbs.
I don't feel anything when using it, but it does do a much better job with hot / cold sensitivity than anything else I have tried on the market. I find it more effective than Biomin or Nano-Hydroxyapatite.
I use toothpaste with Novamin and I also feel burning / heat. It begins immediately and lasts for about 2 minutes.
I feel it on the spot that was sensitive to cold, and that was the reason I looked for something new. The paste is of room temperature, so that feeling must be not a fluke. No idea if it actually works, F+Ca used to be enough.
The image with the cross section looks convincing. I don’t really know what I’m looking at.
Try biomin F, newer novamin
> marketing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Hard to brush that one off!
[that was brilliant, you missed your calling. I am completely enamled :D]
Just wanted to add for anyone suffering problems with gums and teeth
Gums and Collagen - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7570157/
* As far as I understood, calcium needs a scaffold to attach to bones and teeth - collagen, as in gelatine, can seemingly support the regeneration of the gums, as well as some limited regeneration of the teeth
* Personal Note: I used to have knee pain in my twenties when I still ate a standard diet, when I took collagen it took about a month until the knee pain went away
* Teaspoon in the morning was enough
* Overdosing on Collagen might create some problems - might wanna read up on this
>While fluoride toothpastes are currently used to slow this process, keratin-based treatments were found to stop it completely.
That's really great I hope to use this some day.
Sensodyne toothpaste has two lines: one that contains a mild painkiller (Rapid Relief) and one that [claims to] repair small cracks in teeth (Repair & Protect).
I use the latter. I do not know if it works, but I use it. I have never suffered from tooth pain before or after.
I found out the hard way that my mouth really doesn't like having SLS in it because I bought the wrong version of Sensodyne once. The "Pronamel" version is the only one I'm sure doesn't have SLS.
Regular Sensodyne in other countries has novamin though, and does not have SLS. I've brought home a few tubes from traveling and it seems to work just as well as the US version - I don't get sensitivity back when using it.
It depends on the country also. In the UK for example, Repair & Protect uses novamin but in the US it just uses stannous fluoride.
I think Canada has it with Novamin, while the US doesn't. The Netherlands does, and Germany doesn't. All with the same "repair & protect" name. It's puzzling. Now Germany does have it under a new "clinical repair" name, of course the "clinical" ones in the US do not, those do contain soap for some reason (sodium lauryl sulfate) which I don't think I've seen in any other country.
I actually started using Sensodyne because of the lack of SLS. I'm not in the US though.
Be careful, they add SLS to several versions of their products in the US.
Was thinking about oddities of language recently (happens a lot since moving to Germany), specifically how "toothpaste" isn't made from teeth and "tomato paste" isn't something you rub onto a tomato.
So anyway, should we be calling this "hairpaste for teeth", or "toothpaste from hair"?
This semantic variability in the relation between the two nouns of a compound is pretty common in compound nouns: "Y made of X", like "tomato paste", "Y used (somehow) for X" (like "toothpaste", "paintbrush", "electrical outlet"--here an adjective, but still a lexicalized phrase), "Y in X" ("treehouse"), "Y for X" ("doghouse"), "Y containing X" ("paint can"), not to mention metaphorical uses, with some etymological relation between X and Y ("moon shot", "crapshoot", "greenhouse"), and so on. Not to mention multi-word compounds, like "greenhouse gas"--but I'm sure you've seen lots of those in Germany :).
“Windows Subsystem for Linux” is probably the most confusing example of this (an environment subsystem which provides a Linux userspace to a Windows NT kernel). more intuitive would be to call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows, but presumably for branding purposes they wanted Windows in front.
That one isn't an example of this. It is actually a Windows Subsystem (at least WSL1) that exposes Linux syscalls, so is for Linux userspace programs. There is also the Windows Subsystem for Win32 and there used to be a Windows Subsystem for Unix.
Linux Subsystem would be completely wrong, because it is a Subsystem of Windows not of Linux.
No it wouldn't. Following the scheme a couple of comments above, we have:
Y of X providing Z - Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Y providing X on Z - Linux Subsystem for Windows.
The former is "for [having]", the latter is "for [use on]".
I wrote the comment you're referring to, but it wasn't intended as a complete schema, rather as a way of saying two nouns in a compound can be related in most any way. The interpretation is pragmatic and conventional, not syntactic. (And while [W S] is a compound, [W S for L] isn't, it's a (compound) noun plus a prepositional phrase.)
While W S for L is fine in the intended sense, it could just as well mean a subsystem on Linux that runs Windows (like Vine, I guess). Parallel examples might be Brake Pads for Chevys or Oven Cleaner for Microwaves.
As further examples of the weirdness of compound nouns in English, consider Atomic Scientist, which does not mean a scientist who is atomic, but rather an 'ist' (= person) who does atomic science. Likewise Nuclear Physicist, Artificial Intelligence Researcher (at least for now, since AI systems aren't researchers :)).
I still would expect it to be something running on top of Windows, not a part of the NT kernel. Subsystem is a specific term for a core concept of the NT kernel here, so no it wouldn't make sense to call it LSW.
MS has some confusing naming, this isn't one of them.
"Windows Subsystem" is a noun-phrase here though. If you want an X providing Y on Z, then it would be "Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows"
I regard that as Microsoft's problem.
“Toothpaste” is the commonly accepted English word (in most English dialects, as far as I’m aware) for that paste which we use to clean our teeth with a brush. So I expect we’ll call it “toothpaste” regardless of the exact chemical composition.
If keratin is the active ingredient, I would suspect the exact source doesn’t really matter.
I agree that the source won't be a reason for not calling it toothpaste, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not called toothpaste anyway - that's a term they're using now as it makes it easy for people to imagine what they're talking about, but dentists don't call every type of gel/stuff that they apply to teeth "toothpaste", and as this will be about targeting repair rather than daily cleaning I suspect it will get a new name.
I meant colloquially.
Indeed.
We expect olive oil to be made from real olives, but not baby oil…
The coffee cake is a lie.
18 years in the USA and this still makes me sad. https://www.taste.com.au/recipes/jennys-coffee-cake/e2f028f1...
There was some joke where they showed a sign saying “Kinder Kebab, €2”
And "pasta" is just the Italian word for paste.
Thanks for this, I'll be calling it toothhairpaste regardless of what the marketing department comes up with.
Is Baby Oil made from...?
I only clean my teeth with a dentifrice. I do not want to have to risk turning my teeth into paste!
Isn’t it Zahnpasta in German too?
Sometimes you need a (language) barrier to realize a inconsistency/detail which you'd never take notice of otherwise.
Tomato paste is Tomatenmark, not Tomatenpaste though.
Open Access Paper: [ https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adhm.20... ]
How does this compare with nano-hydroxyapatite, which is the current rage in toothpaste innovation and remineralization?
nHA is prohibitively expensive to produce and the most effective process that produces the smallest particles is patent-protected by Sangi, and therefore many nHA toothpaste brands only contain a fraction of the concentration used to produce the effective results reported in academic studies (1-2% instead of 10%).
If keratin toothpastes can be produced more economically they could be a better option for mass adoption. For anyone who wants to try nHA toothpaste for remineralization, I can only recommend Sangi Apagard Royal toothpaste ($$$) but it does work quite well when used as directed.
bah it's like $15-20 a tube that will last a couple months. That's nothing to most people on hackernews
More expensive than conventional fluoride toothpaste available in the US but I agree it is a small price to pay when considering the benefits
First time I've heard about apagard royal. In India it costs ₹5145 or $60 appprox.
Thats... substantially more expensive than regular toothpaste. Which costs ₹100-₹200 or $2-3.
That’s very good news, but we’ll have to wait a little bit: >>> “keratin-based enamel regeneration could be made available to the public within the next two to three years.”
That's pretty unbelievably fast, actually.
You can just put hair in your blender today.
I don't think you can blend hair into a paste you can then spread over your teeth.
This is about tooth paste, not a supplement
Toothpaste is not a complicated compound to make.
The question is one of optimization. What size (mechanical) or what type of keratin is most suitable, or do we depolymerize (chemical) it first or let oral enzymes do it..? Is brushing as-is sufficient or do we need a longer dwell time..?
The article mentioned "extracting keratin". It might be more a chemical than a mechanical process.
You are quite right, seems like there are unbreakable matrices that require chemical action:
https://www.jsr.org/hs/index.php/path/article/download/4787/...
Suitable chemical methods:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01418...
You have clearly not dealt with hair and mechanical devices.
I'm forever unwrapping the beater bar and replacing belts in my vacuums. I don't want to do it in my blender too.
Think about it, the human genome already contains genetic encoding of keratin, it wouldn't have to evolve (incrementally bruteforce) a full protein code to "protect and repair" damaged teeth. It would just need to "happen onto" accidentally expressing it somewhere in the mouth: perhaps the mucous membrane lining the inside cheeks, perhaps the tongue, perhaps some glands in the mouth. Accidentally expressing a gene in a cell type that didn't before is much easier to occur (i.e. more likely) than generating a new functional protein: all it takes is a change in the binding site (or promoter region) so that the relevant cell type (say lining the mouth) would express it, conditionally or unconditionally.
If this were effective, our bodies would probably be doing it already.
Just to clarify: even if 2 people had the exact same genetic coding for proteins, but different coding of promoter regions, then these will have different binding affinities, modulating when proteins will or wont be expressed and at what rate. So when considering a population's genome statistics, there is already a spectrum of promotor region codes in the population, if this keratin presence on teeth had significant advantage, selection pressure would already have increased that level towards optimum.
The only caveat for my reasoning would be if it were discovered that this is exactly what happens in a healthy mouth, and that we recently discovered that conventional toothpastes have been stripping such layer of keratin by abrasion.
Funny that the first picture on the website is a bald man, I guess he hasn't tested it himself?
Why do you think he ran out of hair?
Perhaps he had hair before the harvesting
As you can see, he has a beard, so…
Or tested too much..
I wonder if this will fall into 'supplement' territory for US approval in toothpaste. I can imagine there would be a lot of manufacturers throwing it in without testing to see if their formulation actually works or not.
Is there any blogpost or website to get my mind unstuck on toothpaste? I feel this market is extremely confusing and I don’t know what to buy anymore.
EU citizen here.
I'd appreciate that too. My dentist recommended me to use Duraphat, a 9 euro per 50 gram toothpaste.
I recently started using a nano-hydroxyapatite based toothpaste. It can't restore enamel but does better at remineralization than fluoride, hopefully it will be a good intermediate for me until something regenerative is available.
It seems to me the two are effectively the same unless you have significantly misshaped teeth (remineralizing vs regenerating). I also use hydroxyapatite, just to reduce my fluoride exposure, although I believe fluoride is supposed to be a more potent remineralizer (and fluorapatite is allegedly stronger than natural hydroxyapatite). But the upside is that I don't mind swishing hydroxyapatite around in my mouth for 10 minutes, twice a day, so whenever I go to the dentist, I'm the healthiest mouth of the day (not the case pre-hydroxyapatite tooth paste/powder).
What product(s) do you recommend? I'm in the US.
Nobs is good because they only use rod-shaped NHA, not needle-shaped NHA which has a worse safety profile. Safety profile is important for anything nano
Is there anywhere I can learn more about NHA shapes? I currently use Apagard Renamel.
NHAP particles are smaller than fluoride particles, so they're able to penetrate farther into the porous surface of the teeth; flouride basically can only coat the surface. There is some research indicating that NHAP is more effective than flouride at remineralizing (e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4252862/) but that flouride is more protective than NHAP because NHAP isn't protective at all. (The flouride creates a temporary sacrificial enamel-like shell layer that closes off pores in the surface of the teeth in addition to buffering acids; the NHAP will just create new enamel.)
My dentist says that NHAP is great if you have lots of cavities or drink lots of acidic drinks like soda, but once your enamel is repaired too much of NHAP can actually cause weird growths.
Dave's toothpaste has both NHAP and flouride (and the sensitivity agent used in Sensyodyne) if you're looking for the best of all worlds in the U.S.
>Dave's toothpaste has both NHAP and flouride
And has an RDA of 101. Why on earth would a toothpaste meant for sensitivity have this high of an RDA? (Non-whitening sensodyne is around the 40s)
After doing some research, I decided to go for this one: https://drjennatural.com/products/dr-jen-super-paste-with-na.... 10% nHAP (rod-shaped), RDA under 50 (exact number unspecified), nothing obviously objectionable in the ingredients, and comes with or without fluoride. My only minor quibble is that I couldn't determine the exact range of HAP particle sizes, which some other vendors do list. On the other hand, it has some strong reviews that seem credible, and there aren't many other options that explicitly provide 10% nHAP with a low RDA, and even fewer that offer a fluoridated version on top of that.
SuperMouth also looked like a great option with an RDA of 67 (particularly for kids who like crazy flavors), and Elims also looked good for anyone who doesn't mind the 92.71 RDA. Ollie stood out for its minimal ingredients list, but turned out to have a relatively high RDA of 143.
I currently use BioMin C in the morning and F at night, but based on everything I'm learning right now about nHAP, I figure it can't hurt to stack Dr. Jen with those. Maybe in a few years I'll get some keratin in the mix too.
To everyone reading this you should still use flouride! Flouride and nanohydroxyapetite together both strengthen the outside layer of your teeth while strengthening the inside of them. Either alone is good, both together are great.
Oh! To clarify. I use fluoride in the morning and hydroxyapatite at night.
Hydroxyapatite based paste is incredible, and has astonished a few of my incredulous friends dealing with dental problems.
It always seemed very interesting in a cynical way that Sensodyne Repair and Protect has a European version with hydroxyapatite but doesn't offer it in the US. The only reputable US brand I'm aware of is Dr Collins Biomin, which is excellent but weak on the hydroxyapatite.
I'll be abused for it here, but I'm intractably convinced the ADA and generally despicable US health industry prefer to avoid it due to its efficacy and how much revenue would be lost if it were more common. Say what you will against this, and I'll remain convinced.
AFAIK the European version of Sensadyne Repair and Protrct uses Novamin, not Hydroxyapatite. From what I can tell, they are similar but separate chemicals.
While not sold directly in the US, Sensadyne with Novamin is available from Amazon (usually from India).
Thanks for clarifying that. I'm confused that my head still insists there was hydroxyapatite involved, but I believe you're correct. My information is over a decade old though.
Not everybody agrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYqP5y3iYHo
I appreciate the info, but it honestly seems this person is blabbering, barely presenting even anecdotal evidence and literally just saying it's bad because she thinks maybe it is, because, hey look at my friend over here who nods. Definitely makes me wonder if the "Dr" in her handle is more than text.
That said, I'm not surprised people argue against it. But my teeth haven't "crumbled" after more than a decade of regular apatite use, and that's under various impacts and hard use. If there's any validity to her concerns about it, she should actually discuss them, instead of talking about charcoal and her friend.
I pick up a couple tubes of that Sensodyne every time I’m in Europe.
What product(s) do you recommend? I'm in the US.
Smart mouth has a flouride + hydroxyapetite. I’ve been using it for a few months now and all my tooth pain is completely gone. I’ve been dealing with issues for years and have a wonderful dentist but really had to get myself in shape and brush 2x and really floss correctly. Anyway, that toothpaste also helped compared to only stannous fluoride paste.
Either Biomin, or my first choice, Apagard (from Japan).
Biomin is cleaner, but weaker.
I generally choose Apagard though. If you do too, the Premio is a good version with a substantial hydroxyapatite content.
Try to buy from a reputable seller if Apagard. I'd not worry about Biomin much.
Edit: also note that these are rinseless pastes, intended to remain on the teeth for as long as they linger. This is where Biomin has an advantage, being cleaner. Spitting is fine, but rinsing will reduce efficacy.
Edit II: Some will wail in disagreement. I think a waterjet can literally add years to the average lifespan while helping with oral health. Maybe consider one, with simple design and minimal features.
Dave's is available in the U.S. and has NHAP, flouride, and the anti-sensitivity stuff from Sensodyne.
Do you mean David's? Their web site says it's "fluoride free".
https://davids-usa.com/products/davids-sensitive-whitening-n...
Did they mean route as in path to a solution? Or root as the source? Seems odd.
“The root of the problem” is a more usual usage, but is just as readily applied (ha get it) as “the root of the solution”, especially when a dental pun can be bonded (puns are swell) to the headline (I can’t think of a way to pun on gumline here).
I found the phrasing really difficult to read and understand, even though I got the pun, so you’re not alone in that.
Root as in seed [crystal], as in nucleation point is what I would surmise.
Dentistry pun? Root as in the root of a tooth?
Strange to see this at 246 points on the front page and no mention of bioglass such as novamin?
Is this mechanism different?
> The team ... believes [it] could be made available [in] the next two to three years.
Hey Siri, remind me in three years to look for keratin based toothpaste.
Visibly there is already Sanogyl Complete Essential Care that includes some.
I wonder how they got the idea to put some in it
Chew your fingernails! Do the toes with your molars. My foot is usually in the neighborhood anyway.
rms - is that you...?
So, that explains the benefits of chewing on one's own locks.
And nail biting.
Does this kind of treatment still need probably years of testing and FDA-style approval, even if it’s essentially just a keratin derivative?
Back in 2017, we were promised actual regeneration, not holding my breath.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/09/decline-of-t...
Brushing my teeth with Head and Shoulders
Any upcoming advances for gum disease?
Isn't Xylitol supposed to help with that? And brushing and flossing...
>Unlike bones and hair, enamel does not regenerate, once it is lost, it’s gone forever.
This simply isn't true. I've chipped two teeth at separate times. Both healed up over the years. I still have all my teeth, including wisdom teeth. No dental work in my lifetime.
> Both healed up over the years.
They….did not. Maybe the sharp edges eroded into smoother curves, and the nerve acclimated so any sensitivity resolved, but your teeth did not “heal” as in “replace the lost portion”.
>but your teeth did not “heal” as in “replace the lost portion”.
I can assure you that is exactly what happened, because one was a vertical chip out of the front of my tooth, like a small rice grain. For my tooth to "wear down" to hide it, I would have had to lose all the enamel on the front of that tooth, which did not happen.
As for the other, where I lost the corner of a front tooth, I suspect my old dentist in my hometown still has an xray, because my parents took me in. He offered to crown it and I declined, choosing to live with the chip. Good thing I did that, since it healed up.
I’ve been reading about how “X could repair tooth enamel” for years, including on HN. Nothing ever comes of it. I’ll believe it when something exists out of a laboratory and on the market.
> The treatment could be delivered through a toothpaste for daily use or as a professionally applied gel
Could. In other words, they haven’t even tested if a toothpaste is viable, yet the title is written as if this is a ready-made and proven product.
Only thing missing is a B Corporation certification so that otherwise smart people won’t recognize the grift
So, chewing on beetle exoskeletons would repair teeth enamel? Wonder if there is archaeological evidence of humans doing that. Edit: there seems to be plenty of evidence of eating insects but any dental association is probably incidental (pun not intended). Maybe we just haven’t been looking into the enamel for these structures.
Exoskeletons are usually made of chitin and not keratin. But maybe it works the same way
Insects are made of chitin, as far as I know.
You could chew on your fingernails...
Did past humans have the dental problems we have? I imagine a lot of our problems are caused by our diet and access to sugar.
Starchy food led to rotten teeth in ancient hunter-gatherers:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-07-starchy-food-led-rotten...
But I think the more common prehistoric tooth problem was severe wear from using the teeth to process things like fibers and hides.
It's not just sugar, starchy foods like bread, potatoes start breaking down quickly right in the mouth into simple sugars, it's enough that white bread has a higher glycemic index than actual sugar :)
Yes, some studies and observations suggest that pre-contact Aboriginal Australians had generally good oral health with low rates of tooth decay and periodontal disease.
Never in History have humans had as good teeth as they do today. Also consider that until we had vaccines and antibiotics in the early 20th century, the average lifespan was very short.
average, yes, but living to 70 was reasonably common if you made it past childhood.
I was under the impression living to 70 would have been very rare in, say, 1100 CE
Figure 2 in https://gurven.anth.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth... suggests that about 15% of hunter-gatherers would reach age 70.
Not deeply knowledgeable here but imagine this depended quite a bit on where you were living in 1100 CE.
I think it was fairly rare in Europe, but IDK how well those numbers capture what was common for the majority of the human population living elsewhere.
It was pretty rare even among medieval kings to live to be 70.
The first English king to be definitely alive on their 70th birthday (though no longer "in office") was Philip of Spain (jure uxoris) in 1597, so not a medieval king. That is Early Modern Age.
Elizabeth I. didn't make it, though barely, and so the next to reach 70 was George II. in November 1753! Only since the second half of the 18th century is it common for British monarchs to reach their seventies.
Richard Cromwell lived to be 85, but he was never a king, only Lord Protector.
Edgar Aetheling lived to be 73, but he was never king either, due to certain William arriving en force from Normandy.
Was this meant for someone else?
I did not dispute that this was likely rare in medieval Europe (for the same reason you cite).
Yeah, it was midnight back here, I possibly chose the wrong thread comment. Sorry.
Medieval kings were warriors and very often victims of assassination, so they had a way lower life expectancy than a typical peasant of their times.
Medieval European nobility tend not to die in battle. They were captured and ransomed. Richard III died in battle but nobody was gonna ransom him.
Assassination definitely brings down the average. But a fair number of English monarchs managed to die in bed. (I was gonna write British, but no: the Scottish kings practically never died in bed. Unless they were stabbed in their sleep.)
Another commenter raised the ransom point for kings. One of the reasons why higher nobility and the king's household was so visible on the battlefields was that they shouldn't get killed by mistake.
As for the common folk, if you look at actual medieval cemeteries that were excavated and studied, the peasants didn't live long either. The age of death can be assessed by looking at the bones, and already the above 50 cohort is somewhat thin, while the above 60 is infrequent.
You underestimate the effects of hunger on mortality. Prior to introduction of potatoes (e.g., ~ 18th century in much of Europe), failed crops would be a common occurrence, happening ~5-6 times during life of a normal rural person. If two of them happened back-to-back, the resulting mortality was already serious, and older people would often be victims. It made sense to use whatever food was left for the younger, stronger generation which was still able to work.
Famine was basically never a concern for the royalty. We have a record of the English king going dinner-less once, but that is not a threat to your life.
BTW If you really want to find a relatively long-lived sector of the society, it would be the high clergy, which had all the upsides of noble life (food, warmth in winter) and almost none of the downsides (most wouldn't fight, murder was less common). This is the only "job" which saw some 70 y.o.s still alive and active, mostly as cardinals.
Sure. We can also treat cancer better than ever before, but it would still be interesting to know where the rise in cancer cases came from, even if we can patch around the problem and are better off overall. Same for dental health: my understanding is also that people didn't used to need toothpaste to enjoy a comparable dental health
a lot of it comes from better detection as much as poor diets and very low amounts of exercise.
My understanding is that they were often missing multiple teeth.
Absolutely false.
Check out Nutrition and physical degeneration book by Weston Price.
All you need to do is to look at the pictures in the book, you don't even need to read it.
> Never in History have humans had as good teeth as they do today.
This is absolutely untrue. What is your reference?
Never in history have so many people had such "good" looking teeth, but they involve an enormous amount of prosthesis and amalgam. Veneers aren't good teeth, they're intentionally destroyed teeth used to root false teeth.
And brushing, although it keeps teeth clean and not stinky, deepens the gum pockets around teeth that host the microorganisms that will eventually uproot them.
I'll take my bets on modern day britain having much better dental health than any other british era back to the romans. Starchy food + no brushing = bad news.
Chewing plant twigs to clean teeth is an ancient way of tooth cleaning in many cultures[1]. I wonder if the Lignin or Suberin in plants acts the same was as Keratin in this study.
Just make sure to identify the plant first, and ensure it is suited for that (unlike the poison oak twig which the naïve city kid picked on one training deployment when trying to impress the country rubes with his knowledge of woodcraft --- fortunately a medic was able to perform a tracheotomy when the allergic reaction swelled his windpipe shut).
My grandmother was hospitalized, as a child, after she ate a hotdog she roasted on a poison oak stem.
Yes! I've seen people with some very striking white teeth in India which is a place where people often do have horrible teeth (often from betel nut use). So the twig users sometimes really stand out. The Wikipedia article has a good point about frequent use though - some people clean their teeth with these twigs almost like a nervous habit and are very intense about it.
What the article doesn't mention is the salivation that Neem twigs cause! Neem trees also produce a biocide called azadirachtin and although the concentration is low in twigs maybe it helps clean the teeth when used a lot?
I used a Neem based shampoo for a short period, but my wife complained that it had an atrocious smell. Guess Neem based oral hygiene would take this to the next level...
But why not chew on hair directly?
Because you'll get a bezoar (hairball).
Not if you drink coca cola, which is even listed in medical books as a way to disolve it. You might get IR though :)
I don't think there's a need to consume it, this looks like a topical application.
Which would neutralize the effect of the hair on your teeth! I guess there's no free lunch. ;)
What's IR?
I think GP is referring to Insulin Resistance
Coca cola is also good at dissolving teeth - makes it quite counterproductive.
Which you then spit out like chewed up gum.
no one said to swallow it silly!
I can see flossing with it, but chewing?
Beetle exoskeletons are not made of keratin. Try eating non-defeathered poultry.
Another great reason to chew on my nail clippings!
“Made from hair” is clickbait — the research is about keratin, a common structural protein.
They literally made it from hair (wool) though… So it’s fairly accurate.
I guess it implies human hair.
FWIW, I did not assume human hair.
Hah, I didn't assume that either, it was only until after I read the first sentence of the article, "Toothpaste made from your own hair.."
Human hair is probably easiest to source in quantity, given it is a waste product in hair dressers world wide. Other current uses are wigs, and cleaning oil spills.
In the Dutch public TV program "Keuringsdienst van Waarde" they had an episode about bread improvement ingredient (keratine) and traced it down to being sourced from human hair collected at hairdressers in China. Sounds disgusting of course, but many raw materials are, and after processing industrial grade pure keratine is the output.
https://www.bnnvara.nl/joop/artikelen/chinees-mensenhaar-ver...
Ok, we've taken hair out of the title above.
This is also why people who bite their nails don't get cavities.
Sadly not true. Source: my teeth and nails.