Why Do We Have Crooked Teeth When Our Ancestors Didn’t?
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Evidence shows that people in ancient times typically had straight teeth set well into strong jaws, with even wisdom teeth fitting properly.
So, what went wrong? Did evolution do us a disservice?
Some information to chew on
Transition from hard-to-chew diets to processed, refined foods over millennia has reduced jaw size while tooth size stayed constant. Smaller jaws lead to tooth crowding, crookedness, and impacted wisdom teeth, requiring braces or extractions in modern times.
However, all is not lost!
Studies on non-human animals show softer diets reduce jaw and facial growth, causing dental crowding. In other words: dental crowding is primarily attributed to dietary and lifestyle changes, though genetics may play a role.
And notably, when it comes to humans, populations with less processed diets experience fewer dental problems, suggesting lifestyle modifications could help prevent tooth crowding.
And no, it is not too late. Remember, you are rebuilding your body all the time, including your bones!
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
The Exercises That Can Fix Sinus Problems (And More) ← this also improves the jaw structure
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When You “Should” Be In Better Shape
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It’s easy to think that we “should” be many things that we aren’t. However, it can be counterproductive to implementing real change:
The problem with “should”
The word “should” often sabotages changes in mindset and habit formation. Saying things like “I should be further along” typically leads to frustration, feelings of failure, and ultimately a lack of motivation to take action. Yes, in the first instance, “I should…” can be a motivator, but when your goals are not achieved by the second session, and the “I should…” is still there, the subconscious says “well, clearly this is not working”. Even though the conscious mind can easily see the fallacy in that dysfunctional line of thinking, the subconscious is easily swayed by such things, and in turn easily sways our actual behaviors.
Also, even before that, if goals feel impossible, people often do nothing instead of making small, manageable changes.
So, what should we do instead?
Step 1: assess your current lifestyle and priorities. Your current results are a reflection of past habits and actions, including dieting practices, inconsistent workouts, and lack of planning. Instead of searching for a “perfect plan,” first acknowledge your current lifestyle and priorities. Then, identify which habits are beneficial, which ones hold you back, and what common excuses you make. By understanding where you are now, you can create a sustainable plan that fits your life rather than fighting against it.
Step 2: define your future lifestyle. It’s not enough to just set goals—you need to define what the lifestyle associated with those goals looks like. Recognize that real change requires adjustments in habits and routines. Don’t stress over whether these changes feel overwhelming; simply identify what might be necessary. Writing things down (and then consulting them often, not just putting them away never to be seen again) makes them more tangible and helps create a roadmap for progress.
Step 3: make one small change today. Rather than making vague or overwhelming changes, start with one small, realistic step that aligns with your goals. Building momentum through cumulatively beneficial small actions leads to longer-lasting motivation. Also, instead of focusing on what you need to cut out, look for positive habits to add, as this makes change easier. Track your progress visibly—like using a checklist—and commit to revisiting and adding new changes weekly.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
How To Plan For The Unplannable And Always Follow Through
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Healthy Harissa Falafel Patties
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
You can make these as regular falafel balls if you prefer, but patties are quicker and easier to cook, and are great for popping in a pitta.
You will need
For the falafels:
- 1 can chickpeas, drained, keep the chickpea water (aquafaba)
- 1 red onion, roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp chickpea flour (also called gram flour or garbanzo bean flour)
- 1 bunch parsley
- 1 tbsp harissa paste
- Extra virgin olive oil for frying
For the harissa sauce:
- ½ cup crème fraîche or plant-based equivalent (you can use our Plant-Based Healthy Cream Cheese recipe and add the juice of 1 lemon)*
- 1 tbsp harissa paste (or adjust this quantity per your heat preference)
*if doing this, rather than waste the zest of the lemon, you can add the zest to the falafels if you like, but it’s by no means necessary, just an option
For serving:
- Wholegrain pitta or other flatbread (you can use our Healthy Homemade Flatbreads recipe)
- Salad (your preference; we recommend some salad leaves, sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, maybe some sliced onion, that sort of thing)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Blend the chickpeas, 1 oz of the aquafaba, the onion, the parsley, and the harissa paste, until smooth. Then add in the chickpea flour until you get a thick batter. If you overdo it with the chickpea flour, add a little more of the aquafaba to equalize. Refrigerate the mixture for at least 30 minutes.
2) Heat some oil in a skillet, and spoon the falafel mixture into the pan to make the patties, cooking on both sides (you can use a spatula to gently turn them), and set them aside.
3) Mix the harissa sauce ingredients in a small bowl.
4) Assemble; best served warm, but enjoy it however you like!
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in more of what we have going on today:
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
- Hero Homemade Hummus ← another great option
Take care!
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Staring At The Sun – by Dr. Irvin Yalom
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
A quick note first: there are two editions of this book; the content is the same, but the cover is different. So if in your region it has a bright yellow cover and the subtitle is the excitable “Overcoming The Terror Of Death” rather than the more measured “Being At Peace With Your Own Mortality”, that is why; different regional publishers made different choices.
For most of us, dying is the last thing we want to do. We may fear it; we may ignore it; we may try to beat it—but it’s a constant existential threat whether we want it or not.
This book is about “death anxiety”, either direct (conscious fear of impending death) or sublimated (not necessarily realising what we’re avoiding thinking about it). In its broadest sense, the fear of death can be described as rational. But angst about it probably won’t help, so this book looks to help us overcome that.
The style of the book is largely anecdotal, in which the author uses examples from his therapeutic practice to illustrate ways in which the fear of death can manifest, and ways in which it can be managed healthily.
Subjective criticism: while this author developed existential therapy, many of the ideas in this book lean heavily on the psychodynamic approach derived from Freud, and this reviewer isn’t a fan of that. But nevertheless, many of the examples here are thought-provoking and useful, so it is not too strong a criticism.
Bottom line: there are many ways to manage one’s mortality, and this book brings attention to a range of possibilities.
Click here to check out Staring At The Sun, and manage your mortality!
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How To Avoid Age-Related Macular Degeneration
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Avoiding Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Eye problems can strike at any age, but as we get older, it becomes a lot more likely. In particular, age-related macular degeneration is, as the name suggests, an age-bound disease.
Is there no escaping it, then?
The risk factors for age-related macular degeneration are as follows:
- Being over the age of 55 (can’t do much about this one)
- Being over the age of 65 (risk climbs sharply now)
- Having a genetic predisposition (can’t do much about this one)
- Having high cholesterol (this one we can tackle)
- Having cardiovascular disease (this one we can tackle)
- Smoking (so, just don’t)
Genes predispose; they don’t predetermine. Or to put it another way: genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger.
Preventative interventions against age-related macular degeneration
Prevention is better than a cure in general, and this especially goes for things like age-related macular degeneration, because the most common form of it has no known cure.
So first, look after your heart (because your heart feeds your eyes).
See also: The Mediterranean Diet
Next, eat to feed your eyes specifically. There’s a lot of research to show that lutein helps avoid age-related diseases in the eyes and the rest of the brain, too:
See also: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It
Do supplements help?
They can! There was a multiple-part landmark study by the National Eye Institute, a formula was developed that reduced the 5-year risk of intermediate disease progressing to late disease by 25–30%. It also reduced the risk of vision loss by 19%.
You can read about both parts of the study here:
Age-Related Eye Disease Studies (AREDS/AREDS2): major findings
As you can see, an improvement was made between the initial study and the second one, by replacing beta-carotene with lutein and zeaxanthin.
The AREDS2 formula contains:
- 500 mg vitamin C
- 180 mg vitamin E
- 80 mg zinc
- 10 mg lutein
- 2 mg copper
You can learn more about these supplements, and where to get them, here on the NEI’s corner of the official NIH website:
AREDS 2 Supplements for Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Take care of yourself!
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Dial Down Your Pain
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This is Dr. Christiane Wolf. Is than an MD or a PhD, you ask? The answer is: yes (it is both; the latter being in psychosomatic medicine).
She also teaches Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which as you may recall is pretty much the most well-evidenced* form of meditation there is, in terms of benefits:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
*which is not to claim it is necessarily the best (although it also could be); rather, this means that it is the form of meditation that’s accumulated the most scientific backing in total. If another equal or better form of meditation enjoyed less scientific scrutiny, then there could an alternative out there languishing with only two and a half scientific papers to its name. However, we at 10almonds are not research scientists, and thus can only comment on the body of evidence that has been published.
In any case, today is going to be about pain.
What does she want us to know?
Your mind does matter
It’s easy to think that anything you can do with your mind is going to be quite small comfort when your nerves feel like they’re on fire.
However, Dr. Wolf makes the case for pain consisting of three components:
- the physical sensation(s)
- the emotions we have about those
- the meaning we give to such (or “the story” that we use to describe it)
To clarify, let’s give an example:
- the physical sensations of burning, searing, and occasionally stabbing pains in the lower back
- the emotions of anguish, anger, despair, self-pity
- the story of “this pain has ruined my life, is making it unbearable, will almost certainly continue, and may get worse”
We are not going to tell you to throw any of those out of the window for now (and, would that you could throw the first line out, of course).
The first thing Dr. Wolf wants us to do to make this more manageable is to break it down.
Because presently, all three of those things are lumped together in a single box labelled “pain”.
If each of those items is at a “10” on the scale of pain, then this is 10×10×10=1000.
If our pain is at 1000/10, that’s a lot. We want to leave the pain in the box, not look at it, and try to distract ourselves. That is one possible strategy, by the way, and it’s not always bad when it comes to giving oneself a short-term reprieve. We balanced it against meditation, here:
Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically)
However, back to the box analogy, if we open that box and take out each of those items to examine them, then even without changing anything, even with them all still at 10, they can each be managed for what they are individually, so it’s now 10+10+10=30.
If our pain is at 30/10, that’s still a lot, but it’s a lot more manageable than 1000/10.
On rating pain, by the way, see:
Get The Right Help For Your Pain
Dealing with the separate parts
It would be nice, of course, for each of those separate parts to not be at 10.
With regard to the physical side of pain, this is not Dr. Wolf’s specialty, but we have some good resources here at 10almonds:
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- 10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief: When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
When it comes to emotions associated with pain, Dr. Wolf (who incidentally is a Buddhist and also a teacher of same, and runs meditation retreats for such), recommends (of course) mindfulness, and what in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is called “radical acceptance” (in Buddhism, it may be referred to as being at one with things). We’ve written about this here:
“Hello, Emotions”: Radical Acceptance In CBT & DBT
Once again, the aim here is still not to throw the (often perfectly valid) emotions out of the window (unless you want to), but rather, to neutrally note and acknowledge the emotions as they arrive, á la “Hello, despair. Depression, my old foe, we meet again. Hello again, resentment.” …and so on.
The reason this helps is because emotions, much like the physical sensations of pain, are first and foremost messengers, and sometimes (as in the case of chronic pain) they get broken and keep delivering the message beyond necessity. Acknowledging the message helps your brain (and all that is attached to it) realize “ok, this message has been delivered now; we can chill about it a little”.
Having done that, if you can reasonably tweak any of the emotions (for example, perhaps that self-pity we mentioned could be turned into self-compassion, which is more useful), that’s great. If not, at least you know what’s on the battlefield now.
When we examine the story of our pain, lastly, Dr. Wolf invites us to look at how one of the biggest drivers of distress under pain is the uncertainty of how long the pain will last, whether it will get worse, whether what we are doing will make it worse, and so forth. See for example:
How long does back pain last? And how can learning about pain increase the chance of recovery?
And of course, many things we do specifically in response to pain can indeed make our pain worse, and spread:
Dr. Wolf’s perspective says:
- Life involves pain
- Pain invariably has a cause
- What has a cause, can have an end
- We just need to go through that process
This may seem like small comfort when we are in the middle of the pain, but if we’ve broken it down into parts with Dr. Wolf’s “box method”, and dealt with the first two parts (the sensations and the emotions) as well as reasonably possible, then we can tackle the third one (the story) a little more easily than we could if we were trying to come at it with no preparation.
What used to be:
“This pain has ruined my life, is making it unbearable, will almost certainly continue, and may get worse”
…can now become:
“This pain is a big challenge, but since I’m here for it whether I want to be or not, I will suffer as I must, while calmly looking for ways to reduce that suffering as I go.”
In short: you cannot “think healing thoughts” and expect your pain to go away. But you can do a lot more than you might (if you left it unexamined) expect.
Want to know more from Dr. Wolf?
We reviewed a book of hers recently, which you might enjoy:
Outsmart Your Pain – by Dr. Christiane Wolf
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Healing The Modern Brain – by Dr. Drew Ramsey
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We previously reviewed Dr. Ramsey’s Eat To Beat Depression & Anxiety, and this time [it briefly covers that ground again, and then] it’s more about comprehensive brain health and mental fitness.
He tackles this in a methodical fashion, first briefly covering the need for mental fitness, and the obstacles to same, before the main part of the book—which covers the “how”.
The “how” in question is multifaceted, and the “nine tenets” mentioned in the subtitle cover very obvious things like diet, exercise, sleep, etc, as well as less obvious yet very important things like connection, engagement, purpose, and so forth, and some things that don’t get talked about much at all elsewhere, such as the processes of grounding and unburdening, as he describes them.
The style is mostly narrative with many anecdotes to illustrate points, but with practical advice woven throughout also, all very readable. There’s a respectable bibliography at the back.
Bottom line: if you’d like your brain health to get gradually better instead of gradually worse, this book can help set you on the right track.
Click here to check out Healing The Modern Brain, and heal your modern brain!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
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