A new study published in The Journals of Gerontology Series A found that if you don’t take care of your teeth, you’re more likely to suffer from inflammation, reduced brain size, and heart damage. At first glance, this may seem like a reach. What do teeth have to do with the brain and heart? But as one of the researchers, Dr. Benjamin Trumbull, told Salon, “The way we think about health is to think of the body as two parts. “Our culture of putting mouths in one category and everything else in the other is wrong.”

In fact, your oral health has a huge impact on the rest of your body. The scientists behind a recent paper discovered this by examining more than 700 pairs of teeth. All belonged to members of little-known South American tribes.

The Tsimane people, an indigenous group living in the Bolivian lowlands, live a much simpler life than the majority of humans. While the rest of us thrive or drown in a world of post-industrial technology, this community lives a traditional lifestyle of foraging and growing their own food. They are not exposed to the pollution, reduced physical activity, and poor diets that cause epidemic levels of heart and brain disease in developed societies. As a result, when researchers drew connections between each individual’s oral health and cardiovascular and brain health, they felt more secure that their findings would not be confounded by extraneous variables.

The study found that oral health in the region was generally poor, but also had low rates of dementia and cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, those with a large amount of damaged teeth had higher rates of inflammation, brain tissue loss, and aortic valve calcification. In contrast, damaged or missing teeth were not associated with coronary artery calcium or thoracic aortic calcium.

“I think this really highlights the importance of oral health in overall health,” Trumbull, a professor at Arizona State University’s Center for Evolutionary Medicine, told Salon via email. Trumbull cited the famous expression, “Don’t look at the inside of a mouth like it’s a gift horse,” as evidence that people have always suspected the link between health and examining an animal’s teeth. However, humans are often culturally unable to apply the same logic to ourselves that we do to horses.

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“Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health,” Trumbull said. “Currently, we distinguish between health insurance and dental insurance, but in reality both impact our health and aging.”

So why do we arbitrarily divide dentistry into its own form of medical care that is not equally covered by insurance? In fact, despite clear evidence to the contrary, teeth are a matter of “look” is often treated as. In fact, the website for Covered California, the largest state-based health insurance marketplace in the United States, is clear about this: “Adult dental insurance is not considered an essential health benefit.” Because adult dental insurance is offered separately from health insurance, there is no financial assistance to purchase these dental plans. ”

But even before this study, scientists had established strong links between oral health and inflammation, cardiovascular and brain health. But the new paper shows that it exists in populations that are free not only from the environmental devastation of industrialism and factory farming, but also from social injustices, particularly social injustices that negatively impact oral health. The relationship is further clarified by showing the following.

Trumbull said the Tsimane are “much lower on the socio-economic gradient and have little access to modern dental care.” “This allows us to actually look at the relationship between oral health and chronic disease without confounding social factors” — meaning that in developed societies like the United States, socio-economic conditions The fact is that they tend to provide inferior dental care compared to people with lower rates.

“That’s the real power of this paper: it allows us to assess the association between dental health and cardiovascular and brain health, independent of confounding from socio-economic status,” Professor Trumbull said.

The new paper also provides useful background to research conducted on how oral health relates to other forms of health. A January paper published in the journal BMC Oral Health found that tooth decay reduces the thickness of the cerebral cortex in BANKSSTS. BANKSSTS is a brain region important for language-related functions and is the region most affected in Alzheimer’s disease.

Similarly, a January paper published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology concluded that people who wear dentures are more likely to develop coronary artery disease, stroke, myocardial infarction, heart failure, and type 2 diabetes . Additionally, a 2022 paper published in the International Journal of Dentistry found that people with significant tooth loss and diabetes, as well as those with just significant tooth loss, have lower levels of serum C-reactive protein (CRP). ) was also found to be likely to have increased levels. Liver enzymes that indicate inflammation. They also found that people who regularly flossed their teeth were more likely to have higher CRP levels.

There’s a lot we don’t understand about how our mouths and the rest of our health are intertwined. Just last week, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle discovered that the bacteria that live in our mouths, Fusobacterium nucleatumis associated with an increase in colorectal tumors.

However, much of the research to date has included the possibility that some external factor, such as diet or environment, could explain the relationship between the mouth and these symptoms. Thanks to Trumbull and the extensive research team that included anthropologists, cardiologists, neurologists, radiologists, and dentists who joined him, researchers now have a large-scale research team that includes anthropologists, cardiologists, neurologists, radiologists, and dentists. Cohort-based studies can now be considered.

The experience wasn’t just educational, it was inspirational for Trumbull.

“Working with the Tsimane people over the past decade and a half has been one of the great honors of my life,” Trumbull said. “Modern urban living is an evolutionary novelty. We were hunter-gatherers for 99% of human history. The sedentary lifestyles we live today are a result of the rest of humanity’s past. It’s very different.”

Post-industrial urban life is so abnormal compared to what our physiology was intended for that “we are essentially living outside the bounds of our manufacturers’ recommended bodily guarantees.” ” says Trumbull. “Although most of human evolution took place in traditional subsistence groups, nearly all health research has been conducted in urban centers, which means that health before the advent of electricity, cars, and grocery stores was We have no idea what it was like.”

Trumbull added, “Working with people like the Tsimane is a great experience and gives us a better understanding of the health problems that people had before living in the city.” .