Part 2 | Darwinian Dentistry: Early Childhood Nutrition, Dentofacial Development, and Chronic Disease

As was discussed in Darwinian Dentistry Part 1: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Etiology of Malocclusion¹, the concept of a genome-environment mismatch is one explanation for the high rates of systemic diseases of civilization (DC’s) now seen in industrialized popfigulations that were seldom, if ever, present in ancestral populations. Evidence from various academic disciplines suggests a correlation between risk for chronic systemic DC’s like type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease, and changed dietary practices associated with industrialization. The mismatch hypothesis can also help explain the relatively recent increasing prevalences of certain chronic DC’s of oral origin; dental caries, periodontal disease and malocclusion are oral infirmities that have plagued mankind since the advent of agriculture some 10-12,000 years ago, but have only begun increasing in frequency over the past 250-300 years, and mainly in cultures consuming an industrial-type diet. Human fossil and pre-Industrial skeletal evidence suggest that the relatively recent secular trend in increasing worldwide prevalence of human malocclusion seems to closely coincide with changed dietary practices since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th-mid/late 19th centuries.