Caries by pregnancy

2008/11/18 Lakar Iraizoz, Oihane - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Nekazaritza
• Anatomia/Fisiologia

The fact that they started having more children caused women to have more cavities than men.

They have always believed that the health of our teeth began to deteriorate when we changed the way we feed. When we stop being hunter-gatherers and become farmers we change our eating habits. The fact that we were able to produce food impoverished our food, as we grew very few species, which covered much of our diet. These foods were mainly cereals, such as wheat and corn, and we all know that cereals are very rich in sugars, specifically starch. The addition of sugars in the diet generally increases the joking of the teeth.

With the beginning of agriculture, in addition, we distributed the work by sex, and in that distribution, women had to spend more time eating... and being tempted to eat a snack. Hence most experts believe that women have more cavities than men.

John Lukacs studied 147 dental collections for the dental health of men and women. (Photo: EIA-Jordi Maestre

Another consequence of the conversion into a farmer was that we stopped moving. This allowed women to have more children because, on the one hand, they did not have to move forward and back with the children and, on the other, because having more access to food was easier for children to get ahead.

The anthropologist at the University of Oregon felt that the fact that women started having more children in agriculture was not going to affect their dental health in any way.

To see if his suspicion had any foundation, he studied 147 dental collections (thousands of teeth in total), from the populations of 12,000 years ago to those of 800 years ago. As we started with agriculture about 8,000 years ago, he was able to check the state of dental health both before and after becoming a farmer.

She reaffirmed that women have more and more dental problems since the creation of agrarian societies. He mentioned three reasons beyond simple eating habits. The first is that women have in pregnancy sweet foods, rich in energy, whims to eat.

Because when they are uncured food is collected many times in the fruit and vegetable industry. (Photo: Morguefile

The second reason was related to saliva. Women produce less saliva than men, leading to greater difficulty in eliminating food waste. In addition, during pregnancy there is a change in the chemical composition of saliva and, among other things, the antimicrobial action of saliva is reduced.

As a third reason he explained that during pregnancy estrogen is usually in large amounts and that estrogen is related to physiological factors such as caries formation. If pregnancies increased, the number of jokes could also increase.

Lukacs does not know to what extent each of the factors mentioned affects the risk that women have more cavities than men. However, in his opinion, it is not evident that it is an exclusively cultural issue, that is, of eating habits, since it has observed this general trend in populations belonging to different ethnic, cultural and costumbrist groups.

Published in Deia