Meet and Meat

For many humans, and in particular, my Filipino ancestors, it was never “meet and greet” at parties but “meet and eat” or more accurately “meet and meat”, as we were prodigious consumers of animals like pork and beef at special occasions, and in fact every day at home. As dental providers ourselves, we might ask what do our teeth themselves say about eating meat? Well our front teeth, the incisors, come to a sharp ridge on their working end, and are good for biting through meat. However, the rear teeth, the molars, are flat, like an herbivore’s, and are good at grinding tough things like fibrous vegetables. Also, our jaws are capable of moving side to side when we chew, also good for processing vegetables. If you compare our teeth to a true carnivore’s, like the fox skull below, you see that many of the fox’s teeth, the premolars, are sharply pointed and serrated like a knife edge, with very sharp canines to puncture veins and kill prey. So no, we are not adapted to biting animals to death and consuming them like a carnivore. We are adapted to fine dinners at restaurants! I am only partly joking. We are truly adapted for eating cooked food. Cooked food and humans have developed in biological history side by side. The introduction of cooking made meat and especially raw vegetables easier to chew with less energy expended to digest. The energy saved may have gone into developing the most nutrient expensive organ in the body: your brain. So next time you are eating cooked pancit or adobo and someone asks, why do you eat such food, you might say “its evolution, baby”.  Best wishes – ProDentalFx, LLC (Source: Wikipedia)