Telluride Pediatric Conference PowerPoint Presentation

The goal of this talk, is to change the way we approach  health, both as practitioners and patients.

I hope I can show you how important the evolutionary approach is, while stimulating the idea that lifestyle is the foundation of health.

I will include the craniofacial complex, of course

Our environment is ultimately what matters because 90% of disease is causes by it, including our lifestyle.

 the next three slides are related to this new paradigm

Head banging is either cured by giving a helmet the western medicine approach, or by stopping the behavior.

This is very important to understand!!!!!

The more harmonious our environment and behaviors are, the healthier we are

Dogs are just like us

They eat too many carbs and don’t move

They now have all of our diseases

This is a very important concept. Too much was made of the human genome project. No miracles came from it. Christopher Wild got tired of the relentless obsession.

 He described the exposome as the cause of 90% of our disease, not the genome.

I was introduced to the concept of the exposome of the craniofacial complex immediately.

My professor was onto the exposome, he just did not know the term yet

For the next several minutes, I am going to talk about a bunch of different things that have something to do with our evolution and development. This slide is incorrect. Live is 4 billion years old.

But first, I want to share some really useful short videos that you can show your patients.

They are from James Nestor. I show these to every patient. Its very powerful!!!

10,000 years of Craniofacial change

Paleolithic to Neolithic to Modern

Sagittal Changes Over Several Hundred Years

Sagittal Changes to the Airway

We probably thought the least believable part of this movie was Raquel Welch. It is probably the most accurate.

Sorry, no dinosaurs, but probably handsome healthy people with well formed faces and straight teeth. I wonder what they mean by scenic splendors?

Notice that the normal state is warm with no ice caps.

We are currently in an ice age, we have the good fortune (maybe) of being in an interglacial

They call the current epoch the Holocene because humans influence the environment more now than ever, but beside that, the same as the Pleistocene epoch

Not much grows when its cold. We were hunters!!!

The star is about where modern humans come in, We have survived three or four glaciations!!!

The next four slides describe diet classification for the sake of clarity. Most animals are classified as omnivores, however, they specialize most often.

Generalization is called eurytopy-most animals don’t use this strategy

Stenotopy is specialization, most animals do this

Trophic levels best describe what we call food webs

We have the same trophic level as anchovies

To this point I have discussed the climate and defined trophic levels. Let’s look at food availability and a few other things.

Humans are unique in the way we process food before we eat it. This makes us CUCINAVORES.

The bottom part explains some of the methods and benefits.

We may have been wired to enjoy cooked foods.

Apes prefer it over their uncooked food!

Natural fires may have introduced cooked foods.

We have been cooking for perhaps a half a million years.

Cooking is also very unique and helps predigest food, making it safer and more nutritious.

Humans have consumed cooked foods for around 250,000 to 400,000 years which is enough generations for the changes in our guts to occur.

We have highly acidic stomachs, long small intestines, small colons, and a non-functional cecum

The last slide, and many researchers and physicians ignore the mouth!!!

Leiberman: Less chewing, makes for  smaller jaws, smaller GIs, and larger brain

Softer more nutritious foods helped our brains develop. Kleiber’s law defines the relationship between the size of an animal and the size of their brain.

The increase in hominin brain size started with meat consumption but accelerated only relatively recently.

Miki Ben-Dor states that the evidence points to humans relying on large fatty animals for our primary nutritional needs

Miki Ben-Dor is my go-to researcher when trying to understand what we were eating during our recent evolution.

It wasn’t brontosaurus burgers, nor was it chicken, salads and smoothies!

It is interesting to note that plants have their own pesticides. Most plants will harm. Cooking helps.

Hunter gatherer bands were small. An elephant, wooly rhinoceros, or giant beaver could feed us for long periods, hence…

We have the stomach acid of a scavenger

We need to kill pathogens with it.

Incidentally, it is difficult to maintain high gastric PH on modern diets.

We mistake the inability to digest meat with the meat, instead of low stomach acid.

Meanwhile, we can’t break down fiber in any state of health.

More evidence of our diets comes from analysis of nitrogen isotopes. Neanderthals were top-level carnivores, we come in higher-level in many instances

This 2022 study pokes a hole in the blue zone theory

Hong Kong, a densely populated metropolis with scant resources, eats the most animal-based food and has the longest lifespan.

Not what we would expect.

Here is the plot of animal-based foods and life expectancy from less than one year ago.

It is true that carbs are fermented into short chain fatty acids.

It is false that they are the only means

Karl Popper told us to pay more attention to observations that go against current thinking

My Postulate is that meat is close to an ideal food

We eat smaller animals and added more vegetable due to the warmer climate

The neolithic period is the real start of our troubles

Jared Diamond has several good books like Guns, Germs, and Steel. This essay is quite something.

In a nutshell, we shrank, we got cavities, our brains shrank. We recovered our height, but not brains

The introduction of processing grain seed into flour is the root cause of our problem.

Our plaque ferments it and acid is produced, melting our teeth.

Also, the colonies in our mouths and guts change in numerous ways, producing toxins like lipopolysaccharides that cause chronic low-grade infections.

The modern foods are the dense acellular carbohydrates shown in dark. The only ancestral one that is also dense, cassava, needs processing to detoxify it of cyanide. These foods have replaced the more traditional, nutrient dense ones.

The government started to try to reverse our low-quality food choices

At the same time, WAP wrote nutrition and physical degeneration and described the displacing foods of modern commerce

Francis Pottenger experimented on cats and noticed poor craniofacial development with inferior diets. He drew parallels to humans.

He was correct on two points: nutritional value of foods, and consistency

Here is the result in a few generations

WAP was perhaps off on his reasoning, but his vitamins can stand as a proxy for animal-based foods non the less.

None of this is new.

George Catlin noted the perfect face and health of Native Americans and wrote about it in 1862

As Weston A. Price found, they have little decay and malocclusion

We can still be farmers and have good health

We don’t need to carnivores!!!

Dr. Corruccini is an amazing source of knowledge on the connection between hard foods and facial development.

It really went bad in the 70’s

George McGovern became an amateur nutritionist, much to our detriment.

He hired Louise Light, a nutritionist and rejected her recommendations.

To paraphrase Louise Light later, “if you do this, you will end up with a country of fat and sick people”

As much as we blame processed carbohydrates for decay, gum disease and small jaws, we need to look at vegetable oils the same way.

Once an agricultural waste, seeds would be pressed to extract industrial oils for lubrication.

Proctor and Gamble hydrogenated it into a solid and made candles and soap.

They then decided to make it a food.

Heart attacks were only first described in the AMA journal in 1912. We did not see one in a hospital setting until 1921.

Carbs are a bit down, vegetable oils are up, so is obesity and diabetes.

The fat studied was soybean oil.  The least amount of it resulted in the least weight gain, even while on a high carb diet!!!

This is the graph from the Chinese study showing how the soybean oil is correlated to weight gain

Once again, we have a black swan

Spoons ruin the transition to normal swallowing

12 to 18 months is ideal for their introduction

Rural Kentucky study Corruccini, University of Florence Cast study

The effect is somewhat bidirectional. For example, if it is hard to breathe because of small jaws, a forward head posture may help. On the other hand, a forward head posture will cause alterations in facial growth. A forward head posture generally results in a longer face, while a head-back posture, which is less common, results in a shorter face with a protruding chin.

We used to sleep on harder surfaces which may effect oral posture.

Third world: parasites and more germs: no allergies or autoimmune.

Perfect food

Perfect motion

This should not be controversial.

Why would we remove the perfect food, mother’s milk, to give rice cereal?

Babies need more nutrition due to rapid growth.

We are still developing digestive enzymes. The undigested carbohydrates may help the gut microbiome develop.

What does hard food do?

The forces are directed mesially.

The mesially directed forces diminish as we move to the midline

The next six slides will address some elements of mastication on facial and brain development

Toddlers can chew adeptly but use different methods.

The first molar does the most work, so this makes sense.

Despite correction of malocclusion, function can suffer!!!

Ortho Needs Myo

Fire together, wire together

If our brains can’t move our masticatory apparatus they won’t develop properly.

I repeat, ortho equals myo!!!

This is a list of the lifestyle changes between ancestral and modern people.

I’ll address some of these as we go along Changes in the Craniofacial-respiratory Complex Due to the Agricultural Revolution and Industrialization

Lets talk about pressure

The negative pressure collapses the eustachian tubes

The negative pressure sucks chyme into the esophagus.

Bad nutrition equals low stomach acid equals gastric pressure, priming us for GERD

The negative pressure is sensed by baroreceptors.

We compensate for the low oxygen and disrupted blood flow with adrenalin, causing a cascade of negative health consequences.

A few months ago the negative pressure was visualized in the heart and explains how we can suffer from enlarged hearts with apnea.

We need to renew ourselves daily with seven things. We can’t skip them. I use the analogy of making a cake. The seven ingredients can’t be too much or too few, just like a cake recipe, things will be off.

Snoring is not normal and the sleep physician I refer my patients to says all of it will eventually become apnea.

We are meant to get 7 to 8 hours. Children need more.

We can not be healthy with too little sleep.

Chronic stress elevates cortisol and adrenalin.

Both hinder growth and promote breakdown.

Both cause fight or flight symptoms, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar.

They also cause leptin resistance and increase ghrelin sensitivity which causes weight gain.

You can’t build anything worthwhile without quality building blocks

Walking is most important

Julianne Holt-Lunstad has determined that social integration is the biggest predictor of a long life.

Nurturing relationships are more effective than quitting smoking, drinking, and losing weight.

We need IR too!

Adequate non-burning sun decreases the likelihood of many conditions and The decrease in these conditions was independent of vitamin D status, demonstrating that sun exposure does more than just increase vitamin D.

We are optical vessels for infrared