Recipe for good teeth

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32677, 5 August 1971, Page 8

Recipe for good teeth

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) MANILA. A dentist who examined the filed and blackened - teeth of three men from a long-isolated tribe recently found in -a Philippines jungle said that to his surprise not one of the men had a single cavity. “It must be their simple diet,” he said. .. The tribesmen, who call themselyes ‘the' Tasaday, were discovered last month in a mountain. rain-forest of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. They live 1 a stone-age life and eat-the pith of palmtrees, wild roots and small animals. They had never tasted sugar, salt, corn or rice. The dentist, Ir Norton Winters, an American who has practised in Manila -for 20 years and is an honorary curator of the Philippines National Museum, said that the lack of cavities was the I biggest surprise of his exam- ■ ■nation. 1 Members of neighbouring, < more civilised tribes, had < “plenty of cavities.”' ' The Tasaday: file their > teeth down with sandstone— 1 some nearly to .the gum line —and blacken them with pitch or carbon. Anthropolo- i gists say that most primitive < people in the Philippines, do i that so that they will not ] have sharp white teeth like < animals. - 1