DENTAL PERFECTION

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 April 1932, Page 8

DENTAL PERFECTION

TRISTAN DE CUNHA RESIDENTS Inquiry into the health of the residents of the islands of Tristan de Cunha during the recent visit of H.M.S. Carlisle showed that they have no diseases, accident, or old age being the only causes of death. A special dental examination was made of 156 of the islanders whose ages ranged from infancy to 92, and not a single instance of decay was found. One of the investigators, Mt. J. R. A. Moore, president of the Dental Society of the Cape Province, states that such dental perfection is entirely outside the experience of his profession in any other community, and the puzzle of it lay in the fact that the conditions under which the islanders lived are in marked conflict with those which modern scientific research lays down as desirable for dental health. “A clean tooth never decays,” he said is an accepted axiom, and yet the islanders' never clean their teeth. And it is a dental maxim that “hard tack” is desirable for the life of teeth, and yet the food of the islanders is entirely soft. The staple diet of the people, it was determined, was potatoes, fish, milk, and eggs. Meat is eaten only on high days and holidays. The mode of diet of the people is that they never eat more than one kind of food at a time, and this, as Bishop Watts says, may be the reason for their perfect health. In living on potatoes chiefly as they do, they live on ‘,bare” potatoes— that is, potatoes eaten without salt and unaccompanied by tea or any other food; fish they eat with nothing else, and penguin eggs—perhaps three at a time —are eaten alone.