Does a Vegan diet mess up Facial Bones and make kids unattractive?
A well formed face is attractive and functional. Does diet affect facial bone development?
About 5 months ago I released a video titled Vegan diets don’t work. Here’s why
A friend was asking me about a particular section of Mic the Vegan’s video response to my video so I’ll share my thoughts on that part here. This also ties nicely into a topic that I’ve been really into lately: how improperly formed mouth, teeth and jaws can worsen sleep quality and even worsen posture, lead to muscoskeletal issues and even lower power output in the gym.
In my vegan video, I explain that the fat-soluble vitamins A, D and K2 work together to transport calcium and other minerals to ensure the proper formation of the bones. Weston A. Price alleged in his 1939 book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration that a key reason traditional diets afforded people much better facial and dental development (straight teeth, broad jaws, excellent sleep-affording airways) was because these diets had far more fat-soluble vitamins than the modern diets that were spreading at the time. Often, the traditional diets offered 10 times more the fat-soluble vitamins of the modern diets as well as much more minerals.
To keep this post from being way longer than it already is, we’ll just focus on the fat soluble vitamin D, which is primarily found in animal foods (or supplements). Some light digging revealed 20 studies highlighting the well-known fact that getting enough vitamin D is a challenge for vegans so they need to be vigilant with supplementation.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20] Further, 5 different studies specifically show that a vegan diet negatively affects bone health in adults and children.[1,2,3,4,5]
With that in mind, let’s take a look at Mic the Vegan’s comments on facial development in response to my video.
Mic the Vegan (5:16): “To summarize, he then says that the traditionally eaten animal product vitamins were actually what allowed people to form proper jaw structure and have enough room for their teeth. But by this logic, as these people switch to a more modern diet, wouldn't their bones also have malformations? All over their body. Like, wouldn't they have crooked, rickets like legs because they didn't have enough vitamins to form proper bone structure? They didn't.”
Mic is missing the point that we can expect sliding scale of negative effects that come from having suboptimal levels of nutrition. That is, as you progressively reduce the nutrition, you should get progressively worse development.
Obviously there is a fuzzy threshold of vitamin D deficiency that has to be passed to be classified as having rickets. Just like there is a spectrum of rickets (i.e. mild to awful) and you can have a mild vitamin D deficiency or an extreme deficiency, why shouldn’t we expect the body to respond differently to optimal nutrition than just-barely-good-enough nutrition?*
Of course there is a point where you hit ‘optimal’ nutrition and increasing the vitamin intake past that point won’t provide any more benefits. DJ Qualls can’t just stuff his kid with cod, goose and beef livers and expect him to grow up to have the jaw structure of an 1800’s Native American.
Mic’s saying ‘why didn’t the modern diet cause awfully malformed bones?’ isn’t too different from saying :
・If caffeine makes people more anxious, why aren’t coffee drinkers in a psych ward?
・If sugar is actually bad for the teeth, how come I still have teeth?
・If alcohol is so bad for you, how come I’m not dead?
Actually, on this note, the first time I started noticing bowed legs was when I was in Japan. It wasn’t until after a couple dates with one woman that I noticed that her legs were slightly bowed. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have noticed if she didn’t compliment my ‘straight’ legs.
A 2018 study concerned about the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in children in Japan found the prevalence of symptomatic vitamin D deficiency to be 3.5 out of 100,000 children. Investigating 89 children with D deficiency, 83% had bowed legs, 88% were exclusively breastfed, 49% had a poor diet and 31% had insufficient sun exposure. Considering 88% of them were breastfed but only 49% and 31% had poor diet and/or insufficient sun exposure, the mother’s health and nutrition is obviously very important for whether or not these children would develop improperly formed leg bones or not.
However, children with hypovitaminosis D do not always exhibit symptoms or signs associated with vitamin D deficiency.
I emphasized the word ‘symptomatic’ because physicians don’t consider a slightly too small upper jaw bone (maxilla) that leads to airway issues later in life as ‘pathological.’ Remember that because this will be important later. By the way, I doubt that that woman’s only slightly bowed legs would have even been considered ‘symptomatic.’
Mic the Vegan (5:40): “But what I don't think he looked at is what modern scientists actually have to say about why our teeth got crooked and jaws got smaller. One example is this 2020 paper in Oxford Academics Bioscience journal mentioning that, based on previous research, the effect of loading bone with heavier mastication or chewing appears to directly affect the density and size of these facial structures and that food consistency determines facial development, suggesting that a diet with harder textures enhances bone and muscle growth.”
Let me note that while Mic says ‘food consistency determines facial development,’ the paper he cites doesn’t speak so strongly - it only says that food consistency has an “effect” on orofacial development. I highlight this because it seems Mic is arguing that heavy mastication is the major or only determinant of facial development (aside from genes), especially since his point is to discount my assertions about the importance of fat-soluble vitamins for facial bone development.
So let’s take a look at why we should expect optimal nutrition to have different effects on facial development from just-barely-good-enough nutrition. This is very important point because the development of facial bones affects attractiveness, straightness of the teeth and often affects sleep quality and even athletic performance.
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