And don’t forget the dentistry. That’s the best answer to someone who wants to live in the ‘idyll’ of yesteryear
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Funny enough, when you're dirt poor with no access to anything, your teeth will last a lot longer. They didn't have access to refined sugars in the middle ages. They had a starchy diet but that didn't do as much damage as a high sugar diet.
I'm Indigenous Canadian and I have family photos of my grandparents and great grandparents from 100 years ago. They had amazing teeth into adulthood because they seldom ate any refined sugar.
Grain-based diets in particular can do some damage, but generally it's a different form of dentistry required - tooth damage from grindstone dust in the flour wearing teeth down to eventually require extraction, or malnutrition causing gum damage and eventually affecting the teeth.
Diets with a healthy selection of plant and animal products, on the other hand, are generally just all-around better for your teeth than modern diets.
Volume and amount of food also saves your teeth.
We live in a world where we constantly gorge ourselves with all kinds of food. We get bored and we just reach out to eat something.
I grew up poor but not so poor that we starved but what I do remember as a kid was that we had enough but nothing more. Mom always made us a giant pot of porridge every morning, then a huge lunch of something and then nothing for supper. If we felt like wanting a snack for something in the evening, there was nothing, you just drank some tea or drank water and you ignored your hunger. It was so normal to not eat past about 4pm that at one point I just stopped noticing. I do remember a few times finding bread and we'd eat toast ... we were so short on food that instead of butter, we used lard instead.
I didn't have the best diet when I was a kid. I ate and gorged on candy, chips and pop whenever I could but we did with so little that we seldom had the opportunity to eat these things. I gobbled up sugar things whenever I could find them. So by the time I was 20, I had all my teeth, decent gums and few cavities .... one of the few side benefits of being poor and not eating enough.
Ah yes, the sleek, svelte Iberian isthmus of yore
Y'all know your Europe maps better than I do, but I feel that this map's got a lot of Europe under water.
Anything I should know?
The past was the worst.
Said the person from 45 minutes ago
Edit - looking back on this comment from an hour ago, I wish to apologize. I was not in a good place back then, the past was indeed horrible and I would like to offer up my sincerest hopes that the impending future be filled with positivity and love for all!
Exactly, I would know.
I edited my comment to reflect my current mindset. You are indeed correct, the past was horrible and while I can't change what was done, I can move forward learning from the mistakes I made.
That's some USDA Prime trolling, fellow netizen.
It ain't much but it's honest work
Ha, I took it as a joke, and I liked it.
When we were younger, we used to include in our conversations: "Remember back when we were stupid?" to the point that it became "Remember back when we were stupid? Five minutes ago?"
Glad you got it! I even set a timer so I could come back and make my dumb joke.
God I was so cringe back lol
I must admit that I didn't fully "get it" until after I had hit send on my last reply.
You are why I love the internet.
I'd rather deal with Aztec raiding parties than trying to find a job in America in 2025.
Mister Neon's new job: organ donor
They've definitely got the heart for it
You beat me to the punchline by like 30 seconds.
Our hearts must beat as one
What can I say my heart is into it.
Not a fan of the rampant rape and murder of the previous few millennia and I enjoy reading and showers and functional medicine. If we could bring back peasant revolts, I’d be perfectly happy
Peasant revolts 🤢
Burgher revolts 😎
Yeah, but nowadays we have to do the dishes. And then tomorrow, have to do the dishes AGAIN! So, pretty much the same.
Dishes, but they're all wood, and no running water 😬
I read a book on Stalinist-era Soviet sanitation systems earlier this year, and let me tell you, just the description of lugging water from the local pump up to one's apartment to do dishes, laundry, cook, etc, sounded absolutely miserable
Ah yes, this was before Copenhagen migrated from Poland to Zealand
And Warsaw was just an empty plain 😔
You're 50 years old?!! .... Wow! ... are you some kind of wizard or something? What spell did you cast or what magic did you use to live so long? My father, grandfather and all their siblings all died at 25 and I'm only 16 and half of all my children already died before their first year.
Low average life expectancy doesn't mean you can't get old. If you survive the first few years of childhood, you have a decent chance of getting reasonably old. The average is being pulled down by high child mortality.
Both are true - half of all children dying before age 10 in some pre-modern societies, for example, really drives the average life expectancy down.
On the other hand, people who made it to adulthood did die much younger than we did on average - in places, as low as one's 30s is the average; more often, 40s or 50s. Still comparatively young. You'll not know your grandchildren for more than a handful of years.
These are still averages. Just because the average person dies in their 30s or 40s, you wouldn't be called a wizard because you lived to 50 or higher. It wasn't as common to get old as it is today but there were definitely people living into their 60s, 70s or even higher.
I remember reading a passage from Pliny the Younger, I think, in which he expresses surprise over the good health of a particular mountain town. It was so good, he noted, that some people even had living grandfathers!
Living now, or dying then?
I'm taking the second option. With enthusiasm, if I can get a guarantee that my plague-infested corpse with be trebucheted over the enemy walls.
I'll take dying now, as long as it happens quickly. Getting tired of all this "hurry up and wait" shit. Aren't we all supposed to be mortal? smh
I could use some plague
But afterwards, demand for workers was high and compensation was better.
it seems like people got so fed up with this "actually life back then sucked" that we've all decided to make the future objectively worse than living with the plague..
Best part was that all those beakie plague doctors were the equivalent of snake oil salesmen