Whether Weather Affects Our Oral Health, And If Climate Changes It Too
Whether Weather Affects Our Oral Health, And If Climate Changes It Too
Right at this moment, it’s 38ºC, with 76% humidity and heavy storms predicted. It doesn’t inspire you to do much, except find some oasis of safety for the car, and hide yourself from the heat. Outside, shade is just a concept. Opening the door is much like opening the oven, only there’s nothing delicious in there to look forward to. All the windows and doors are closed to keep the hot air out, and the ceiling fans are on full bore which seems barely enough. The dog is laying on the tiled floor draped in towels that were thrown in the sink, spun dry and shoved in the freezer. Her panting has finally stopped and she’s asleep.
Must’ve been the bowl of vanilla ice cream – and that’s the type of thing that has weather impact our oral health. What we munch, crunch and suck on, and whether we’re too heat fatigued to brush and floss before bed.
We have a relationship with temperature. Studies have found a correlation between high temperatures, and an increase in aggressive behaviour and violent crimes. Similarly, climate rather than weather identified a pattern in Italy, France, and Spain – all countries with notable condition variations between the north and south. Between 1950 and 2004, the frequency of civil conflict related to the phenomena of El Niño and La Niña; there was double the strife during the hotter and wetter El Niño years.
This relationship between temperature and violent tendency isn’t linear, but curvilinear. A Dallas study of the number of aggravated assaults in its city showed that as the temperature rose to 30˚C, so did the amount of attacks. Above that, violence decreased.
Well, duh. It’s too hot to do anything.
There’s also what’s known as the Baron and Bell’s model of ‘negative affect escape’ (NAE). It states that the discomfort caused by moderately high and moderately low temperatures promote aggression; but extreme temperatures induce other conflicting motives (like wanting to ‘escape’) and hostility abates.
I guess you can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Anecdotally on an almost 40ºC day, that’s a feat in itself. And just to clarify the essential difference between climate and weather, climate is what you expect; weather’s what you get.
Gloomy days generally lower our mood, although goths might debate that. Deeper thinking and focus comes more easily, with some studies finding that memory improves on cloudy, rainy days in comparison to sunny ones. Researchers tested the ability of Australian shoppers to recall the location and identity of several small items that had been randomly placed in a small shop. On leaving the store, participants were stopped across different times and weather conditions and on average, recall increased by 30% on overcast days.
The theory is that a good mood may result in declined memory because there’s less motivation to remember: either by the simple preference of wanting to hurry up and get on with enjoying the day; or figuring that the effort of recollection could spoil an uplifted state of mind. There are different types of cognitive processing – prominently, negative emotional states have us focus on bottom-up processing, while a positive temperament encourages top-down thinking. Although speculative, bottom-up processing might be more advantageous for simple memory tasks.
Could be that sunny days make your glasses slide off your nose making small, random, unexpected items impossible to notice.
It’s hot. I’m prone to say anything at this point.
The UK, Scandinavia, Russia, Western Europe, the US, Australia, and New Zealand are all well represented.
The US for instance, has the most – 420 – from a population of 346 million; Britain, with 69 million citizens, has 143 laureates. Currently inhabited by 27 million people, Australia has produced 15 Nobel prize winners. If that sounds paltry in comparison, were it to have the population of the US, that’d be 192 Nobelists and good reason to have a beer for each one.
Ostensibly, such inequality appears unsurprising. Simply illustrative of income and opportunity; but there are statistical techniques that remove these variables. The dispersion remains: and all due to climate and weather.
Having a long-term interest in what generally underpins creativity, Van de Vliert uses another indicator – the number of patents a country generates. He speculates that extremes are important: cold and heat stresses trigger ingenuity – as long as there are associated resources to support the research. Biting weather and sweltering heat promote inventiveness in wealthier nations, but inhibit creativity in poorer ones.
Even accounting for other variables, like intellectualisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation I’m not convinced it would take a Nobel laureate to work that one out.
Climate also affects the spread of parasites and disease, (much more common in hotter environments) and that certainly puts a dent in inspired thinking time. Whether it’s a wet or dry climate has little impact – but that surely ignores floods and drought. Climate crisis has increased the intensity and frequency of these extreme events, with Oxfam reporting that the ten worst hit countries had 24 in 2013.
In 2023, it was 656.
That’s enough to put your teeth on edge. While you’re dodging more parasites.
So to verify Van de Vliert’s valued verdict, variations in creativity across the world are constrained by climate, wealth, and parasite load.
What most scientists never really thought about, is how climate changes your oral microbiome. Logic predicts that it would; bacteria do best in warm environments: compared to being in 26ºC, there’s a 50-60 fold increase in microorganism growth when the temperature hits 34.
New and startling evidence tells us that where we live, and with whom we share our environment significantly shapes our oral microbiome, with genetics having almost no role. Household conditions primarily drive the makeup of mouth microbiota – so having your toothbrush generally sitting in hot temperatures for instance, will change the types and quantities of bacteria given the opportunity to move into your mouth.
Understanding how these colonies are formed and maintained in the saliva offers the development of a range of innovative treatments for dental and gum diseases.
Now that’s hot. Whether the weather is or not.
Note: All content and media on the Bacchus Marsh Dental House website and social media channels are created and published online for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice.
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