How our desk jobs and smartphone addictions are warping our skeletons
Modern life has us working longer hours than ever and staring at our phones 24/7 — which has dire consequences for our brains and bodies.
From crooked teeth to narrower elbows, the way we live today has terrifying consequences for the way we’re built.
Here are some of the weirdest ways our bodies have changed, as reported by the BBC.
Crooked teeth
The way we eat has changed drastically in the past 200 years.
While our food was once tough and chewy, much of our grub today is soft and processed. And scientists believe this change of diet means our teeth are going crooked.
That’s because chewing helps our gnashers grow straight through childhood and modern foods mean we’re not forced to work our jaws as hard as we grow up.
“In post-industrial populations, we’re much more likely to suffer from dental problems — dental crowding, crooked teeth, etc,” said expert Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, from The State University of New York at Buffalo.
“Having a slightly more biomechanically tough diet, particularly in children, might be useful for counteracting some of the imbalance between the way that our teeth grow and develop and push through.”
Spiky skull growths
Alarmingly, spiky growths up to 30 millimeters long are beginning to appear on people’s heads.
These lumps, which were extremely rare 100 years ago, jut out from the lower back of the skull, just above the neck.
They’re caused by our obsession with smartphones, which has us staring at screens for up to four hours a day.
That means we’re craning our necks a lot more than we used to, forcing the body to compensate.
“I have been a clinician for 20 years, and only in the last decade, increasingly I have been discovering that my patients have this growth on the skull,” said David Shahar, a health scientist at the University of The Sunshine Coast, Australia.
The lump is a build up of bone where the neck muscles meet the head.
It grows to help our neck support the weight of our noggins as we ogle our gadgets.
If you have one, you can likely feel it with your fingers. If you’re bald, it may even be visible from behind.
Narrow elbows
Our skeletons are becoming more fragile due to our sedentary lifestyles. Bones grow and toughen up as we use them but modern humans walk and stand less than ever before.
In Germany, scientists at the University of Potsdam uncovered an unusual consequence of our lazy lifestyles.
They found that our elbows are shrinking at a rapid rate — largely because we don’t walk enough. German children studied by the team had smaller elbows the less they walked during the average week.
The change is due to the shrinkage of our skeletons as a whole because we’re sitting down far too much.
Sensitive fingers
Typing text messages, scrolling web pages, and checking email on our smartphones could be changing humanity’s sense of touch.
According to one 2014 study, our thumbs and fingers are becoming more sensitive than ever before.
That’s because we’re scrolling, tapping, and swiping with our digits multiple times a day, permanently warping the way our brain and fingers interact.
Experts at the University of Zurich in Switzerland tracked the brain activity of 37 phone addicts.
Twenty-six volunteers had a touchscreen gadget, such as an iPhone, while 11 preferred retro keyboard-based cellphones.
Those who used touchscreens showed more brain activity when their fingertips were touched than those who didn’t, suggesting their fingers were more sensitive.
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