Most of us have a penchant for a sweet treat, but too much of a good thing causes weight gain and tooth decay.

Effective dentistry treatments and general oral hygiene awareness has taught us how to look after our teeth and prevent cavities, but in bygone times, tooth loss was actually a sign of status.

Dr Iona McCleery, lecturer in medieval history at Leeds University, says people with bad teeth or suffering from tooth loss in the 19th century were perceived to be wealthy and among the elite because they could afford sweets.

The ravaging effects that too much sugar and bad diets can have on our bodies is being explored at the University of Bradford in a workshop this month. Participants will be able to see skeletal and dental remains of people from the past.

The workshop is part of a three-year research project, called You Are What You Ate: Food Lessons From The Past, running until 2013 and funded by an award from the Wellcome Trust. It involves academics from the universities of Bradford and Leeds and cultural officers from Wakefield Council.

“It is important educationally to learn about diets from the past because it helps us understand the choices that we make about our food today and encourages us to make better choices,” says Dr McCleery.

“We take food for granted now, but learning what it was like to live before fridge-freezers, when what we ate depended on the seasons and rains, and before mass importation of foreign foods gave us lots of choice all year round, helps us pause for thought.”

Dr McCleery explains how using archaeology and medieval sources to show the impact on the body is a profoundly visual way of getting the message across about healthy eating. “Some of the health problems of the past are returning, like rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D. Some, like gout, never went away. Obesity also leaves its mark on our bodies, causing mobility problems, yet it is difficult to demonstrate this using modern bodies due to ethical issues of confidentiality and the Human Tissue Act, or without being too preachy or causing squeamishness. Using historical skeletons gets round some of these problems,” she says.

“Our healthiness is not just based on how much food we get, but also on its quality and how we cook and eat it.

“There are a lot of assumptions about food that an historical approach like this can tackle. For example, foods that we consider local, like rhubarb and liquorice, were not originally from England at all, and foods that grow happily in Yorkshire, like apples, are usually imported today from Australia and the US, and are therefore far from fresh when sold.”

She adds: “Foods like potatoes, sugar, sweetcorn, tea and chocolate have a long exploitative history and appear in our shops at a massive global human cost if we look at them over time. They were originally very expensive, only becoming widely-available in the 17th century. The problem of the cost of food is an ancient one, yet we actually spend far less on food than our ancestors did proportionally.

Many children today have no idea where foods come from, what they look like raw, or how to cook them. This is despite schools initiatives to grow vegetables and include personal health and hygiene issues in the curriculum.

“There is still a mistaken perception that fresh fruit and veg are very expensive. They are not if eaten seasonally. Our project tries to promote healthy eating by causing reflection and encouraging alternatives.”

Jo Buckberry, a lecturer in biological anthropology at the University of Bradford, who is also involved in the project, believes it will help people make more informed choices about healthy eating in future.

“We are aware that our diets are healthy, but I don’t think we understand how it actually changes our bodies,” she says.

“Hopefully, by being able to see archaeological skeletons with conditions like dental cavities, gout and osteoarthritis, it will home how much the diet has affected their body. You can’t see that in a living person because it is under the skin. It is a very visual way of looking at these things.”

l The workshop runs on May 18, from 2pm to 4.30pm, and on June 4, from 10am until 12.30pm, in the archaeological sciences department at the University of Bradford. The event is open to anyone over 18, but booking is essential. Anyone interested in attending should call (0113) 3431910 or e-mail youarewhatyouate @leeds.ac.uk.