Gum health much more important than most know....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-10-2009

The somewhat more obvious connection is that a key way to prevent some kinds of bad breath is to keep your teeth and gums healthy.

We now know that in addition to getting less bad breath, by taking good care of your teeth and gums you can avoid the biggest two causes of losing your teeth, sharply lower your risk of heart attack and other cardiovascular diseases; and, just recently, research found that you lower your risk of oral cancers of all kinds too!

That’s a huge amount of expense and suffering you can avoid if you take care of your teeth and gums.

Even better, the two most important of the several ways to do that are super cheap and easy to do once you learn how & get used to doing them each day.

I’ve been unusually fortunate in learning to do that & how to do that than most. I found out later that I was even luckier to learn how to keep my gums healthy and doing it than I ever imagined.

Since my Dad’s Dad was a dentist, I grew up brushing my teeth and even got some good dental work from my Grandfather as a kid that my Dad might not have otherwise been able to afford.

Then I was lucky again. My wife pointed out to me that if I flossed my teeth just before I brushed them each day, I was much less likely to have bad breath.

That made excellent sense to me since I clearly wasn’t brushing between my teeth and flossing would clean there; and I absolutely wanted to avoid any bad breath that I could avoid.

So, I immediately began flossing every day. (I also began using Stimudents, a specially designed toothpick that fits into the chink between your teeth and gums, before flossing to get the worst of the big chunks of food out from between my teeth so that flossing was far less messy with those big chunks removed first.)

Then I got lucky a third time. Like most people I’d never heard that gum disease is the single largest reason people lose their teeth. To beat out bad cavities, that means gum disease really causes a lot of tooth loss!

Then, at the Dentist’s office where my wife and I went, their hygienist told me that while you do want to brush the biting surfaces of your molars, or grinding teeth in back – but because gum health is so important, it’s critical not that you brush the rest of your teeth but that you brush thoroughly right at the gumline between your teeth and gums. (I’d not been doing that before.)

She also let me know that the flossing I’d been doing was even more important for good gum health than that kind of brushing. That’s so true that good dentists now tell their patients, “Just floss every day between the teeth that you want to keep.”

So, I began brushing the biting surfaces first and then brushing at the gumline inside and out and both bottom and top each day after I flossed. But the measurements later showed my gums weren’t quite as good as they should be even though they were much improved.

So, the fourth time, I created my own good luck. I decided to brush at the gum line a second time -- brushing inside and out and top and bottom and then repeat. And, I decided that if gentle gum stimulation for circulation improvement in part was one of the reasons to brush, I might do well to then brush my gums on a third pass just above and below the gumline.

THAT did the job! Now I always check out good to excellent when they measure and look at my gums.

(The teeth cleaning the dentist or hygienist does each six months is to remove plaque that builds up on the part of your teeth just under the gum line that also can cause gum disease. But that is far too little too late if you don’t take the right care of your teeth and gums each day.)

It seems that the bacteria that otherwise grow in your gums when you don’t follow these practices either directly harms the insides of your blood vessels or causes inflammation that does. So, not only do you get to keep the teeth you floss and brush right each day, you also avoid what is now known to be a major cause of heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.

Now, just in the past few days, a new study was reported that found that bad gum health also tends to significantly increase your chances of getting oral cancers, such as throat cancer and mouth cancer.

(That might be because smoking harms your circulation so much that the smokers in their study both had more gum disease and more oral cancers too. But, because of the inflammation from gum disease and how hard that is on you, gum disease may also directly tend to cause oral cancers.)

Two last points.

Taking at least 1,000 mg a day of vitamin C and getting natural vitamin C from eating lots of vegetables and at least one piece of fruit each day helps to keep your gums healthy. This also helps prevent other infections and protects your heart. So does taking 100 mg or more a day of CoQ10. (Doing both those things also directly protects your heart and health in other ways.)

A week ago, on Tuesday, 9-3, NewsMax Health Alert email’s headline story was that Low-Fat diets could harm your teeth, gums, and health.

The study done at the University of Washington School of Dentistry in Seattle and reported in the Journal of Dental Health actually didn’t find that so much as they found that a diet high in high glycemic carbs, which many lowfat diets have been, is high in easily “fermentable carbohydrates” for that reason. And, eating a lot of fermentable carbohydrates reliably tend to cause tooth decay and gum disease. (That’s most true if you don’t remove the bacteria and the fermenting carbohydrates from the spaces between your teeth and gums by flossing and brushing right each day.)

But the study reported in the NewsMax article is quite correct that eating more low glycemic foods and avoiding foods made from sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and refined grains not only avoids these “fermentable carbohydrates” to protect your teeth and gums, it also helps people avoid gaining excess fat, & tends to prevent type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

So eating right both protects your heart directly, & it also protects your heart indirectly by helping keep your gums healthy at the same time.