Teeth, Diet And Health – What Is The Connection?
Health, teeth and diet are closely related. An Egyptian pharaoh may have died from a dental infection. Honey was only available to pharaohs and was found in jars next to mummies. Throughout history decayed upper eye teeth have been most dangerous because an abscess over the tip of that root can spread into the brain through a vein that runs along the side of the nose.
How often have we gone to the dentist and been warned to stay away from sweets? The connection between our diet, sugar and cavities is abundantly clear. Neither our teeth nor our waist lines were made to withstand the amount of sugar we consume today.
Without modern dentistry loss of teeth limited what foods we could eat. Cavities in teeth would allow bacteria to enter into the body with serious, potentially fatal consequences. Today we have antibiotics and root canal treatment. Modern dentistry enables us to continue our sugar addiction. In fact, this dental destruction is driving research and innovation leading to ever more amazing ways to restore us back to function. It began with extractions and dentures with porcelain teeth. Dental anesthetics enabled dentists to drill on teeth to fabricate crowns and bridges. Now we have 3-D X-rays that allow us to analyze the available bone in cross-sections for optimal dental implant placement. We are learning how to induce our body to regrow lost tissues and build new bone with the help of bone morphogenic proteins.
Two Choices: Prevention Or Treatment
Today modern dentistry and medicine give us two clear choices:
- We can continue eating what makes us sick and get cavities and let modern medicine, dentistry and medications come to our rescue or
- We can change our behavior and avoid what makes us sick so we can get healthy. As a result we become independent from medications and reduce our need for medical and dental care.
