Endless commercials advertise creams that promise to erase wrinkles. Magazine and web articles applaud celebrities who manage to look as fresh and young as they did a decade ago. Despite our cultural obsession with a youthfulness appearance, most regular people want to recapture the feeling of being young rather than the just the looks. As we enter our middle and later years, we tend to lose the spring in our step, our ability to enjoy the same foods as we did in our youth, and that confidence that comes with feeling healthy and vibrant. The loss of one or more of your permanent teeth accelerates the aging process, resulting in poorer diet and poorer overall health. Although dental implants won’t have you looking like you did during your college years, they can help you recapture a youthful sense of wellbeing.
How Tooth Loss Affects Your Health
Most experts point to nutrition as the key factor linking missing adult teeth to poor overall health later in life. When you lose a single tooth, the impact on your diet may be small: you may avoid certain foods or chew more on one side of your mouth than the other. After losing multiple teeth, you may have to alter your diet further, choosing fattier (and therefore softer) cuts of meat, fewer whole grains, and processed fruits and vegetable rather than fresh ones (think applesauce as opposed to a whole apple). By the time most or all of your teeth have gone, you may be down to a nearly-liquid diet that lacks the vitamins, minerals, and fiber needed for truly good health. In fact, total tooth loss is associated with a higher for diabetes, heart disease, and depression.
Recovering Your Health after Tooth Loss
Any type of dental prosthetic, even traditional removable dentures, will help restore some of your normal chewing ability (and, thus, help you enjoy better nutrition and better overall health). Securing a dental prosthetic to an artificial tooth root (a.k.a. a dental implant post) enhances your ability to chew even more. For example, with suction-secured dentures, most patients experience a 10-20% improvement in chewing ability. In comparison, dental implant-secured dentures provide an average 80-90% improvement in chewing ability.
About Shawn Hofkes, DDS
With advanced training in oral and maxillofacial surgery, Shawn Hofkes, DDS is qualified to provide a full range of dental implant secured prosthetics from our state-of-the-art dentist office in Cerritos, CA. To schedule your appointment or consultation with Dr. Hofkes, contact us today. We proudly serve patients of all ages from Cerritos, Lakewood, Long Beach, Buena Park, and all surrounding communities.
