By: Dr. Jazli Aziz
As the new year quickly approaches, many people are undoubtedly preparing their resolutions for the new year. Health-focused resolutions are common for many people, like going to the gym and eating more healthily. In line with this focus on health, I would like to suggest that everyone adds one more resolution to their list – improving their oral health.
Why is it important to ensure that we have good oral health? For starters, our mouth is our body’s biggest opening to the external environment. Every time we open our mouth, we risk inhalation or ingestion of harmful microorganisms and environmental contaminants through the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Therefore, it is essential that we regularly clean our oral cavity to prevent the build-up of harmful compounds and bacteria.
Secondly, our oral health has a significant impact on our systemic health. In other words, our oral health affects our overall health. Scientific research over the past few decades has uncovered many associations between oral health and other health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. In many instances, improving oral health can have therapeutic effects on those other disease conditions as well.
So, what are the best ways to improve our oral health? The simplest and most effective way to do so is by simply brushing your teeth regularly – twice a day for approximately 2 minutes each time is the recommended practice. Importantly, we must always brush our teeth before going to bed. Which means if you get a midnight snack, you should brush your teeth again before bed. This is because the bacteria in our oral cavity feed on the food debris in our mouth left behind after we eat. In the process of metabolising this food debris, the bacteria produce acid which can accumulate over time and lead to oral diseases like caries. During the day, our saliva mitigates this acid production, but at night the acid build-up is increased as we do not produce saliva while we sleep. By brushing our teeth before going to bed, we minimise the amount of acid produced by oral bacteria while we sleep, thus preserving our oral health.
Secondly, we should visit a dentist at least once a year, even if we brush our teeth regularly. This is because dental plaque can accumulate on our teeth even with regular brushing, and eventually calcify to produce hardened or mineralised plaque, also known as dental calculus. Calculus cannot be removed by regular tooth brushing. Instead, we would need to visit a dentist for scaling to remove it. Additionally, visiting a dentist will allow them to inspect various aspects of our oral health, such as the presence of cavities and to assess our gum health. Early detection for oral diseases can be extremely beneficial during treatment, so regular dental check-ups are not only important for our current oral health, but our future oral health as well.
As we approach the new year, let us remember that our oral cavity is not isolated from the rest of our body. If “health” is going to be something we aim to improve in the new year, we should remember our oral health too. A healthy mouth is the first step to a healthy body.
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The author is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences, Faculty of Dentistry, Universiti Malaya, and may be reached at jazliaziz@um.edu.my
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