How important is it to have a healthy smile?

woman smiling

Ask anyone and you will hear that a healthy smile is important for being considered attractive, intelligent, approachable, likeable, capable and successful. A healthy smile improves your chances of being hired and promoted, finding love and making friends. But this is not all there is to have a healthy smile.

The Oral Health Foundation outlines some of the great benefits of taking care of your smile. Of course, to improve and maintain the optimal health of a smile, you need to implement all the techniques of a good oral health care programme, consume a tooth-friendly diet (avoid sugar-heavy foods and beverages), brush twice a day, floss and visit a dental professional for routine oral health checks.

To properly brush and floss, you need to have perfectly aligned dental arches. Teeth that are misaligned, overcrowded or have spaces in between can prove challenging to keep clean. This is because these undesirable dental conditions create areas in the mouth where food can get easily trapped and is difficult to remove. Jagged corners and hard-to-reach spaces present a challenge for toothbrush bristles to reach and floss thread to manoeuvre into.

Dental practitioners rely on effective teeth straightening treatment plans including Invisalign St Albans to help correct these issues and make it easier for patients to maintain good oral hygiene. More than 12 million patients have used the removable tray-based orthodontic solution to give them beautifully aligned smiles and healthier mouths.

a senior with youthful skin

Day-to-day benefits of a healthy mouth

A healthy physical body requires adequate nutrition to function well. Nutrition is derived from the foods we eat. Strong healthy teeth are required for grinding the food down into tiny pieces to make digestion and nutrient absorption more effective. Having a full dental arch enables you to consume a wide array of foods so that you increase the likelihood of ingesting a variety of essential vitamins and minerals.

Prevent illness and disease. Good oral health keeps many unwelcome dental conditions at bay including chronic bad breath, dental caries, gum disease and tooth loss. But it is not only dental health that benefits but the physical body too. Harmful bacteria from the mouth can cause inflammation of the blood vessels and blood clots to form. These two adverse consequences of uncontrolled bad bacteria in the mouth have been associated with cardiovascular diseases, strokes, and lung diseases including pneumonia. And various cancers (breast, skin, gall bladder and esophageal).

Other medical conditions that are influenced by poor oral health issues include mental illnesses such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. Researchers have discovered that tooth loss was a higher risk for impaired cognitive functioning in their later years.

Without a pleasant dental appearance, making a good impression on others is nearly impossible. A healthy smile is vital for confidence, and lack thereof can curtail career progression and social engagement is often kept to a minimum.

Considering the above, it has never been more important to prioritise good oral hygiene to enjoy a strong body and mental wellbeing. Scheduling that oral health check is the first step on the path to dental protection.

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