As a tried-and-true solution for tooth loss, dentures make for great replacement teeth. You can generally trust them to help you smile, speak, eat, and more. Even so, the fact remains that dentures impact nutrition in ways that harm your health. You should consider adding dental implants to them, thus ensuring your restored grin works well in the long term. For more relevant details, here’s a primer on the matter from your local Copperas Cove dentist.
Dentures & Your Bite
To grasp how dentures affect nutritional health, you must know how they affect your bite first. The latter facts provide context for the final explanation.
Today’s dentures can’t “bite” as intensely as natural teeth. Since they’re removable and insecure, your mouth can’t use them to exert a strong force. Even the highest-quality dentures only give you a fraction of your former smile’s bite force. As a result, they can’t thoroughly grind, tear, or chew pieces of food apart.
Given the facts above, dentures only provide limited help with meals. They make the eating process easier, but still don’t “work” as well as a fully natural smile would.
How Do Dentures Impact Nutrition?
Since dentures bite weakly, they don’t just make eating trickier. They deprive your body of key nutrients that maintain your physical fitness.
It comes down to how chewing is the first step of bodily digestion. This act breaks food into small, easy-to-absorb particles, so it’s crucial to physical health. That said, dentures can only break food into larger pieces that your stomach struggles with; they thus force you to swallow earlier. Such effects keep your body from absorbing some of your meals’ nutrients.
While this lack of nutrition won’t affect you in the short term, it adds up over time. You’ll likely suffer from indigestion, fatigue, or worse if it goes unchecked.
Consider Adding Dental Implants
If there’s any good news, it’s that dental implants can solve the nutrition issue. Attaching them to your dentures would help you get more nutrients from meals.
Modern “implant dentures” don’t saddle you with subpar chewing. Because they use dental implants to secure themselves, they restore most (if not all) of your bite’s force. That means they let you chew food into small and digestible pieces, ensuring you can absorb all the nutrients from your meals. Using them would benefit your physical health more than merely “regular” dentures.
Though dentures impact nutrition, you aren’t in a powerless situation. Consult your dental provider to see if adding dental implants could help.
About the Practice
Benchmark Dental & Orthodontics is based in Copperas Cove, TX. Led by Drs. Celebi and Ahmed, our practice emphasizes “lifetime care” of each patient’s grin. We thus offer dental treatments for all ages, ranging from preventive and cosmetic options to restorative and emergency work. You can trust our team to give your whole family beautiful, thriving smiles! For more details or to book a visit, please contact us on our website or by phone at (254)-547-4866.