If you rely on dentures, you know that they help you eat meals. Their artificial teeth are strong enough to let you bite many softer foods. Still, they don’t do a perfect job – dentures can harm your nutrition and (as a result) your physical health. If you’d like to learn the reason, it isn’t a hard thing to grasp. Just keep reading to learn the connection between dentures and nutrition, as well as what to do about it.
Context: Dentures Affect Chewing Force
Before moving ahead, it helps to review how dentures affect your “chewing force” or bite. Knowing this factor makes it easy to see how replacement teeth could harm nutrition levels.
Of course, you can’t chew with regular dentures as you would with natural teeth. The restorations are removable and don’t affix themselves to anything in your mouth. That means they won’t let your bite exert as much strength as it could with a full and natural smile. As a result, you can only chew food with a fraction of your earlier chewing force. Your dentures don’t have any ability to grind or tear your food.
Dentures, Chewing Force, & Nutrition
With the context now covered, it’s clearer why dentures can harm your nutrition. These devices don’t let you chew food into small and manageable bites.
You see, chewing is the first step in a person’s digestive process. It breaks down food into small particles that the body can easily absorb. However, dentures can’t chew with as much force as natural teeth. They can only break food into larger particles that are hard for the stomach to process. Worse yet, they prompt you to swallow earlier – an act that limits the breakdown effect from saliva. These effects can interfere with your body’s ability to absorb nutrients.
Adding Dental Implants Can Help
Despite the facts above, your dentures don’t have to get in the way of the digestion process. Just attach them to dental implants to fix the matter.
An “implant denture” doesn’t have the same chewing issue as a regular one. It’s connected to dental implants fused to your jaw, meaning it almost fully restores your bite’s strength. You’ll then find it much easier to chew food into small and digestible pieces. From there, you can absorb all the nutrients from your meals to stay healthy.
Your dentures can harm your nutrition, but they don’t have to have this effect. Talk to your dentist about switching to implant-based kinds in the days ahead.
About the Practice
Silfa Dental is based in Commack, NY. Led by Dr. Silfa himself, our practice focuses on friendly, tech-savvy, and personalized dental care. That means we offer customized treatments that span preventive, cosmetic, and restorative dentistry, as well as emergency oral health services. Naturally, our team is always ready to fit you with dentures or implant dentures as well. For more details or to book a visit, you can reach us on our website or by phone at (631)-651-1322.
