• After the age of 30 or so regular brushing of the teeth becomes more valuable in terms of what it can do to promote healthy gums than in the battle against tooth decay. Brush your teeth at least once a day with fluoride toothpaste, ensuring that you have a good-quality nylon brush. Always brush from gum to tooth and never scrub across the teeth. Work systematically around your mouth so that no area is missed. Don’t forget the inside surfaces of the teeth.
Now return to where you started and, using small circular motions with the brush at the junction of tooth and gum, work around your mouth from tooth to tooth ‘massaging’ the gums gently. If you notice that your teeth trap food between them (this is especially likely with meats) see your dentist to have this area looked at. A piece of food caught between two teeth even for a day or two can make your gum very sore and start up an infection.
• If you do get a sore gum, don’t panic. Simply start the above routine and within days it should be better. In other words, thorough brushing can actually cure early gum disease, provided your technique is good.
• Take more vitamin Ñ on a regular basis-1 g a day and double this when you have a sore area of gum. Animal research has proved that vitamin Ñ helps reduce the risk of gum disease, and experiments in Yugoslavia have found that the vitamin can reverse the kind of gum breakdown seen in gum disease. When the volunteers were given as little as 75 mg vitamin Ñ daily for six weeks the cells in the gums became observably healthier.
But vitamin Ñ alone may not be enough-calcium too may be vital. Certainly it is true that calcium deficiency can weaken the jawbone into which the teeth are set, but in addition this is now thought to make the bone more liable to infection. After the menopause women especially lose calcium in large amounts and many a woman first notices loose teeth at this time of life. Repeated pregnancies also cause a substantial loss of calcium into the fetuses. These plus slimming diets that involve eating no milk or dairy products can leave a lot of women calcium-deficient.
One US study used folate (the  vitamin) too with great success. After sixty days of gargling with folate-rich water the subjects’ gums were examined. They had soaked up folate ‘like a sponge’ and were much less inflamed than those of a control group who had been gargling with plain water for the same sixty days.
• There is some evidence that gum problems are linked to emotions. Trench mouth, for example, is a very rampant type of gum disease. Sufferers have higher levels of the natural steroid Cortisol in their urine than normal. One study found that these patients had experienced more negative, unsettling life events in the previous year than had other people. They also demonstrably had higher levels of anxiety, depression and emotional disturbances. Clearly, preventing these life events is one way to combat at least this cause of gum disease.
*157/72/5*
No comments yet.