reasons you should brush your teeth

Okay, so its pretty obvious that if you don t brush you ll probably lose your teeth, but by the time you get to the bottom of this list you ll see that brushing twice a day can potentially save you much more than a couple hundred bucks on a cheap pair of dentures. It can save you tens of thousands of dollars in health care over the course of your lifetime and potentially save your life as well.

While we know it sounds obvious we just wanted to be clear, your mouth smells bad because of bacteria and chewing gum does not kill bacteria. At least not to any significant extent.

Caused by plaque build up on your teeth Gingivitis often leads to swollen gums that bleed when you brush them. Ironically, there is only one way to prevent this

Your chances of actually preventing Gingivitis look fairly bleak. With 80% of Americans afflicted by some form of gum disease it quickly becomes clear why dentistry is such a lucrative profession. But gingivitis is only the beginning. Eventually you ll find yourself with some much worse

You thought swollen, bloody gums were bad? Well, that gingivitis will eventually spread and you ll start losing the alveolar bone around your teeth, followed by the teeth themselves. Couldn t get much worse than that could it? Oh it certainly could. Periodontitis, doctors have found, is often a gateway to many other much more serious complications. Let s start with

Your mouth is one of the primary ports of entry into your body. Food, bacteria, almost everything inside of you passed through it at one point or another. This means that when something as critical as your mouth becomes infested with harmful bacteria (as it would when you have gingivitis or periodontitis) it will inevitably affect the rest of your body.

Coined in the trenches of Word War 1 where it afflicted many soldiers, this is essentially an extreme form of gingivitis. Your mouth becomes so overrun with bacteria that they often spread into your cheeks, lips and jaw bones. This however, is just the beginning.

If your gums are bleeding and your mouth is overflowing with plaque and bacteria, it will eventually make its way into your bloodstream. Unfortunately this means that it will inevitably pass through your heart, and plague in your heart is never a good thing. Besides causing heart attacks though, this rogue bacteria can also lead to

In a mechanism very similar to what happens in the heart, the bacteria can also spread through the blood stream and into your brain. So, not only can it increase you chances of having a stroke but it can also lead to

Poor gum health increases your risk of developing dementia by almost 30% to 40%. There are several theories about the exact mechanism but hopefully you can see the correlation. Remember to brush your teeth and it will help you remember everything else as well.