Sunday 14 March 2021

Fun facts about your mouth

1. Breathing through the mouth is one of the biggest contributors to tooth decay.

2. Saliva is amazing, 99.5% water, but in the other 0.5% it has calcium to remineralise enamel, enzymes, Antimicrobial chemicals, pain relief and more! (See Wikipedia for a huge list of helpful ingredients!)

3. There's a lot we don't know. Just last year a new saliva gland was discovered

4. Tonsil stones have an unknown cause, but after a night of mouth breathing and feeling in the morning like I had tonsil stones forming,  I have a hypothesis. It's all linked.   Maybe the calcium content enters in your saliva somewhere near the tonsils, and when it dries out via mouth breathing the stones form, and they collect there at the back of your throat instead of being used to repair your teeth. Keep getting tonsil stones? Try breathing through the nose more and your whole mouth will thank you for it

5.  You have a nasal cycle, and you probably never knew it. When you breathe through your nose most of the air goes through one side. After 10-15 minutes it'll automatically switch sides!    This gives that side a rest and the slower moving air through the other nostril may help to improve your sense of smell

The intelligence that created you can heal you.

"Man prefers to perish rather than change his habits" - Leo Tolstoy

Instead of going to the dentist to fix the few bad holes I have in my teeth I'm perhaps foolishly doing somewhat of an experiment on myself... Dentistry says a hole too far progressed cannot heal - but how many studies have been done where someone with advanced decay has totally changed their habits for a long duration of time.

For the last 9 months I've made changes:

- change from mouth breathing to nose breathing (you can use micropore surgical tape to train yourself to do this at night)
-change from never flossing to flossing daily
- change from excessive sugar consumption to virtually no added refined sugar.

This should at the very least slow down the decay, whether it will reverse or heal over remains to be seen.   

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