Dr. Nammy Patel talks about how keeping your teeth can add 10 years to your life.
Keeping your teeth adds an extra 10 years to your life, mainly because when you have teeth, you can chew. And when you can chew, you’re able to get the leafy greens in. And as we know, the leafy greens have antioxidants, has a lot of macronutrients that we need to make sure that our cellular function is operating properly, and that we’re able to heal from disease and break down.
And so when we have our teeth, we can chew; when we can chew, we can get the nutrients; when we can get the nutrients, our body gets a fuel it needs to be able to survive.
It’s kind of like a car. You need gas in it in order for it to work, or an electric, what have it, but you need some sort of energy source. And so the teeth help create that energy source. And if the teeth are not there, your body has to work harder to break down any food you get and it’s probably not going to get the nutrition that it needs or the fuel that it needs.
What if you just blend everything in a smoothie and drink it that way?
You can do that, but you won’t be able to have, for example — for some people — meats, certain proteins, that would be very challenging.
And that’s one of the things that we find is also the quality of life for older geriatric patients. If they have dentures their quality of life isn’t quite where it used to be. Also the emotional component. They don’t feel good when they’re not able to chew and crunch down on something. Sometimes I just get a satisfaction from like, if I’m having a rough day, I want to chomp down on some tortilla chips. So we really need that crunch feeling in order to give us some satisfaction.
