In our last article, we discussed how maintaining a healthy and active body can be vital to your teeth and gums. Before that, we discussed some of the nutrients (calcium and vitamin D) that are essential for maintaining your mouth’s health. For instance, calcium is needed to help keep your jawbone healthy and strong enough to support all of your teeth. The mineral also helps increase your chances of cavity prevention, but it is not the only mineral that your mouth needs. Astoria dentist, Dr. Jeffrey Leibowitz, explores the forgotten nutrient of dental health—magnesium—and why it is needed for your body and mouth to continue functioning.
Your Body’s Dependence on Magnesium
Although not as often discussed as calcium or vitamin D, magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in the human body. Your bones contain about 50% of your body’s magnesium supply. The rest is shared between your body’s tissues and organ cells, with one percent travelling throughout your blood. Magnesium is critical for over 300 essential biochemical reactions, and the mineral is needed to maintain muscle and nerve function, steady your heart rhythm, and maintain a healthy immune system.
How Does Magnesium Benefit Your Dental Health?
Concerning your oral health, magnesium is important for a number of reasons. You may be aware that calcium, vitamin D, and phosphorous are mandatory ingredients for forming and maintaining your tooth enamel. Magnesium is also crucial to tooth enamel development and is therefore an important contributor to your teeth’s cavity-fighting abilities. Perhaps more importantly, magnesium helps control your body’s inflammatory response to harmful microbes, such as malicious oral bacteria. When dental plaque, which is made mostly of your mouth’s germs, accumulates along your gum line, its presence can irritate your gum tissue, causing it to swell and sometimes bleed. If oral bacteria are allowed into your blood stream, they can instigate inflammation in other areas of your body, including your heart and brain, leading to chronic inflammatory illnesses such as heart disease and dementia.
Keep Your Smile Strong and Healthy in Astoria
To learn more about how proper nutrition can help keep your mouth operating at its finest, or to schedule a dental consultation, contact Dr. Leibowitz by calling our Queens dental office at (718) 728-8320. We proudly serve patients from Astoria, Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the surrounding communities.
