You brush and floss daily and see your dentist for your routine care, but every time you turn around you are in need of more dental treatment. It’s easy to understand why you might think you’re suffering from bad teeth genes, but what if there’s more to it?
While genetics can predispose you to certain dental conditions, this is not a guarantee. This concept has become more widely understood recently through the emerging field of dental epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environmental factors can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. So in other words, our genes may not have as much impact on our health as our daily lifestyle and environment. While we can’t exactly blame genetics for bad teeth, there are a few other factors that weigh pretty heavily on oral health.
Your nutrition is incredibly important to dental health. Though your parents’ cavity-prone teeth probably didn’t rub off on you, if you grew up eating family meals together, you are more likely to share similar oral health troubles. Teeth need to be taken care of from the inside, which means providing the necessary nutrients through proper diet. A nutrient-dense anti-inflammatory diet particularly high in vitamins D3, K2, C, A, and Magnesium helps promote strong healthy teeth and gums while helping to prevent cavities.
Parafunctional habits and tethered oral tissue (tongue/lip ties) can play a large role in structure and placement of teeth. That’s right, even the shape of your mouth isn’t exactly hereditary. If the tongue cannot reach the upper palate during early development, or has a thumb, bottle, or pacifier in the way, the tongue is unable to help grow the palate. This creates a high and narrow palate that may not be able to fit all the teeth comfortably. This leads to other issues like malocclusion, tmj dysfunction, crooked teeth, mouth breathing, dry mouth, and more.
While proper oral care is important to healthy teeth and gums, providing the proper environment for your oral health to flourish involves more than brushing and flossing.