oil pulling

While people usually focus on keeping their teeth pearly white, your gums should not be overlooked. Even if your teeth are as healthy as they can be, your gums may not be free from disease. As gum disease is usually painless, it often goes unnoticed. Gum disease, however, is treatable and the damage can fortunately be reversed. Learn more about gum disease and treatments at home to prevent your gums from looking like this!

Gum Disease: What is it?

Gum disease is caused by plaque buildup. Without proper oral hygiene, plaque can build up along your gum line and ravage your teeth! Gingivitis will cause your gums to become inflamed, red and swollen, making your gums prone to bleeding when you brush. Periodontitis is an advanced form of gum disease, damaging the bones that hold your teeth in place.

Signs You May Have Gum Disease!

According to the American Dental Association, signs you may have gum disease include:

• Bad breath
• Receding gums
• Swollen/red gums
• Gums that bleed easily
• Tooth loss

Home Treatments for Gum Disease

While nothing can replace visiting the dentist, if you have experienced any of the symptoms related to gum disease, there are home remedies that can help to keep your gums healthy.

1. Hydrogen Peroxide: This chemical works as an agent to kill germs and fight gum disease. Mix the 3% solution with water and wash out your mouth once a day to help treat gum disease
2. Oil pulling: In this method, oil pulls toxins right out of your mouth! Swish an organic oil such as sesame seed oil around your mouth once a day, until it turns milky, then spit it out. This should get your gums in tip top shape in no time! Learn more about oil pulling here.
3. Aloe Vera: This plant has great natural inflammatory properties. Swish some aloe vera juice around your mouth, or rub some aloe vera gel on your gums to help reduce swelling and gum disease.
4. Garlic and Turmeric Toothpaste: With both foods having natural antibacterial properties, making and using a garlic and turmeric toothpaste is a great home remedy to gum disease.
5. Drinking Green tea: Besides being good for the body, green tea has natural antioxidants that will help reduce gum inflammation.
6. Warm saltwater rinse: Saltwater can help reduce inflammation and kills deadly bacteria, Check out more of the benefits of saltwater

Along with these home treatments for keeping your gums healthy, you should visit a dentist if you experience gum disease symptoms. Let Water Tower Dental Care take care of you. Learn about some of our treatments.

Ways to Prevent Gum Disease and Keep your Gums Healthy

Gum disease can be prevented with good oral hygiene. Here are a few ways you can prevent gum disease on your own at home, before you even have to worry!

1. Floss Daily, Brush Twice a Day. Both flossing and brushing will prevent plaque and food buildup, helping to keep your gums nice and healthy.
2. Therapeutic mouthwash. Using an antibacterial mouthwash will help reduce plaque and gingivitis.
3. Fluoride toothpaste. Use fluoride toothpaste, which will keep your gums looking fresh and reduce plaque.
4. Do not smoke. Smoking is associated with the onset of gum disease as it weakens your immune system. Keep your body in grade-A shape by avoiding this habit altogether.
5. Get regular checkups and cleanings! Nothing can replace getting your teeth cleaned regularly by a professional, as well as getting a regular checkup to prevent gum disease at the beginning, before gingivitis turns into periodontitis. If you have a family history of gum disease, regular checkups are especially important and may need to be more frequent, as gum disease can be genetic. Come into Water Tower Dental Care today to get started!

When it comes to taking care of our teeth, we generally hear the same kind of advice all of the time: brush and floss everyday and don’t eat too much candy. While this advice is extremely important, there are a lot of additional ways to keep your teeth healthy as well. We asked our dentists at Water Tower Dental Care to share some tips for taking care of your teeth that you probably haven’t heard before. Here are 6 unusual teeth tips straight from our dentists.

1. Eat Cheese (In Moderation)

Believe it or not, cheese is good for your teeth! Like the peroxide-based teeth-whitening solutions we described earlier, cheese helps to neutralize acids in your mouth, increasing your pH levels for about 30 minutes, according to the Academy of General Dentistry. This means less bacteria breeding in your mouth and less teeth erosion. Cheese also causes salivation, which helps get rid harmful bacteria and food particles. Finally, cheese contains casein phosphate, which keeps your teeth strong. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you should eat all of the cheese that you possibly can. You only need about ⅓ of a slice to get these oral benefits.

2. Whiten Your Teeth For Health & Cosmetic Reasons

While teeth whitening can make your teeth look better than ever, its benefits aren’t purely cosmetic. Teeth whitening can also help keep your teeth healthy by removing plaque and preventing tooth decay. Recent research has found that teeth whitening products that contain a peroxide-based solution can effectively get rid of plaque, reduce caries bacteria, and increase the pH level of your mouth, according to Professor Van B. Haywood.
When the pH level in your mouth becomes too low, this means that it is highly acidic. If your pH level is highly acidic, bacteria will begin to breed and your enamel will break down. Peroxide-based teeth-whitening solutions will neutralize your pH levels to a healthy 7 or 8, reducing the acidity in your mouth. This is especially helpful after you eat or drink highly acidic food, such as coffee, wine and citrus fruits. Ask us about our at-home teeth whitening kits to help your teeth look and feel healthier today!

3. Keep Your Mouth Healthy With Coconut Oil

Coconut oil has a ton of health benefits, from decreasing cholesterol levels to helping diabetes. It turns out that coconut oil is great for your oral health too. Through a method called oil pulling, coconut oil can actually help pull bacteria off of your teeth for a healthier and cleaner smile. All you have to do is swish around a teaspoon of coconut oil in your mouth for about 20 minutes. Of course, you should still keep up with your regular routine of brushing, flossing and using mouthwash.
If you’re questioning the validity of this claim, good for you. You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, especially when it comes to oral health. Thankfully, there are various studies, including the following three, that have proved that oil pulling effectively fights off bacteria: Study 1, Study 2, Study 3. You can read more about oil pulling for your teeth here.

4. Use Oral Probiotics For Your Mouth

In the past, probiotics were thought to only help digestive and immune health. But recently, probiotics designed specifically for oral health have been found to naturally support gum and tooth health, make your breath fresh and whiten your teeth. Effective probiotics trigger the production of healthy bacteria that work to keep your mouth and gums healthy. They also reduce the nutrients for bacteria that cause bad breath, and produce low doses of hydrogen peroxide to gently whiten your teeth. Learn more about oral probiotics from Evora.

5. Don’t Use Your Teeth As Tools

While it may be more convenient to open that bag of chips with your teeth rather than finding scissors, using your teeth as tools can have serious (and expensive) consequences. Many of our patients have come in with broken, cracked or chipped teeth because they tried using their teeth to cut or open something. Your teeth are meant for chewing food in your mouth - Not for anything else. It’s not worth the pain or the price to fix your teeth.

6. You Can Use A Reversal Agent for Mouth Numbing

Some patients avoid important dental procedures because of the irritating and sometimes damaging numbing sensation that they experience hours afterwards. While it’s great to be numb in the dentist’s chair, it’s not so great when you’re hungry a couple hours afterwards. At worst, some patients chew their lip and gums because they can’t feel what their teeth are doing. Many patients may drool and not be able to talk properly, smile, or eat and drink because their mouths are numb. Thankfully, at Water Tower Dental Care, we offer reversal agents for teeth numbing, so that you can return to feeling your mouth much faster, and avoid the painful and embarrassing after effects.
We hope these unusual tips from our dentists, along with your normal health routine, help you to make your teeth even healthier. If you would like any more tips, reach out to us on our Facebook page. We’re full of helpful and creative ways to keep your teeth looking and feeling as good as new!

Sometimes we find home remedies and new tricks to cleaning your teeth incredibly interesting, and potentially helpful. Oil pulling has been around for thousands of years, yet has only sparked the attention of many of our patients just recently. So what exactly is oil pulling and can it help keep your teeth is top health?

Oil pulling originally comes from Indian folk remedies to help clear the mouth of harmful bacteria. Not until the ‘90s did oil pulling start to emerge as a healthy practice in America. A medical doctor, Dr. F. Karach, was the first to introduce oil pulling to his patients in the United States. After finding the remedy a successful tool for lowering harmful bacteria levels, oil pulling began to grow in popularity.
As bacteria build up in your mouth, it creates plaque so it can adhere to your teeth and cause as much harm as it wants. Brushing, flossing, and visits to your dentist all aim to remove the plaque that the bacteria are harboring on. Oils such as sesame, sunflower, and coconut oil, when used properly, can help pull these bacteria off of the teeth for a cleaner, healthier mouth.
It’s rather simple to do, just use a tablespoon of oil and swish it in your mouth like mouthwash for 20 minutes. Once the twenty minutes are complete, spit into a trash can. Twenty minutes is the instructed amount of time because it allows enough time for bacteria to be pulled off the teeth and into the oil without allowing them to be reabsorbed into the body.

Does Oil Pulling work?

There is much debate as to the effectiveness of oil pulling and what it actually can help. In a study conducted in 2008, 20 adolescent boys were instructed to either perform an oil pulling procedure, or to use Chlorhexidine to reduce the amount of streptococcus mutans- one of the main bacterias that can cause plaque build up and tooth decay. After two weeks, the boys who used oil pulling had significantly reduced the amount of streptococcus mutans in their mouth, however not as much as the patients using the Chlorhexidine. That does not mean oil pulling does not work, only that it is slightly less effective than the harsh chemicals of Chlorhexidine.
A similar study was conducted to test oil pulling’s effect against gingivitis causing bacteria alongside Chlorhexidine. In this study, both the oil pulling and mouthwash were equally effective against the bacteria.
And last, a final study showed that oil pulling is significantly effective in reducing bacteria that cause halitosis, or more commonly know as bad breath.
While oil pulling may not be recommended by every doctor, we find it to be a more natural way to help clean your teeth and keep your gums healthy.
If you have more questions about this home remedy or many others that are often discussed on this blog, please contact Water Tower Dental, would be happy to help answer any of your questions.