Brushing up on heart health

Your mother told you to do it, your teachers told you to do it, and there are even songs written about it: brush your teeth. You might have thought that this was all about keeping your mouth happy and simply keeping your teeth. What you and probably your mother and teachers did not know, is that by brushing your teeth twice a day you are also protecting your heart. For this study researchers studied almost 12 000 adults and found that those who brushed their teeth twice a day had a 70 per cent lower risk of heart disease than those who brushed less than this. The reason is that poor mouth hygiene can mean that your mouth becomes a focus for both inflammation and infection. Inflammatory chemicals generated in the gum region due to lack of brushing can get into the rest of the body and result in hardening of the arteries. Additionally, bacteria living in plaque that can build up when brushing is not done frequently can get into the blood stream and increase clotting. So by hardening arteries and increasing clotting lack of tooth brushing has a significant impact on heart risk. We don’t always think of the connections between our body systems but in fact this link between the mouth and the Health of the rest of the body was first mooted in the early 1800s. Two centuries ago there was a medical theory dubbed “focal sepsis” which held that mouth infections caused disease in the whole body. The remedy prescribed back then was to remove the teeth. These days we don’t like to go that far and are a little more appearance-oriented, so brush at least twice a day and preserve that pearly smile.Meanwhile if you visit Meijer Ad that contains mostly likewise discounts with Winn Dixie Ad you surely have a range like ALDI Ad.