Po Dentistry

12/25/2022

Merry Christmas to all of our amazing patients and team!

12/22/2022

Christmas dinner!!

12/16/2022

We love having family work together! Please welcome Danny as our new sterilization tech! Deisy, his sister, is one of our wonderful hygienists that is stepping in today to help us out!

11/23/2022

Do you wake up feeling tired?

Some signs of poor sleep include:

• Restless, active sleep
• Nightmares
• Cold hands and feet
• Digestive issues
• Anxiety and depression

In the dental chair, one of the main symptoms of sleep issues includes teeth grinding. In both adults and children experience it:

If you’re grinding your teeth at night, don’t ignore the signs.

Firstly, it’s a sign of poor unrestful sleep.

If you’re damaging your teeth, you are doing real harm to your body.

Tooth enamel is made of hydroxyapatite, one of the strongest biological materials on the planet.

When you wear it down

The nanostructured calcium apatite plays an important role in the construction of calcified tissues. It has ability to attach biological molecules such as proteins, which can be used as functional materials which can regenerate.

When you wear the surface down, it can’t do so.

Teeth grinding often represents a closing airway during sleep.

When the airway closes, due to many factors, the brain signals the jaw to move in order to tense the muscles to hold the throat open to breathe.

Breathing is paramount during sleep, and your brain is obsessed with monitoring the airway. Throughout the nose and throat are ‘pressure’ sensors that detect how much resistance the air needs to push through to reach the lungs.

Practical ways to decrease teeth grinding.

1) Tongue posture: Here you need to train the tongue to seal to the roof of the mouth during sleep. A difficult skill to learn, but sealing the tongue up, including the back of the tongue to the soft palate is key
2) A tongue that seals to the roof of the mouth helps open the airway, but also turns off the large chewing muscles such as the masseter that runs down the cheek.
3) This is correct ‘oral posture’, Tongue sealed to the roof of the mouth, teeth slightly apart. This helps turn the masseter off, which stops teeth grinding!

Have you struggled with teeth grinding?

11/05/2022

Do you have restless sleep or grind your teeth?

Teeth grinding often accompanies a set of other symptoms, including:

​- Low blood pressure
- Chronic stuffy nose
- Temporomandibular dysfunction (TMD)
- Headaches or migraines
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Tension headache
- Hyperventilation syndrome
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Cold feet and hands
- Depression or anxiety
- Brain fog, daytime sleepiness
- Allergies, skin rashes
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Why would this be?

People who grind their teeth, often work or study long hours or report stressful family situations. Stress plays a part, but teeth grinding also reveals how people breathe during sleep.

To put it more correctly, teeth grinding hints at a set of sleep disorders and lack of oxygen during sleep. It’s a little-known condition known as upper airway resistance syndrome. And it is far more common than you’d expect.

It’s estimated that 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders. You may ask how the number could be so big? Many people simply don’t know they are at risk. They also have sleep disorders that are hard to pick up and even define.

The relatively small number of diagnoses are those with obstructive sleep apnea, yet it’s estimated 1 billion people globally suffer from OSA.

Teeth grinding is often associated with a condition abbreviated as UARS – UPPER AIRWAY RESISTANCE SYNDROME.

Sleep tests reveal UARS is sleep interrupted with frequent respiratory effort related arousals (RERAs). It’s due to higher pressure in the airways that send a message of ‘choking’ to your brain. If you suffer RERAs all night long, your body cannot enter deep REM sleep.
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​UARS indicates sympathetic FLIGHT OR FLIGHT driven sleep. It is the little sister of sleep apnea, and we need to talk about it.

Imagine the sound of tooth enamel screeching against under 250 pounds of force per inch.

Whilst guards can sometimes help, the real way to help a patient is to identify their structural or breathing issue.

Do you or a family member suffer from teeth grinding?

11/02/2022

If there’s one thing we both agree on, it’s that feeding kids is hard. 😵‍💫

🤱🏼Breastfeeding or infant formula👨🏽‍🍼is the primary source of nutrition for a baby for the first six months of their life. BM is a miraculous living liquid of life providing your rapidly developing baby it’s sole source of nutrition.

👶🏼 From here, it’s advised that babies nutritional needs increase at around 6m. As such it’s recommended babies begin their weaning, introducing solids alongside secondary to breastmilk or infant formula is the way to ensure their nutritional and neuromuscular developmental needs are met.

We see so many children today with small, underdeveloped jaws, crooked teeth, not to mention tooth decay in 1 yr olds.

Many parents don’t know the crucial role solids has in a child’s jaw development, and underestimate the importance of that 6 months of food nutrition and the role it plays in strengthening our teeth and orofacial development.

As a child starts to grow its baby teeth, it is developing it’s touch and feel, & connection with chewing.

As these tiny teeth cut through the gum, the trigeminal nerve senses ‘pressure and touch’ sensations through the ligament of the teeth down deep into the jawbone.
�As these neural signals flood through the jaw bone, sending electric current through their tiny bone.

These pressure signals, felt through the teeth, like any other joint in the body, signal the body to place bone and develop the joint.

😬Chewing is the physical signal that your child’s teeth & jaw grow and develop.

🧈 Introducing your baby to nutritionally dense first foods will also allow your baby to build a strong immune system full of fat soluble nutrients, needed to ward off tooth decay, and build strong bone.

If you knew the numbers of babies presenting with tooth decay, you’d be as alarmed as we are.

Begin the weaning process at approximately 6months, when your baby is showing correct developmentally approximate signs. This will help their craniofacial jaw development, assist with straight teeth, and avoid tooth decay.

How was your weaning journey?

Let’s share experiences & tips below ⬇️
Knowledge is power and mothers need support 💗

10/31/2022

Don’t sleep well?

Burn easy?

Inflammatory conditions?

Tired all the time?

You may need more sun.

An interesting trend I see in patients, is that sunlight deficiency.

Even if you live in a latitude with good sun exposure, vitamin D deficiency and its associated diseases are as common as ever.

Vitamin D is important, but if we look at the way the body responds to sunlight, it leads us to understand that there is far more going on.

In the middle of the day (11am-2pm) roughly, the angle of the sun is steep enough to send UVB light through the atmosphere.

When UV-B light hits your skin, it stimulates cholesterol molecules to enter a cascade that eventuates with vitamin D production.

However, during the process, there are many other physiological benefits. For example, there are up to twenty vitamin D like molecules that act as a ‘spectrum’ through the body as sunlight is absorbed.

So, while we measure vitamin D, there could be a lot more lacking than just this one, very important molecule.

The other side is it’s likely the body needs more than just straight UV-B exposure to efficiently produce vitamin D.

Before 10am the light in the morning contains far more infra red and UVA light. These types of ultraviolet energy, send message to the brain through the eyes.

Vitamin A derived receptors in the eyes, convert this energy that primes the brain to release serotonin, which is like your inner circadian ‘switch’.

It also helps you sleep.

Morning sun primes the release of melatonin at night. That means the UV light spectrum available roughly before 10am, sends messages through the eyes to the brain, that sets of a circadian clock 12 hours later as you go to bed.

These inner workings of your body can all work properly if you

- Watch the sunrise
- Expose yourself to sunlight before 10am.
- Add smaller exposures to middle of the day sun.

Is morning sunlight part of your routine?

10/30/2022

10/25/2022

The biggest development period of a human child’s life happens between ages 6-12.⠀
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From age 6, a child sheds their 20 milk teeth to make way for 28 adult teeth. Then 7-10 years later the wisdom teeth grow.⠀
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At 5-6 the lower central incisors get loose and fall out. Then until age 12-13, the arch is growing and expanding to accommodate the huge explosion of space required for the adult dentition.⠀
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Crooked teeth occur when the jaw bones don’t grow enough to accommodate adult teeth. The adult teeth will jostle and move with what space there is. If their time comes, and there isn’t enough space, they move into whatever position they can.⠀
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Sometimes if there really isn’t enough space, they will get stuck up in the bone, buried under the gums and may only be found with xray. One of the most common ‘impaction’ teeth, are the upper canine teeth.⠀
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At around age 11, these last teeth begin to move into the dental arch. The dimensions required include width, and forward growth.⠀
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As you can imagine, this is a hungry engine, and lots can go wrong. The jaws and teeth make the skeletal system hungry for nutrients. The fat-soluble vitamins, centred around vitamin D ‘drive’ this growth. When the body is deficient in vitamin D, long bones can be deformed in children, due to inadequate placement of calcium.⠀
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In old age, osteoporosis is the shedding of calcium from bones, also a nutrient deficiency.⠀
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Children born with vitamin D deficiency are lacking the nutrients needed to grow this system. It’s written on their faces.⠀
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You can spot the early warning signs. Slow growing jaws create functional habits that further stunt growth.⠀
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Warning signs include:⠀
• Open lip posture⠀
• Mouth breathing⠀
• Forward heard posture⠀
• Narrow palate (roof of mouth)⠀
• Overbite (lower jaw too far back)⠀
• Cross bite (lower jaw stuck in front of upper teeth when biting)⠀
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Today we’re learning that this system can be diagnosed, corrected, and compensated for.
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Has your child shown any of the signs?

If you are a professional who addresses this, let's discuss in the comments, lots of parents need help with this.

10/23/2022

Liver is THE superfood.

If you’re suffering from a health issue, then integrating liver into your diet is a worthwhile transition to make.

Sounds strange? I’d suggest reading on…

Human culture has consumed liver as a necessity for a well-functioning skeletal, immune system, and brain.

It may be why tooth decay is far less prevalent in ancestral societies. By eating liver, the fat-soluble vitamins are adequate to reinforce teeth and the skeletal system strong and mineralized.

Vitamin D deficiency, which we talk in length about, sits as the root cause of many dental diseases such as decay and gum disease.

Liver is one of the best dietary sources of vitamin D, because the liver stores it as a fat-soluble vitamin, to be distributed to the body.

We often think of the liver as a toxin filtering agent, but that is really understating the role of the liver to transport critical vitamin D around the body allowing calcium absorption for bone mineralization.

The nutrients and minerals are unrivalled to any food. If you forget about the teeth and bone benefits of liver, the use of these nutrients are critical for the brain.

Vitamin B12 is a critical brain developing agent.

A far less appreciated nutrient is choline, choline deficiency is known to associate with memory loss.

Choline has a critical role brain functionality because of its impact on the acetylcholine neurotransmitter.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to improve your health, there’s one dietary principle that you can’t look past.

Liver is the most nutrient dense food on the planet.

Here are some strategies eat more liver:

1) You can cook it into a mince diced with normal ground beef (hiding it)
2) Make a pate, which is a traditional way to prepare and consume
3) Lightly pan fry with butter, eggs, and onion
4) Eat it raw – yes, like sashimi, it avoids the difficulty of preparing and could preserve some of the more delicate nutrients stored in the liver.A
Are you ready to liver yet?

10/07/2022

We see it everyday. Parents who are watching their child’s teeth erupt, only to see the enamel hasn’t formed correctly.

Why would this happen?

Remember, when milk teeth erupt, there is another set of adult teeth growing and developing underneath the gums.

While problems in kids teeth will be stressful, and we may lose the battle, everything we do will help fortify the adult teeth of a child.

Don’t lose hope.

In the womb, a child is imprinted with signals from its mother’s body.⠀
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Today we are learning how important ante, prenatal, and postnatal nutrition is to help nourish our next generation.⠀
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For critical nutrients, like vitamin D, we need to remember, that it is a hormone, and acts deeply on the body, affecting how the DNA will express many years later.⠀
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Strong teeth and bones, require many years of nourishment from sunlight derived vitamin D.

Babies born with vitamin D deficiency may have affected bone growth or in severe cases rickets (flexible bones). Vitamin D deficiency has also been linked with the development of childhood allergy.
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A recent study indicates that children born to mothers with inadequate vitamin D levels had a greater chance of developing early childhood tooth decay. ⠀
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During the study, the vitamin D levels of 206 pregnant women were analyzed during their second trimester. Only 10.5 percent of the women had adequate levels of vitamin D. Of the children born to women with lower levels of vitamin D, 21.6 percent of them had enamel defects, which leave teeth more susceptible to dental cavities. Tooth decay was found in 33.6 percent of the children born to women with the lowest levels of vitamin D.⠀
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Although most pregnancy multivitamins contain 10 micrograms (400 international units), for women at high risk of vitamin D deficiency this may not be enough.

Vitamin D deficiency and dental disease is a strange one. When you think about it logically, it seems very strange that it’s not the FIRST thing that comes to mind when we see decayed teeth.

Our children need:

1) More sunlight
2) More vitamin D rich foods
3) More animal based fats that help absorption of fat-soluble vitamins

We can all start this today!

Did you experience vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy?

10/02/2022

What a year 1984 was...

This Time cover was published in 2014, nearly 8 years ago.

The idea that fats in the diet cause heart disease, and other problems has been a mainstay now for forty years.

My parents threw the fat out of our fridge. I remember how my heart sank with the taste of margarine compared to butter.

It was so effective because it made some kind of intuitive sense. I remember thinking butter must be bad, what could possibly taste so good and still be healthy?

It’s slightly disturbing we are still fighting this. The USDA food pyramid is still etched into our minds, telling us that vegetables, fruits, and grains should make up the bulk of the diet.

From the Time article:

We were embarking on a “vast nutritional experiment,”

Nearly four decades later, the results are in: the experiment was a failure. We cut the fat, now, by almost every measure, Americans are sicker than ever.

In his book Putting Meat on the American Table, the historian Roger Horowitz concludes that the average American in the 19th century ate 150 to 200 lb. of meat per year–in line with what we eat now.

The 2010 USDA dietary guidelines recommend that Americans get less than 10% of their daily calories from saturated fat–the equivalent of half a pan-broiled hamburger minus the cheese, bacon and mayo it’s often dressed with.

The AHA is even stricter: Americans over the age of 2 should limit saturated-fat intake to less than 7% of calories, and the 70 million Americans who would benefit from lowering cholesterol should keep it under 6% of calories–equal to about two slices of cheddar per day.

When scientists crunch the numbers, the connection between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease becomes more tenuous.

A 2010 meta-analysis–basically a study of other studies–concluded that there was no significant evidence that saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Those results were echoed by another meta-analysis published in March in the Annals of Internal Medicine that drew on nearly 80 studies involving more than half a million subjects.

2022 is the year to eat butter again!

Do you remember the low fat craze coming in?