Poor dental health is linked to the heart disease and dementia. So why do we neglect it?

A new study published in the Journal of Gerontology Series A finds that if you don’t take good care of your teeth,

you’re more likely to develop inflammation, reduced brain size, and heart damage.

At first glance, this may seem far-fetched—what do teeth have to do with the brain and heart?

But as one of the researchers, Dr. Benjamin Trumbull, told Salon, our culture makes the mistake of “thinking about health by dividing the body into two parts,”

putting the mouth in one category and everything else in another. one type.

“Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health.”

In fact, the poor dental health profoundly impacts other areas of your body. The scientists behind the recent paper learned this by examining more than 700 sets of teeth — all among members of a little-known South American tribe.

“Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health,” Trumble said. “Now we differentiate health insurance from dental insurance, but really they both impact our health and aging.”

Yet even before this study, scientists had established strong links between oral health and inflammatory, cardiovascular and brain health.

The new paper adds more clarity to that connection, however, by showing that it exists in a population that is free not only from the

environmental scourges of industrialism and factory farming, but also its social injustices — particularly those that negatively impact oral health.

The Tsimané “have far less of a socioeconomic gradient, and very little access to modern dentistry at all,” Trumble said.

“This makes it possible to actually examine associations between oral health and chronic disease without confounding social factors”

— namely, the fact that industrialized societies like the United States tend to provide inferior dental care to people in lower socioeconomic conditions.