While dental implants are great tooth replacements, you may want to give your own an edge. Fair enough – making your prosthetic teeth successful is good for your oral health. Luckily, one easy way to enhance the posts is to get the right nutrients. It turns out vitamin D helps dental implants succeed, ensuring they work correctly for years at a time. To learn more, let your New Braunfels dentist explain things in this helpful primer.
Dental Implants Work Through Fusion
To grasp why a vitamin benefits dental implants, you should remember how implants work. They differ quite a bit from dentures and dental bridges.
You see, dental implants don’t sit on your gums like other restorations. Dentists place them directly in your jaw’s empty sockets – the spaces left by missing teeth. For that reason, they slowly fuse with your jawbone until they become permanent parts of your mouth. This fusion process (i.e., osseointegration) ensures the implant posts remain stable and don’t fall or slip around.
How Does Vitamin D Help Dental Implants?
Given how dental implants fuse, vitamin D helps them by doing two things. First, the nutrient makes the fusion process more effective. Secondly, vitamin D reduces the risk of infections while you heal from implant surgery.
On the first point, vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium to strengthen your bones. That means it promotes bone growth in your jaw, ensuring you have tissue for the implant fusion. The result is that your implants are more likely to be held in place properly.
Regarding point two, vitamin D boosts your immune system. Since it helps your body fight off infections, it reduces the risk that you’ll get gum disease. That’s a big deal – infected gum tissue tends to cause early implant failure. So, avoiding gum troubles means you’ll heal from implant surgery well.
What Can You Do to Get Vitamin D?
Of course, vitamin D only helps dental implants if you get enough of it. Try upping your intake by using these tips and tricks:
- Eat Vitamin-Rich Foods – If you have meals of beef liver, fatty fish, and fortified dairy, you’ll get plenty of vitamin D from your diet.
- Take Supplements – If vitamin-rich foods aren’t an option, get vitamin D from a supplement. The best brands offer 600-800 international units (IU) per vitamin capsule.
- Get Out & Tan – The human body produces vitamin D naturally when exposed to sunlight. So, try tanning outside more; twenty minutes daily is a good start.
Vitamin D helps dental implants succeed, but they’re not the only relevant factor. Talk to your dental provider to learn other ways to make the posts effective!
About the Practice
Gruene Family Dental is based in Assonet, MA. Led by Drs. Kim Turnbow and Jamie Knox, our practice dedicates itself to patient-focused dental care. We tailor our preventive, cosmetic, and restorative services to your smile, ensuring results that will dazzle. So, you can trust us for anything from a standard checkup to top-of-the-line dental implants! For more details or to book a visit, please reach us on our website or by phone at (830)-626-1111.