Mastication, Nutrition, Oral Health and Health in Older Patients

Abstract

The mouth is the portal of entry for all foods to enter the digestive tract and thereby be available for digestion and absorption to sustain life. It is not surprising therefore that there are clear and profound links between the health status of the oral environment and foods, and there are also reciprocal links between the foods that we eat and health of the teeth, their supporting tissues and the oral mucosa. The objective of this chapter is to discuss the evidence for the links between foods and the oral environment and to establish how the dental team can maximise health benefits for their patients. The changes in population demography and the epidemiology of oral disease with reference to the aging population have been described previously in this book and will not be reviewed in detail. However, it is pertinent to reflect on the combination of both changes in demography and oral health status and how this interaction is likely to influence the numbers of people with different patterns of oral health status that will be seen. The outcome of this interaction appears to be country specific and depends on the relative rates of fall of edentulism and increase in age cohorts with population growth. Thus for the United States, it has been suggested that the numbers of people who are edentulous will remain high because of the relatively low rates of reduction in edentulism over the next 20 years compared with population growth in the age groups where edentulism remains prevalent (Douglass et al., 2002). Whereas in Europe the numbers of people who are edentulous are likely to fall as the rates of reduction in edentulism are higher in some European countries than they are in the United States (Mojon et al., 2004). It should be noted that this difference reflects the higher base rates for edentulism in some European countries than those seen in the United States, rather than differing standards of care (Zitzmann et al., 2007). On both continents, there will be an overall growth of both