Without dental implants, dentures are not as good for eating as your natural teeth, and that can be a big impairment to your ability to enjoy food. But dental implants let you eat in a more natural way that enhances your enjoyment of it.
With the upcoming Labor Day weekend, you’re probably already thinking about all the delicious barbecue food to enjoy. From grilled chicken to cheeseburgers and hot dogs, you can only hope that your dentures will pull through and make it possible to eat. If you have to ask “How to eat a hamburger with dentures” you probably don’t want to wear dentures anymore. Learn more about dental implants and how they can help you enjoy food more, especially on big eating holidays like Labor Day!
Can You Eat with Dental Implants?
Yes! If eating comfortably is at all important to you, dental implants are the best tooth-replacement option by far. Dental implants secure your replacement teeth to your jaw just like a natural tooth has a tooth root that stays in place in your jaw. Eating with dental implants feels completely natural and makes eating a breeze.
Tear Food Easily With Dental Implants
Many types of food require you to tear them with your teeth to enjoy. All the foods that you bite while holding with your hands, such as sandwiches, pizza, hamburgers, and more aren’t normally cut through by your teeth. Instead, you bite partly through them, grasp them with your teeth, and then tear them away.
You can’t really do that with dentures–they’re not secure enough. Certain types of foods require cutting and eating with a fork. But with dental implants, you can enjoy your food the way you did with natural teeth.
Natural Chewing Motion Helps You Eat More Foods
Some foods are just hard to break down. And that’s why our natural chewing motion goes in a complex circuit, including both up-and-down motions as well as side-to-side motions.
But you can’t chew that way with dentures–the side-to-side motion will dislodge your dentures. This means that many hard-to-chew foods will take much longer to chew, which can get wearisome.
Does Food Get Under Implants?
Even if you get pretty good at chewing with dentures, it’s not uncommon for them to get dislodged many times during a meal. This allows food to get caught under the dentures, which can be unpleasant and requires you to wash your dentures after every meal to avoid bad breath and irritation.
Foods Don’t Stick as Much
Teeth are naturally nonstick. Although some things can cling to it, enamel tends to allow most foods to slide right off. What does stick gets efficiently cleaned off most of the time by the action of the tongue.
Dentures, though, are made partly of plastic, which allows more food to stick to them, and because they can be bulky it can be hard for your tongue to move freely in your mouth to clean the dentures.
With dental implants, we can reduce or eliminate the plastic so that your replacement teeth will be made of nonstick ceramic–and your tongue can more easily clean around them.
Enjoy More Taste
By far, the most enjoyable part of eating is the taste, and you may get a lot less of that with traditional dentures. Traditional dentures rely on suction to stay in place, and to create enough suction for the upper denture there’s a plate that covers much of the upper palate. The upper palate has many taste buds, similar to the tongue, so eating with dentures you might find that you get less taste.
It’s also hard to taste liquids when you have dentures. The natural motion of swishing liquid in the mouth for taste can dislodge dentures.
But dental implants don’t rely on suction. We make them with no upper plate, allowing you to enjoy more food flavors. They are also very secure, so there’s never a problem with swishing liquids in your mouth.
By Labor Day of next year, you can be ready to enjoy your favorite foods without the awkward taste of dentures, the instability, foods sticky, foods trapped under your dentures, or difficulty tearing or chewing. What are you waiting for?
To learn more about the benefits of dental implants in Columbia, SC, please call (803) 781-9090 today for an appointment with a cosmetic dentist at Smile Columbia Dentistry.
