Thirteen Amazing Facts About Your Teeth

Teeth are amazing. We don’t always give our teeth the credit they deserve because we don’t realize everything your teeth affect. Think about smiling, chewing, and talking for example. Without your teeth, those three tasks alone would be nearly impossible. We’ve got to hand it to our pearly whites: they’re pretty cool.

For fun, we decided to share a list of thirteen amazing, wacky, and downright crazy facts about teeth (and spoiler: they’re not all about human teeth!).

1.Tough Stuff
Your teeth are the hardest substance in your body, specifically, your enamel. Talk about great placement! This extremely durable, mineralized substance is your teeth’s first line of defense against wear and acidity.

2. Gigantic Chompers
Elephants are a great example of the amazing evolution of teeth within the animal kingdom. Over their lifetime, pachyderms will go through about six sets of teeth. Every couple of years, these teeth—with their hard enamel cap—are worn down and a new, larger tooth takes its place. Unlike humans, where our teeth come from the top and bottom or our jaws, elephant’s teeth come from the back, shuffling the oldest teeth forward in an assembly-line-like fashion!

3. Bacteria & Your Mouth
Within your mouth lives over 300 different types of bacteria. Unfortunately, almost all those bacteria are bad or are harmful. Good brushing habits keep these bacteria in check!

4. Pick a Side!
Like how we pick a predominant hand, people often choose a side which they chew on. Research hasn’t linked whether you’re right-handed or left-handed to which side you chew, but instead notes pain or discomfort as a driving factor in deciding which side you prefer to chomp.

5. What color is your toothbrush?
Studies show that more people use blue toothbrushes than they do red ones. What about you?

6. The Most Valuable Tooth
The Guinness Book of World Records reports that the most expensive tooth ever sold (yes, you read that right: sold) was supposedly John Lennon’s tooth. It sold at an auction in late 2011 for a whopping $36,857!

7. Lots and Lots of Toothpaste
Each year in the U.S., we buy nearly 14 million gallons of toothpaste! That’s nearly the volume of 21 Olympic sized swimming pools!

8. Jaws In Real Life
Over their lifetime, sharks can lose up to 30,000 teeth! Their multiple rows of razor sharp teeth reappear in a groove within their mouth. As they lose teeth, new ones from the back row of the jaw will begin moving forward to replace those that were lost.

9. Brushing Your Teeth Takes Time
On average, people spend nearly 38 days of their lives brushing your teeth. (Remember, it’s not as much about how long you took to brush, but how thoroughly you cleaned your teeth!)

10. Teeth Are Like Icebergs
If you’ve ever seen a picture of an iceberg, you know that most of their size hides below the surface of the water. Similarly, our teeth are hidden within our gums. Right now you’re only seeing about 2/3 of your teeth.

11. Baby Teeth Breakthrough
Although a baby’s teeth don’t start pushing through the gums until about 4 months of age, teeth have started forming already in utero. When a baby’s teeth fully come in around age 3, they will only have about 20, in comparison to adult teeth where there are 32!

12. Commander and Chief Without the Teeth
Many people don’t realize that George Washington, who was afflicted with dental problems from a young age, never had wooden teeth. Instead, throughout his lifetime, he had pairs of dentures, some that featured his own pulled teeth and teeth he had purchased!

13. Giraffe’s & Humans Have the Same Number of Teeth
With all the recent excitement surrounding April the giraffe and her newborn calf, we thought it’d be fun to share one final tooth fact on the world’s tallest animal! Oddly enough, giraffes only have a few teeth toward the front of their mouth and accompanying incisors in the back, making a grand total of 32 teeth in their mouth—the same number of teeth people have!

With this little reminder on how amazing our teeth (and animals!) really are, maybe it’s time to get your pearly whites looked at again. Whether it’s been a long time since your last check-up, or you’re looking for a new practice to serve you, give the office of Mogren Dental a call at 231-737-5500 or by scheduling online today!