As we age and bits of our bodies no longer work as well as they once did, life can get pretty limited. But if we work on our bodies, keeping fit and healthy for as long as we can, then we have a good chance of enjoying our later years rather than enduring them.

Thankfully, modern dentistry means that we can entirely replace teeth and what they do — no half measures and soft food diets any more, when you choose dental implants at Farnham Road Dental Practice in Guildford.

Why do we say half measures?

This is because traditional methods for replacing lost teeth — flexible dentures and bridges — only replace the crowns of the teeth, and not the roots. Imagine if you try to replace a tree by sticking one without roots on top of the ground. It’s not going to do a very good job of staying upright in the even the slightest breeze. And that is also the thing with teeth, they need their roots to do their job of biting and chewing properly.

The roots hold the teeth stable when you bite and chew. You can get that stability with a bridge, but you have to lose the use of two perfectly good healthy teeth to do so. These teeth are ground down to create abutments to fix the bridge onto. You can never have them back as normal teeth again.

Dentures rely on suction to the gums, and this works pretty well for a while, if you want to spend the rest of your life on a soft food diet. The gums give about a quarter of the stability of tooth roots, so really interesting chewy, crunchy foods are off the menu. Goodbye apples, goodbye steaks, hello soft mushy foods and fewer nutrients.

The other thing about implants is they keep your jawbone strong and healthy, acting as transmitter of the vibrations from biting and chewing that tells the jawbone to renew itself. Dentures and bridges can’t do this, and the jawbone quickly starts to resorb, shrinking in size and density. Before too long, dentures no longer fit and are even less good at chewing food. For food fans, surely implants are the only way to go.