WHAT IS AS BRITTLE AS GLASS and at the same time, the hardest substance in your body?
Tough Stuff
Your tooth enamel! Each time you bite down it handles the equivalent of 72 kilos of pressure, time after time after time. Think about how often you bite down during your lifetime. It’s crazy!
Enamel is the hard outer layer of your teeth, built to protect the softer dentine layer, and your super-sensitive pulp.
It’s Amazing How Such A Brittle Substance Handles The Pressure
It’s an engineering marvel. Enamel is actually made up of a dense forest of long rods. These rods start crisscrossing each other as they go deeper into the tooth, diffusing the pressure. It’s like sprawling your body out flat to crawl over an ice-covered pond, spreading the pressure over a wider area.
Mother Nature’s Pattern For Strength
This same concept actually inspired a group of scientists to create glass that is 200 times stronger than normal! Read about it in the article, How to Toughen Glass by Cracking It: A Lesson From Teeth and Shells.
Enamel Is Built To Deal With Pressure… But Not Erosion
As strong as your enamel is, it doesn’t deal as well with acid and bacteria. It needs our help for that.
4 ways your enamel CAN get worn down:
- Acidic breakdown (usually from acidic drinks like fizzy drinks, fruit juices, and sports drinks).
- Abrasion from rough brushing and tooth-whitening toothpastes.
- Bad habits like tooth-grinding.
- High sugar-and-starch diets, which create acid byproducts.
Your Enamel Is Finite So Treat It Well
As amazing as your enamel is, it’s one of the only parts of your body unable to regenerate itself because it’s one of the only parts of your body not comprised of living cells. So protect your enamel by brushing regularly with fluoride toothpaste, flossing, and keeping your regularly scheduled checkups.
We’re Here To Help
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As a kid, my favorite miromees from diabetes camp weren’t diabetes related. But as an adult, they’re the miromees that I have kept are the ones that involved not feeling so alone, and for once, not being the only kid with diabetes. Oh, I gave my first injection by myself when I was at camp. And got an award for it and everything!