While standing at a checkout counter recently, I was intrigued by a photo in a fitness magazine that featured a trim, muscular 63 year old man in a headstand pose. The article described how, by the age of 57, he had grown fat, tired and zapped of energy. He realized that his lifestyle, if continued, would lead to a very unhealthy old age. He dedicated himself to getting fit, started doing yoga and committed to doing it every day. At first he found it painful to stretch body parts that hadn’t moved in years. He persisted and at 63 he was more limber, stronger and healthier than at any other time in his life.

According to Dr. Eric Plasker, author of THE 100 YEAR LIFESTYLE, aging poorly is not inevitable. You have a choice. Based on your parents and grandparents’ experiences, you’ll see where you are headed unless you choose a different path. That path may include major shifts in lifestyle, such as regular exercise, balancing hormones, vitamin and mineral therapy, eating organic foods, and a commitment to maintaining your dental health.

It sometimes takes a rude awakening to realize that you are the only one who can alter the course of your own health. Many people don’t give up smoking until they suffer a heart attack; many don’t lose weight until they’re diagnosed with diabetes. And though we’re constantly urged to exercise, many don’t take it up until they find themselves huffing and puffing walking up a short flight of stairs.

Many common diseases seen in older people in this country are not a normal part of aging in other parts of the world. According to Dr. Plasker, these diseases are largely brought on by lifestyle choices. That’s a sobering thought. You can influence not only how you feel today, but whether you’ll have a healthy body in your geriatric years.

At 60, I’m in better health than when I was 40. Through a change of diet — eating less and eating organic — as well as starting yoga a few years ago, I’ve lost weight and feel healthier than ever. A recent physical showed my blood pressure to be lower than normal for my age.

As your St Louis dental health provider, I know that no matter how beautiful you make your teeth, unless the rest of your body is in good physical condition, your oral health will suffer. And conversely, your oral health affects the rest of your body. Just as a diseased liver will affect the remainder of your body, so will diseased gums or missing teeth that throw off the delicate mechanism of chewing affect your health

All of the good habits you implement daily will culminate in healthier and thus more enjoyable later years.

In November of 2005 Newsweek’s cover proclaimed “READY OR NOT, BOOMERS TURN 60.” 3.4 million Americans were born in 1946 — a million more than in the entire previous decade. And 1957 saw the largest number of births in any one year in US history: 4.3 million.

Older generations had predictable benchmarks between birth and death: college, family life, empty nest, retirement. Not any more. As boomers get older, they demand more and disrupt any predictable patterns set by earlier generations.

In some areas of the country, you’ll find 50 and 60 year olds starting a second or third family, buying a bigger house and spending money at Disney. My 40-something year old brother and sister-in-law in San Francisco are among the youngest parents where their six and seven year old children attend school.

Yankelovich Partners, one of America’s respected research groups, surveyed early boomers (those leading the generation in age) who defined “old age” as starting 3 years after life expectancy (82.3 years). Irrational as it may be, boomers are not bound by facts. They fully expect advances in health care to have them living an active fulfilling life in good health.

Boomers are not thinking in terms of “slowing down,” “aging gracefully,” or “retiring.” According to Merrill Lynch’s New Retirement Survey, 80% plan to work well past age 65. This explains the sizable segment of boomers who are extraordinarily proactive in attempting to influence their own health and looks with what were once considered “alternative” or “radical” means. This is fueling dramatic sales growth in nutritional supplements, herbal supplements, treatments available at foreign clinics, and organic foods.

The explosion in services and products just mentioned comprise the “wellness industry.” These and others catering to wellness, such as cosmetic surgeries, cosmetic dentistry, massage, and integrative medicine have grown to an estimated $400 billion dollar industry in 2005 (Business Week).

I see this regularly in my own dental practice. Half of my patients are over the age of 40. For the most part, these folks take excellent care to maintain a healthy, attractive smile. Increasingly, I am restoring gum health, rebuilding teeth and re-creating smiles. Whereas even ten years ago patients of the same age would be content to neglect their dental health and get dentures, this mindset is no longer as common.

I challenge you to name any other single enhancement that improves appearance and health as drastically as restoring teeth and gums and updating your smile.

When that occurs, instead of your teeth all sharing equally in the function of chewng, some are forced to work overtime to compensate for missing, broken or shorter teeth.

If you were driving your car with two bald tires and two new tires, it would create a rough ride.The analogy is comparable when it comes to your teeth. If you chew on an uneven surface a tooth can crack, resulting in more chewing force on the remaining teeth.

It’s not only for cosmetic reasons that you straighten your teeth position, get crowns or implants. These treatments improve the way your teeth mesh together. They also balance your bite. They can even enhance or even create entire body balance. You may not notice an immediate effect from imbalance and uneven chewing, but like the “perfect storm,” many health conditions are the result of long-term, non-optimum conditions that have been ignored.

Well … your dental condition has some similarities. Once it starts to deteriorate, you face a crossroads: do you want to keep your teeth for your natural life or lose them?

If you catch up on your dental work before it’s too late, you can sidestep many procedures that “older” people wind up getting. For example, a 45 year old woman came into my office requesting her thirty-year old silver fillings be removed, since they were dark and detracted from her beautiful smile.

Lurking underneath were cracked teeth which, left alone for another year or so, would have required extraction and replacement with implants and crowns. She was lucky that we treated the situation in time and was able to restore the teeth with buildups. Had they deteriorated even slightly more, she would have been faced with having to replace her teeth.

I see people neglect simple fillings, which over time get bigger and, in some cases, lead to infection and root canal therapy. It’s just not a good idea to neglect needed dental treatment. Teeth and gums don’t get better by themselves.

Normally, the motivation to catch up on years of backlogged treatment is cosmetic. There’s a romantic or professional reason. Or, the person recognizes the role a smile plays in maintaining a youthful appearance. Whatever the motivation, if you already know you want to keep your teeth for the rest of your life – or you want to get some cosmetic procedures to brighten up your appearance, the first step is to restore the health of your teeth and gums. Neglected treatment always results in more expense, unless you’re content to wind up with dentures.

Centenarians are one of the fastest-growing age groups in the industrialized world. Anyone today who’s 40 has a good chance of living until 100. But, according to Dr. Eric Plasker of The 100 Year Lifestyle, some people don’t want to live that long due to concerns that they won’t be in good health, or will be broke or both.

Someone once said that tomorrow is made up of small decisions you make today. For example, someone under fifty who has been relying on social security to live on when they retire may not have set aside any savings. They may have spent their money on vacations or electronic equipment like tvs and stereos instead of creating a nest egg. A similar false security on dental insurance might have someone making decisions to postpone dental work because their insurance has annual limits. In either case, the reliance on someone else to determine what you should do today in order to secure your tomorrow might be a leap of faith.

Even if you’ve under-planned your financial or dental future, it’s almost never to late to remedy the situation. For example, Beth Thames, a tax manager in Atlanta, calculated that if a 50 year old started with nothing saved and set aside $500 a month until the age of 75, at 7% interest, she’d accumulate a nest egg over $400,000.

Similarly, many of my patients over 40 are aware of the discrepancy between insurance coverage and the true amount of dental work needed to preserve their teeth. Since they want to have their teeth in their senior years, they are restoring and preserving them. Others are enhancing their smiles with crowns, veneers, straightening, and whitening.

100 year lifestyle planning involves making decisions that ensure you have the quality of life you want in your later years.

According to research and polls conducted in the last few decades, your smile greatly determines how you are viewed and even treated by others. 74% of Americans believe an unattractive smile can harm a person’s career success. Also, maintaining the height of your teeth is one of the best anti-aging steps you can take.

As you age, your teeth get shorter, thus collapsing the lower face area. For more information on aging and dentistry see our midlife dentistry page.

If you’ve passed the age of forty, you really should have a mid-life diagnosis to evaluate the overall state of your oral health AND to plan a proper course of treatment that will enable you to keep your teeth for the remainder of your lifetime.

Patients over forty have often shortchanged their dental health or just barely maintained their teeth and gums. With the expense of family taking precedence through the previous two decades, Boomer-aged patients coming to me for the first time are often prepared to play catch-up with their own dental health.

Today you can plan a course of treatment that will ensure you’ve got your own teeth to chew with well into your senior years. In addition, nothing is more youthful than a natural-looking white smile. Unlike your parents, if you take care now you can have both.

Why do we neglect the role our mouths play in overall health? Why do we accept missing teeth and dentures as a “natural” course of aging?

My answer is the extreme lack of information on the subject. Look for my book coming out soon.