It’s common knowledge that cigarette smoking is terrible for your health, and the health of those around you. Its negative impacts are extensive. Lung cancer, pulmonary disease, heart disease, stroke – the list goes on. But those don’t even include the issues that smoking causes for your oral health, and there are a great deal of them.
A recent study has discovered that smoking actually changes the natural bacteria within the mouth, causing a number of problems. Without the naturally occurring oral bacteria, tooth decay and oral diseases become more prevalent. Another potential byproduct of smoking is tooth cancer and other oral cancers – in fact, oral cancer is currently one of the most common forms of cancer in Canada and smoking plays a big part of that.