The Green Zone

This is guest post brought to you by DentRx, the flexible, BPA-free nightguard specialists.

With the kids back in school and busy fall schedules upon us, many of us express our stress by grinding our teeth when we sleep.  Luckily, there are planet-friendly solutions available to help.

Teeth-grinding is no joking matter if it’s ever affected you or someone you love. It can have serious consequences including flaking of tooth enamel, which requires costly veneer replacement. Damage to the joints of the jaw is another persistent concern, as well as earaches, headaches and face pain.

Happily for almost all patients, a remedy exists that requires neither surgery nor medication — the night guard. Custom made to the individuals mouth and bite, a night guard protects and cushions, preventing damage to tooth enamel and joint stress. Some patients who wear night guards even find that the grinding reflex tails off or vanishes over time. Also, the device is usually covered by many dental plans.

There’s one concern for green dentists and their patients, however – night guards are made of plastic. And plastic still means BPA. Bisphenol A is a synthetic compound, a monomer of polycarbonate used in plastic manufacturing. It is an endocrine-mimicking chemical linked to a long, long list of health concerns, from cancer to thyroid trouble, even when present in vanishingly small amounts. It’s banned from use in baby bottles in the European Union and Canada. Here in the U.S., consumers have forced it out of infant formula packaging, and some food companies have removed it from their containers. It’s not something you want leaking into your body all night long.

“Our night guards have always been BPA-free,” says DentRx Dental Lab owner Hank Owen, “but now patients are actively seeking out a BPA-free alternative to the night guards most dentists provide.” DentRx’s flexible Talon® Nightguard is entirely BPA-free, and it’s made from semi-hard thermoplastic that softens after only 20 seconds of exposure to warm water. Sleep is all the more precious when you don’t have the added stress of wondering whether preventing one health problem might contribute to another. Insisting on a BPA-free night guard is also one more way to exert pressure on the marketplace to clean up its act and get rid of these troubling and unnecessary chemicals.