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Behind your smile: What's your mouth made of?

From teeth to tongue, a look at what's inside your mouth.

Your mouth is perhaps one of the most multifunctional parts of your body. You use it to speak, eat, kiss and smile. With such important functions, keeping a healthy mouth is key to keeping a happy mouth. Understand your mouth's main components — your teeth, gums, tongue and salivary glands — to help you stay on the right track.

Teeth: Help with digestion
Of your mouth's many functions, three of the most essential are biting, chewing and swallowing food. The most important tools in this process are your teeth.

Each of your teeth consists of a visible portion called the crown and a hidden portion below the gumline called the root. The surface of a healthy crown is covered with enamel, a thin layer of calcified material that's the hardest substance in the body. The outer surface of the root is covered by cementum. The periodontal ligament, a connective tissue, binds root cementum to the bone that forms the tooth socket.

Beneath the enamel and cementum lies the body of the inner tooth (dentin). Dentin is softer than enamel and cementum, but it's harder than bone. It surrounds the hollow tooth core (called the pulp canal or root canal), an area where nerve endings and blood vessels sensitize and nourish the tooth. Nerves and vessels feed into the pulp canal through an opening at the root tip.

Gums: Pink means healthy
Firm, pink gums (gingiva) surround a healthy tooth. At the edge of your gumline, your gum tissue folds back underneath itself before connecting to your teeth. This creates a snug, 1- to 3-millimeter groove called the gingival sulcus around each tooth.

Tongue: Responsible for tasting to talking
Your tongue is a muscular organ covered by a mucous membrane. Small bumps called papillae cover its upper surface. Between the papillae are your taste buds, which provide your sense of taste. In addition to helping you taste food, your tongue moves food to aid with chewing and swallowing. It's also an extremely important element in speaking.

Salivary glands: Aid digestion and help prevent decay
Three major sets of salivary glands as well as numerous smaller glands exist throughout your mouth. These glands produce and secrete saliva, which serves several purposes. It aids in swallowing and contains enzymes that help with digestion. Saliva also protects your mouth from decay and disease in several different ways. It flushes food away from your mouth, helps neutralize acids that can eat away at teeth, directly kills or inhibits disease-causing organisms, replenishes minerals in your tooth enamel and helps to heal wounds.

Maintaining a healthy mouth
Keep speaking, eating, kissing and smiling with confidence. Understand what each part of your mouth does, and practice good oral hygiene habits.

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Oral health and overall health: Why a healthy mouth is good for your body

Taking care of your mouth, teeth and gums isn't just a matter of good grooming. It can prevent infections, and maybe even diseases, throughout your body.

Taking good care of your mouth, teeth and gums is a worthy goal in and of itself. Good oral and dental hygiene can help prevent bad breath, tooth decay and gum disease — and can help you keep your teeth as you get older.

Researchers are also discovering new reasons to brush and floss. A healthy mouth may help you ward off medical disorders. The flip side? An unhealthy mouth, especially if you have gum disease, may increase your risk of serious health problems such as heart attack, stroke, poorly controlled diabetes and preterm labor.

The case for good oral hygiene keeps getting stronger. Understand the importance of oral health — and its connection to your overall health.

What's in your mouth reveals much about your health
What does the health of your mouth have to do with your overall health? In a word, plenty. A look inside or a swab of saliva can tell your doctor volumes about what's going on inside your body.

Many conditions cause oral signs and symptoms Your mouth is a window into what's going on in the rest of your body, often serving as a helpful vantage point for detecting the early signs and symptoms of systemic disease — a disease that affects or pertains to your entire body, not just one of its parts. Systemic conditions such as AIDS or diabetes, for example, often first become apparent as mouth lesions or other oral problems. In fact, according to the Academy of General Dentistry, more than 90 percent of all systemic diseases produce oral signs and symptoms.

Saliva: Helpful diagnostic tool Your doctor can collect and test saliva to detect for a variety of substances. For example, cortisol levels in saliva are used to test for stress responses in newborn children. And fragments of certain bone-specific proteins may be useful in monitoring bone loss in women and men prone to osteoporosis. Certain cancer markers are also detectable in saliva.

Routine saliva testing can also measure illegal drugs, environmental toxins, hormones and antibodies indicating hepatitis or HIV infection, among other things. In fact, the ability to detect HIV-specific antibodies has led to the production of commercial, easy-to-use saliva test kits. In the future, saliva testing may replace blood testing as a means of diagnosing and monitoring diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease, cirrhosis of the liver and many infectious diseases.

Article provided by MayoClinic.com