Teeth are known by an array of names such as dens, pearly whites, grill, gnashers or ivories. Dr. Marielle Pariseau, founder and chief executive officer of the Park City-based nonprofit known as Teeth First, uses a different name when she and fellow dentist Dr. Brandon Bailey talks to second gra ders about oral care — sentinels. “We explain what a sentinel is by talking about princesses and kings and queens living in castles,” said Pariseau, who is also known as her organization’s Chief Tooth Fairy. “Sentinels see things first and warn the occupants of the castle about a potential problem. And the parallel with teeth is everything we eat and drink to nourish our bodies touch the teeth first.” Pariseau and Bailey began working together to help the community brush up on oral health more than a decade ago. “Dr. Marielle and I have been working together primarily doing an outreach program for elementary school students during Dental Health Month,” said Bailey, a pediatric dentist. “We go and do presentations about oral health.” The two were introduced by Park City Mayor Nann Worel, who at the time was the executive director of the People’s Health Clinic, a nonprofit that provides medical treatment to underinsured community members.   “I had reached out to Nann after I moved to the area, and she welcomed me to the clinic and mentioned Dr. Bailey,” Pariseau said. “Brandon and I have been working together going back to 2014, with a hiatus during COVID.” The two dentists don’t just talk with Park City School District students about brushing, flossing and cavities, according to Pariseau. “Teeth do far more than chew our food and brighten our faces when we smile,” she said. “(In their sentinel role) teeth connect to the rest of the body by warning us when our diet is out of balance. They show signs of stress and imbalance before any other body part.” Tooth decay is ubiquitous, Pariseau said. “In children, it is four to five times more prevalent than asthma, and by age 19, more than two-thirds of children have signs of the disease in their mouth,” she said.Teeth are also one of the body parts that don’t heal, Pariseau said. “When you break an arm, you go to emergency, have a cast put on and your bone eventually heals, but not teeth,” she said. “So it is important we take care of them.” Once Pariseau and Bailey establish those facts during their presentation, they introduce the classes to bacteria. “Most kids say bacteria is something bad or it’s a germ that makes you sick,” Pariseau said. “That’s when we introduce the idea that there is also good bacteria and how important it is to feed the good bacteria that will help us be healthy.” To do that, Pariseau and Bailey talk about drinks and foods.  “One of the things we discuss is eating an orange versus drinking a glass of orange juice,” Pariseau said. “Both appear to be healthy, but a glass of orange juice due to the high sugar content only feeds the bad bacteria. Eating an orange, with its good fiber, feeds bacteria that is important to keeping one healthy.” Continuing with the drink discussion, the dentists ask the students to organize 10 beverages they think have the last amount of sugar to the most amount of sugar. Bailey loves seeing how the children’s minds work with this exercise. Students are tasked to organize popular soft drinks based on sugar levels during each Teeth First presentation. Credit: Photo courtesy of Teeth First “We have Coca-Cola as one of the beverages, without fail in the past 10 years, with the exception of one class, Coca-Cola has always been deemed having the highest amount of sugar in terms of a beverage,” he said. “But some of the fruit juices we use like pomegranate juice or even a mango smoothie has significantly higher amounts of sugar than Coca-Cola.” To illustrate this finding, the dentists show some Ziploc Baggies full of different amounts of sugar to show the quantity of what’s in the beverages, Bailey said. “There is a yogurt smoothie that is packaged in a tiny bottle that has fresh fruit on the label, making it look healthy, but by size concentration it’s like liquid sugar,” he said. When the drinks are organized correctly, Coca-Cola is in the middle. “The thing with Coca-Cola is that it also contains acid,” Bailey said. “So we also explain that sugar is not so much the bad thing, but it feeds the bad bacteria that processes it into acid. So Coca-Cola has both sugar and acid.” Still, the exercise gives the students a glimpse of the prevalence of sugar in everyday foods, even if the packaging suggests healthy eating, Pariseau said.  “Manufacturers purposefully misguide us, and we refer to it as a ‘health halo,’” she said. “While we don’t really mention the ‘health halo’ in our presentation for the kids, by the end of the presentation with the drinks, the kids have become more aware that they need to pay attention to how they choose their foods. They realize that they really need to pay attention not just to the front of the package, but also the back of the package.” This idea is driven home when the dentists compare candy bars and protein bars. “The marketing of these individual bars is really impressive because, with the chocolate bar you know it’s a candy bar and you know exactly what you’re getting,” Bailey said. “With the other, on the package it’s marketed as an energy bar, but we ask where do you get the energy? Of course, after a couple of seconds, they say, ‘Oh, from the sugar.’ So we show the quantity of sugar in both bars is basically equal, even if there’s no question that there are other things in the protein bar that will be better than the candy bar.” By law, a product’s most prevalent ingredient by weight has to be listed first on the label, according to Bailey.  “Of course, for candy bars, it’s sugar,” he said. “In order to get cavities, you have to have three things — teeth, bacteria and sugar, and when we ask the kids what we need to get rid of they always say ‘sugar,’ but it turns out that everything has sugar.” Last year, sugar appeared first on the ingredient list of protein bars, but things changed this year, Bailey said. “Manufacturers have separated the sugar into three different types of sugar, so these appear lower on the label,” he said. Of course, brushing and flossing will always be important in oral care, Pariseau said. “So, at the end we have a part when the kids brush and floss their teeth all together with us,” she said. And we invite them to help mom and dad choose the right products while grocery shopping.” While these presentations are eye-opening for the students, parents have told Pariseau how much they have learned just by looking at labels with their children. Still, one of the big challenges of raising awareness about the scope of oral care is perceptions that have developed over the decades. “Teeth are seen as disposable,” Pariseau said. “If one goes bad, you just pull it out.” Another issue is that dentistry and medicine have been practiced separately for a long time, she said. “They divorced back in 1840, so we want to reunite teeth with the rest of the body,” Pariseau said. “I think there’s a lot about teeth that people don’t know, and when we reveal how much bigger a role teeth can play in health and life, people are impressed and eager to learn more.” It’s never too late to start taking care of teeth, and parents and adults shouldn’t feel ashamed if their teeth or their children’s teeth need help, said Bailey, who became a dentist because he wanted to help people. “I face that a lot and I always tell them that I’m so happy they’re here, because this is something that is common,” he said. “The important thing is to focus on getting better, and this is the first step in the correct decision to move forward.” Pariseau, who originally wanted to be a physician but saw dentistry as a way she could balance a medical career with raising a family, said dentists are the first medical professionals who can see the first warning of noncommunicable diseases that may take years or even decades before they manifest. “If we see these signs in a child’s mouth, we can change the health trajectory of that child,” she said. For information about Teeth First, visit teethfirst.org. To watch Dr. Marielle Pariseau’s TEDxSaltLakeCity talk, visit tinyurl.com/4swxepww. The post Local dentists promote Teeth First with classroom presentations appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less